Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

CHOMSKY ON ANARCHISM
we are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty
inheritance. We have engrossed to ourselves ... an altogether disproportionate
share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We
have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the
unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly
acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less
reasonable to others than to us.
To be sure, such honesty is rare in respectable society, though the passage
would be acceptable withom the italicized phrases, as Churchill understood.
He did make the paper public in the 1920s, in The Wo rld Crisis, but with the
offending phrases removed. 1 1
It is also instructive to observe the framework in which the disaster of
Communism is portrayed. That it was a monstrosity has never been in doubt,
as was evident from the first moment to anarchists, people of independent
mind like Russell and Dewey, and left Marxists-indeed predicted by many of
them in advance. Nor could the collapse of the tyranny be anything but an
occasion for rejoicing for anyone who values freedom and human dignity. Bm
consider a narrower question: the standard proof that the command economy
was a catastrophic fa ilure, demonstrating [he superior merits of capitalism:
Simply compare West Germany, France, England, and the United States to the
Soviet Union and its satellites. QED. The argumenr is scarcely more than an
intellectual reflex, considered so obviously valid as to pass unnoticed, the pre ­
supposition of all furrher inquiry.
It is an interesting argument, with broad applicability. By (he same logic,
one can, for example, demonstrate the colossal failure of the kindergartens in
Cambridge Massachusens, and (he grand success of MIT: Simply ask how well
children emering first grade understand quantum physics as compared with
MIT PhDs. QED.
Someone who put forth (hat argumem might be offered psychiatric treatment.
The fallacy is trivially obvious. To conduct a sane evaluation, one would
have to compare the graduates of the Cambridge kindergarrens with children
who entered the system at the same level. The same elementary rationality dictates
that to evaluate the Soviet command economy as compared with the capitalist
alternative, we must compare Eastern European coumries to others that
were like them when the "experimem" with the two development models
began. Obviously not the West; one has to go back half a millennium to a find
a time when it was similar to Eastern Europe. A proper comparison might be
Russia and Brazil, or Bulgaria and Guatemala, though that would be unfair to
(he Communist model, which never had anything remotely like the advaIHages
of the US satellites. If we undertake the rational comparison, we conclude,
indeed, that the Communist economic model was a disaster; and the Western
one an even more catastrophic failure. There are nuances and complexities, but
the basic conclusions are rather solid.
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