Maher considers bolsheviks right wing?

[ComradeAV]

On Overtime of Bill Maher's real time show, Bill maher said that he considered Lenin and Stalin right wing. He stated that communists are so far left that there right wing. Bill maher is a funny comedian but he seems to know squat about world politics and the Arab world. What are your thoughts on this? oh and here is the link:http://www.hbo.com/#/real-time-with-bill-maher/episodes/0/202-episode/video/202-february-11-overtime.html/eNrjcmbOYM7XLMtMSc13zEvMqSzJTHbOzytJrShhLlTPz0mBCQ Ykpqf6JeamcjIysjGySSeWluQX5CRW2pYUlaayMQIAVKYXOA==

[khad]

Who cares about this libertarian fuck? We all know he's a right wing Zionist. What else, the sky is blue?

[gorillafuck]

He stated that communists are so far left that there right wing.
I always cringe when people say stuff like that.

Also, lol at the options being center-right, center-left, and then extremist. Not actually left or right, just EXTREME!

I don't know what they want to accomplish but I know it will be extreme!

[Dimentio]

On Overtime of Bill Maher's real time show, Bill maher said that he considered Lenin and Stalin right wing. He stated that communists are so far left that there right wing. Bill maher is a funny comedian but he seems to know squat about world politics and the Arab world. What are your thoughts on this? oh and here is the link:http://www.hbo.com/#/real-time-with-bill-maher/episodes/0/202-episode/video/202-february-11-overtime.html/eNrjcmbOYM7XLMtMSc13zEvMqSzJTHbOzytJrShhLlTPz0mBCQ Ykpqf6JeamcjIysjGySSeWluQX5CRW2pYUlaayMQIAVKYXOA==

That is actually an attempt to save the left. My Social Democratic/Social Liberal teacher in primary said the same thing.

The thing is, that was not an attack on the Bolsheviks. Why attack something which is utterly representing evil anyways? That was an attempt to save the social liberals (and perhaps the democratic socialists) from the stigma of association with Lenin's ghost evoked by Beck.

[Os Cangaceiros]

The whole concept of the political spectrum as a circle is a load of bullshit.

[khad]

The whole concept of the political spectrum as a circle is a load of bullshit.
That political circle crap was started by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in his ode to political centrism The Vital Center (http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/vital-center.html). In it he used that construct to argue that neither right nor left had a place in America. This was primarily directed towards Henry Wallace's Progressive party, which he characterized as weak, unmanly, and un-American.

[ZeroNowhere]

We're not right wing so much as totally out of left field.

[Geiseric]

Think he meant that their authoritarianism turned them right wing? Also when I watch his show at friends house, he seems to not have his beliefs involved in interviews/commentary. But I can kinda see what he meant, just kinda.

[khad]

Think he meant that their authoritarianism turned them right wing? Also when I watch his show at friends house, he seems to not have his beliefs involved in interviews/commentary. But I can kinda see what he meant, just kinda.
So, what, leftists are now forced to bend over backwards trying to scrape together the logic which would validate the words of known right wing zionist libertarians?

Is the left this much of a joke?

[Geiseric]

Hmm I don't know, I was trying to just piece togather what he was trying to say. I have no idea, but I could live without a Cheka or media censoring.

[GPDP]

Hmm I don't know, I was trying to just piece togather what he was trying to say. I have no idea, but I could live without a Cheka or media censoring.

The FBI and corporate self-censorship, anyone?

Granted, they may not be as blunt or brutal as their Soviet counterparts, but they are hella effective in their own right. Perhaps even more so, dare I say.

[khad]

Hmm I don't know, I was trying to just piece togather what he was trying to say. I have no idea, but I could live without a Cheka or media censoring.
What, you want to piece together what a right wing libertarian zionist has to say? Why would you want to do that? Are you trying to claim Maher as part of the left? Pathetic.

[Geiseric]

No damnit, i'm not trying to include him as a part of the left, i'm trying to include him as a critic, despite any of his personal beliefs. Attacking him, not his argument, would just be an ad hominem, and i'm trying to address his argument.

[the last donut of the night]

What, you want to piece together what a right wing libertarian zionist has to say? Why would you want to do that? Are you trying to claim Maher as part of the left? Pathetic.



http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/c/c6/YOU_MAD.jpg

no, but seriously. dude, i don't know what has flown up your ass today, but please act in a more civil way. chill the fuck out

[Nolan]

Stupid is as stupid says.

[Lyev]

LOL I once saw a 'horseshoe' diagram in a friend's A-level (higher education in the UK for 16-18 year olds) history book that put communism next to fascism.

[NGNM85]

Bolshevism is a right-wing perversion of socialism.

yQsceZ9skQI

[NGNM85]

What, you want to piece together what a right wing libertarian zionist has to say?

Bill Maher is not a 'right-wing-libertarian-zionist.'


Why would you want to do that? Are you trying to claim Maher as part of the left? Pathetic.

Only according to the literal definition...

[StalinFanboy]

Is the left this much of a joke?
yes

[GPDP]

Bolshevism is a right-wing perversion of socialism.

yQsceZ9skQI

This summer, The Chomsky. Starring NGNM85.

[NGNM85]

This summer, The Chomsky. Starring NGNM85.

If anything, I take that as a compliment.

[Jose Gracchus]

Bill Maher is not a 'right-wing-libertarian-zionist.'

How do you figure that? He is definitely an apologist for Zionist claims on Israel, he accepts all the shibboleths of the Holocaust as an exceptionalist event thereby giving the Jewish people an exceptional claim to Palestinian territory, ad nauseum...

He is a culturally liberal intellectual elitist who talks down at working and poor people who vote (however irrationally) Republican, and he espouses anti-imperialism only in a self-servingly isolationist basis, and holds to Dawkinsonian New Atheism but then proceeds to support vaccine and anti-scientific medical irrationalism.


Only according to the literal definition...

What does that mean? Left-of-center is the left-by-definition? For all your praise toward Chomsky, Maher is not claiming the Bolsheviks are right-wing in the same sense as Chomsky. Chomsky in that video is basically stating a position which is in large parts merely an amalgation between the positions of the German-Dutch Communist Left and the anarchists on the Russian Revolution and Leninist socialism. Maher is just indulging in ZOMG JUST LIKE THE NAZIS agitprop of the U.S. 1950 variety.

Chomsky has also criticized hardline attacks on religion for not respecting the central roles religious people and religiously-leaning organizations have had in constructive struggles, while upholding secularism and empiricism as a principle. (Contrast with Maher's adoration for pharmaceutical conspiracy theories.) Chomsky's description of the "official liberal" sector of public discourse on the issue of imperialism, and Israel in particular, is quite close to a description of Maher's politics.

[GPDP]

If anything, I take that as a compliment.

Of course you do.

[RadioRaheem84]

The Inform Candidate, very well said, comrade. :thumbup1:

[Weezer]

Bolshevism is a right-wing perversion of socialism.

yQsceZ9skQI


:lol: How much more liberal can you get?

[the last donut of the night]

Bolshevism is a right-wing perversion of socialism.



And sweden is a socialist republic. How liberal can you get?

[the last donut of the night]

Bill Maher is not a 'right-wing-libertarian-zionist.'

What is he then?




Only according to the literal definition...

And what's the literal definition?

[Nolan]

:lol: How much more liberal can you get?

Anarchy.

[Robocommie]

Anarchy.

Anarcho-capitalism, at least...

[Nolan]

Anarcho-capitalism, at least...

I was referring to the Chomskyite brand of anarchism on this forum, but yeah that too.

[Jose Gracchus]

[sigh] Don't be a bunch of butthurt Leninists. He is just giving a Cliffs Notes version of the council communist and anarchist position on the issue. I do not agree with NGNM posting it as a bog standard reply to any approval of Leninism, much less to back up Maher's nonsense. But that hardly makes Chomsky a "liberal".

What's your point other than to wave the sectarian flag and fling shit at "anti-authortiarian" socialists? Lenin was criticized by Luxembourg for his political opportunism, the Bolsheviks did repress all other political parties by July 1918, before the Civil War began in earnest (and the Czech White Legion and the Don Cossacks had nothing to do with the Left SRs). Socialism requires authentic democratic participation by the empirical working class, something that was missing by 1918, and despite attempts (including some within the Bolshevik party itself) to reconstitute it in 1920-1922, it was quashed. Furthermore, the peasantry was systematically denied political recourse and disenfranchised despite composing the clear supermajority demographically, of the Russian state. The Bolsheviks' antagonistic economic and political relations with the peasantry increased their ambivalence toward support for the Reds during the Civil War, exacerbated the economic and food problems, and led to the 'retreat' of the NEP. All this despise in the Kronstadt program, another way being shown forward. I do not see why one should employ oneself in shoring up 90-years-wrong Bolshevik apologia.

