How George Orwell Paved Noam Chomsky’s Path to Anarchism

August 28, 2024 4:03 AM

"...Noam Chomsky himself did not come to left-libertarian or anarchist thinking as a result of his disillusionment with liberal thought. He quite literally started there."

This piece appeared recently on Arts & Letters Daily, and it caught my attention because I recently read both Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London for the first time.

posted by cupcakeninja (19 comments total)

here dissents by taking exception to Orwell’s paraphrasing of the POUM line. He emphasizes that “fascism is not simply another name for capitalism. It is a form, and a particularly brutal one, which capitalism takes under certain historical circumstances (including today in many third world countries under the sponsorship of U.S. capital)

the Chomsky/Foucault debate's fascinating
posted by HearHere at 4:58 AM on August 28 [5 favorites]

For a little fresh air, Red Sails is a treasure:
On Orwell:

Jones Manoel expresses his anger at the way working class people were represented in Animal Farm:

Orwell spends the entire book describing generations of animals as easily confused, dumb, stupid, illiterate, amnesiac… the entire book! The main target of this book’s critique aren’t the revolutionaries or communism: it’s the working class. George Orwell writes from an aristocratic ethos. “Elite theory” posits the people as incapable of self-governance, without the capacity to constitute themselves as a political subject, and therefore always the object of dispute and manipulation by vying elites. The people lack the capacity for political self-determination, cannot build a political program or engage in autonomous political action. This is George Orwell’s theory, borne out by his choice of metaphors. […] Animal Farm isn’t a critique of revolutionaries; it’s a critique of workers. It’s an aristocratic manifesto against the working class. [6]

On Chomsky:

The culmination of his arrogance and condescension comes in 2003, on a C-SPAN interview:

The collapse of the Soviet Union is a small victory for socialism in my opinion. [12]

This sentiment is completely at odds with reality, considering both the human tragedy witnessed in former Soviet states and the suffering inflicted since by triumphalist neoliberalism.

Chomsky never bothers to define “socialism” or “capitalism,” and the result is this pair of completely incoherent proclamations:

There was more socialism in Germany, in Western Europe, than there was in Russia. No, Russia’s about the most anti-socialist place you can imagine. Since 1918 it had wage labor, had super exploitation, had no element of workers control or involvement or participation. [13]

So giving microcredit loans to women is a very smart thing to do. It’s not the end of everything, but it has paid off. It’s a good capitalist approach. This is pure capitalism, actually, much purer than the U.S. economy. It’s real capitalism. The U.S. economy is state-based to a large extent. [14]

Everything about this is incorrect. Microcredit loans did not work. The welfare state wasn’t socialism. Markets are not synonymous with capitalism, and never have been. Real capitalism looks exactly like the loot and plunder we’re all accustomed to witnessing. These definitions are absolute nonsense, matching neither any previously laid out principle, nor any purely-functional colloquial usage.

posted by Space Coyote at 6:11 AM on August 28 [6 favorites]

Good catch, cupcakeninja.

It's been a while since I read it, but I found Homage to Catalonia very moving. It played a role in my anarchist thinking. (And don't forget the poor man was shot through the throat on the front lines!)
posted by doctornemo at 6:18 AM on August 28 [3 favorites]

I wonder to what extent Orwell's style, and his writing about language, played a role in Chomsky's own style, at least his political writing.
posted by doctornemo at 6:18 AM on August 28 [1 favorite]

It’s an aristocratic manifesto against the working class

It...what?
posted by mittens at 6:38 AM on August 28 [2 favorites]

Oops link for On Chomsky.
posted by Space Coyote at 6:56 AM on August 28 [1 favorite]

American Prestige did a wonderful two part biographical interview with Chomsky a couple years ago. It includes a long section on his childhood/undergrad political development, including the Spanish Civil War and pre-Israel Zionism.

I've only read a few pieces from Red Sails and I haven't been all that into it. The quote sort of rubs me the wrong way too. Worker control of means of production is a fairly solid common "definition," or at least a generally used notion, of socialism, and Chomsky stuck to that fairly well. Even if Chomsky were wrong about common usage, I don't see how that definition could be"absolute nonsense."

Chomsky's a polemicist and inspires intense loyalty from his fans, which unfortunately leads to a proliferation of criticism that matches his polemical tone and seems aimed at his grand public image rather than his work. Not sure if that's what Red Sails is doing here, but I do think Chomsky would have benefited from better interlocutors holding him to a more disciplined theoretical approach.
posted by Hume at 7:01 AM on August 28 [3 favorites]

> Orwell spends the entire book describing generations of animals as easily confused, dumb, stupid, illiterate, amnesiac… the entire book!

This isn't a feature of working class people, but a feature of people. The pigs who ended up as the elites were also to be counted amongst the easily confused, stupid, amnesiac. As the poster says, "All of us" is dumber than "one of us." Individuals can be smart, but take any group as a class, and they are a directionless hydra, pulled in a hundred million directions and unable to coordinate action in their mutual self-interest.

