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Title: The Chomsky effect or anarchism of the State Author: Claude Guillon Date: 2002, summer Language: en Topics: noam chomsky, post-situationism, situationist, liberalism, libertarianism, communism, the state, socialism Source: http://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/inclassables/oiseautempete/hight/oiseautempete-n09.pdf Notes: 12th column from this journal: http://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/inclassables/oiseautempete/hight/oiseautempete-n09.pdf
(From: Oiseau-tempĂŞte no. 9, summer 2002, originally in French,
translated into English by Anonymous)
The beginning of 2001 saw an editorial infatuation arise for the
writings of Noam Chomsky, noticeable since 1998. Several collections
have been published (notably by the publisher Agone), as well as
interviews; a part of the anarchist press makes moderate use of a fair
deal of Chomsky texts and interviews available on the Internet. Le Monde
libertaire, then, gave him the front page of their re-entry issue, with
prelude to a longer series on him[1]. The political texts of the famous
American linguist were before that hard to find for some twenty years.
This rediscovery happens almost always in a eulogistic way. “Noam
Chomsky is the most famous of the contemporary anarchists; he is also
one of the most famous living intellectuals”, writes N. Baillargeon
(L’ordre moins le pouvoir, Agone, 2001). In the preface of De la guerre
comme politique étrangère des États-Unis (Agone, 2001) J. Bricmont with
glory characterizes Chomsky as “underappreciated political giant”. The
“authors” of an interview curiously titled Two hours of lucidity (Les
Arènes, 2001), don’t go easy either, welcoming “one of the last living
authors and thinkers truly rebel in this young millennium”, for which
one must “wait six months in advance in the beaches of free time to
meet”. No doubt that these formulas, characteristics of of a foreign
personality cult in the libertarian tradition, make laugh the
interested, whom I don’t accuse of any crime. They aim, and it is there
that they are interesting, to persuade the reader that there is an
opportunity to discover a thinking so absolutely original and yet
hitherto unappreciated or ignored. From the part of libertarian journals
and commentators (Baillargeon, etc.), it is a matter of using the
reputation of the famous international linguist to spread political
positions quantifiable as anarchist that he defends, which are then
through authority legitimized by his academic and scientific prose. One
must therefore present Chomsky as celebrity linguist doubling as great
anarchist thinker. It is on legitimacy and the consequences of him as
such an object of propaganda that I wish to write this critique.
One must first note that while the anarchist is presented to the
militant public, the analyst of foreign politics (notably military) from
the United States sees himself largely and frequently respected in the
biggest (French) national presses, without necessarily getting presented
as libertarian. Le Monde, which offers him a full page in one of their
supplements on the war (22nd of november, 2001), qualifies him as
“incarnation of radical thinking”. Le Monde diplomatique, which
publishes “Terrorism, weapon of the powerful” (December 2001), does not
speak of their engagements. It is also Chomsky himself who abstains from
alluding to it. We may them notice – reserving ourselves to a future
examination – the separation which he reveals between academic
linguistics and militant activity (justified by the fact that the latter
mustn’t appear reserved to the specialists), yet we are conflicted on
why the “anarchist” Chomsky ignores similar large tribunes, and waits
for us to ask him questions on his anarchistic tendencies, as if it were
a matter of “personal affairs”, to hit on this side of things. Thus, he
contributes to his own instrumentalization by ideological fabricators,
still ignored (in the US, even his book 9-11, for September 11, sold
itself, without big press coverage, at over a hundred thousand pieces),
similarly celebrated (in France) with a perfume of anti-Americanism.
In his pamphlet of vulgarization The order minus power, unanimously
saluted by the anarchist press, Baillargeon estimates that Chomsky has
“prolonged and renovated” the anarchist tradition. He abstains at the
same time – and for reasons! – from describing in what way this
“renovation” would constitute itself. Chomsky himself seems closer to
the truth when he precises (in 1976): “I do not really fancy myself an
anarchist. Let us say that I am but a fellow traveler.” Outside of his
identification with revolutionary anarchist trade unionism, obtained in
numerous interviews with militant journals, it is not easy – in spite of
the plethora of recent publications – to give oneself a clear idea of
what Chomsky’s anarchistic companionship signifies. I have limited my
quest to the essential question of the destruction of the State and
doing away with the capitalist system.
