Masters of Mankind

Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013

Noam Chomsky

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781608464258
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Imperialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

• Introduction by Marcus Raskin name in spread sheet.
  
• Collection of essays dealing with State terrorism.
  
• Chomsky in built large audience 400,000 Facebook followers.
  
• Noam Chomsky is the foremost critic of U.S. foreign policy in the world. This volume of essays offers readers a concentrated, accessible introduction to Chomsky's insights on the affects of state power around the world.
  
• US citizens are war weary following more than eleven years of fighting the "War on terror." The Obama administration has made unprecedented attacks against sovereign nations: Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, etc., escalated drone bombing campaigns, and even assassinated a US citizen.

One

Knowledge and Power: Intellectuals and the Welfare-Warfare State *

“War is the health of the State,” wrote Randolph Bourne in a classic essay as America entered the First World War:

It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. . . . Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.

And at the service of society’s “significant classes” were the intelligentsia, “trained up in the pragmatic dispensation, immensely ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared for the intellectual interpretation or the idealistic focusing of ends.” They are: “lined up in service of the war-technique. There seems to have been a peculiar congeniality between the war and these men. It is as if the war and they had been waiting for each other.”1

Bourne emphasizes the ideological consequences of national mobilization: the “irresistible forces for uniformity” that induce obedience to the State and subservience to the needs of the “significant classes.” To this we may add the material benefits of mobilization for war, particularly evident in World War II and the Cold War as government intervention in the economy brought the depression to a close and guaranteed the “healthy functioning” of an economy geared, quite extensively, to the social goals of destruction and waste. Events have verified Bourne’s prediction that the mobilization for war would bring the intelligentsia to a position of power and influence “in the service of the war technique.” His remarks may be compared to those of James Thomson, East Asian specialist at the Department of State and the White House between 1961 and 1966:

[T]he increased commitment to Vietnam was also fueled by a new breed of military strategists and academic social scientists (some of whom had entered the new Administration) who had developed theories of counterguerrilla warfare and were eager to see them put to the test. To some, “counterinsurgency” seemed a new panacea for coping with the world’s instability. . . . There is a result of our Vietnam policy which holds potential danger for the future of American foreign policy: the rise of a new breed of American ideologues who see Vietnam as the ultimate test of their doctrine. . . . In a sense, these men are our counterpart to the visionaries of communism’s radical left: they are technocracy’s own Maoists. They do not govern Washington today—but their doctrine rides high.2

To this observation we can conjoin another, regarding a parallel phenomenon that has been the subject of wide discussion in recent years: “Power in economic life has over time passed from its ancient association with land to association with capital and then on, in recent times, to the composite of knowledge and skills which comprises the technostructure . . . [that is, the group that] embraces all who bring specialized knowledge, talent or experience to group decision-making [in government and corporation].”3

The role of the technical intelligentsia in decision-making is predominant in those parts of the economy that are “in the service of the war technique” (or such substitutes as the space race) and that are closely linked to government, which underwrites their security and growth. It is little wonder, then, that the technical intelligentsia is, typically, committed to what Barrington Moore calls “the predatory solution of token reform at home and counterrevolutionary imperialism abroad.”4 Elsewhere, Moore offers the following summary of the “predominant voice of America at home and abroad”—an ideology that expresses the needs of the American socioeconomic elite, that is propounded with various gradations of subtlety by many American intellectuals, and that gains substantial adherence on the part of the majority that has obtained “some share in the affluent society”:

You may protest in words as much as you like. There is but one condition attached to the freedom we would very much like to encourage: your protests may be as loud as possible as long as they remain ineffective. Though we regret your sufferings very much and would like to do something about them—indeed we have studied them very carefully and have already spoken to your rulers and immediate superiors about these matters—any attempt by you to remove your oppressors by force is a threat to civilized society and the democratic process. Such threats we cannot and shall not tolerate. As you resort to force, we will, if need be, wipe you from the face of the earth by the measured response that rains down flame from the skies.5

A society in which this is the predominant voice can be maintained only through some form of national mobilization, which may range in its extent from, at the minimum, a commitment of substantial resources to a credible threat of force and violence. Given the realities of international politics, this commitment can be maintained in the United States only by a form of national psychosis of the sort given voice, for example, by the present secretary of defense, who sees us “locked in a real war, joined in mortal combat on the battlefield, each contender maneuvering for advantage”6—a war against an enemy who appears in many guises: Kremlin bureaucrat, Asian peasant, Latin American student, and, no doubt, “urban guerrilla” at home. Far saner voices can be heard expressing a perception that is not totally dissimilar.7 Perhaps success can be attained in the national endeavor announced by this predominant voice. In Moore’s informed judgment, the system “has considerable flexibility and room for maneuver, including strategic retreat.”8 In any event, this much is fairly sure. Success can be achieved only at the cost of severe demoralization, which will make life as meaningless for those who share in the affluent society as it is hopeless for the peasant in Guatemala. Perhaps “war is the health of the state”—but only in the sense in which an economy is “healthy” when a rising GNP includes the cost of napalm and missiles and riot-control devices, jails and detention camps, placing a man on the moon, and so on.

Even in this sense of “health,” it is not war that is the health of the state in the modern era, but rather permanent preparation for war. Full-scale war means that the game is lost. Even a “limited war” can be harmful, not only to the economy,9 as the stock market and the complaints of aerospace executives indicate, but also to the long-range commitment to the use of force. Probably what success the peace movement has had in limiting the attack on Vietnam came not from its present power but rather from the danger that the “predominant voice” that Moore correctly hears might be challenged in a more general and far-reaching way. Better to nip dissent in the bud while it is still focused on the specific atrocity of Vietnam and deflect a movement that might, if it grows, begin to raise serious questions about American society and its international role. Thus we now hear of the mistake of bombing North Vietnam (which caused moral outrage and thus threatened the stability of the body politic)10 and of using conscripts to fight a colonial war; and we hear proposals for a volunteer army at “market prices” so that resistance will be cooled when Vietnam is reenacted elsewhere.

