Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

INTERVIEW WITH BRRRY PRTE MRN
it-there were very signifigant popular libertarian, sometimes anarchist initiatives
all over, from peasant anarchism in the Ukraine to workers' councils in
the Soviets. They were simply smashed by force, by great violence. Lenin and
Trotsky were totalitarian extremists and they had a theory behind it. They were
dedicated Marxists who believed that a backward, primitive country like
Russia can't go to socialism because the Master's principles tell us that.
Therefore we have to drive the country by force through the stages of essentially
state capitalist development and then ultimately something will happen.
They weren't repeating the master accurately, this required the suppression of
many years of Marx's later work-which were literally suppressed-his studies
of peasant societies in Russia and so forth.
The point is they had the force. It wasn't easy to destroy it. Take Makhno's
movement, Kronstadt, or the elimination of the Soviets: it wasn't a trivial operation
but it was carried out. Berkman saw it and he saw the vicious totalitarian
society arising very much the way anarchists had predicted. I mean,
Bakunin spelled it all OUt. In fact even Trotsky in his early work, before he
joined [the Bolsheviks] , said it was going to happen, as did Rosa Luxemburg
and others. But it happened and that's their variant. Our variant was different.
Berkman was writing right after Wilson's Red Scare, which made the Patriot
Act look like a tea party. It was a violent repression run by the "progressive"
Woodrow Wilson and others, not just against the anarchists-not just Emma
232
Goldman who was kicked out-but against people pretty much in the mainstream
like Eugene Debs, who was the leading labor figure. Wilson was completely
vindictive, tossed him in jail because he raised questions about the
nobility of Wilsons' war, and he refused to grant him an amnesty when everyone
else was granted an amnesty. All this really crushed independent thought
and labor. It had a big effect.
Alongside the violence there is the rise of massive propaganda, the rise of
the public relations industry, to try to control attitudes and beliefs. Apart from
that, there is something quite simple: the disciplinary effects of the way life is
organized. Take students today They are in some ways freer than they were 60
years ago in their attitudes and commitments and so on. On the other hand
they are more disciplined. They are disciplined by debt. Part of the reasoning
for arranging education so you come out with heavy debt is so you are disciplined.
Take the last 20 years-the neo-liberal years roughly-a very striking
part of what is called "globalization" is just aimed at discipline. It wants to
eliminate freedom of choice and impose discipline. How do you do that? Well,
if you're a couple in the U.S. now, each working 50 hours a week to put food
on the rabie, you don't have time to think about how to become a libertarian
socialist. When what YOLL are worried about is "how can I get food on the
table?" or "I've got kids to take care of, and when they are sick I've got to go
to work and what's going to happen to them?" Those are very well-designed
techniques of imposing discipline. And there are costs to trying to be inde-