But hey, I just spent five minutes actually saying something worth reading, instead of puerile one-liners, sectarian showmanship, contextless use of pejoratives (e.g., "liberal") and dog-piling. :rolleyes: If you wish to contest something someone says, at least take the time to explain why rather than back-slapping.

[Ocean Seal]

Shit is this man trying to pull a Beck? Only Glenn can lie like that and get away with it. Although, I did see this coming if one capitalist says that fascists are left-wing, then someone else has to say that communists are right-wing.

[Jose Gracchus]

Its just a recitation of 1950s-era Western self-serving ideology of "extremism" as being the font of Stalinism and Fascism. That way they could link the enemy they'd just saturated everyone with propaganda over with the new one, and simultaneously obliterate the West's and capital's collaboration with fascism and the particular factors which led to the development of Stalinism on one hand, and European fascism on the other.

[Amphictyonis]

Bolshevism is a right-wing perversion of socialism.

yQsceZ9skQI

The Chomsky grab bag is getting old. Stalin was obviously not a sort of 'leader' we would want (if any leaders at all) but the conditions in Russia during Lenin's time were different than that in advanced capitalist nations which had industrialized and practiced a certain albeit small degree of democracy. Russia's path to socialism was intertwined with the fate of advanced capitalist nations, Russia had yet to develop to advanced industrial capitalism which is why they weren't even socialist. Stalin was basically the result of a failed or lack of a global revolution. This was the material cause behind his tomfoolery. It can also be shown how unchecked hierarchy plays out, but, to just make a blanket statement that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were horrible for socialism is unfounded.

Stalin 'had to' proclaim the socialism in one country silliness after it became obvious a global revolution wasn't taking place. This misguided theory combined with WW2 and attacks from the US after WW2 made for a strange environment far from anything Marx envisioned. Quite simply the ongoings in Russia can be blamed on a lack of a global socialist revolution not centralized hierarchy. This isn't to say centralized hierarchy is desirable what I mean is if Russia were as democratic as humanly possible socialism, actual socialism, still would not have taken hold. The economic preconditions simply werent there. They had to industrialize under capitalism.

Chomsky is a smart man but his words aren't that of the Jesus or anything. You should read more than Chomsky or at least post something besides Chomsky. Try reading Marx, you may actually learn something about capitalism.

[DaringMehring]

[sigh] Don't be a bunch of butthurt Leninists. He is just giving a Cliffs Notes version of the council communist and anarchist position on the issue. I do not agree with NGNM posting it as a bog standard reply to any approval of Leninism, much less to back up Maher's nonsense. But that hardly makes Chomsky a "liberal".

What's your point other than to wave the sectarian flag and fling shit at "anti-authortiarian" socialists? Lenin was criticized by Luxembourg for his political opportunism, the Bolsheviks did repress all other political parties by July 1918, before the Civil War began in earnest (and the Czech White Legion and the Don Cossacks had nothing to do with the Left SRs). Socialism requires authentic democratic participation by the empirical working class, something that was missing by 1918, and despite attempts (including some within the Bolshevik party itself) to reconstitute it in 1920-1922, it was quashed. Furthermore, the peasantry was systematically denied political recourse and disenfranchised despite composing the clear supermajority demographically, of the Russian state. The Bolsheviks' antagonistic economic and political relations with the peasantry increased their ambivalence toward support for the Reds during the Civil War, exacerbated the economic and food problems, and led to the 'retreat' of the NEP. All this despise in the Kronstadt program, another way being shown forward. I do not see why one should employ oneself in shoring up 90-years-wrong Bolshevik apologia.

But hey, I just spent five minutes actually saying something worth reading, instead of puerile one-liners, sectarian showmanship, contextless use of pejoratives (e.g., "liberal") and dog-piling. :rolleyes: If you wish to contest something someone says, at least take the time to explain why rather than back-slapping.

I've seen this clip of Chomsky's before. Watched it again, and again it strikes me as quite idealistic-doctrinaire --- it doesn't give any account of the material forces at play.

For instance, he asserts Leninism is a right-wing mutation of socialism. But he doesn't ask the question, what were the material and social forces that led a right-wing mutation of socialism to occur and triumph in Russia?

He makes it sound, like everything was just Lenin's idea. Whatever Lenin thought --- that is what was. But Lenin was just some nobody revolutionary in 1915. The Bolsheviks were a small tendency of under 10,000 people, not near the largest of the revolutionary groups, who were themselves a small minority in Russia. So how did Lenin come to power, what social forces did he represent? Just because some emigre in Switzerland thinks something, doesn't mean anything. Ideas ride on material currents, on social forces.

He also cites State & Revolution, saying Lenin was using it as propaganda to cover for his authoritarianism. His evidence is that State & Revolution was not fully carried out in Russia in the short time before Lenin was incapacitated. Here once more he lacks a material basis for his critique. He fails to show that State & Revolution could be carried out in that time frame given the material conditions & social forces of Russia (Great War, Civil War, and shortly thereafter).

He talks about the "holding action" idea (that Russia was an unnatural leader for world socialism, and so would have to promote the revolution in more advanced countries, in order to return to being a backward country as its forces of production & level of cultural development required) -- and how Lenin was in accord with mainstream Marxism on this point. Then he says - well Marxism just adopts that theory, so it can do nothing, while using "socialism" to try to gain street cred with workers. Again a purely idealistic way of thinking. Totally ignores the historical-materialist justification of this idea. Socialism cannot be built without the requisite level of productive forces... there is a reason radical egalitarian peasants have failed to make socialism for thousands of years -- Marxism 101. But if they can't make it themselves, they can at least try to, while subordinating all efforts to the World revolution.

The canard about rolling up the Soviets, is also not accurate. Yes Soviet power suffered some blows, but it was a long process of degeneration, death by needle pricks rather than one throwing of an on/off switch.

And his citing of the "militarization of labor" argument of Trotsky also doesn't mean anything if you study the history of the period. You'll find that Trotsky had identified a problem --- total economic collapse -- and had proposed several remedies, one of which was NEP-esque and another was the militarization of labor. Of course he was attacked as a backslider for his NEP-esque suggestion, so he focused on the militarization of labor argument. Again we have a situation, where real material forces were decisive. Russia was collapsing economically, something had to be done, Chomsky 1989 was like the Bolshevik Party 1919 -- not wanting to acknowledge the reality of the country's economic collapse requiring a shift away from War Communism. But they had to deal with reality, and Trotsky, who running around on his train was one of the first to recognize that reality on the ground, was the first one to make big proposals.

[Jose Gracchus]

The Chomsky grab bag is getting old. Stalin was obviously not a sort of 'leader' we would want (if any leaders at all) but the conditions in Russia during Lenin's time were different than that in advanced capitalist nations which had industrialized and practiced a certain albeit small degree of democracy.

This to me, ironically given your position in the debate, sounds like liberal excuses for why "primitives" and "undeveloped" countries (i.e., the inhabitants of our colonial economic periphery) have so much trouble establishing democracy. While there were fatal flaws in the class movements in Russia, it was not a mere issue of they were less accustomed to union work, striking, and voting. I think that's absurd, but it appears to be your point.


Russia's path to socialism was intertwined with the fate of advanced capitalist nations, Russia had yet to develop to advanced industrial capitalism which is why they weren't even socialist. Stalin was basically the result of a failed or lack of a global revolution. This was the material cause behind his tomfoolery. It can also be shown how unchecked hierarchy plays out, but, to just make a blanket statement that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were horrible for socialism is unfounded.

I don't know about that. Despite reassessments, there's a lot of anti-democratic and anti-workerist tendencies in Second International socialism. In the case of the Bolsheviks, both some of their doctrines, leadership, and just how things turned out exacerbated these tendencies. Trotsky allegedly (I have been trying to confirm this with multiple sources) fixed the apportionment of the 2nd Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. The electoral support in the Soviets for the Bolsheviks were instrumentalist: workers and advanced peasants wanted the Bolsheviks to carry-out their rhetoric, and get the bourgeois Provisional Government out of the way of the industrial and agrarian revolution, and an all-socialist, provisional workers' and peasants' government. Anti-democratic and anti-worker elements in the Bolshevik party insisted on translating this support and the October seizure of power into an Bolshevik-only government and insisted on resisting attempts to negotiate a socialist unity government (as agitated for by workers in Vizkel and elsewhere). Four Bolshevik narkoms themselves resigned saying "A solely Bolshevik government can only be maintained by political terror".

There was also the bald-faced malapportionment of rural voters in the soviet system, and the (not carried out in practice) 1918 Soviet Constitution. The suppression of the Left SRs and anarchists had to do with unnecessary stoking of class war between poor peasants and middling elements that completely backfired.