I indicate here, for the convenience of my intent, that I consider
“revolutionary” precisely he or she who takes part in such a rupture,
judged by a prior necessity to construct an egalitarian and libertarian
society. Symmetrically, he who is “counter-revolutionary”, is he who
would proclaim such a rupture impossible, undesirable or ultimately
works to in reality go against this prospect.
In one of the recently published texts[2], Chomsky recommends a politics
which – from the anarchist point of view – merits the characterization
of being original: the strengthening of the State.
“The anarchist ideal, in whatever form, has always contended, by
definition, towards a dismantling of State power. I share this ideal.
However, it often comes directly into conflict with my immediate
objectives, which are to defend or even reinforce certain aspects of
State authority […]. Today, in the frame of our societies, I contend
that the strategy of the sincere anarchists must be to defend certain
State institutions against the assaults they undergo, while
simultaneously opening themselves up to a bigger and more effective
popular participation. This view is not inherently contradictory either
strategically or ideally; it proceeds naturally of a practical
hierarchization of ideals and of a just as practical evaluation of means
of action.”
Chomsky returns to the subject in another text not translated into
French, so I will provide us with the essence of its contents before
critiquing a thing or two.
Interviewed on the odds of realizing an anarchist society Chomsky, using
a slogan used by agricultural workers from Brazil, answers: “They say
they have to enlarge their cage until they can break the bars.” Chomsky
asserts that, in the current US state of things, one must defend the
cage against external predators; defend power – however certainly
illegitimate – of the State against private tyranny. It is, he says, “an
evidence for all people troubled by injustice and unfreedom, for example
someone who thinks children must be nourished, but this seems difficult
to make understand many who fancy themselves libertarian or anarchist.”
“In my view”, he adds, “it is one of the irrational and self-destructive
instincts of good people who consider themselves left who, in fact,
distance themselves from the legitimate lives and aspirations of
suffering people.”
Except for the reference, more precise than in the prior text, to only
the US, it is here again the same classic defense and illustration of
the so-called realistic reformist. This time, in spite of the oratory
precautions, the actual opponents of the State are supposed to be more
foolish than anyone else preoccupied with justice and, incidentally, are
incapable of understanding their contributions to letting children die
of hunger! The “sincere anarchists” are thus invited to recognize
honestly finding themselves in a reformist impasse.
Let us immediately observe that this Statist fatalism, doubled of a
crusty and reformist moralism, is not without echo here in France. The
French libertarian La Griffe published in its summer issue of 2001 a
“State dossier” in which the first article ended with the same formula,
signed Chomsky: “the State [sic] is today the last bulwark against the
private dictatorship which, in particular, will not give us any gifts.”
Since such similar enormities can be published today in libertarian
reviews without its authors seeing in it anything but a legitimate view
as any other, it is indispensable to counter the effects of the
Chomskyan “pedagogy” by putting the record straight.
Recent history provides us with examples of struggles led partially in
the name of defending “public services” (transportation, social
security, etc.) which certainly did not deserve to be condemned with an
abstract anti-State principle. I have, for example, analyzed the
dismantling of the traditional railway system and its replacement with
the “TGV system”, predestined first and foremost to a clientele of
roaming cadres between the large European metropolises. It was quite
apparently part of the larger historical push to privatize the valuable
“services” (transportation, health, mail and telecommunications, water,
gas, electricity) and the nefarious consequences which stem from them.
It did not occur to me to – because there exists no logical connection
between the two suggestions – to deduce from this a “practical
hierarchization of the ideals”, which should inevitably lead to theorize
a support to the State institution which would apparently be desired as
destroyed.
That there can exist, in a historical given moment, different enemies,
dangerous on unequal levels, and that a revolutionary may find the
painful (and aleatory) necessity to play one adversary against the
other, one would need a foolish dogmatism to not agree. It is then not
inconceivable to press on this attachment to “public service” (on the
condition that one desecrates it) to hit the brakes on, for as much as
it is possible, the appetites of the large firms. It is wrong that this
should be seen as equivalent to a necessary denouncing, of which the
quasi-Leninist “withering of the State” – which Chomsky precisely
reincarnates – would give us the calculated formula. In other words:
strengthening the State to better erase it afterwards, we have already
been pranked by this before! Consequently, if oppositional movements
within the current tendencies of capitalism lead to restore,
temporarily, certain State prerogatives, I do not see a reason to lose
any sleep.
