Chomsky on democracy and fascism

This is a brief discussion on the validity of using "fascism" to describe modern society. From FaceBook where S posted the following image of Chomsky and its quotation:








I objected briefly to using fascism in this way, and S responded like this:

S: Firstly, and to be fair, Chomsky makes a distinction between economic and political fascism. He may be appropriating the term to (unhistorically?) characterise a set of socio-economic conditions that do not wholly correspond to those in pre-war Italy, Germany and elsewhere. e.g. the persistence of (almost totally ineffective, corrupt) democratic institutions. Even so, he's not far off the mark. One of the defining characteristics of fascism is corporatism, and there can be no doubt that the US is a corporate-colonial economy. Add the rapidly expanding encroachment on individual freedoms, civil and human rights, an authoritarian regime, compliant courts, controlled media, burgeoning police powers, brutality and impunity, a militarised state that spends more on 'defence' than next 13 countries combined, perpetual war to protect 'national' interests, and you have most of the elements that go to make up what looks very much like an ongoing transition from advanced capitalism to fascism, albeit in a more modern guise.

To which I replied:

Yes, Stuart - lots of facial fuzz, but not yet a full-fledged beard. 

"Ongoing transition" is exactly what this is all about, and in that case the fundamental historical tradition is from capitalism to socialism - from one historical economic mode of production to another. The slave-owning mode of production morphed into the feudal mode of production over hundreds of years with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of smaller, more flexible states based on feudal relations of vassal fiefs and serfdom. The workers weren't just cattle any more. They were human, but chained to the land and were forced to labour on the lord's land for free besides scraping a living off the plot of land they were tied to.

Then feudalism morphed into capitalism over hundreds of years, starting with the ex-Roman municipalities in Italy and Germany, then magnificently and irrepressibly in the English Revolution of 1640 and onwards (high point 1649 with the beheading of Charles 1 and the setting up of a republic) and the French Revolution of 1789.

These revolutions (as Marx frequently says) borrowed lots of props from the past, especially Rome, but they weren't a revival of the Roman Empire or Republic. 

In the same way, today the world is morphing into socialism. Individual, free enterprise capitalism was dying in Marx's day and he saw it and wrote about it in Capital. All production and distribution is thoroughly socialized and collectivized and we're all inextricably linked to each other through great national and international institutions of circulation like banks and credit card companies and social media. The only capitalist thing remaining is the relation of ownership - but that's enough to make the world the horrifying place it is under imperialist domination.

The capitalist ownership relation was broken definitively by the Bolshevik Revolution and its successful expropriation of the land-owners and capitalists in Russia in October 1917. That model has since been successfully followed in huge parts of the world - Vietnam and China, Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, and Cuba. Due to the persistence of capitalist ownership and huge material (military) power in the biggest imperialist countries (the US, Britain and France in particular) political pressure on the ruling groups in these countries has been enormous, and some of the non-capitalist countries have been dragged back into capitalist social relations, primarily Russia and the old Eastern Bloc. But they are all dismal failures when it comes to advertising the historical superiority of capitalism that was so deafeningly trumpeted in the 1990s after the capitulation of the Soviet bureaucracy to imperialism. When they have remained independent of US or EU imperialism - like Russia - they have created a post-capitalist capitalism you might call it, a state capitalism where huge oligarchical control of production is mediated through equally centralized political control in a very authoritarian form.

But this is a process foreshadowed in the fate of the post-colonialist countries, too - throwing out the colonialists but not the capitalists has led to all kinds of bizarre authoritarian political set-ups, from ostensibly democratic India, via the stinking corruption of Mandela's non-apartheid South Africa to the familiar dictatorships of Zaire, Zimbabwe, Libya, Saddam's Iraq, Assad's Syria, etc. 

In fact, authoritarian political control coupled with capitalism generates many fascist features, but the process is much more general than what surfaced in Italy and Germany between the world wars.

The truth of it is that modern capitalism - ie decadent, rotten imperialism - is a dead-end, literally dead, necrotic, for human society, and all these "fascist" phenomena worldwide are symptoms of its necrotic decay. If they are allowed to develop unchecked, they will produce barbarism - unchained brutality and destruction of people and the environment in the service of profit.

