Why some people think Noam Chomsky is wrong
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http://www.metafilter.com/112583/Why-some-people-think-Noam-Chomsky-is-wrong
Haven’t checked the links, could be a load of right-wingers.
Some probably are. Personally I’ve never been a fan of Chomsky (though I know some Socialist Party members are), especially not his stuff on US foreign policy, which is just boring and apparently (according to the link you give) not always accurate and does lend comfort to kneejerk anti-Americanism and its devotees.Having said this, I can’t deny that his stuff on the media, manufacturing consent is useful.There’s an assessment of Chomsky from the August 1998 Socialist Standard here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1998/no-1128-august-1998/chomskys-weakness
His speaking style is very boring with some notable exceptions such as his debate with William Buckley and his comments on Leninism in response to a Leninist.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlMEVTa-PIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” There’s no end of fools who storm in to try and get one over on Chomsky, I’ve never yet seen anyone succeed. Chomsky is in fact always accurate, as his replies to his critics make abundantly clear, and you can hardly hold him responsible for what other people make of his work.He admits himself that his talks and writing style are boring, and says that’s how he likes it, because he wants people to consider the issues, and make up their minds for themselves, not be swayed by rhetorical/oratorical brilliance. Having said that, who can fail to be amused and impressed at how he takes people apart in debate, merely by calmly referring to the plain facts? I particularly enjoy his demolition of Andrew Marr:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu1ONVg362o
I still find fault with Chomsky’s advocacy for the “lesser evil” as demonstrated in his preference for Kerry over Bush. “No one should delude themselves into believing that they are taking a stand on principle if they help grant another mandate to the radical statist reactionaries around Bush — unless the principle they adhere to is dismantling what remains of the progressive achievements of a century of popular struggle at home, and consequences internationally and for the future that we don’t have to dwell on.” Kerry voted for the war in Iraq and penned part of the Patriot Act.”Anyone who says “I don’t care if Bush gets elected” is basically telling poor and working people in the country, “I don’t care if your lives are destroyed. I don’t care whether you are going to have a little money to help your disabled mother. I just don’t care, because from my elevated point of view I don’t see much difference between them.” That’s a way of saying, “Pay no attention to me, because I don’t care about you.” Apart from its being wrong, it’s a recipe for disaster if you’re hoping to ever develop a popular movement and a political alternative.”Well, we now have had the experience of the second Bush term and now of an Obama presidency. Kerry would no doubt have been an Obama – all promise and little change. Feeding illusions as Chomsky appeared to be doing only leads to the inevitable disillusionment. Chomsky i feel was in error endorsing Kerry. Howard Zinn stated,“I don’t have faith in Kerry changing, but with Kerry there is a possibility that a powerful social movement might change him. With Bush, no chance.”Has it been the Occupy Wall St or the Tea Party which has made Obama change the most. He may adopt the radicals rhetoric but the fundamental changes to his policies on foreign policy and health insurance has stemmed from the right’s influence, forcing through compromise. Would a President Kerry have behaved any differently? Would Chomsky be regretting his position?
Chomsky does not feed illusions. He says very clearly, and over and over again, that the Republicans and the Democrats represent two wings of the Business Party, and that it won’t make a huge amount of difference who gets in, certainly not when it comes to foreign policy and so on. But although it won’t make a huge amount of difference, it will make a small amount of difference (Chomsky quotes empirical evidence to support this) to some of the poorest people in the country. So, do you care? They do. Chomsky’s position on voting is born out of compassion and class solidarity. Supporting the lesser evil is a pretty obviously sensible and decent thing to do.
Then can i assume at the next election you will be following the advice of the SWP and voting Labour Party without illusions. Did you vote for Tony Blair, Gordon Brown in the previous elections? If not , why not?
And line up with those US Occupiers who say re-elect Obama against whatever nutter the Republicans finally come up with?
Or perhaps line up with Ron Paul, too, as the lesser of the three evils running for the Republican nomination?