As Alexander Rockwell on libcom put it (thanks to DNZ for the reference):

http://libcom.org/forums/theory/socialist-bourgeois-revolution-03052010?page=8



There was never any "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Russia. What existed, such as it was, between the October Revolution and the March signature on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (4 months / 5 months?) was a "dual dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." After that date you had a bonapartist bureaucracy standing in for the minority proletariat carrying out raids against the peasant’s food supplies to support the Civil War. This was the Civil War.

This is of course ignoring the matter of attempts of re-establishing some measure of workers' control and workers' democracy following 1920, and the establishment of a new settlement between workers and peasants. The Kronstadt program was more progressive than the NEP and more socialist.

I think that progressive social formations well to the left of fucking Stalinism were possible, and one cannot use the world revolution to hand-wave away how things degenerated to such depths in Russia.


Stalin 'had to' proclaim the socialism in one country silliness after it became obvious a global revolution wasn't taking place. This misguided theory combined with WW2 and attacks from the US after WW2 made for a strange environment far from anything Marx envisioned. Quite simply the ongoings in Russia can be blamed on a lack of a global socialist revolution not centralized hierarchy. This isn't to say centralized hierarchy is desirable what I mean is if Russia were as democratic as humanly possible socialism, actual socialism, still would not have taken hold. The economic preconditions simply werent there. They had to industrialize under capitalism.

And again, how is this so much better than what Chomsky is saying? You're just taking a hardline Left Comm line, which looks at 1917 etc. as simply historically unripe material conditions. Capitalism wasn't ready to be overthrown according to historical materialism.

Again, I think that hardly means the only possible ways forward from 1917 in Russia was authoritarian Leninism or Stalinism on one hand, or straight-up Great Power capitalism of the typical 1920s variety.


Chomsky is a smart man but his words aren't that of the Jesus or anything. You should read more than Chomsky or at least post something besides Chomsky. Try reading Marx, you may actually learn something about capitalism.

I agree the CHOMSKY SEZ! routine does wear a little. I also do not think Marx's works are required to understand 21st century capitalism. Nonetheless, in spirit I agree NGNM would have been better off making his point more purposefully.

[~Spectre]

Chomsky is awesome. Which is why it pains me that NGN tries to associate himself with his ideas, and wears out his name on this forum.

NGN has a cult of personality around figures like Chomsky and Maher, and Sam Harris. It's even more bizarre as Chomsky would reject the other two.

BTW, how the fuck is Bill Maher, who endorsed Netanyahu for PM, not a zionist?

[ExUnoDisceOmnes]

Bolshevism is a right-wing perversion of socialism.

yQsceZ9skQI

That lady's rhetoric and persuasive speaking style is excellent.

[Jose Gracchus]

BTW, how the fuck is Bill Maher, who endorsed Netanyahu for PM, not a zionist?

Where did he do this? Link?

[Jose Gracchus]

I've seen this clip of Chomsky's before. Watched it again, and again it strikes me as quite idealistic-doctrinaire --- it doesn't give any account of the material forces at play.

For instance, he asserts Leninism is a right-wing mutation of socialism. But he doesn't ask the question, what were the material and social forces that led a right-wing mutation of socialism to occur and triumph in Russia?

I will say this clip is problematic because of is simplistic qualities. However, I'm afraid that "materialism" or not, it conforms more closely to a fair appraisal of the Russian Revolution than the knee-jerk party-lines one can expect from most Marxist-Leninists (and Trotskyists, for that matter).

Good luck getting them to see militant and revolutionary and conscious workers and peasants in the real world when they do not agree with Lenin. But of course that's a rhetorical question, as by definition they aren't revolutionary or conscious unless they follow the lead of the CC.

In any case, this was some canned question from the ISO that is supposed to basically be a typical sectarian flag wave (you're NOT GIVING LENINISM ENOUGH CREDIT RAR) during a Q&A after a talk on media indoctrination and the like. I think Chomsky deserves credit for trying to discuss the topic lucidly in front of an audience not composed solely of militants. Sadly, most workers today still think in terms of idealist frameworks that come from official discourse and culture and media.


He makes it sound, like everything was just Lenin's idea. Whatever Lenin thought --- that is what was. But Lenin was just some nobody revolutionary in 1915. The Bolsheviks were a small tendency of under 10,000 people, not near the largest of the revolutionary groups, who were themselves a small minority in Russia. So how did Lenin come to power, what social forces did he represent? Just because some emigre in Switzerland thinks something, doesn't mean anything. Ideas ride on material currents, on social forces.

I agree. This is the weakest part, but I also don't know if a fitting reply would have been to quibble with the ISOite over material conditions in front of a lay audience.


He also cites State & Revolution, saying Lenin was using it as propaganda to cover for his authoritarianism. His evidence is that State & Revolution was not fully carried out in Russia in the short time before Lenin was incapacitated. Here once more he lacks a material basis for his critique. He fails to show that State & Revolution could be carried out in that time frame given the material conditions & social forces of Russia (Great War, Civil War, and shortly thereafter).

His point is solely that Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks shaped their agitprop to meet workers and peasants' common beliefs about all-socialist government, an end to the war, workers' control, the agrarian revolution, a return to economic normalcy, and the like using the Bolsheviks as an instrument to achieve soviet power. This is true, it is also true Lenin had no real commitment to this. He came up with potential alternative slogans, and potential alternative conceptions of his party seizing power and forming a government. Trotsky, Lenin, and their wing the party resisted attempted by their Left SR coalition partners and the working masses, as well as party dissenters, in organizing a coalition, in checks on political repressions, etc.


He talks about the "holding action" idea (that Russia was an unnatural leader for world socialism, and so would have to promote the revolution in more advanced countries, in order to return to being a backward country as its forces of production & level of cultural development required) -- and how Lenin was in accord with mainstream Marxism on this point. Then he says - well Marxism just adopts that theory, so it can do nothing, while using "socialism" to try to gain street cred with workers. Again a purely idealistic way of thinking. Totally ignores the historical-materialist justification of this idea. Socialism cannot be built without the requisite level of productive forces... there is a reason radical egalitarian peasants have failed to make socialism for thousands of years -- Marxism 101. But if they can't make it themselves, they can at least try to, while subordinating all efforts to the World revolution.

To some extent one must simply allow here for Chomsky's own anarchism. Anarchists have traditionally had a much more voluntaristic and spontaneous and "will"-based view of revolution and class consciousness, and the revolutionary capacity of non-exploiting non-proletarians. To be honest, I lean toward his view, because from Engels' arguments in The Peasant War in Germany, a dismissive attitude and vulgar anti-peasant attitude has developed in non-Maoist Marxists. I have heard peasants "don't matter" vis-a-vis the malapportionment of soviets in the 1918 constitution and the second Sovnarkom and CEC (composing Left SRs based on the Bolshevik-Left-SR power in the Peasant Congress). I think that socialism was and will remain an uphill battle if socialist strategies cannot conceptualize of any means of translating the less developed sectors of production in capitalism over to socialism without it being solely dependent on factory workers...


The canard about rolling up the Soviets, is also not accurate. Yes Soviet power suffered some blows, but it was a long process of degeneration, death by needle pricks rather than one throwing of an on/off switch.

Trotsky allegedly fucked with the apportionment of delegates, and Lenin-Trotsky and their wing blocked any attempt to create a genuinely representative government of the soviets. I do not think it is unfair at all. If we are to be honest, they did take steps, perhaps governed by material conditions and we can debate what those are, but nonetheless took those steps, to repress workers' democracy and workers' control. The nascent Bolshevik state did, in practice, move to destroy what Trotskyists call the core of socialism. I recommend Acton's "The Libertarians Vindicated?" from Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, Maurice Brinton's "Bolsheviks and Workers' Control", Simon Pirani's The Russian Revolution in Retreat: Soviet workers and the new communist elite, and Israel Getzler's Kronstadt: Fate of a Soviet Democracy, 1917-1921.

There is texture, but I do not think Chomsky's version is an altogether unfair Cliffs Notes, and honestly to be expected from an anarchist. It sounds exactly like something syndicat or a big anarcho-syndicalist would say here.


And his citing of the "militarization of labor" argument of Trotsky also doesn't mean anything if you study the history of the period. You'll find that Trotsky had identified a problem --- total economic collapse -- and had proposed several remedies, one of which was NEP-esque and another was the militarization of labor. Of course he was attacked as a backslider for his NEP-esque suggestion, so he focused on the militarization of labor argument. Again we have a situation, where real material forces were decisive. Russia was collapsing economically, something had to be done, Chomsky 1989 was like the Bolshevik Party 1919 -- not wanting to acknowledge the reality of the country's economic collapse requiring a shift away from War Communism. But they had to deal with reality, and Trotsky, who running around on his train was one of the first to recognize that reality on the ground, was the first one to make big proposals.

