Revolutionary Marxism v. Chomsky, Part 1
On Fascist Republicans, Complicit Democrats, Class Reductionism, and Understatement
Recently The Nation published an interview with the great left intellectual Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian that first appeared on TomDispatch.com. Below I write up some critical reflections expanded from my notes in the margins of my print-off of this interview. They are I hope instructive on some of what distinguishes a modestly accomplished revolutionary Marxist (myself) from a legendary left thinker who identifies as a workerist left anarchist and tends towards social democratic reform in real world/real time politics. There is much in the interview that I agree with, of course, and I was struck (as always) by the precision and eloquence of Noam’s prose, reflections of a magnificent mind at work. For what’s it’s worth, it has long been my observation that Chomsky’s undeniable brilliance on matters of linguistics (the academic field he essentially re-made), United States (US) imperialism (so called “American foreign policy”), and corporate-imperial media control and propaganda (“manufacturing consent”) has led too many of his many fans and interviewers to mistakenly consider him an expert on just about everything else, including areas where he does not especially excel like Left/radical strategy and US domestic politics.
My critique comes in two parts. This is part 1. Part 2 (“Revolutionary Marxism v. Chomsky: Antonio Gramsci was a Communist with a Problematic Maxim”) will be published here on Thursday, October 27th.
Against Class Reductionism
The title of the interview is “The Class War Never Ends, the Master Never Relents’: An Interview with Noam Chomsky.” I find this a bit odd. That’s because Barsamian and Chomsky talk about what Chomsky calls the “proto-fascist” (more on that term below) attack on “what’s left of democracy” – an assault notable in Chomsky’s words for its “white supremacy, racism, misogyny, Christianity, anti-abortion rights” (Chomsky’s words). Clearly, then, we are dealing also with race war, gender war, religious war, and culture war, and an overall war on democracy. These attacks are taking place in a class rule society and fuel divisions that serve the capitalist ruling class, of course, but they do not simply reduce to “class war.”
So the title smacks of class reductionism, which, as Tatiana Cozzarelli wrote on Left Voice two years ago, “is the belief” – common among US social democrats in the Bernie Sanders and DSA modes – “that class causes all oppression and, in turn, that economic changes are enough to resolve all forms of oppression.” In reality serious radical thinkers from Marx and Engels through and beyond Lenin ( to mention some communist revolutionaries who seem to have never particularly impressed the avowed “anarchist” Chomsky) have always been concerned with the dialectical interaction between class and other oppression structures, rejecting in advance the contemporary caricaturized debate between bourgeois identity politicos who say “race, gender, sexual orientation, disability” and “Marxists” who say “class, class, class, class.”
It is of course unfair to accuse Chomsky (hereafter “NC”) of economistic class reductionism because of an interview title likely generated by The Nation and/or Barsamian. NC is of course quite conscious of other forms of oppression, most obviously imperial and military oppression. Still, there’s a definite economistic and class reductionist tilt evident in the interview, consistent with NC’s past attachment to the classically revisionist and reformist Sanders and with NC’s occasional tendency to exaggerate the working-class and potentially social democratic content behind the racist, sexist, and indeed (as NC has resisted acknowledging) fascist Trump phenomenon.
To the Battle Stations Against Not-So Proto-Fascism?
David Barsamian: What we are facing is often described as unprecedented—a pandemic, climate catastrophe and, always lurking off center stage, nuclear annihilation. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Noam Chomsky: I can add a fourth: the impending destruction of what remains of American democracy and the shift of the United States toward a deeply authoritarian, also proto-fascist, state, when the Republicans come back into office, which looks likely. So that’s four horses… And remember that the Republicans are the denialist party, committed to racing to climate destruction with abandon in the hands of the chief wrecker they now worship like a demigod. It’s bad news for the United States and for the world, given the power of this country.”
