I like the way you say Chomsky is taking the "safe" route, an assertion which reveals a good bit about you. Here is a little background info to quench your fake interest:
users.bigpond.com
Some excerpts:
CHOMSKY: Stalinism went fast. I mean I was always anti-Stalinist; that happened very early, I’d say by the time I was ten years old, partly because of an interest in the Spanish Civil War in the late 30s. It was quite clear, even not knowing much, that something was wrong with the standard picture, er and I did, by the time I was twelve or thirteen I was haunting anarchist bookstores in New York and so on, picking up pamphlets, and talking to people who were happy to talk to some young feller who walked around, and could see that the Spanish Civil war was - in fact, it was like, as I have later learned, all civil wars are, it was tripartite. There are two parts that are fighting, and they enter history; they’re fighting to see who picks up the share of power; then there’s the general population, who they both wanna destroy. In the Spanish Civil War, there was a popular revolution, and the Stalin-backed Republic, and the Fascists, first combined, along with the Western democracies, to destroy the popular revolution, and after that was done, they fought to pick up the spoils. Which is not an unusual pattern. And, I though I can’t claim to have understood it, I couldn’t already see the picture, by the time the Stalin-Hitler pact came along, and the information about the purges, it was impossible to take any of this seriously. I was also anti-Leninist, because it struck me at the time that however horrifying the Stalinist crimes were, they clearly had their origins in Leninist authoritarianism er and I was also quite sceptical about Marxism, not so much the particular ideas, as the concept of any movement that is named after a person already arouses scepticism; it suggests at once that it’s a form of organised religion or something like that. So for example, in physics, there’s nothing like Einsteinism, and in any serious domain, you don’t personalise collections of beliefs and that immediately set me off to later learn more about it.
<snip>
CHOMSKY: Well, Let’s take the various parts of the world. What was called ‘socialism’ in eastern Europe was killed by late 1917 or early 1918. Every socialist tendency that had developed in the pre-Bolshevik period was immediately extirpated, including Soviets, workers factory councils, any popular organization was wiped out. So since then there hasn’t been a trace of socialism in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet system. In the west there have been, you know there’s kind of a slow, there’s a move towards a kind of a social democratic, state capitalism of some kind or other, in various places. The basic ideas of socialism are in the future. Socialism is based, traditional socialism is simply based on, the application of enlightenment ideals to an industrial society, and it means that er workers will control production, communities will control communities, and so on, that’s socialism, if it means anything. |
