Legitimately purchase this book

"Those who feel that like lemmings they are being led over a cliff would be well-advised not to read this book," says Noam Chomsky. "They may discover that they are right."

That book is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, edited by Joshua Frank and Counterpunch's Jeffrey St. Clair, a compilation of essays on the Obama years just published by AK Press. Touching on everything from drone strikes to bailouts, the book includes a piece by me on the persecution of Bradley Manning. That's a hint that you should buy it.

Noam Chomsky, anarchist, on the impossibility of anarchism

After my last typically tedious post about Noam Chomsky, a blogger friend who took issue with my taking issue with the professor -- meaning he's of course now dead to me -- sent along another interview with the Chomster on what anarchism means to him. To clear up any misconceptions: I realize Chomsky is well aware of the corporate-state nexus. My issue is not his analysis of the status quo, but his solution to it, which he reiterates yet again in this excerpt:

Q: As far as we favor a stateless society in the long run, it would be a mistake to work for the elimination -- I've said that it would be a mistake to work for the elimination of the state in the short run, and we should be trying to strengthen the state, 'cause it's needed on the check of power of large corporations. Yet the tendency of a lot of anarchist research -- my own, too -- is to show that the power of large corporations derives from state privilege, and governments tend to get captured by concentrated private interests. That would seem to imply that the likely beneficiaries of a more powerful state is going to be the same corporate elite we're trying to oppose. So if business both derives from the state and is so good at capturing the state, why isn't abolishing the state a better strategy for defeating business power than enhancing the state's power would be?

Chomsky: Well, there's a very simple answer to that: it's not a strategy, and since it's not a strategy at all, there can't be a better strategy. The strategy of "eliminating the state" is back on the level of "let's have peace and justice". How do you proceed to eliminate the state? Okay? Can you think of a way of doing it? I mean, if there were a way of doing it in the existing world, everything would collapse and be destroyed. You just can't do it. I mean, there is nothing to replace it. If there was a rich, powerful network of, you know, cooperatives, community organizations, worker-controlled industry, you know, extending over the whole country, and the whole world, in fact, yeah, then you can talk about eliminating states. But to talk about eliminating the state in the world as it exists is simply to keep yourself in some remote academic seminar or small group, you know, saying, "Gee, this would be nice." It's not a strategy, so there can't be a better strategy. We are faced with realities. What is described here, and in fact it's true (I've written plenty about it, too), is that we have a number of systems of power, closely interlinked. One of them's corporate power, business power. That's by far the most dangerous of all. That means, effectively, unaccountable private tyrannies. A second, pretty closely linked to them, is state power. And the comment is correct (as the commentator says, I've written about it, too, a lot) that state power tends to be overwhelmingly influenced by concentrated private power.

Hey, Noam: You're an anarchist, bro! So why are you so condescendingly dismissive of strategies to eliminate the state? Peace and justice are also long-term, elusive goals, and yet we strive for them anyway -- and, importantly, we do so not by advocating more conflicts and instances of injustice, politicians and professional pundits excepted. Fighting wars to end war hasn't turned out so well and, mock though you may the smash-the-state crowd, Noam, increasing the power of the institution with a legal monopoly on the use of violence, the state, as part of a strategy to eventually abolish it -- which, if Chomsky's anarchism is anything more than intellectual pose, we can only assume is his goal as well -- is fraught with the same error in logic.

That is not to say corporate power is not a great evil. It undoubtedly is. But it is an evil enabled by the institution of the state; when I rail against the latter, I am railing against the former. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the target of my blogging wrath is the corporate-state nexus Chomsky identifies, for without the coercion and legal cover government currently provides in the form of everything from the police and military to intellectual property and the tax code, corporations as we know them could not exist.

Argue all you want about which is the greater evil, but it's about as useful as debating which came first, the chicken or the egg. Atomic weapons, for example, may be built by nominally private companies, but it's the U.S. government that provides the tax money that makes them possible -- and the only institution that has actually used them. Private prisons may be evil, but it is the state that fills them with prisoners. Rather than adversarial, the corporate-state relationship is symbiotic.

Chomsky's own work shows this, which is why I find it all the more irksome he chooses to argue against what seems to me an anarchist strawman. There may be a few anarchists who would like to smash the state tomorrow, but most that I've come across believe an anarchist society can only come about after the long-term process of creating a society of anarchists and the building up of institutions, like cooperatives and mutual aid associations, built on consensus, not coercion. We talk about eliminating the state because that is a long-term goal to strive for, like peace and justice, not because it's something we think can or should happen overnight.