Trotsky on his train was not having insight into the problems of workers in their own mass organizations. Funny enough, workers did have structures with which to address this problem themselves, called soviets, factory committees, and party and union locals. Trotsky was part of repressing these organs, and part of the apparatus offering theoretical abstractions for why the party dictatorship was mystically the same as the dictatorship of the class through soviets. Trotsky was just contriving a rhetorical gimmick or excuse for increasing state control at the micro level, and increasing the base of state-based labor compulsion, upon rank-and-file workers. Saying that this is not socialism is not unfair, it is simply stating definitions.

Again, there were alternatives, like the Kronstadt program. There was real workers' opposition, both inside and outside the Communist Party (as opposed to the post-1918 fiction Trotsky fabricated, that he was some sort of libertarian/democratic opposition to nascent Stalinist bureaucratism).

[~Spectre]

Where did he do this? Link?

oN3K1Wsd-I0


The entire interview is Maher co-signing Netanyahu's likud talking points, and proposing things like maybe the world is anti-semitic being the reason for Israel's growing isolation...etc

Endorsement comes at the end of the interview.

[Jose Gracchus]

Yeah, there's absolutely no doubt where Maher lands on which side of the barricades.

[DaringMehring]

I will say this clip is problematic because of is simplistic qualities. However, I'm afraid that "materialism" or not, it conforms more closely to a fair appraisal of the Russian Revolution than the knee-jerk party-lines one can expect from most Marxist-Leninists (and Trotskyists, for that matter).

Good luck getting them to see militant and revolutionary and conscious workers and peasants in the real world when they do not agree with Lenin. But of course that's a rhetorical question, as by definition they aren't revolutionary or conscious unless they follow the lead of the CC.

In any case, this was some canned question from the ISO that is supposed to basically be a typical sectarian flag wave (you're NOT GIVING LENINISM ENOUGH CREDIT RAR) during a Q&A after a talk on media indoctrination and the like. I think Chomsky deserves credit for trying to discuss the topic lucidly in front of an audience not composed solely of militants. Sadly, most workers today still think in terms of idealist frameworks that come from official discourse and culture and media.



I agree. This is the weakest part, but I also don't know if a fitting reply would have been to quibble with the ISOite over material conditions in front of a lay audience.



His point is solely that Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks shaped their agitprop to meet workers and peasants' common beliefs about all-socialist government, an end to the war, workers' control, the agrarian revolution, a return to economic normalcy, and the like using the Bolsheviks as an instrument to achieve soviet power. This is true, it is also true Lenin had no real commitment to this. He came up with potential alternative slogans, and potential alternative conceptions of his party seizing power and forming a government. Trotsky, Lenin, and their wing the party resisted attempted by their Left SR coalition partners and the working masses, as well as party dissenters, in organizing a coalition, in checks on political repressions, etc.



To some extent one must simply allow here for Chomsky's own anarchism. Anarchists have traditionally had a much more voluntaristic and spontaneous and "will"-based view of revolution and class consciousness, and the revolutionary capacity of non-exploiting non-proletarians. To be honest, I lean toward his view, because from Engels' arguments in The Peasant War in Germany, a dismissive attitude and vulgar anti-peasant attitude has developed in non-Maoist Marxists. I have heard peasants "don't matter" vis-a-vis the malapportionment of soviets in the 1918 constitution and the second Sovnarkom and CEC (composing Left SRs based on the Bolshevik-Left-SR power in the Peasant Congress). I think that socialism was and will remain an uphill battle if socialist strategies cannot conceptualize of any means of translating the less developed sectors of production in capitalism over to socialism without it being solely dependent on factory workers...



Trotsky allegedly fucked with the apportionment of delegates, and Lenin-Trotsky and their wing blocked any attempt to create a genuinely representative government of the soviets. I do not think it is unfair at all. If we are to be honest, they did take steps, perhaps governed by material conditions and we can debate what those are, but nonetheless took those steps, to repress workers' democracy and workers' control. The nascent Bolshevik state did, in practice, move to destroy what Trotskyists call the core of socialism. I recommend Acton's "The Libertarians Vindicated?" from Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, Maurice Brinton's "Bolsheviks and Workers' Control", Simon Pirani's The Russian Revolution in Retreat: Soviet workers and the new communist elite, and Israel Getzler's Kronstadt: Fate of a Soviet Democracy, 1917-1921.

There is texture, but I do not think Chomsky's version is an altogether unfair Cliffs Notes, and honestly to be expected from an anarchist. It sounds exactly like something syndicat or a big anarcho-syndicalist would say here.



Trotsky on his train was not having insight into the problems of workers in their own mass organizations. Funny enough, workers did have structures with which to address this problem themselves, called soviets, factory committees, and party and union locals. Trotsky was part of repressing these organs, and part of the apparatus offering theoretical abstractions for why the party dictatorship was mystically the same as the dictatorship of the class through soviets. Trotsky was just contriving a rhetorical gimmick or excuse for increasing state control at the micro level, and increasing the base of state-based labor compulsion, upon rank-and-file workers. Saying that this is not socialism is not unfair, it is simply stating definitions.

Again, there were alternatives, like the Kronstadt program. There was real workers' opposition, both inside and outside the Communist Party (as opposed to the post-1918 fiction Trotsky fabricated, that he was some sort of libertarian/democratic opposition to nascent Stalinist bureaucratism).

Fair enough. I disagree about Trotsky & the early soviet state, but its complex and I don't want to turn this into a Trotskyist vs. LeftCom vs. Libertarian Socialist piss fight. You make fine points, and the fact that this wasn't a prepared speech but rather an off-the-cuff question response does make a difference to me -- context is always important.

[Pavlov's House Party]

That is actually an attempt to save the left. My Social Democratic/Social Liberal teacher in primary said the same thing.

The thing is, that was not an attack on the Bolsheviks. Why attack something which is utterly representing evil anyways? That was an attempt to save the social liberals (and perhaps the democratic socialists) from the stigma of association with Lenin's ghost evoked by Beck.

Interesting. The moderate left has indeed started to distance itself from Bolshevism, Anarchism, Socialism etc. a lot more since the rise of Glenn Beck and Fox News style fear mongering; a lot of liberals and "socialists" are becoming centrists. I think the best example of a former liberal turned centrist is Jon Stewart, what with his "rally to restore sanity" which condemned "political extremists" on both sides of the spectrum.

[NGNM85]

How do you figure that? He is definitely an apologist for Zionist claims on Israel, he accepts all the shibboleths of the Holocaust as an exceptionalist event thereby giving the Jewish people an exceptional claim to Palestinian territory, ad nauseum...

I haven’t seen any evidence of this. Although, I would be curious to see some.

I actually hashed this out with 9 some time ago. Essentially, the issue is the limits of the word Zionism. I think a lot of people, including Khad, who I was responding to, at least, in this instance, stretch the word beyond it’s acceptable limits. I compared it to the myth of the ‘New Anti-Semitism’, what is the ‘New’ Anti-Semitism? It’s criticizing Israeli foreign policy. This is the same thing in reverse. I would simply say he takes a hawkish, establishment stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict, and that he is completely wrong in this respect.


He is a culturally liberal intellectual elitist who talks down at working and poor people who vote (however irrationally) Republican,..

I’m somewhat dismayed with those people, myself.


and he espouses anti-imperialism only in a self-servingly isolationist basis,..

That’s vague, but I think I agree with what that would be if you translated it into plain English.


and holds to Dawkinsonian New Atheism

I think ‘New Atheism’ is essentially a media creation. Atheism hasn’t changed. We just have more data to support the rational, materialist view of the universe. However, this is completely beside the point as it has nothing to do with right (Fake) ‘Libetarianism’ or Zionism.


but then proceeds to support vaccine and anti-scientific medical irrationalism.

Yeah, I think that’s totally absurd, however, again, I don’t see that this is a sufficient condition of being a right-wing (Fake) ‘Libertarian’, or a Zionist, or both.


What does that mean? Left-of-center is the left-by-definition?

Well, do we agree that words have definitions? That’s sort of fundamental.

Literally speaking, he is not right-wing. Furthermore, he is not a right-wing (Fake) ‘Libertarian’, in the vein of Ayn Rand, the CATO institute, etc.


For all your praise toward Chomsky, Maher is not claiming the Bolsheviks are right-wing in the same sense as Chomsky.

I never suggested otherwise. I haven’t even seen the clip in question, so I haven’t said anything about it.