Street: Yes, things look dark indeed on the current US political trajectory, without a mass movement on an actual Left, but what’s with the “proto-” before the “fascism”? The Republicans are bona-fide fascists, no prefixes required. For my latest essays (two of many more) on this topic, please see this and this. Feel free also (and especially) to consult my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. In that volume readers will discover one of a number of differences that my fellow Routledge author Anthony DiMaggio, author of Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here, and I have with NC (and many other academics and intellectuals) on “the F-word”: a critical emphasis on the centrality of white supremacism and white nationalism. In our opinion, NC’s understanding of the term fascism and why it supposedly (in NC’s view) did not apply to the Trump presidency was excessively attached to (among other things) the classic 20th Century historical model of the Third Reich and – oddly enough for anyone who has read Hitler’s virulently racist autobiography Mein Kampf and Hitler’s 1930s political speeches – to a significantly class-reductionist, outdated, and overly political-economistic understanding of the disease, with racism and other key traits given mistakenly short shrift. (An essential anti-racist intervention against older white male Western academics’ fixation on the classic 20th Century versions of fascism in understanding the political pathology’s 21st Century revival can be found also in Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective’s brilliant volume White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. See also Jason Stanley’s 2018 study How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them for an important description of ten key and signficantly racialized politico-ideological narratives in contemporary and past fascism).
Warning about a “shift toward” authoritarianism and “proto-” fascism is quite an historical understatement. A good study here is Carl Boggs’s chilling volume, Fascism Old and New: American Politics at the Crossroads (Routledge, 2018). Boggs details the United States’ many-sided drift toward fascism over many decades. He explores the drift’s deep roots in the main classist, racist, sexist, imperialist, militarist, corporatist, and Christian-fundamentalist currents of US-American history.
The US is already “a deeply authoritarian” and perhaps even “proto-fascist state” under the unelected dictatorship of capitalism-imperialism. Becoming a fascist state would take authoritarianism to a new and horrific level, of course, making it yet more difficult (as NC suggests) to tackle the first three horsemen.
It seems worth noting that the United States being just a partly or “proto-” fascist state (as it may already be) is (as NC also suggests) a much bigger deal than 1930s Germany becoming (as it did) a/the fully consolidated classically fascist and genocidal state. The United States is the most powerful and dangerous nation in world history. With more than 800 military bases in over 100 countries and enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world many times over, the reach of its empire and its capacity to destroy life on Earth dwarfs the dark power of the Third Reich or any other previous nation state. It has long stood in the vanguard of the “fossil-capitalist” and now increasingly “fossil fascist” (Malm and the Zetkin Collective’s terms) project of turning the entire planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber (a crime that would have horrified Hitler). Its reckless provocation of the nuclear-armed fascist and imperialist Vladimir Putin (a topic on which NC has provided essential and brilliant insight) — himself very much the product of US-led Western imperial economic and military aggression in post-Soviet Eastern Europe — has currently brought the world to the most perilous moment of potential thermonuclear annihilation since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Saying that the USA “looks likely” to turn “proto-fascist” (try fascist) would seem to be a call to popular battle stations, no? So where is the urgent call for mass mobilization and flooding the streets and public squares with millions of outraged citizens – people (of all classes) who care about the future of humanity? Nothing of this sort is remotely apparent in the Barsamian-NC discussion.
“Bad news” is quite the understatement! This is no time for understatement.
I know it must sound unduly buoyant to many amidst current stormy, starboard-leaning seas, but how about we climb down from our Mandarin perches and watchmen’s towers to enter the fray and struggle to make some good and revolutionary news? How about we try to change these potential Nightmare Years (to use the title of William Shirer’s memoir of reporting on German politics during and after Hitler’s rise to power) into Liberation Years? More on this wild-eyed proposition (in relation to NC and a long dead Italian communist) in Part 2.
Getting the Republi-fascists and Democrats Wrong in Class Reductionist Ways
Barsamian: The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance just issued the Global State of Democracy Report 2021. It says that the United States is a country where democracy is “backsliding.”
Chomsky: Very severely. The Republican Party is openly dedicated—it’s not even concealed—to undermining what remains of American democracy. They’re working very hard on it. Since the days of Richard Nixon, the Republicans have long understood that they’re fundamentally a minority party and not going to get votes by advertising their increasingly open commitment to the welfare of the ultrarich and the corporate sector. So they’ve been long diverting attention to so-called cultural issues…white supremacy…other issues. It’s now the virtual definition of the party: So let’s run on attacking “critical race theory”—whatever that means! It’s a cover term, as their leading spokesmen have explained, for everything they can rally the public on: white supremacy, racism, misogyny, Christianity, anti-abortion rights…
Street: I see all this somewhat differently. The Nixon-era Republicans thought of themselves as “the silent majority” and meant it. The Republicans’ explicit sense of themselves as a demographic and electoral minority party is more recent. It reflects their reading of white US-Americans’ projected coming minority status and the fact that they’ve lost the popular vote in seven if not all of the last eight US presidential elections.