Yet all Chomsky seems to have is disdain for the mere talk of a stateless society as he argues against an anarchist caricature, falsely suggesting those anarchists who do not share his opinion on the wisdom of increasing state power would like to keep intact all the corporate privileges it provides; as if their enemy is corporate taxes, not corporate personhood.

And while Chomksy casts himself as wisely pragmatic, the more I read about his solutions the more I find them naive and indistinguishable from those offered by a standard-issue liberal. Indeed, later in the interview excerpted above he even bemoans the loss of the loathsome Martha Coakley in the Massachussets Senate race a few years back, complaining that the electorate yet again voted against its own self-interest -- as if the Democrats, and former prosecutor no less, favor anything more than a marginally more subtle assault on those interests.

If one wants to be pragmatic, there are many ways a philosophical anarchist can act that don't depend on the dubious notion of short-term increases in state power. Economist Dean Baker details this in his new book, from patent reform to removing tax loopholes, and I'd argue they're at least as politically viable as instituting a the type of national health care system Chomsky favors. Indeed, when Democrats took back the White House and both chambers of Congress and had the opportunity to implement that very health care reform, which Chomsky accurately notes enjoys broad public support, they instead turned around and only increased the power of pharmaceutical giants and corporate insurance providers, even mandating the purchase of the latter's products.

And that illustrates a key point: increasing the power of the state, as the individual insurance mandate indisputably does, has historically been accompanied not by a decrease in corporate power, but an expansion of it. Just as wars for peace have only led to more wars, expansions of state power often enable only greater economic exploitation. While the state may be subject to influence as Chomsky contends, it's those with the most money who tend to do most of the influencing -- and who in turn use the state to ensure their power is not subject to the nuisance of labor unions and general strikes.

So who's really naive: the person who wants to limit corporate power by decreasing the power of the state, historically its chief enabler, or the one who believes that this time around the power of the state can be harnessed for good -- and that the road to a less coercive society depends on increasing the power of an institution whose unique feature is its legal monopoly on coercion?

Picking on Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is great. Manufacturing Consent is a masterful look at how the mainstream media in America subtly and not so subtly serves the interests of the state and its corporate puppeteers. He has long been one of the most trenchant critics of the U.S. empire, a fact that's led to him to be ostracized from respectable political discourse – good riddance – and to be ridiculed by Weekly Standard neocons and Mother Jones liberals alike.

But – and with effusive praise like that, you just had to know there'd be a “but” – because I think he's generally on the side of Truth and Justice, like a relative or loved one (not always the same thing) he's thus open to more withering criticism from yours truly than your average tenured professor, Melissa Harris-Perry excepted.

My chief issue with Uncle Noam comes down to the fact that, while his analysis of the state often charms this anarchist's black heart, his professed allegiance to anarchism as a philosophy often appears like a lot of folks' professed Catholicism: something one claims allegiance to in order to keep up appearances – be it to before one's radical readers or just dear mother – but which one doesn't think twice about on weekdays, outside of May Day or Christmas.

By that I mean, while Chomsky professes anarchy to be his end-goal, his strategy on how to get there doesn't strike me as substantively different than the Marxist-Leninists he mocks. That is, he views the state as a necessary bulwark against the privations of corporate capitalism; a necessary evil that ought to be maintained and even strengthened in order to prevent private tyranny. But, like the communist he derides for believing the dictatorship of the proletariat – or rather, the dictatorship of the Party – will voluntary wither away and cede power to a society of anarchists, Chomsky never really elaborates on how to get from a system of centralized power and coercion to a decentralized world of consensus.

"What, is the state just going to give up that power all on its own?" Chomsky might witheringly ask.

Take the good professor's response when asked about “the prospects for realizing anarchism in our society”:

Prospects for freedom and justice are limitless. The steps we should take depend on what we are trying to achieve. There are, and can be, no general answers. The questions are wrongly put. I am reminded of a nice slogan of the rural workers' movement in Brazil (from which I have just returned): they say that they must expand the floor of the cage, until the point when they can break the bars. At times, that even requires defense of the cage against even worse predators outside: defense of illegitimate state power against predatory private tyranny in the United States today, for example, a point that should be obvious to any person committed to justice and freedom -- anyone, for example, who thinks that children should have food to eat -- but that seems difficult for many people who regard themselves as libertarians and anarchists to comprehend. That is one of the self-destructive and irrational impulses of decent people who consider themselves to be on the left, in my opinion, separating them in practice from the lives and legitimate aspirations of suffering people.

