Noam Chomsky - Bakunin’s Predictions

I think it's a tragedy and a catastrophe that the left has accepted the idea of humans as historical products Simply reflections of their environment because what follows from that, of course, is that there's no moral barrier to molding them anyway you like And that humans have no inner nature. They don't have an inner instinct for freedom... You know... if it's not fundamental that their nature to have free, creative, productive work under their own control... if that's not part of their nature Then why... you know... there's no moral reason for allowing them that space You could just mould them into being what you think they ought to be and you can be the Central Committee, or you can be with the... you know... the managers of the corporation or the directors of a fascist state or whatever And it's quite interesting that the modern intellectuals have mostly moved in one or the other of those directions overwhelmingly either there... and in fact this was foretold in one of the maybe the only prediction of the social sciences that ever came so dramatically true was Bakunin's discussion of this in the late 19th century... he was arguing with Marx And it's well before Leninism, but he predicted very perceptively that the rising class and intellectuals were just kind of becoming identified as a class and modern modern industrial societies... he predicted that they were essentially going to go in one of two directions There would be some who would believe that The struggles of the working class would offer them an opportunity to rise and take state power in their own hands And at that point he said they would become the red bureaucracy who would create the worst tyranny that humanity has ever known of course all in the interests of the workers. That's one direction and he said the others Would recognize that you're never going to get power that way and the way to get power is to associate yourself with What we would nowadays call state capitalism And just become the servants of its ruling class And then you become the managers and the ideologues and so on for the state capitalist system And as he put it those people will beat the people with the people stick in other words They'll talk about democracy, but they'll really be beating people with the stick of democracy Which they'll turn into a mechanism of coercion. There's some who think you can get power by by exploiting popular struggles And there are others who see that you're going to get power by just associating yourself with the people already have economic power and that's largely dominated And I think there was a very accurate description of the century that followed him On the one his is fifty years before the Bolshevik Revolution But he predicted its form very precisely and also its ideological background, and he also predicted quite accurately what happens in the modern state capitalist industrial societies and looking at it now from the retrospective a hundred years We can see I think we can see this development very clearly and it also explains an odd fact about 20th century intellectual life Namely, how easy it's been for people to shift from one position to another so the same person who's a Stalinist apologist one year is a super American patriot the next year is supporting every atrocity and working and working in the Hoover Institute And you know associated with most reactionary institutions that transition, which sometimes is called the God that failed Change which was sort of authentic in the early years like people like Salone and others You know there was something authentic about it. It became a joke. I mean when people within the... in fact We're seeing in Russia right now the the worst commissars are now the ones who are most passionate about the You know the free market and investing and enriching yourself and so on They've made the transition very easily and that goes way back, and I think the reason is there's no transition. It's just a different estimate as to where power lies, but the same ideology. The ideology is you beat the people with the people stick and we're going to do it in fact if you look at modern acad... Democratic theory in the West it's remarkably similar to this. It's remarkably Leninist in its character if you think of modern Democrat the leading tendencies in the modern democratic theory in the West so in in academic world it would be the Strands of political science that developed from the thinking of people like Harold Lasswell and others one of the founders of modern contemporary political science and in the general sphere the Wilsonian Intellectuals the so-called progressive intellectuals of whom maybe Walter Lippmann was the most striking example in the United States progressive intellectual in the 1920s ..all of these people developed theories of democracy and they're quite interesting they're very Leninist in their character The conception is that in a democracy there's two classes of citizens There's the general public who Lippmann calls ignorant and meddlesome outsiders and Lasswell says they're too stupid to... We should not be overcome by dogmatism About the common man, who's too stupid to be able to do anything That's the standard view so there's these people the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders Which is maybe 90% of the population and then there are the responsible men the wise men... you know... the smart people the People with integrity and honor or the intellectual aristocracy whatever you call them and they have to rule they're the ones who make the decisions who do the thinking and so on and the role of the Masses the ignorant and meddlesome Outsiders is just to show up every couple of years Decide which of the smart guys is going to be their leader and then go home

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 589,218

Keywords: Power, Bakunin, Chomsky, Intellectuals, Capitalism, Leninism, Soviet Union, Communism, Democracy, Noam Chomsky, Politics, Ideology, Political philosophy

Id: 3gS6g41m_NU

Length: 6min 15sec (375 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 18 2017