Chomsky in that video is basically stating a position which is in large parts merely an amalgation between the positions of the German-Dutch Communist Left and the anarchists on the Russian Revolution and Leninist socialism.

Yes, and I happen to agree.


Maher is just indulging in ZOMG JUST LIKE THE NAZIS agitprop of the U.S. 1950 variety.

I never suggested otherwise. I haven’t even seen the clip in question, so I haven’t said anything about it.


Chomsky has also criticized hardline attacks on religion for not respecting the central roles religious people and religiously-leaning organizations have had in constructive struggles,

I agree in certain contexts. I totally agree that it didn’t make sense to launch into a crusade against religion in South America during the cold war while the indigenous religious groups (Rome was largely against it.) were the center of the struggle against the US-supported dictatorships. That makes sense.


while upholding secularism and empiricism as a principle.

Absolutely. The difference is more in terms of emphasis.


(Contrast with Maher's adoration for pharmaceutical conspiracy theories.)

He has some totally wacky ideas about health and nutrition. However, again, that is not a sufficient condition…etc.


Chomsky's description of the "official liberal" sector of public discourse on the issue of imperialism, and Israel in particular, is quite close to a description of Maher's politics.

In a number of respects, that’s true. Although, again, this is beside the point.

[Amphictyonis]

This to me, ironically given your position in the debate, sounds like liberal excuses for why "primitives" and "undeveloped" countries (i.e., the inhabitants of our colonial economic periphery) have so much trouble establishing democracy. While there were fatal flaws in the class movements in Russia, it was not a mere issue of they were less accustomed to union work, striking, and voting. I think that's absurd, but it appears to be your point.
Have you read read Engels and Marx? Establishing democracy isn't the issue it's establishing socialized control over the advanced means of production. Russia wasn't an advanced capitalist nation, the economic pre conditions weren't there. It has nothing to do with the line of drivel you just tried to put in my mouth. Socialism isnt about building industry it's about taking it over. Russia was mostly farmers and peasants. At best it's industry was in the infant stage- not yet ready for a socialist revolution unless the more advanced capitalist (industrialized) nations also went socialist. Democracy or certian amounts of democracy can be implemented anytime with no economic pre conditions but socioslaim as a whole (which does incude democratic control of the means of production and hence sociaty itself) takes a nation who's industry has advanced through the capitalist phase.




I don't know about that. Of course you don't because you haven't taken the Marxist critique of capitalism into account. No socialism in advanced capitalist nations= no socialism in undeveloped nations. Socialism isn't about producing industry it's about workers taking over industry. It's a process, a sort of evolution and to skip the capitalist phase is, well, impossible. I don't need a history lesson either we're talking about material/economic pre-conditions necessary f or socialism to manifest. Russia couldn't have become socialist on it's own and hence, it didn't. No matter how much workers did or didn't control the nation socialism cant arise in non (capitalist) advanced nations unless the advanced capitalist nations also go socialist. Same can be said of Spain although the war had much to do with it's failure as well (no doubt you'll blame it all on Marxists). If a non advanced capitalist nation had an anarchist revolution tomorrow, with no major industry, with no trade set up with other socialist nations, no way of providing abundance, no advanced military for defense how do you think it would pan out? You can't have an island of socialism in a sea of capitalism.







And again, how is this so much better than what Chomsky is saying? You're just taking a hardline Left Comm line, which looks at 1917 etc. as simply historically unripe material conditions. Capitalism wasn't ready to be overthrown according to historical materialism.
It's actually an orthodox Marxist "line" as you put it. Nothing to do with "left communism".






Again, I think that hardly means the only possible ways forward from 1917 in Russia was authoritarian Leninism or Stalinism on one hand, or straight-up Great Power capitalism of the typical 1920s variety. I'm not making any excuses for Stalin just simply explaining the conditions which gave rise to his idiocy. Lenin is a different story. I tend to give him a little more leeway but yes it would have been ideal if the party didn't take power from the workers councils but that didn't happen and here we are. No point in arguing over it. I tend to agree with the anarchist critique of hierarchy- I only differ from anarchists in I can't see how capitals can be abolished without the state apparatus to defend gains by workers. If we just "abolished the state" in a future French revolution then the USA would simply send in it's state to reestablish the old social order.




I agree the CHOMSKY SEZ! routine does wear a little. I also do not think Marx's works are required to understand 21st century capitalism. Nonetheless, in spirit I agree NGNM would have been better off making his point more purposefully.
The people calling him liberal are doing so after reading past posts of his in various threads. It's not an attack on anarchism.

[NGNM85]

What is he then?

He’s essentially a modern-day Liberal/Progressive.


And what's the literal definition?

http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/luc/files/2009/10/left-right.png (http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/luc/files/2009/10/left-right.png)

[NGNM85]

Interesting. The moderate left has indeed started to distance itself from Bolshevism, Anarchism, Socialism etc. a lot more since the rise of Glenn Beck and Fox News style fear mongering; a lot of liberals and "socialists" are becoming centrists. I think the best example of a former liberal turned centrist is Jon Stewart, what with his "rally to restore sanity" which condemned "political extremists" on both sides of the spectrum.

This has been going on for a long time, back through to the beginnings of the Cold War, if not earlier. ‘Moderation’ has always been a problem of the Left, never the right. For example, all this bogus rhetoric about ‘Judicial activism’, that is never applied to Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas.

[Amphictyonis]

Who cares what Bill Maher is? Who gives a crap what Lawrence O'donnell is. If they're on the TV everyday/week they're on team capitalism. Bill Maher is just a smug pseudo intellectual who, at the end of the day, falls on the right unless it's making fun of Bush or Sara Palin. He's part of the false political paradigm so many of us seem to be paying attention to.

[Die Rote Fahne]

Although I enjoy Bill Maher and he's show, he has certain politcal positions which infuriate me.

These are:

- he's unabashed zionism
- his covert islamophobia
- His anti-communism and lack of knowledge on communism and it's history.

[Amphictyonis]

Although I enjoy Bill Maher and he's show, he has certain politcal positions which infuriate me.

These are:

- he's unabashed zionism
- his covert islamophobia
- His anti-communism and lack of knowledge on communism and it's history.

Three good reasons not to enjoy him or his show :)

[Os Cangaceiros]

I don't like him because he's a smarmy prick/condescending POS.

Really, even if homeboy was talking about how the proletariat should seize control of the factories and raise a red flag over the White House, I'd still hate him. The way he talks and his general demeanor on his show is really irritating. Even more annoying are his audience members, a crowd of knuckle-dragging sycophants who clap at his every inane statement ("RELIGION IS STOOPID! *raucous applause* "SARAH PALIN IS STOOPID!" *raucous applaus*...seriously, where do they get these idiots?)

[Jose Gracchus]

I haven’t seen any evidence of this. Although, I would be curious to see some.

Norman Finkelstein's work is what I would consider pretty definitive on this political topic. He is, at it happens, a close personal friend of Noam Chomsky. He actually discusses Finkelstein's academic fate in his discussion of thought control in Understanding Power, called "The Fate of an Honest Intellectual". In any case, Finkelstein traces the pretty broad establishment line that Israel via the Jews has an authentic right to a home-land in Israel, that the Arabs initiated an aggressive war upon hapless Jewish settlers, who really civilized the place -- all of this is there.

Bill Maher supports the extreme racist and colonialist right in Israeli politics. I mean, as someone who, rightfully in my mind, holds Chomsky to be a standard in political and social insights, you seem to not be familiar with his on-going decades-long commentary on the mis-named "peace process". The viciousness of Likud's politics in particular should be clear as day from that work. Likud is a Zionist party, with Zionist rationales for policy, foreign, and domestic. He has said the Holocaust is an exceptional event, something that Finkelstein rightfully identifies with a 'Holocaust industry' party-line.

Look at the above video. Check his remarks with regard to foreign policy with Michael Schoeuer.


I actually hashed this out with 9 some time ago. Essentially, the issue is the limits of the word Zionism. I think a lot of people, including Khad, who I was responding to, at least, in this instance, stretch the word beyond it’s acceptable limits. I compared it to the myth of the ‘New Anti-Semitism’, what is the ‘New’ Anti-Semitism? It’s criticizing Israeli foreign policy. This is the same thing in reverse. I would simply say he takes a hawkish, establishment stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict, and that he is completely wrong in this respect.

I'm sorry, but this plainly absurd. "Zionism" is not some radical right-wing ideology on the fringe. Zionism is part of the foundational ideology of the Israeli state, and virtually all of its public relations industry and lobby in the United States preaches it consistently. From Harvard liberals who bemoan "the bleeding bleeders" (a Chomsky reference, as it happens) to the Christian far-right near-fascists who adore the idea of offering up the Jews as a sacrificial lamb to be immolated in God's Glorious Return, it is a consistent line in the U.S. Zionism is legitimate; the Jews have a unique historical claim to a homeland in and at the expense of the inhabitant of, Palestine.


