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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
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