David Hawkes in the TLS and Chomsky (eclectics and science)

On FaceBook a mate of mine linked to an article by David Hawkes in the TLS about Noam Chomsky: How Noam Chomsky's world works

I made the following comment:

This is a weasel article full of half-truths and very slippery deductions. Chomsky himself is to blame (as always  ) for not going the whole hog and following reason along the path it beat after Kant and the French revolution using Hegel and especially Marx. But Hawkes is either disingenuous or blind to his own analytical shortcomings here (pot kettle black as Chomsky might be tempted to say). 

In the first place, rooting language in a biological capability doesn't turn people into objects or language into a non-social phenomenon. We use our brains to orient ourselves in the world as subject (or let's say a self-orienting object among non-self-orienting objects) and language is one of our special human faculties for doing this. Science and logic and so on have nothing to do with capitalism as such, they are formalized and institutionalized human capacities and activities that have developed in various kinds of societies to improve our self-orientation. Capitalism as a form of society drove this development much further than any previous society. Now capitalism is incapable of taking things any further and socialism will either take over the baton or humanity will collapse into an unimaginable state of barbarism.

Hawkes gestures abstractly at Marxism in what he writes, but makes damn sure not to give chapter or verse or make any concrete observations.

Chomsky is empirical and rational, and driven by scientific curiosity. Once something appears to him to be empirically and rationally validated he takes it as a basis for a next step. In this he is ruthlessly logical. The US government lies and goes to war using violence and atrocities for the benefit of big capital. The US media establishment supports it to the hilt. So get used to it. Structuralist and behaviourist linguistics only scratched the surface of human language and drew all kinds of misguided conclusions about it. Chomsky blew them out of the water by taking structuralist method as far as it would go and transcending it, as any good philosopher and/or scientist would. As Syntactic Structures brilliantly demonstrated in 1957, and I was privileged to discover in 1965.

Anyhow, more of a conundrum in Chomsky is the modesty of his approach. What is revolutionary is the ruthlessness with which he holds to scientific principles and the insistence with which he asserts his findings and pursues their logic, not the content of his findings as such. The problem for reactionaries and trimmers and eclectics (like Hawkes) is that they don't understand the depth of his certainty and conviction once his principled conditions for reasonable proof are met. The trimmers are swept around like dust by winds and tides (Dante has them blowing about helplessly on the banks of the Styx, despised even by Charon and refused even the basic courtesy of admission to Hell - they have done nothing worthy of eternal residence anywhere  ). Like all good scientists, Chomsky gives us an Archimedian "pou sto" (somewhere to stand) - a stable fulcrum that we can use our levers with to move the earth. One that winds and tides swirl around, not one swirled around by winds and tides.