Noam Chomsky (10 page)

That Chomsky would describe himself as an anarcho-syndicalist is simply a position that is derived from a scientific analysis of all available political theories, much in the same way that his linguistic position is that of a generative grammarian, based on an analysis of competing theories. Since political activism, however, is radically different from the concerns of science, there is one important aspect that Chomsky took from the anarchist position, namely that action is far more important than constructing theories. While the Left is littered with tomes of theoretical work that literally suffocate ‘action’ – as in contemporary France, for example – there is an almost spiritual call for action in Chomsky’s political work. As a teenager he may have learnt valuable lessons from Jewish anarchists in New York, but he also learnt them from his home and school environment. While anarcho-syndicalism had great appeal from an idealistic point of view, there was much activist pragmatism practised by his parents and their associates in the field of education: to do what is possible – and not to live in a dream world of what is seemingly impossible – is the maxim. Change the world by applying common sense. Educate people for a better world by taking incremental steps. Change the system from within. No great theories are necessary to achieve this. Elsie Chomsky personified the gentle but firm approach in such matters. In one of her rare published essays she describes a drama lesson she taught:

This type of work ethic and commonsensical approach to do good work must have influenced young Chomsky very deeply, even though as a teenager he may have rebelled, at least on the surface, by associating with the wilder members of Elsie’s family in New York, especially with uncle Milton and the anarcho-syndicalists.

In essence this shows a young Chomsky who is already hard to pin down as to the single most important influence that makes him tick. As he grows older he adapts and adopts, but remains faithful to his basic principles. These are perhaps best summed up by the subtitle of Smith’s book about Chomsky, namely ‘ideas and ideals’.
⁹
Chomsky’s ideals are thus rooted in anarcho-syndicalism, while his ideas for political activism are driven by common sense. Few people can understand what his ideals are, but many can follow what he expresses with common sense. His main vehicle for achieving this is through education – giving lessons for free – even though he is not averse to some direct action in joining protest marches and getting arrested or, in fact, organizing resistance, such as the national tax resistance in 1965 and founding
RESIST
, the main
US
resistance support organization from 1967.

As a young man, Chomsky behaved as the consummate political activist. For many years he merely pursued his ideals, poking around in libraries for anarchist and libertarian socialist literature, and becoming enamoured with Orwell and Russell in particular. While neither were hard-core anarchists, the former confirmed Chomsky’s earlier take on Barcelona. Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia
left a deep impression on Chomsky, even though Orwell was not so much on the side of the anarchists. Orwell is of course the political activist
cum
author
par excellence
, the man with an upper-class education and a socialist heart. He had fought in Spain on the side of the POUM, the Marxist – but anti-Stalinist – Republican group, and had been part of the takeover in Barcelona by the orthodox communists, who declared both Orwell’s
POUM
and the anarchists as ‘fascists’, hence as traitors to the cause. By then Orwell saw the Soviets as developing into a totalitarian state, a course of events later immortalized in
Animal Farm
. Chomsky was much amused by it, endorsing its fundamental message. As a historical footnote one might mention here that Orwell’s main publisher, Warburg, also published Rocker’s book on Barcelona and the anarchists in 1938.
¹⁰
There is a good chance that Orwell might have read it. Another connection between Orwell and Chomsky is the American political activist Dwight Macdonald, who published the political magazine
Politics
from 1944 to 1949 and to which Orwell made some contributions. Chomsky, as an undergraduate, was an avid reader
oí Politics
.

George Orwell’s
NUJ
membership card.

For Chomsky, though, Bertrand Russell is next in line. Russell is a person whose life and work included much that should be greatly admired. He was first and foremost a scientist – a mathematician and logician to be precise – and a political activist second. He therefore embodies the scientist who has a social conscience and acts accordingly, very much in the way that Chomsky would develop. Both men have a conviction that in the natural sciences one cannot be a fraud for ever – one gets found out eventually. Empirical facts of nature cannot be obfuscated: a given theory proves to be right or wrong, at least as long as empirical measurements are part of the equation. The scientific mind is thus highly trained to solve problems and equations, using the scientific method, logic and (sometimes) intuition to try to answer questions of how nature works. Such a finely tuned mind, when accompanied by a social conscience, is in a very good position to advise on problems facing mankind. Strangely enough, the human condition seems not to be subject to the laws of nature, inasmuch as science is unable to devise a method by which we can live in paradise or utopia, or at least in a socialist state of social justice. Chomsky’s explanation is that the hard sciences keep to quite simple systems. When a system becomes too complex, physics hands it over to chemistry. The same thing happens for chemistry–biology, biology–psychology–human affairs – all far too complex to expect anything like the theories of extremely simple systems. That’s why, since Galileo, physics has relied on experiments and idealizations, not what happens in the natural world surrounding the scientist. For Galileo and his successors, what mattered was what happens when a point-mass rolls down a frictionless true plane, something physically impossible, not what happens when a rock rolls down a hill or a feather drops to the ground, about which physics can say very little.

