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Louis Proyect wrote: > Unfortunately, given the geopolitical orientation that serves as > Chomsky' compass, there is a tendency to adopt a Manichean > understanding of world politics in which the USA symbolizes Darkness. > While it is true that the USA is evil, it does not follow that those who > oppose it are pure as the driven snow. Of course, an anarchist like > Chomsky would never write the same kind of pro-Kremlin propaganda as a > Seymour Hersh or a Patrick Cockburn, but he has come dangerously close on > occasion and even wandered into their territory. As you say, this has appeared before in Chomsky's writing. When he writes about the crimes of Western imperialism, he puts forward a type of anti-imperialism without the working class, and that leads to the problem you refer to, where the viewpoint becomes restricted to one imperialism versus another. Back in 2002, I wrote a review of his book "9-11"; it began as follows: ======================================================== On Chomsky's book '9-11' Anti-imperialism without the working class (from "Communist Voice", vol. 8, #3, issue #30, December 15, 2002) In the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Noam Chomsky gave interviews denouncing the stepped-up militarism which the Bush administration unleashed in the name of fighting terrorism. The first month of these interviews has been collected in the short book "9-11". No doubt Professor Chomsky deserves credit for being among the few prominent public figures that immediately ridiculed the pretensions of the Bush government. But "9-11" also shows the weaknesses of the non-class approach to political events. True, Chomsky advocates a sort of anti-imperialism. He lays emphasis on the crimes of the US and major European powers against the subordinate countries. But there is no class struggle in his picture of the causes behind the events of Sept. 11, and of the response to it. He downplays the difference between rich and poor outside of the most advanced industrialized countries, and ignores it within these countries. Elsewhere he may talk about the corporations and the ravages of globalization, but in dealing with the issue of war and peace, he apparently thinks that this is out of place. In "9-11", imperialism comes out of nowhere, not out of the world system of oppression of the poor by the rich. The very word "imperialism" is shunned in favor of just mentioning the name of various countries. And book advocates that the crimes of Western imperialism--beg pardon, of the US and of Europe--will vanish if only governments start obeying international law and reasonable rules of conduct. Chomsky's is a protest against imperialism which appeals to *Reason* with a capital "R", rather than looking to find any mass force which can resist imperialism. If Chomsky is angry about the chauvinism that has taken hold of the "Western intellectuals" whom he denounces, it is because he implicitly looks towards the liberal wing of the establishment to rein itself in. With his moral rhetoric, he sails far above imperialism, but with his practical suggestions, he stays firmly rooted within it. These days, with the working class movement in crisis all over the world, this type of anti-imperialism without a social base is very common. It is also as old as imperialism itself. Lenin commented a hundred years ago that "In the United States, the imperialist war waged against Spain in 1989 stirred up the opposition of the 'anti-imperialists', the last of the Mohicans of bourgeois democracy, who declared this war to be 'criminal', regarded the annexation of foreign territories as a violation of the Constitution, declared that the treatment of Aguinaldo, leader of the Filipinos (the Americans promised him the independence of his country, but later landed troops and annexed it), was 'Jingo treachery', and quoted the words of Lincoln: 'When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs others, it is no longer self-government; it is despotism. ' But as long as all this criticism shrank from recognizing the inseverable bond between imperialism and the trusts,. . , while it shrank from joining the forces engendered by large-scale capitalism and its development [the working class and its class struggle--JG]--it remained a 'pious wish'. " ("Critique of Imperialism", Ch. 9 of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, emphasis added) Chomsky has been attacked by pro-war liberals such as Christopher Hitchens as supposedly justifying the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. This is the same chauvinist hysteria with which Hitchens attacks the anti-war movement as a whole. True, there are some groups, such as the Workers World Party, who really do think that there is something anti-imperialist in the conflict of any force, no matter how reactionary, with US imperialism. Thus, no matter how misguided WWP thought the tactics of the bombers were, and how much it might sympathize with the victims, the WWP tried to hold back the anti-war movement from directly condemning the bombings of Sept. 11. (1) Chomsky's position on these atrocities, however, is different from that of the WWP. He doesn't see anything positive in their motivation. But a good part of Chomsky's 9-11 nevertheless reads like WWP, because both ignore the class struggle within the dependent countries. Soft-core anarchists like Chomsky, hard-core defenders of state-capitalism like WWP, and pro-war liberals like Hitchens have more in common than any of them would probably like to admit -- they all play down the bitter class conflicts which lie behind the dramatic political events of today. .................................. ======================================================== (The full article can be found at http://www.communistvoice.org/30cChomsky.html) -- Joseph Green -- Joseph Green _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com