I’m somewhat dismayed with those people, myself.

Calling them "fucking morons" and the like and basically contrasting "educated" and "intelligent" people with what he regards as basically white trash working-class scum, I don't think is part of the Yellow Brick Road to the self-emancipation of the working class.


That’s vague, but I think I agree with what that would be if you translated it into plain English.

Imperialism is a discrete enough term, is it not. I mean I don't think imperialism is some pollysyllable Noam Chomsky is uncomfortable. Haven't you seen his debate with Buckley?

In any case, Ron Paul-type anti-imperialism means recognizing American intervention and striving to geopolitically control the world, but regarding it as "bad for America" and "expensive", and that is why we should just stay home but carry a big stick.

You'll have to excuse me but that's a mile away from principled opposition to American hegemony in the example of the popular resistance to the Vietnam War, or the solidarity campaigns with the Nicaraguan Revolution.


I think ‘New Atheism’ is essentially a media creation. Atheism hasn’t changed. We just have more data to support the rational, materialist view of the universe. However, this is completely beside the point as it has nothing to do with right (Fake) ‘Libetarianism’ or Zionism.

There is clearly a wave of new literature, organizations, and now a public media presence for an aggressive viewpoint which had been in recession in the public sphere for some time. Radical secularism and atheism had been traditionally unwelcome in atypically religious America, and the growth of Thatcher-Reagan-type right-wing voters enticed by reactionary religious groups (wanting to roll back various social and cultural reforms and revolutionary changes, for instance, modern gender, sexual, kinship relations). They began intruding into biology education, and a semi-movement of anti-religious and skeptical literature in response grew. Dawkins and then Harris and the rest of the Four Horsemen published renown books out and out on why belief in God or dieties or the supernatural is just stupid, and there's just material beliefs.

I am cynical enough to believe that to the extent its publicized, and its authors, it is because often it is summoned in pursuit of apologism for new Islamophobia, racism, "clash of civilizations" and other nonsense. However, unlike many here, I do not believe these authors are themselves right-wingers or apologists for atrocities, except for Hitchens. I think they have a lot of idealist - i.e., "this is logically wrong because blank blank blank" - critique, that misses the social roots and problems of endemic religious belief, especially intensely and among working and socioeconomically lower people. Maybe it is a personal thing, but an enormous number of these types tend to be right-libertarians. Maybe its just a personal feeling. I used to be very much a New Atheist, I own all their books and have read them. I still do appreciate them. But as a group they seem to fail to look at things in a way that really appreciates the material, educative, and community poverty of working and poor people, and the extent to which seductive religion, cults, right-wing lunacy takes hold. There's a reason that once, when contemplating how in practice we'd operate neighborhood participatory democracy - it became so clear, the only meeting place that could be consistently counted on everywhere was the church. Some places you're lucky to have anything else but the Super Wall-Mart and some feed store and 7-11.


Yeah, I think that’s totally absurd, however, again, I don’t see that this is a sufficient condition of being a right-wing (Fake) ‘Libertarian’, or a Zionist, or both.

He believe that austerity is necessary, the debt is the major problem in society - related to war stance. I mean he's left on what? Left of the right-wing which controls the entire political discourse? He's what used to be called a centrist relative to international political standards. Even Chomsky notes what is called "Democrat" today isn't even liberal, but has been moving farther and farther to the right for 40 years. "Richard Nixon was the last liberal President."

He espouses more or less a lot of right-leaning social libertarian line in our society. Church and State off the back of my pot and sex. We need to take care of ours bring those troops home. We're bankrupt and the good ol' days are gone.

This is not left. It is not even social democrat. It is not even liberal. Tell me this is Great Society liberalism.


Well, do we agree that words have definitions? That’s sort of fundamental.

Don't be evasive. What are your definitions? As I can see it, by standards of working people austerity versus social assistance, both political parties, including what is called "liberal" (but is hardly even that) has been moving right for 40 years. There are no Great Society liberals in the mainstream today. The very narrow spectrum has moved into the broad Right of historical standards. The right involves social and economic viewpoints. Simply not pining for bloodbath Christ return, gays to be public shamed, women to be subordinate to men, and believing America is savior of all does not make you "left".

Of course he is on what is called today the "liberal left" of American politics. Of course, I, like Chomsky, think that what terms the official institutions use they have almost totally evacuated of meaning and rendered Orwellian. Obama is not a left-winger. Especially since the most recent election, he has committed, across the board, to positions which are clearly recognized as on the right during the Campaign and even across the official media, including Guantanamo, Iraq, health care compromise, austerity, tax cuts, civil liberties, ad nauseum. I think over all between his Israel-apologism, intellectual elitism, vague debt-phobic and lifestyle libertarian, I'd regard him as part of the overall right in terms of being substantially influenced by politics belonging to the political right. Overall, of course I'd rather have people influenced by him than Glenn Beck. In practice, I would take exception with someone in personal conversation who repeated many of his claims.


Literally speaking, he is not right-wing. Furthermore, he is not a right-wing (Fake) ‘Libertarian’, in the vein of Ayn Rand, the CATO institute, etc.

You do not need to be a far-right economist or suffer from a pathology to be a right-libertarian. Although I will agree that he lies about as far to the left in that bubble containing those general politics as you get in the U.S. I think he's right about how contemptible far-right arguments and people are, I think he is right Obama is a compromising weakling, I think he is right that God is an absurd superstition, I think he's right that it ought to be a right to access health care regardless of ability to pay. But these are totally peripheral to my politics. I would regard many a legitimate European social democrat at least on the left. I would regard him on the far-left of the American Official Spectrum, and on the moderate right or center of overall politics.


I never suggested otherwise. I haven’t even seen the clip in question, so I haven’t said anything about it.

I don't think your sound-byte responses was a critique in good faith, then.

[Jose Gracchus]

Have you read read Engels and Marx? Establishing democracy isn't the issue it's establishing socialized control over the advanced means of production.

The empirical, "really existing"toilers need to have functional control over policy-and-decision-making for the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" - that is, the power of a class - to have any non-abstract meaning. This presupposes workers' democracy. You are right; workers' democracy is not an abstract goal or ideal, it is a functional prerequisite to socialism.

I am talking about common sense. Of course I have read Marx and Engels. Nothing they say contracts what I just said, and even if it, they are wrong. It is clear logic and honesty to state that working people need actual control over society if they are to be in power.


Russia wasn't an advanced capitalist nation, the economic pre conditions weren't there. It has nothing to do with the line of drivel you just tried to put in my mouth. Socialism isnt about building industry it's about taking it over. Russia was mostly farmers and peasants. At best it's industry was in the infant stage- not yet ready for a socialist revolution unless the more advanced capitalist (industrialized) nations also went socialist. Democracy or certian amounts of democracy can be implemented anytime with no economic pre conditions but socioslaim as a whole (which does incude democratic control of the means of production and hence sociaty itself) takes a nation who's industry has advanced through the capitalist phase.

Yes, I am well-aware of this well-rehearsed piece of Orthodox Marxist pablum. Yeah, Engels' The Peasant War in Germany, I know. Anarchists have a different position. Furthermore, prospects for socialism will remain slight if there is no way, even with the assistance of workers involved in production, for non-proletarians to participate.

You are just mad that in reply to some gotcha canned question from an ISOite, Chomsky did not recite your preferred narrow Left Comm "it was economically inevitable" line. Sorry but large audiences have vague, usually idealist conceptions, and responding to a question is no time to step directly into Marxian materialism as a lesson. Furthermore, he was right in terms of Lenin and Trotsky and what their politics in practice were, and what they ended up doing.

He was mostly arguing that the USSR was not socialism, and could not be, because the nascent Soviet state apparatus, under the control of the Bolsheviks, began repressing workers' democracy and workers' control, which is a basic prerequisite - a necessary, but not sufficient, condition - of socialism. What you are talking about is the deeper reasons why attempts to build socialism failed. One could argue an immature society with a tiny working class, isolated in a barely modernized and educated pre-modern agrarian wasteland. That may be correct. But that is beside the point of the narrow question for why "gut check"-wise the USSR was demonstrably not socialism, and Leninism is no magic remedy unlike the account of Brave ISO Woman.

Yet again, a RevLefter would have had a public speaker launch into a 20 minute speech about the persistance of generalized commodity production or [some other arcane criterion], because, dammit, Marxist purism and what Bordiga or [insert figure here] said needs to be heard! Take that ISO Woman!