Chomsky makes two assumptions. (1) Kerry then Obama were really the “lesser evil” and (2) that there is something to be gained by choosing an admitted “evil”. Both are questionable. We have the record of Obama as president of his “lesser evil”What ruling class politicians will actually do once elected is impossible to predict and for Chomsky to claim providence even with a history of statistics on the matter is simply not very credible. Chomsky is claiming what bourgeois politicians say have some relationship to what they do. But politicians may say anything they wish but once elected, they may do whatever they please. There is no requirement that they tell the truth. Democrats with Obama at the helm, at one point had a super majority in Congress and accomplished little. Arguing fo a Democrat vote on the grounds that things may be marginal better strikes me as valid as newspaper pundits devising mathematical schemes to improve your chances of winning the lottery, you still remain a highly probable loser! This is the illusion of choice. The Democratss are there to pacify us. They are not there to bring around any change to the way government is done what-so-ever. They are there to flick a few crumbs to keep us from uprising and that’s it. And those throwaway crumbs are the basis of Chomsky’s case.We are living in a period of reaction, and the “real choices” are all reactionary. So we should be unrealistic and utopian and we should advocate what we really want, regardless if it makes us “ineffective” or dreamers. That is our basic function: to develop alternatives, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. The best we can hope for is to use this as an opportunity to regroup, in order to get the working class in a stronger position to start from when the boom returns. All we can do is to try to negotiate the best redundancy terms possible and try to resist as effectively as we can the increased downward pressures on wages and working conditions (for which we need collective organisation and action, even within the existing trade unions). As to what revolutionaries can do, at the moment being so small a minority, we can’t do much more than keep on arguing that the only way-out is to replace capitalism by a system based on common ownership (instead of class ownership) and production solely for use (instead of production for profit) and to keep on urging workers to self-organise themselves democratically to bring this social revolution about. A working class that can’t defend itself is also a working class that is incapable of making a revolution. We all know the Debs quote…if we support what we don’t want – just guess what we will get.Chomsky said “Those who prefer to ignore the real world are also undermining any hope of reaching any popular constituency.”Well, since half of Americans already ignore the elections anyway, that leaves us with quite a potential popular constituency to work on.Chomsky has also said “The smart way to keep people passive & obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”That’s virtually the entire function of the Democrat party.Your reply seems to me to be a bit moralistic. Politics as charity and that one wing of the business party are supposedly more humanitarian and virtuous than the other.We should treat people as grown-ups and state our position honestly declaring that no-one you vote for is going to change your life for the better. If you want a better life, you’ll have to fight for it. Aren’t we serious about abolishing wage-slavery?And what about our own Party’s integrity, attacking the person we just finished telling people to vote for. What a way to earn people’s respect and trust. Even Lenin got caught out with that one by publically saying Bolsheviks should support the Labour Party like a noose around its neck on the gallows …or whatever the actual quote was.
Jesting apart, I think Stuart is making the philosophical point that if there is a choice only of two evils it’s logical to choose the lesser. But the real question is whether or not there is just a choice of two evils.Here’s an extract from wikipedia on the term:
Quote:An early example of the lesser of two evils principle in politics was the slogan “Better the turban than the mitre”, used by Orthodox Christians in the Balkans during the rise of the Ottoman Empire. Conquest by Western Roman Catholic powers would likely mean forcible conversion to the Catholic faith, while conquest by the Muslim Ottoman Empire would mean second-class citizenship but would at least allow Orthodox Christians to retain their current religion. In a similar manner, the Protestant Dutch resistance against Spanish rule in the 16th century used the slogan Liever Turks dan Paaps (better a Turk than a Papist).The reference at the end of the wikipedia article to the 2002 French presidential election which opposed the conservative Jacques Chirac to Le Pen of the National Front reminds me that I actually saw a Trotskyist march in Lille at the time with the banner: “Cholera or the Plague: Vote for Cholera”. Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me.Incidentally, which is the lesser evil: the Roman Catholic Church or the Greek Orthodox Church?
The lesser of two weevils is still a weevil…………..
Would I support and/or vote for any of those people in certain circumstances? Possibly, it all depends. But in any case, voting in an election is only a very tiny and relatively unimportant part of political activity, including Chomsky’s. Was it Chomsky who said it’s not the ballot box that counts but the brain box? It might as well have been.
“Even Lenin got caught out with that one by publically saying Bolsheviks should support the Labour Party like a noose around its neck on the gallows ..”.or whatever the actual quote was.SWP favourite,.. support ” as the rope supports the hanging man”
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