Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

CHOMSKY ON ANARCHISM
to grasp the simple truth that they have no right to live, and they reacted in all
sorts of irrational ways. For some time, the British army was spending a good
part of its energies putting down riots. Later things took a more ominous rurn.
People began to organize. The Chartist movement and later the labor movement
became significant forces. At that point, the masters began to be a bit
frightened, recognizing that we can deny them the right to live, but they can
deny us the right to rule. Something had to be done.
Fortunately, there was a solution. The "science," which is somewhat more
flexible than Newton's, began to change. By mid-century, it had been substantially
reshaped in the hands of John Stuart Mill and even such solid characters
as Nassau Senior, formerly a pillar of orthodoxy. It turned out that the principles
of gravitation now included the rudiments of what slowly became the capitalist
welfure state, with some kind of social contract, established through long
and hard struggle, with many reverses, but significant successes as well.
Now there is an attempt to reverse the history, to go back to the happy days
when the principles of economic rationalism briefly reigned, gravely demonstrating
that people have no rights beyond what they can gain in the labor market.
And since now the injunction to "go somewhere else" won't work, the
choices are narrowed to the workhouse prison or starvation, as a matter of natural
law, which reveals that any attempt to help the poor only harms themthe
poor, that is; the rich are miraculously helped thereby, as when state power
intervenes to bail our invesrors after the collapse of the highly-toured Mexican
"economic miracle," or to save fa iling banks and industries, or to bar Japan
from American markets to allow domestic corporations to reconstruct the
steel, auwmotive, and electronics industry in the 1980s (amidst impressive
rhetoric about free markets by the most protectionist administration in the
postwar era and its acolytes). And far more; this is the merest icing on the cake.
But the rest are subject to the iron principles of economic rationalism, now
sometimes called "tough love" by those who allocate the benefits.
Unfortunately, this is no caricature. In fact, caricature is scarcely possible.
One recalls Mark Twain's despairing comment, in his (long-ignored) antiimperialist
essays, on his inability w satirize one of the admired heroes of the
slaughter of Filipinos: "No satire of Funston could reach perfection, because
Funston occupies that summit himself...[he is] satire incarnated."
What is being reported blandly on the front pages would elicit ridicule and
horror in a society with a genuinely free and democratic intellectual culture.
Take just one example. Consider the economic capital of the richest country
in the world: New York City. Its Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, finally came clean
about his fiscal policies, including the radically regressive shift in the tax burden:
reduction in taxes on the rich ("all of the Mayor's tax CutS benefit business,"
the New York Times noted in the small print) and increase in taxes on the
poor (concealed as rise in transit fares for school children and working people,
higher tuition at city schools, etc.). Coupled with severe cutbacks in public
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