Bertrand Russell in California.

Marx, of course, declared that his brand of ‘scientific’ socialism would take care of that, but to date the situation has become, if anything, worse. Rocker and the anarchists long ago predicted the same, saying that Marx’s scientific socialism was a betrayal of the earlier Utopian socialism elaborated by Proudhon. Both Russell and Chomsky came to the conclusion that politics – or the organization of ordinary human life – must lie outside the realm of science, if only for the simple reason that the vast majority of ordinary people are not scientists. And as noted above, in the case of more complex systems, such as daily life, there are no laws for simple highly idealized systems that one can expect to apply. Both Russell and Chomsky therefore call upon ‘common sense’ as a basis to make the world a better place. For common sense to operate successfully there needs to be good information on which to base decisions. Here the scientific mind can be useful: to research and unearth good and truthful information. Common sense then dictates the appropriate actions to take. Since all ordinary people everywhere on earth are infused with common sense, much as people are born with a language capacity, there is only one thing to do: find out the truth and tell the people. This is what Russell did. This is what Chomsky was going to do as well. This is not to suggest a time line, however, for Chomsky had reached these conclusions well before he learned about Russell. As with Orwell, Russell was a welcome source of verification.

Another Russell–Chomsky parallel can be construed inasmuch as both are established scientists who cannot be ignored, unlike an unemployed, uneducated and wide-eyed anarchist. The establishment would simply eliminate the latter if he posed a real threat. One could not eliminate a Russell so easily – although one could imprison him, vilify and slander him, and deny him the right to teach. One cannot today eliminate Chomsky so easily. That both have tested the establishment to the limits is one of their great strengths, especially when they point out that the unemployed, uneducated, wide-eyed anarchist has far more common sense than any pseudo-liberal of the ruling classes.

When Russell wrote his 1918 book
Roads to Freedom
, subtitled ‘Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism’, he quoted Lao-Tzu lines of wisdom:

One may note that Rocker’s book
Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism
has a chapter entitled ‘History of Anarchist Philosophy from Lao-Tzu to Kropotkin’. We may therefore safely take Lao-Tzu’s lines as programmatic for the brand of anarchism that Rocker, Russell and Chomsky subscribe to. Interestingly though, when Russell brought out a third edition of his
Roads to Freedom
in 1948, he distanced himself in the preface from his earlier approach to anarchism inasmuch as it affords too much freedom. Russell had become disillusioned about man’s capability to be free, calling such wishful thinking ‘wilful blindness’.
¹¹
Chomsky, however, has remained the eternal optimist.

Chomsky’s own road to freedom in the meantime received various setbacks as he attended first high school and then university. He had only known his Deweyite primary schooling, which in many ways was the type of libertarian Beacon Hill school that Russell had set up in England. High school, on the other hand, had a highly regulated and suffocating style of teaching, as was the norm of the day. As already noted, the same was true of university life in Philadelphia until he hit upon a couple of lecturers who combined science with common sense. These were his Arabic teacher Giorgio Levi Della Vida, ‘an antifascist exile from Italy’,
¹²
and Zellig Harris. The latter of course is credited with setting Chomsky on the path of linguistics by first impressing him with his politics. Both Harris and Della Vida were political activists, and they belong to the multitude of people who influenced Chomsky’s ideals and his political ideas of action.

One should pause to consider Harris as a classic example of a general Jewish activism that is unique in the
USA
and, by extension, in Israel. One might classify the whole of Jewish history as ‘activism’
par excellence
, and few would deny that the eventual establishment of the state of Israel is the outcome of a type of activism that is probably unrivalled in history. That Zellig Harris was active in the Jewish issues of the time is simply
de rigueur
. In his book on Chomsky, Barsky makes a detailed study of Zellig Harris and his extensive involvement in various Jewish movements.
¹³
A key issue promulgated by Harris and his group was that Arabs and Jews in Palestine should live together as one, that is, there should not be a separatist Jewish state. As we know now, this line of thinking had no effect on what actually happened. In a fit of Russellian disillusionment one might say that Harris’s stance was ‘wilful blindness’, as much as anarchists are blinded by their calls for freedom. It would have taken many a Jewish Orwell to rush off to Palestine and fight for such a cause. In the event only those who believed in the opposite, a separate Zionist state, rushed there and fought tooth and nail – and the Arabs – to achieve it. That nothing has changed in this method to this very day is a continuing irritant for Chomsky, who still tries to sell the Zellig Harris solution. In fact things have become much worse: in Harris’s time it was still a legitimate, albeit very unorthodox proposal; nowadays the same Chomsky line is generally regarded as a crazy betrayal of Jewish interests. Of course Chomsky remains optimistic, and every time he visits Israel he is encouraged by small bands of sympathizers who still agitate for a united Palestine, where both Arabs and Jews live together happily.