Insofar as Chomsky asserts that there is no one easy, “right” answer to this question, I agree. While I think it's important to lay out a vision for the world you would to build, I personally see anarchism as a process: I would like to minimize the centralization of power and use of coercion in society, as I believe both lead to great evils in the hands of flawed, fallible human beings. In that sense, I see the use of co-ops in Nicaragua's Ometepe, for instance, as an example of anarchism in actiom. a significant step toward a world based on consensus, no coercion, where people can be free and self-reliant, dependent on neither politicians nor capitalists.

At the same time, though, I take issue with Chomsky answering a question on how to realize anarchism almost entirely with an attack on his fellow anarchists. And I find particularly irksome his seeming acceptance of the left-liberal framing of the state as the common person's last best defense against corporate power. I believe Chomsky himself would admit – and the much less radical, left-liberal economist Dean Baker details in his latest book – that it is the state which is in fact the chief enabler of that power, from “intellectual property” laws that guarantee monopoly profits to drug companies to the doctrine of “corporate personhood” that enables those very companies to skirt full financial and legal responsibility for their actions.

As an anarchist, Chomsky ought to have detailed why the divide between “public” and “private” power is less than meet the eye; that, in fact, the state and corporation collude to screw the public and to redistribute wealth from the lower classes to the wealthy; that, in fact, there is no real distinction between the two at all. The Federal Reserve is a perfect example of this: a government-chartered institution that is almost entirely run by the quasi-private banking industry to -- surprise! -- the benefit of bankers.

While those who would remove limits on corporate power while keeping in place the privileges are worth criticizing, Chomsky attacks “libertarians and anarchists” with far too wide a brush, most irksomely by deploying a red-flag raising phrase like “a point that should be obvious” and a groan-inducing appeal to those who “think children should have food to eat.” Really, Noam?

My other point of contention is Chomsky's contribution to the sort of political in-fighting he often decries, namely his denunciation of anarcho-capitalism, a system that he says, “if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history.”

First things first: I'm no anarcho-capitalist. I think those who adopt that label often have an almost self-parodying view of the role markets and the profit motive play in society, every potential problem that might arise discussed by pointing to how a private company could meet Social Demand X or Y, complete with the appropriate citation of some book by Murray Rothbard. Many, though not all, seem to leave no room for other forms of social cooperation, anything that doesn't involve a profit appearing suspiciously commie. And many do not seem to have ever questioned the moral basis for private property and the role the state has played in upholding that particular institution – and in determining who has come to hold property – and whether it could truly be maintained in a world free of coercion and the subsidy of state protection.

I also recognize that it's just a label; that some anarcho-capitalists or market anarchists could very well read the preceding paragraph while nodding their heads. I also recognize that, differences aside, I have a lot in common with these people. Indeed, Chomsky himself admits – when not suggesting anarcho-capitalism would be on par with the evils of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia – that he finds himself “in substantial agreement with people who consider themselves anarcho-capitalists on a whole range of issues,” and that for awhile they were the only ones he would publish his work. He also concedes that there may very well be a role for markets in his ideal anarchist world.

So why the over-the-top, tyranny “with few counterparts in human history” denunciation? While I'm no stranger to hyperbole, and I too have my qualms with anarcho-capitalists, I find it hard to believe that, at its worst, an an-cap world would be any more tyrannical than the one we have now, what with its state-privileged corporate monopolies and standing armies and massive prison complexes. Chomsky's critique, then – and the mirror image attack on anarcho-syndicalism from the clowns at the Mises Institute – strikes me as not unlike the bickering between Monty Python's Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea, where radicals that agree on 90 percent of the issues hate each other more than their shared enemy: the corporate state. Or was it the Romans?

Anarchists should be free to criticize other anarchists. Debate is good and keeps people honest. But let's not lose sight of the common foe: coercion, be it perpetrated by state or corporation, recognizing, I would add, that you can't have the latter without the former. Sure, we can and should debate the merits of syndicalism and the wisdom of municipal versus privatized police forces. But guys! We're a long way from there. We have a lot of coercion to remove from society before we get to the point where those debates will have real world consequences. We can discuss the workability of everyone's desired dream anarchist world as soon as we, say, live in a world where U.S. military bases are only to be found in the United States, okay?

And Noam, buddy: let's not forget, because I know you're aware of this, that right now at this moment the state is the chief deployer of coercion and, far from its foe, the chief enabler of corporate power. No, let's not do away with the social safety net or regulations that, however feebly, restrict corporate excess, at least not without first doing away with corporate privilege. But let's also not forget that, historically, increasing the power of the state as you would like to do has not been found conducive with minimizing coercion or corporate power in society. And as for reducing that power once you've increased it: ask your Marxist-Leninist friends how that worked out.