We will notice that Chomsky also inverts the process. For him it is the
ideal (of the dismantling of the State) which enters in conflict with
the immediate objective. Or, the immediate objective is not reinforcing
the State (or is it?), but for example to delay the privatization of
public transportation in opposition to the restriction of circulation
they necessarily bring. The partial “reinforcing” of the State is thus a
consequence and not an objective. Elsewhere, we well see that the fact
of baptizing as “ideal” the destruction of the State it comes back to
reject this objective outside of the real. Qualification is worth
disqualification.
The veritable realism, it appears to me, consists in remembering that a
State disposes of but two eventual and complimenting strategies to
answer to social movements and even more a revolutionary agitation:
repression and/or reform/recuperation. A revolutionary movement,
beholden by a desire (conscious or not) to rupture with the system in
place cannot – by definition – obtain the approval of a State. On the
flip side, it can constrain it to play reform, retreat and demagoguery.
The inconvenience of reformism as strategy (increasing “popular
participation” of the democratic State, as per Chomsky) is that it never
reforms anything at all. This is for the excellent reason that the
auto-adaptive State arranges for itself reforms at least as well as
certain populae assemblies. The State defuses them, the phagocyte,
reduces them to nothing. The State as such does not exist, outside of
struggle, knowing that the guarantee of “progressive” reform will not be
emptied of its content, but we must realize this evidence, paradoxical
only in appearance, that it is indeed revolutionary action that is the
way of reforming society. Many institutions and social apparatuses are
truly the result of insurrectionary workers’ struggles. The fact that
they have been effectuated by either politician or capitalist can but
lead to see the welcoming of a strengthened “State”, conceived as
abstract entity or as a type of inert matter, a dyke for example, which
we would have to consolidate to protect ourselves from floods. The State
institutionalizes in a historical moment the matters of existing classes
in a society. Let us remind ourselves of the definition (in
constitutional rights) of the modern State which yields the monopoly on
violence. An anti-Leninist like Chomsky knows otherwise very well that
there can exist no “worker’s State”; speaking very well that the State
is by nature a bourgeois arm.
The positions defended by Chomsky and his Canadian admirers do not
reflect, without fault, the general viewpoint of militant libertarians
or anarchist trade unionists in the USA. They are very notably critiqued
in the trimonthly Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, to which he had accorded
an interview. The metaphor of the aggrandizing of the cage, which
Chomsky judges as particularly enlightening[3], sets off the ire of
James Herrod: “The predators are not outside of the cage; the cage, it’s
them and their practices. The cage itself is mortal. And when we realize
that the cage is of world-systemic proportions, and that there is no
“exterior” to which we may escape, then we can see that the only way to
not get culled, brutalized or oppressed, is to destroy the cage itself.”
If the ensemble of the contributors attribute to Chomsky the merit of
having analyzed the foreign policy of the USA[4], gives visibility to
the American anarchist trade unionist movement, furnishes a critique of
the media which seems novel outside of the Atlantic, three of which (out
of four[5]) absolutely notice and scorn his reformism. “It is possible
that Chomsky does this, as purported trade unionist [he is wearer of the
badge of supporter of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
revolutionary trade unionist organization], and to defend the benefits
of liberal democracy, but that is neither anarchist trade unionist or
anarchist”, writes Graham Purchase. “It would be an error for us”, adds
James Herrod, “to turn ourselves towards Chomsky to ask him about his
opinion on subjects that he has not truly studied, because his
priorities were elsewhere, notably that which touches upon anarchist
theory, the revolutionary strategy, conceptions of a free life, etc.”