I would like to elaborate on both of Bourne’s points: the function of preparation for war in guaranteeing the health of the state, and the opportunities that this condition provides for “the new breed of American ideologues”—adding some historical perspective and some comments on what intellectuals might hope to do to counter these tendencies.

The intellectual has, traditionally, been caught between the conflicting demands of truth and power. He would like to see himself as the man who seeks to discern the truth, to tell the truth as he sees it, to act—collectively where he can, alone where he must—to oppose injustice and oppression, to help bring a better social order into being. If he chooses this path, he can expect to be a lonely creature, disregarded or reviled. If, on the other hand, he brings his talents to the service of power, he can achieve prestige and affluence. He may also succeed in persuading himself—perhaps, on occasion, with justice—that he can humanize the exercise of power by the “significant classes.” He may hope to join with them or even replace them in the role of social management, in the ultimate interest of efficiency and freedom. The intellectual who aspires to this role may use the rhetoric of revolutionary socialism or of welfare-state social engineering in pursuit of his vision of a “meritocracy” in which knowledge and technical ability confer power. He may represent himself as part of a “revolutionary vanguard” leading the way to a new society or as a technical expert applying “piecemeal technology” to the management of a society that can meet its problems without fundamental changes. For some, the choice may depend on little more than an assessment of the relative strength of competing social forces. It comes as no surprise, then, that quite commonly the roles shift; the student radical becomes the counterinsurgency expert. His claims must, in either case, be viewed with suspicion: he is propounding the self-serving ideology of a “meritocratic elite” that, in Marx’s phrase (applied, in this case, to the bourgeoisie), defines “the special conditions of its emancipation [as] the general conditions through which alone modern society can be saved.” Failure to present a reasoned justification will simply confirm these suspicions.

Long ago, Kropotkin observed that “the modern radical is a centralizer, a State partisan, a Jacobin to the core, and the Socialist walks in his footsteps.”11 To a large extent he is correct in thus echoing the warning of Bakunin that “scientific socialism” might in practice be distorted into “the despotic domination of the laboring masses by a new aristocracy, small in number, composed of real or pretended experts,”12 the “red bureaucracy” that would prove to be “the most vile and terrible lie that our century has created.”13 Western critics have been quick to point out how the Bolshevik leadership took on the role outlined in the anarchist critique14—as was in fact sensed by Rosa Luxemburg,15 barely a few months before her murder by the troops of the German socialist government exactly half a century ago.

Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of Bolshevism was sympathetic and fraternal but incisive, and full of meaning for today’s radical intellectuals. Fourteen years earlier, in her Leninism or Marxism,16 she had criticized Leninist organizational principles, arguing that “nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straitjacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee.” These dangerous tendencies toward authoritarian centralization she saw, with great accuracy, in the earliest stages of the Bolshevik revolution. She examined the conditions that led the Bolshevik leadership to terror and dictatorship of “a little leading minority in the name of the class,” a dictatorship that stifled “the growing political training of the mass of the people” instead of contributing to it; and she warned against making a virtue of necessity and turning authoritarian practice into a style of rule by the new elite. Democratic institutions have their defects: “But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin17 have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.”

Unless the whole mass of the people take part in the determination of all aspects of economic and social life, unless the new society grows out of their creative experience and spontaneous action, it will be merely a new form of repression. “Socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals,” whereas in fact it “demands a complete spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule,” a transformation that can take place only within institutions that extend the freedoms of bourgeois society. There is no explicit recipe for socialism: “Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts.”

The role of the intellectuals and radical activists, then, must be to assess and evaluate, to attempt to persuade, to organize, but not to seize power and rule. “Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”18

These remarks are a useful guide for the radical intellectual. They also provide a refreshing antidote to the dogmatism so typical of discourse on the left, with its arid certainties and religious fervor regarding matters that are barely understood—the self-destructive left-wing counterpart to the smug superficiality of the defenders of the status quo who can perceive their own ideological commitments no more than a fish can perceive that it swims in the sea.

It would be useful, though beyond the bounds of discussion, to review the interplay between radical intellectuals and technical intelligentsia on the one hand and mass, popular-based organizations on the other, in revolutionary and post-revolutionary situations. Such an investigation might consider at one extreme the Bolshevik experience and the ideology of the liberal technocracy, which are united in the belief that mass organizations and popular politics must be submerged.19 At the other extreme, it might deal with the anarchist revolution in Spain in 1936–37—and the response to it by liberal and Communist intellectuals.20 Equally relevant would be the evolving relationship between the Communist Party and the popular organizations (workers’ councils and commune governments) in Yugoslavia today,21 and the love-hate relationship between party cadres and peasant associations that provides the dramatic tension for William Hinton’s brilliant account of a moment in the Chinese revolution.22 It could draw from the experience of the National Liberation Front as described, say, by Douglas Pike in his Vietcong23 and other more objective sources,24 and from many documentary accounts of developments in Cuba. One should not exaggerate the relevance of these cases to the problems of an advanced industrial society, but I think there is no doubt that a great deal can nevertheless be learned from them, not only about the feasibility of other forms of social organization25 but also about the problems that arise as intellectuals and activists attempt to relate to mass politics.

It is worth mention that the post–World War I remnants of the non-Bolshevik left reechoed and sharpened the critique of the “revolutionary vanguard” of activist intellectuals. The Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek26 describes “the aim of the Communist Party—w...