I'm not making any excuses for Stalin just simply explaining the conditions which gave rise to his idiocy. Lenin is a different story. I tend to give him a little more leeway but yes it would have been ideal if the party didn't take power from the workers councils but that didn't happen and here we are. No point in arguing over it. I tend to agree with the anarchist critique of hierarchy- I only differ from anarchists in I can't see how capitals can be abolished without the state apparatus to defend gains by workers. If we just "abolished the state" in a future French revolution then the USA would simply send in it's state to reestablish the old social order.

No major disagreement here. Nonetheless, I think it is important to be quite clear about what historically happened and not give apologism to figures who a bunch of monastics have decked out in Red, and literally turned Lenin into a mummy on public display for, presumably, Marxist-Leninist pilgrimages.


The people calling him liberal are doing so after reading past posts of his in various threads. It's not an attack on anarchism.

I think the Left would do itself a whole lotta good if it didn't go about looking for insufficiently-left-thinkers and proscribe them with a pejorative and misleading label like "liberal", and then hound them.

I do not agree with all his politics, but I would rather have more anti-propertarians, who, may become more aware of left-wing history or theory or practice and come around, than be run off by some witch hunt.

[NGNM85]

Norman Finkelstein's work is what I would consider pretty definitive on this political topic. He is, at it happens, a close personal friend of Noam Chomsky.

Beyond Chutzpah was excellent. I’ve been meaning to get around to Holocaust Industry.


He actually discusses Finkelstein's academic fate in his discussion of thought control in Understanding Power, called "The Fate of an Honest Intellectual"

I actually haven’t read that one, but I’ve seen the documentary on Finkelstein.

.
In any case, Finkelstein traces the pretty broad establishment line that Israel via the Jews has an authentic right to a home-land in Israel, that the Arabs initiated an aggressive war upon hapless Jewish settlers, who really civilized the place -- all of this is there.


Bill Maher supports the extreme racist and colonialist right in Israeli politics. I mean, as someone who, rightfully in my mind, holds Chomsky to be a standard in political and social insights, you seem to not be familiar with his on-going decades-long commentary on the mis-named "peace process".

I only read a fragment of Fateful Triangle, however it’s a subject Chomsky covers regularly, in Failed States, Hegemony or Survival, etc. I did read Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy, of which very large segments are devoted to this topic. However, I think you misunderstand what I was saying.


The viciousness of Likud's politics in particular should be clear as day from that work. Likud is a Zionist party, with Zionist rationales for policy, foreign, and domestic. He has said the Holocaust is an exceptional event, something that Finkelstein rightfully identifies with a 'Holocaust industry' party-line.


Look at the above video. Check his remarks with regard to foreign policy with Michael Schoeuer.

I must have missed it.


I'm sorry, but this plainly absurd. "Zionism" is not some radical right-wing ideology on the fringe. Zionism is part of the foundational ideology of the Israeli state, and virtually all of its public relations industry and lobby in the United States preaches it consistently. From Harvard liberals who bemoan "the bleeding bleeders" (a Chomsky reference, as it happens) to the Christian far-right near-fascists who adore the idea of offering up the Jews as a sacrificial lamb to be immolated in God's Glorious Return, it is a consistent line in the U.S. Zionism is legitimate; the Jews have a unique historical claim to a homeland in and at the expense of the inhabitant of, Palestine.

I didn’t say it was radical, of course it’s part of the foundation of the Israeli state. However, I just think this definition is overly broad; it almost robs it of meaning. This is why I made the comparison to Phyllis Chesler’s ‘The New Anti-Semitism.’


Calling them "fucking morons" and the like and basically contrasting "educated" and "intelligent" people with what he regards as basically white trash working-class scum, I don't think is part of the Yellow Brick Road to the self-emancipation of the working class.

Probably not. However, I don’t necessarily talk to them the way I would talk to you. Also, being working class I actually find it harder to be sympathetic. I am better educated than most of the rich kids I went to school with, and not because of the educational system, I went to public school, and half the time I wasn’t actually there. I’m primarily an autodidact. So, therefore, I have a natural skepticism about this argument that because you’re poor you just can’t help it. That is very difficult for me to accept because I’ve always been poor.


Imperialism is a discrete enough term, is it not. I mean I don't think imperialism is some pollysyllable Noam Chomsky is uncomfortable. Haven't you seen his debate with Buckley?

Part of it is in the Manufacturing Consent documentary, and the whole thing is in the Special Features. Yes, I have seen it. I love the part where he says to Buckley;’ That’s about ten percent true.’ He’s criticized for being boring and flat but he does have a sense of humor that I think is underappreciated.

I’m not saying the word doesn’t have it’s uses, unlike proletariat, or bourgeois, which, I think, are just not worth using for a host of reasons. However, like these terms this word gets thrown around so much in radical circles that it has become diluted and corrupted. So, I don’t even use it, because there’s too much baggage.


In any case, Ron Paul-type anti-imperialism means recognizing American intervention and striving to geopolitically control the world, but regarding it as "bad for America" and "expensive", and that is why we should just stay home but carry a big stick.


You'll have to excuse me but that's a mile away from principled opposition to American hegemony in the example of the popular resistance to the Vietnam War, or the solidarity campaigns with the Nicaraguan Revolution.

Absolutely.


There is clearly a wave of new literature, organizations, and now a public media presence for an aggressive viewpoint which had been in recession in the public sphere for some time.

I think it’s worth emphasizing that it was banned from the public sphere. Atheists are still about the most hated minority group in the United States.


Radical secularism and atheism had been traditionally unwelcome in atypically religious America, and the growth of Thatcher-Reagan-type right-wing voters enticed by reactionary religious groups (wanting to roll back various social and cultural reforms and revolutionary changes, for instance, modern gender, sexual, kinship relations). They began intruding into biology education, and a semi-movement of anti-religious and skeptical literature in response grew. Dawkins and then Harris and the rest of the Four Horsemen published renown books out and out on why belief in God or dieties or the supernatural is just stupid, and there's just material beliefs.

Thankfully their thesis and analysis is a little more complex than that. However, I won’t argue with the conclusion.


I am cynical enough to believe that to the extent its publicized, and its authors, it is because often it is summoned in pursuit of apologism for new Islamophobia, racism, "clash of civilizations" and other nonsense.

However, this is not what Dawkins and Harris are saying…


However, unlike many here, I do not believe these authors are themselves right-wingers or apologists for atrocities, except for Hitchens.

…as you’ve just confirmed. Yes. We need to be able to differentiate.



I think they have a lot of idealist - i.e., "this is logically wrong because blank blank blank" - critique, that misses the social roots and problems of endemic religious belief, especially intensely and among working and socioeconomically lower people. Maybe it is a personal thing, but an enormous number of these types tend to be right-libertarians. Maybe its just a personal feeling. I used to be very much a New Atheist, I own all their books and have read them. I still do appreciate them. But as a group they seem to fail to look at things in a way that really appreciates the material, educative, and community poverty of working and poor people, and the extent to which seductive religion, cults, right-wing lunacy takes hold. There's a reason that once, when contemplating how in practice we'd operate neighborhood participatory democracy - it became so clear, the only meeting place that could be consistently counted on everywhere was the church. Some places you're lucky to have anything else but the Super Wall-Mart and some feed store and 7-11.

Maybe it’s because I’m from Boston. I don’t know where you’re from but it is different in the South. Although, I’m not totally isolated from it, quite the opposite. I had family members in the Church and I actually worked there for a summer. I had Christmas dinner there several times.

Also, religious fanaticism often transcends class. The 9/11 hijackers for instance, for the most part came from well-educated, comfortable backgrounds. Osama bin Laden is a perfect example. There is data that suggests that in some parts of the world religious fanaticism increases with education. That said, I’m certainly not arguing against education, or improving conditions, and, on the macro scale, it does seem to have a secularizing effect. I don’t think there’s one magic button, one single solution.


He believe that austerity is necessary, the debt is the major problem in society - related to war stance.

The national debt is high, and the two wars contributed significantly. Of course, if they are going to cut funding for anything, I’d suggest taking a hacksaw to the absurd ‘defense’ (Read; ‘offense.’) budget. However, those aren’t the main reasons for opposing the wars, of course.


I mean he's left on what? Left of the right-wing which controls the entire political discourse?

According to the textbook definition.


He's what used to be called a centrist relative to international political standards. Even Chomsky notes what is called "Democrat" today isn't even liberal, but has been moving farther and farther to the right for 40 years. "Richard Nixon was the last liberal President."

The spectrum has been moving to the right, no doubt. I think Goldwater once remarked that he’d be revered more by the Left, or something along those lines.


He espouses more or less a lot of right-leaning social libertarian line in our society. Church and State off the back of my pot and sex. We need to take care of ours bring those troops home. We're bankrupt and the good ol' days are gone.


