Noam Chomsky on Violence, Leninism and the Left after Occupy

CH: In conjunction with this, there has been a renewed interest in the Jacobin legacy. There are new writings on reevaluating, defending and justifying the Terror in addition to justifying Robespierre and his vision of a revolutionary France. This is something that is promulgated by some on the left who still have connections with Twentieth Century Communist ideas like Leninist Vanguardism. What is the legacy of Jacobinism and Leninism on the left?NC: They are quite different first of all. In the case of Jacobinism, we could discuss it but now we are back in a philosophy seminar, an interesting one. There is an interesting question as to what should have been done, what were the proper actions to have been taken in revolutionary France. I don’t happen to agree with Robespierre’s methods at all.Now let’s move to Leninism. They are totally unrelated, no relation whatsoever. Leninism was in my view counterrevolutionary. It wasn’t instituting communism. There was a popular revolution, in fact there had been for years, through 1917 it grew very substantially from February on. Lenin basically tried to take control of it. If you take a look at his writings in 1917 they went way to the left. April Thesis, State and Revolution the most radical things he ever wrote, almost anarchist. My view is that it was basically opportunism. I don’t think he believes a word of it. It seems to me that he was trying to associate himself, become the leader of the revolutionary popular forces. When he became the leader, he didn’t waste much time, and Trotsky helped him, in instituting a pretty repressive regime with the basic elements of Stalinism. They moved pretty quickly to dismantle most of the organs of popular power. Not over night, but over a short time they were able to basically dismantle the soviets, the factory councils, to convert the labor force into a labor army. The peasant revolutionary forces were very much opposed to this incidentally. As distinct from Marx who saw revolutionary potential in the Russian peasantry, the urban communists, like Lenin were strongly opposed to that. In fact, a lot of Marx’s later work was even suppressed, because they didn’t like what he was saying. It wasn’t Marx but their contempt for the backward peasants. Their conception was that Russia is a backward peasant society, it has to be driven towards industrialization and then out of that the iron laws of history will lead to socialism and so on but sometime in the future. In fact, they regarded Russia as a backwater. They were essentially waiting for a revolution in Germany, the most advanced capitalist country, that’s where there should be a revolution. When the revolution was crushed in Germany in 1919, by that time Russia had been pretty much turned into the kind of labor army that Lenin and Trotsky were advocating, not totally but mostly, Kronstadt kind of finished it all. When the German revolution was crushed they realized that’s not going to work, so we have to do something else to drive Russia towards industrialization. Shortly after that comes the New Economic Policy which is essentially lets introduce state capitalism but with an iron fist, because we are going to drive them forward. This is Lenin’s vanguardism.It was sharply criticized back in the early years of the twentieth century by Marxists, in fact by some of his later associates. Although some of the critics, like Rosa Luxemburg, pointed out that Lenin’s program, which they regarded as pretty right wing, and I do too, was, the image was, that there would be a proletarian revolution, the party will take over from the proletariat, the central committee would take over from the party and the maximal leader will take over from the central committee. Pretty much what happened, not precisely but roughly what happened. After that the use of terror to defend the repressive violent state has nothing to do with communism. In fact, I think that one of the great blows to socialism in the Twentieth Century was the Bolshevik revolution. It then called itself socialist, and the west called it socialist. In fact that’s one thing on which the world’s two major propaganda systems agreed; the huge propaganda system in the west and the minor propaganda system in the east. One of the few things on which they agreed was that this was socialism. The west propaganda system liked that because it was a way of defaming socialism, relating it to what is going on in Russia. The east, the Russian propaganda system liked it because they are trying to profit from the moral aura of socialism which was quite real, so they kind of both agreed on that. You know that when the world’s major propaganda systems agree on something it’s kind of hard for people to extricate themselves from it, so by now its routine that that was socialism, all of it very anti-socialist. I remember when in about the late 80’s when it was pretty clear that the system was tottering I was asked by a left journal, I won’t mention it, to write an article on what I thought was going to happen when the system collapses. I wrote an article in which I said I think it will be a small victory for socialism if the system collapses. They refused to publish it. Finally, it was published in an anarchist magazine, so it appeared. They couldn’t understand it. In fact I wrote some of the same things in journals here like The Nation and they published it, but I don’t think anyone understood it because this was socialism. How could you say that this was anti-socialist? My view is not unique. The left Marxists had the same view, people like Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, others who got marginalized, because that’s what happens to people who don’t have the guns. I think they were right. The people who Lenin condemned as the ultra left, the infantile ultra leftists, I think they were basically right, not in everything, as were a lot of the anarchist critics. Early on, Bertrand Russell saw it pretty well.  By 1920 it was unmistakable, I think even earlier. I mean I wasn’t alive then but when I was 12 years old it seemed pretty obvious to me.CH: Do you think that within the coordinates of the entire Marxist tradition there will always be this danger of going towards that edge?NC: You know, I don’t regard Lenin as part of the Marxist tradition, frankly. What the Marxist tradition is, who knows, but it wasn’t Marx’s position. I mentioned his belief in the revolutionary potential of the Russian peasantry. There is hardly a hint of that in Lenin.  Marx had a lot of different views. For example, he thought it might be possible to reach socialism by parliamentary means in the more bourgeois democratic societies.  England was his model, of course, he didn’t rule it out. In fact, Marx didn’t have very much to say about socialism or communism. Take a look at Marx’s work. Very deep, analytic critique of a variety of capitalism, capitalist markets, properties, imperialism and so on, but about the future society a couple of scattered sentences, and I think, my guess is for good reasons. His picture was, as I understand it, that when working people liberate themselves, and can make their own decisions, they will determine what kind of society it will be. He is not going to dictate it to them. I think that’s a pretty wise stand frankly.