The only alternative is socialism, that is, a non-capitalist economy and society run on democratic, collective, universally and coherently planned principles by the actual workers producing the wealth in voluntary association with full political empowerment.

This historical alternative, just under the surface, remains invisible to everyone not grasping Marx's scientific explanation of the underlying economic forces shaping human history. And today that means just about everybody. It's not just unfortunate, but a great tragedy that Marx never got round to writing the political part of his work on bourgeois society. He was able to complete the economic part, in Capital and its companion books, but the political part is missing and needs to be worked out by us on our own using his separate historical and political writings - such as the 18th Brumaire, his work on Palmerston, his comments on various countries and their historical development, like Ireland and India and the US, his Critique of the Gotha Programme, and so on. Only Lenin and Trotsky (and to a lesser extent Rosa Luxemburg) have successfully continued this political work and pulled the threads together for us. Most notably Lenin in The State and Revolution, and Trotsky in Results and Prospects, The Permanent Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed.

It's clear as the noses on our faces that both Lenin and Trotsky (following Marx) weren't just theorists, either, but totally committed to the practical task of organizing a revolutionary socialist party and overthrowing the power of capital, consummated in the successful anti-capitalist revolution in Russia in October 1917.

What I have just written shows the perspectives in which we need to judge what's happening around us, and they have little to do with labels like "fascism" or "corporativism", which scratch the surface of imperialist society with penetrating very deeply. The same goes for "colonialism". They provide a handy way of describing some of the symptoms of our world, but they don't explain anything much, and they certainly don't help us change it.

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.

Chomsky interview on C-Punch about war and empire

There's a good interview by Sameer Dossani with Noam Chomsky on CounterPunch about war, neo-liberalism and empire now:

http://www.counterpunch.org/dossani03092007.html

It makes good points about the differences between Asia, Latin America and Africa.

I felt a couple of things could have been brought out more clearly, though.

What Chomsky doesn't mention is the political power reason WHY the Asian countries could ignore IMF and US pressures and industrialize. Particularly Japan (the big one), Korea, and the other "tigers". It was a clear policy choice by the States to give them their head after the war, and let the local capitalists thrive. It was the only way to avoid a devastating series of social struggles encouraged by the defiant existence and growth of China and Vietnam that could have thrown imperialism out of the region. Not the same history of imperialist/colonialist domination as in Latin America and Africa (which Chomsky does point out, to great effect).

He also remains silent on the strategic revolutionary/socialist aspects of Cuba's international intervention(s). Its subordination to Moscow's Socialism in One Country nationalism etc.

He doesn't mention the changing class structure in India, with the wholesale extinction of the old mainly rural caste system and the creation of a modern urban working class. He describes impoverishment, but not proletarianization as a process. He describes the flight of millions whose land has been stolen from them into the cities to unemployment, but doesn't mention the class dynamic involved in this.

And he doesn't go into where Lula comes from and why he might be a good leftie (class betrayal running the errands of foreign capital and big local capital, instead of the working class that nurtured him), or where Chavez comes from and why he's a leftie at all (same kind of petty-bourgeois military base as Castro in the 50s, and same reliance as Castro on the support of the poor masses to withstand the attacks of imperialism). Of course, Castro had Moscow, but on the other hand, Chavez is deeply rooted in Venezuela itself, and in the military, and he now has control of oil rather than sugar. Serious democratic nationalism today is forced to head for socialism and internationalism if it wants to survive, it has no other choice except capitulation to imperialism. So in a way, Chavez is a throwback to the anti-colonial struggle in the age of imperialism :-) Not much of a model for other countries to follow in other words - but quite possibly an enabler of more working-class and contemporary socialist movements in other countries (maybe Bolivia, Ecuador, even Argentina) to seize the reins of power and move forward.

Interesting that he mentions Clinton but doesn't generalize on the strategic importance of his Latin American initiatives more. Clinton's policies re Mexico, re Colombia, and re Iraq all contributed more than anything the more aggressive Bush has done to undermine those countries and weaken them strategically. And we can expect a repeat performance if another soft-cop Clinton gets into the White House.