This is not left. It is not even social democrat. It is not even liberal. Tell me this is Great Society liberalism.

Don't be evasive. What are your definitions?

I know Wikipedia is far from perfect but the article is actually pretty good. It’s a pretty fair approximation of what I think you’d find in any textbook, what I would consider the standard definition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics


The right involves social and economic viewpoints. Simply not pining for bloodbath Christ return, gays to be public shamed, women to be subordinate to men, and believing America is savior of all does not make you "left".

Yes, I agree, there is more to it than that.


Of course he is on what is called today the "liberal left" of American politics. Of course, I, like Chomsky, think that what terms the official institutions use they have almost totally evacuated of meaning and rendered Orwellian.

Well, there are deeper problems with the Left/Right paradigm, like the fact that it posits Stalin and Emma Goldman on the same end, on the same spot. These are crude oversimplifications. It’s also absurdly broad. However, I didn’t invent it.


Obama is not a left-winger. Especially since the most recent election, he has committed, across the board, to positions which are clearly recognized as on the right during the Campaign and even across the official media, including Guantanamo, Iraq, health care compromise, austerity, tax cuts, civil liberties, ad nauseum. I think over all between his Israel-apologism, intellectual elitism, vague debt-phobic and lifestyle libertarian, I'd regard him as part of the overall right in terms of being substantially influenced by politics belonging to the political right. Overall, of course I'd rather have people influenced by him than Glenn Beck. In practice, I would take exception with someone in personal conversation who repeated many of his claims.

[QUOTE=The Inform Candidate;2021620]You do not need to be a far-right economist or suffer from a pathology to be a right-libertarian.

No, but right ‘Libertarianism’ is a specific, and fairly marginal, but definite subculture, to which Maher plainly does not belong.


I don't think your sound-byte responses was a critique in good faith, then.

I’m not sure which one you’re specifically referring to. The Chomsky video did not have any connection to Bill Maher, nor was it intended to. The OP acted incredulous as if the suggestion that anyone could suggest the Bolsheviks were, in any respect, right-wing, that this was completely incomprehensible. That’s the only connection to the video.

The only thing I said about Bill Maher, all I said, was; ‘Bill Maher is not a right-‘Libertarian’ Zionist.’

[khad]

The only thing I said about Bill Maher, all I said, was; ‘Bill Maher is not a right-‘Libertarian’ Zionist.’
Shut up, liberal.

[Robocommie]

Stalin 'had to' proclaim the socialism in one country silliness after it became obvious a global revolution wasn't taking place. This misguided theory combined with WW2 and attacks from the US after WW2 made for a strange environment far from anything Marx envisioned.

You say that socialism in one country was a misguided theory, but without saying whether I agree or disagree, can I ask what the alternative could have been, if you had been in Stalin's place?

[Jose Gracchus]

I think its plainly absurd for socialists to ever engage in "if you were supreme leader, you'd...?" Part and parcel of the whole idea is we should not find ourselves in the business of asking leaders, but rather that working people themselves may manage society.

Stalin was in no position to effect the degeneration of the revolution. That happened on its own; he did, however, choose particular brutal and Machiavellian routes to near-absolute power.

[Bright Banana Beard]

I think its plainly absurd for socialists to ever engage in "if you were supreme leader, you'd..." Part and parcel of the whole idea is we should not find ourselves in the business of asking leaders, but rather that working people themselves may manage society.

Stalin was in no position to effect the degeneration of the revolution. That happened on its own; he did, however, choose particular brutal and Machiavellian routes to near-absolute power.

Like what? Show me the link that he intended to do so in his writing.

[Robocommie]

I think its plainly absurd for socialists to ever engage in "if you were supreme leader, you'd...?" Part and parcel of the whole idea is we should not find ourselves in the business of asking leaders, but rather that working people themselves may manage society.

Pardon, but I am actually not setting up a hypothetical about what one would do if he were supreme leader, or whatever bullshit. I've always thought that kind of question was useless because revolutions do not occur in a vacuum. But I AM asking Amphictyonis a rather specific question on a rather specific subject in Soviet history. Your personal philosophy on socialism doesn't even come into it.



Stalin was in no position to effect the degeneration of the revolution. That happened on its own; he did, however, choose particular brutal and Machiavellian routes to near-absolute power.

So which was it? Was he a brutal and Machiavellian power-player, or was he in fact not in any position to effect the degeneration of the revolution?

[Amphictyonis]

You say that socialism in one country was a misguided theory, but without saying whether I agree or disagree, can I ask what the alternative could have been, if you had been in Stalin's place?

A bourgeois revolution in Russia (hold nose). Look what happened in reality. I think China did the same thing in the late 20'th century and if communism is to have a future it will most likely spring up out of an advanced capitalist China or an advanced capitalist Russia during America's decline in so forcing the Europe and then the US into socialism. I'm no fortune teller though. Stalin did what any centralized power structure would do, maintained his authority. To think he would conceded to capitalists is absurd so he changed the face of Marxism to fit the agenda of the party.

[Amphictyonis]

Yes, I am well-aware of this well-rehearsed piece of Orthodox Marxist pablum. Yeah, Engels' The Peasant War in Germany, I know. Anarchists have a different position. I'd like to hear a scenario where actual socialism/advanced communism/anarchism could spring up in a non advanced industrialized nation isolated from trade and with the western military apparatus breathing down it's neck. Venesuala is a great example- what do you think would happen if Chavez used the state to facilitate expropriation? The US military bases in Columbia would become quite functional/busy.


You are just mad that in reply to some gotcha canned question from an ISOite, Chomsky did not recite your preferred narrow Left Comm "it was economically inevitable" line. Sorry but large audiences have vague, usually idealist conceptions, and responding to a question is no time to step directly into Marxian materialism as a lesson. Chomsky actually goes in depth on many topics- this topic has always lacked a Marxist analysis, he's always placed the blame purely on Lenin/Stalin. I can see why an anarchist wopuld do that and yes I disagree with what happened post 1917 after it became apparent no global revolution was taking place but if Chomsky is going to be intellectually honest he'd include the missing economic pre conditions (and perhaps WW2) as another reason so much bullshit happened in Russia.



Yet again, a RevLefter would have had a public speaker launch into a 20 minute speech about the persistance of generalized commodity production or [some other arcane criterion], because, dammit, Marxist purism and what Bordiga or [insert figure here] said needs to be heard! Take that ISO Woman! Not sure what you're talking about here :)




No major disagreement here. Nonetheless, I think it is important to be quite clear about what historically happened and not give apologism to figures who a bunch of monastics have decked out in Red, and literally turned Lenin into a mummy on public display for, presumably, Marxist-Leninist pilgrimages. People worship isn't my thing but Einstein did change the face of physics/science as Marx changed the face of economics. Chomsky can implement Marx into his critique of Russia without becoming a "Marxist". This is one problem I see with modern anarchists, the refusal to accept Marx's critique of capitalism. I think many Marxists also need to accept the anarchist critique of hierarchy.





I think the Left would do itself a whole lotta good if it didn't go about looking for insufficiently-left-thinkers and proscribe them with a pejorative and misleading label like "liberal", and then hound them. In the case of NGNM85 (http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=29065) he's been quite vocal and rude in the past so the 'witch hunt' is mostly of his own doing.



I do not agree with all his politics, but I would rather have more anti-propertarians, who, may become more aware of left-wing history or theory or practice and come around, than be run off by some witch hunt. Or the majority of the left is liberal and it ends up watering down our positions. Which one is happening in reality? That's the question. Look around in the USA, where's all the left? Doing what? Where? Why?

[Jose Gracchus]

Rojo:

Damn, wow, you got me there, that's totally the how one approaches historical figures correctly. :rolleyes:

Fine, Stalin was bamboozled by a bunch of shit he couldn't deal with or predict, but we should praise his incompetence for its non-involvement. :rolleyes: At least I'm not in the business of quoting Getty without know what he's talking about.

[Amphictyonis]

Rojo:

Damn, wow, you got me there, that's totally the how one approaches historical figures correctly. :rolleyes:

Fine, Stalin was bamboozled by a bunch of shit he couldn't deal with or predict, but we should praise his incompetence for its non-involvement. :rolleyes: At least I'm not in the business of quoting Getty without know what he's talking about.
Don't even know who Getty is and I'm not excusing Stalin. At the risk of breaking Godwins Law I'll bring up Hitler ;) Could there have been economic/material conditions that gave rise to Hitler? Comparing Stalin to Hitler is silly but what we should focus on is how nations get derailed, how material conditions change the very nature of the society itself. All I'm saying is if a global revolution took place more likely than not actual socialism and hence workers democracy would have taken hold in Russia.