Movements that break this mold are possible, but exceptional. They erode over time and become ineffective. I tried believing in people for a bit, but I have been taught otherwise by the way that people in my communities cried out against Musk's twitter and then continued complacently using it because they couldn't overcome their own lockin. Systems and risk-intolerance are stronger than mutual self-interest. Individuals don't have the energy to fight against it because they're too busy myopically struggling for their own survival.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:07 AM on August 28 [5 favorites]

“Homage to Catalonia” ... gives an accurate and moving description of a working libertarian society. The “beliefs” that it “confirmed” for the teenaged Chomsky were related to his growing conviction that libertarian societies could function and meet the needs of the individual and the collective.

This is a different meaning of "libertarian" than I am used to.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:27 AM on August 28 [2 favorites]

> Orwell maintains that revolution is the only way to remove from power the oppressive business-based ruling class of the type that has dominated the West since World War II.

OK, I'm done. I'm not sure where TFA is headed, but I don't think it can be anyplace good with the kind of howlers that are jumping out at me almost from the start of the journey.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:31 AM on August 28 [1 favorite]

This is a different meaning of "libertarian" than I am used to.

It's not uncommon for anarchists for whom mutualism is a strong anchor to refer to themselves as "libertarian socialists."
posted by mph at 7:43 AM on August 28 [5 favorites]

It's the difference between Left Anarchism and Right Anarchism. One rejects property, while the other embraces it. The libertarianism we're familiar in America is Right Anarchism.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:51 AM on August 28 [3 favorites]

This is a different meaning of "libertarian" than I am used to.

My experience is that there may be a UK/US divide here. Most anarchists I know in the US (a small group but not that small) think of Libertarians here as a splinter party of the right. They are into small/no government but they also are fairly aggressively free market in terms of regulation either internal or external.
posted by jessamyn at 8:20 AM on August 28 [6 favorites]

> or anarcho-syndicalists [wiki/chomsky.info]

> "we love the people who use the platform" [pluralistic]
posted by HearHere at 8:37 AM on August 28 [4 favorites]

This piece appeared recently on Arts & Letters Daily,

cf. why i stopped reading arts & letters daily [wordpress]
posted by HearHere at 8:42 AM on August 28 [4 favorites]

> cf. why i stopped reading arts & letters daily

I am reminded that once upon a time I was a regular visitor there myself, and had forgotten what it turned out to be.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:11 AM on August 28

It's a nice excerpt, I don't think the characterization of Orwell's revolutionary position or his assessment of mercantilism as implausible or incorrect. Nor the proper use of the term libertarianism, there is an academic and leftist context for such terminology that one should apply if one wants to read a text in good faith.

But one of my probably two quibbles I have in this excerpt is the author cites another critic who said that Chomsky didn't appreciate why fascism is bad in a different way and it would not let someone like Chomsky function or exist. But I actually took Chomsky's online class two years ago (where he actually spoke lectures for a hour or so each Thursday) so I know first-hand out of his own mouth that this is would not be his current position, he would say fascism is very bad and that we should actually try to fight it.

Personally, I thought the notion that one already found themselves to have a political temperament to be plausible. It is what I think of my own understanding of Marxism--I didn't so much become a Marxist from a middle-class upbringing but it was that reading those works resonated with my prior life experiences: rather, the leftist literature merely put into words and articulated what I was experiencing in my own daily life. At least, it feels that way. So I thought it was interesting this bio recognizes this as a thing that happens to people's political inclinations.
posted by polymodus at 11:12 AM on August 28 [6 favorites]

I read Homage to Catalonia, so I was a bit taken aback by the author's quoted excerpt. It didn't sound like Orwell.

So I checked. What I found was a crass case of intellectual dishonesty.

Here is the original quote in its context:

"The P.O.U.M. ‘line’ was approximately this:

‘It is nonsense to talk of opposing Fascism by bourgeois “democracy”. Bourgeois “democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers’ control. If you set up any less goal than this, you will either hand the victory to Franco, or, at best, let in Fascism by the back door. Meanwhile the workers must cling to every scrap of what they have won; if they yield anything to the semi-bourgeois Government they can depend upon being cheated. The workers’ militias and police-forces must be preserved in their present form and every effort to “bourgeoisify” them must be resisted. If the workers do not control the armed forces, the armed forces will control the workers. The war and the revolution are inseparable.’ "

The author took out the single quotes, giving the impression that the text is what Orwell believed. This allows him to conclude that "Orwell maintains that revolution is the only way to remove from power the oppressive business-based ruling class of the type that has dominated the West since World War II."

Really? He did have a soft spot for the egalitarian P.O.U.M. But on Revolution, he was equivocal. If you take away anything from Homage to Catalonia and his later work, Animal Farm, it is that Revolution is only a beginning, but a beginning to god knows what.

Here is Orwell at the end of the book.
"When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this — and however it ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter and physical suffering — the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war."

It is this humility which puts Orwell into a class of his own. A humility which would be hard to find in Chomsky.
posted by storybored at 7:47 AM on August 30 [7 favorites]

Given that workers are the most numerous class of citizen, what is the difference between Democracy and Worker Control? Are those not also the same thing? At the end, the workers can't agree on what is best for workers.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:58 AM on August 30