Why forget today the texts of Chomsky on anarchism? Let us widen the
simplistic hypothesis of a French-Quebec co-editorial, financially
supported – including in France – by Quebec cultural institutions[6],
even if the originality of the editorial mode merits to be signaled. Is
it more a matter of publishing without proper judgment a theoretical
body – by its volume –, produced by a reputed scientific, and bringing a
real caution to an “anarchism” of which the precise content would bring
little? This second hypothesis is informed by the simultaneous
publication of N. Baillargeon’s texts, which takes in detail the
Chomskyan distinction between objectives (at very long terms) and
immediate goals, the latter being “determined while taking into account
possibilities enabled by circumstances”[7], which would serve to justify
a compromise of – and the word is of Baillargeon – “certain cyclical,
provisional and measuring matters with the State”. Baillargeon also
takes over from Chomsky his tear jerking arguments (little starving
children) and his calls for “intellectual honesty”: “This means then, if
we don’t play word games, to bring ourselves to defend certain aspects
[sic] of the State.” He advances even, achieving this way the Chomskyan
inversion of the historical perspective, that the obtaining of reforms
“is without a doubt the necessary condition” for the maintaining of an
anarchist ideal. Reformism is then thus not a lesser evil, but the
immediate way of laying the foundations upon which will be built an
apparatus allowing the obtaining of revolutionary aims. We doubt this:
neither the nature of this apparatus nor its mode of propulsion are
specified or even indicated.
This “libertarian” rehabilitation of reformism finds its echo in the
French or French-speaking anarchist milieus, as it does in other walks
like those of Attac, already critiqued in these columns, which does
certainly refer to the “libertarian ideal” but resorts to the
phraseological and the imaginary utopia of the proletarian world (cf.
Oiseau-tempĂŞte no. 8). The reformist-libertarian fashion expresses
itself equally in the echoes coming from the theses of the
“municipalists”, taken from Bookchin, in the attempt to create an
academic-libetarian caucus, within which participate the wise seminars
of the ACL (Lyon) editions and in certain measures the editorial
RĂ©fractions. That this or that initiative be accompanied by excellent
comrades is here not taken into account. At a time where libertarian
ideals arouse a certain renewed interest in the editorial or even the
militant, this fact is given testament through the creation of anarchist
libraries (in Rouen, Besançon, etc.) and numerous publications animate
themselves to present as compatible an anarchist tradition with an
original reformism, given as only possible ersatz the toppling of the
world.
As an American critic of Chomsky reminds us, each one has well the
privilege to take a position which is as such – to speak strictly – of
counter-revolutionary character. It must be deconstructed and critiqued
– with disciplined language –, and this must be done with as little
complacency as is found draped in the folds of the black flag which is
given plume and and pedigree to a flattering anarchism of opinion, which
has become academic discipline, actor of democratic plurality and
museological curiosity.
Within the rupture with the capitalist system, necessary path towards
towards the construction of a communistic and libertarian society,
dwells a point of fracture that is essential between those who accept
this world – liberal-libertarian cynics or citizen supplmenents – and
those who want to invent another world. On the most immediate level, we
would like that all honest libertarians who solicit Chomsky, publish
Chomsky and sell Chomsky in piles take from that the consequences and
tell us if, after considering it, they are rallying themselves behind
the strategy of compromise, the anarchism of the State.
Claude Guillon
[1] “Le capitalisme en ordre de guerre” (20th to 26th of September; text
taken from the Internet; found in the fourth cover of the review Les
temps maudits (theoretical review of the CNT), October 2001); “À propos
de la globalisation” (27th of September to the 3rd of October);
interview taken from the Internet (15th to the 21st of November 2001).
[2] Reponsabilité des intellectuels, Agone, 1998, p. 137.
[3] Outside of the cited text, Chomsky uses this metaphor in his
interviews with D. Barsamian, The Common Good, Odonian Press, 1998.
[4] In the analusys of geopolitics, the domain where his competences are
least subject of caution, Chomsky adopts the same democratic and
reformist twist. The new military humanism. Lessons from Kossovo (Page
deux editions, Laussane, 2000) makes a call to meditate on the merits of
iinternational human rights from which the principal advance would be,
according to the author Chomsky appreciatively cites, “the outlawing of
war and the prohibition of resorting to violence”. What the prefacing
author qualifies as “a reasoning of quasi-mathematical rigor” outlines
here a legalistic silliness.
[5] Only Mike Long delivers himself to a lengthy advocacy for pragmatism
which leads him to, for example, a sympathetic evaluation of the Castro
regime.
[6] It is the case for Instinct de liberté and De l’espoir en l’avenier
(Chomsky) and for Les Chiens ont soif (Baillargeon; cf. note suivante)
[7] Les chiens ont soif. Critiques et propositions libertaires, Agone,
Comeau and Nadeau, 2001. Released in Quebec. Published within the
competition of the Conseil des Arts du Canada, of the program of income
tax for the edition of the Quebec government and with the SODEC.