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Title: Chomsky: Neoliberalism as Statism Author: Kevin Carson Date: September 12, 2005 Language: en Topics: noam chomsky, neoliberalism, Statism Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/09/chomsky-neoliberalism-as-statism.html
I just happened on Chomsky’s new blog. His old one, Turning the Tide,
had been defunct for over a year, and I didn’t know he’d relocated. From
the Chomsky blog at Znet:
The rules of the game were more or less formalized in the Uruguay round
that set up the WTO, in NAFTA, and other such mislabelled “free trade
agreements.” They are a mixture of liberalization and protectionism,
designed—not surprisingly—in the interests of the designers: mainly
MNCs, financial institutions, the investor/lender class generally, the
powerful states that cater to their interests, etc. The rights and
interests of people are incidental. The extreme protectionism of the WTO
and NAFTA goes far beyond earlier forms of protectionism. The outrageous
patent principles, for example, designed to grant monopoly pricing
privileges to immense private tyrannies, far in the future, and to
stifle innovation and development, in their interests.
Concentrated private power strongly resists exposure to market forces,
unless it’s confident it can win in the competition. That goes back
centuries.... Protectionist devices, such as those of NAFTA and the WTO,
are only a fraction of the means by which the wealthy and powerful
protect themselves from market forces. In fact, the core of the “new
economy” is based on the principle that cost and risk should be
socialized, and profit privatized (often after decades in the dynamic
state sector).
Chomsky had a big effect on the development of my thought. Many of the
most important books I’ve read on the history of U.S. foreign policy,
the early history of capitalism, and the present government role in the
corporate system, I was originally referred to by his endnotes in
Deterring Democracy or World Orders, Old and New.
And his approach to politics: 1) that you’d expect the policies of a
government to reflect the dominant class interests in that society; and
2) that you’d expect the structure of world politics and economics to
reflect the class interests controlling the dominant government--seem
pretty common-sense to me. As Chomsky says, a neutral observer from Mars
would be astonished that people put so much effort into not drawing the
obvious conclusion. Contrary to the folks who keep squealing about
“blame America first,” it only makes sense that when a country is the
most powerful in the history of the world, has played the dominant role
in shaping global political and economic institutions since 1945, and
has probably overthrown more governments than any other country in
history, it can take a major share of the responsibility for what’s
wrong in the world. And Jeanne Kirkpatrick can take her “arsonist vs.
fireman” analogy and shove it; the framers of the postwar Pax Americana
themselves admitted that their world order would have been substantially
the same, even without the USSR as a fly in the ointment. All the USSR
did was prevent total consolidation of the “Grand Area,” make it a
little harder for the World Bank and IMF to run things, and stop the UN
Security Council from operating quite as smoothly as a vehicle for
American military power.
But what I’ve never been able to understand is Chomsky’s failure to draw
the logical conclusions from his own arguments. His books are packed
with endless documentation of the ways in which big business
externalizes its costs on the taxpayer, and is protected from
competition by government. As Chomsky himself said somewhere (one of his
by-the-numbers jobs with Barsamian, I think), most of the big
corporations would be bankrupt in a few months without corporate
welfare. But at the same time, he argues that eliminating government
would leave us in the grip of private corporate tyrannies, and that it’s
necessary to strengthen the state to break up such “private
concentrations of power.”
Now, if big business can’t survive without ongoing state intervention in
the economy, why is further state intervention necessary to break
corporate power? That makes absolutely no sense to me. If “concentrated
private power strongly resists exposure to market forces,” then why not
rub their noses in it?
As Friedrich Engels put it over a century ago: anarchists say eliminate
the state and capital will go to the devil; Marxists say the reverse.
Exactly!
Chomsky’s position, it seems to me, is essentially Marxian (albeit of
the SocDem, not the Leninoid kind): the state has to be used to break
the power of the capitalists, before it can be allowed to wither away.
I’m also extremely leery of Chomsky’s claim that the state is
potentially amenable to popular control. I don’t think it’s possible,
myself. The state is the vehicle of a ruling class; and by the nature of
things, a popular majority can’t be that ruling class. The reasons were
explained decades ago by Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Max Nomad,
among others: regardless of the formally democratic means of control,
those on the inside of the state will always have an advantage in
interest, attention, information, and agenda control over those they
allegedly “represent.” Even on Anarres, the libertarian socialist world
of LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, all those syndicates (made up of
recallable delegates from democratic workplaces) wound up
rubber-stamping the economic plans of the permanent staffs of experts.
The only way to prevent centralized machinery from being taken over by a
ruling class is not to have centralized machinery. The state sometimes
responds to intense public pressure, but it cannot be directly or
sustainably controlled by the public. Therefore, we should take
advantage of whatever mass pressure can be put on the state to roll back
its intervention in the economy on behalf of big business, and dismantle
the taxing mechanism by which the corporate economy is able to
externalize its costs. In an economy of producers’ co-ops,
worker-controlled large enterprises, family farms and businesses, and
voluntary mutual aid associations, all interacting entirely through the
free market, there won’t be any coercive mechanism to enable big
business to profit at the expense of the rest of us.