“Increasingly open commitment to the welfare of the ultrarich and the corporate sector” is not accurate. Consistent with a main current in fascist politics, Trump in 2016 ran as something of a “populist” (fake, to be sure), claiming to speak for the working-class heartland against the globalist financial and corporate sector. This was a great deception, of course: his first major “accomplishment” was a huge tax cut for the wealthy Few and his administration undertook massive economic and environmental deregulation that served “the billionaire class”/One Percent while degrading the common good. But no, the Trump-era MAGA Republifascists make great if disingenuous efforts to pose as champions of the broad working- and middle-class majority against the globalist corporate and financial elite, which they (consistent with longstanding fascist ideology) absurdly merge with the supposed menace of “socialism.”
A better take on our current neoliberal era is that the Democrats’ “increasingly open commitment to the welfare of the ultrarich and the corporate sector” (starting during the second half of Jimmy Carter’s administration and fully consolidating under “progressive neoliberal” Bill Clinton presidency) ate up much of the Republicans’ old centrist space. This left the rightmost major increasingly reliant on far-right racist, nativist, and sexist politics, funded in part by revanchist billionaires who profited from deregulation and regressive tax cuts.
I find it distressing that NC says “whatever that means!” about Critical Race Theory” (CRT). It’s quite true that the Republi-fascists use CRT as cover for a many-sided right-wing assault, but there’s nothing mysterious or difficult to grasp about CRT, whose basic tenets ought to be uncontroversial: race is not "biologically grounded and natural" but is instead a socially constructed category used to oppress and exploit people of color; racism is not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American society, including but hardly limited to its legal system. There are reasonable class analysis (Marxist and/or left anarchist) criticisms to make of CRT but there is nothing obscure about its tenets and its opening suppositions are obviously accurate.
Racism, sexism (at the heart of the war on abortion), nativism, homophobia, and Christian fundamentalism vs. secularism need to be understood as more than just “diversionary cultural issues” meant to divide the populace and distract it from the class struggle. They are real historical and material fractures with significant relatively autonomous significance even as they are intimately tied up with the underlying capitalism-imperialist order. Racism needs to be opposed as racism. Sexism needs to be opposed as sexism. Bourgeois politicos oppose or pretend to oppose these forms of oppression without making the essential connections to capitalist class rule and empire – and without understanding that they can’t be overcome under the capitalist-imperialist system. (Indeed, they tend to absurdly disappear class altogether, making it impossible for them to meaningfully understand and oppose racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-transgenderism.) Communists and other progressively minded people can and must make the class and empire connections and indeed show that racism, sexism, and nativism cannot ultimately be defeated under the capitalist-imperialist system.
On Fascist Replacement Theory (FRT)
DB: We all saw what happened in Washington on January 6th. Do you see the possibility of civil unrest spreading? There are multiple militias across the country. Representative Paul Gosar, of the great state of Arizona, and Representative Lauren Boebert, of the great state of Colorado, among others, have made threatening statements inciting violence and hatred. The Internet is rife with conspiracy theories. What must we do?
NC: It is very serious. In fact, maybe a third or so of Republicans think it may be necessary to use force to “save our country,” as they put it. “Save our country” has a clear meaning. If anyone didn’t understand it, Trump issued a call to people to mobilize to prevent the Democrats from swamping this country with criminals being let out of jails in other lands, lest they “replace” white Americans and carry out the destruction of America. The “great replacement” theory—that’s what “take away our country” means and it’s being used effectively by proto-fascist elements, Trump being the most extreme and most successful.
Street: This is dead-on but here I would critically add that “great replacement theory” is full-on fascist – we can drop the “proto-” – and goes back to the Nazis. To say that it is “being used effectively by proto-fascist elements” is quite an understatement. It is a key part of fascist ideology and politics in Europe and in the United States, whose racist and genocidal practices inspired Adolf Hitler.
Sentimentalizing the American Labor Movement
Chomsky: What can we do about it? The only tools available, like it or not, are education and organization. There’s no other way. It means trying to revive an authentic labor movement of the kind that, in the past, was in the forefront of moves toward social justice. It also means organizing other popular movements, carrying out educational efforts to combat the murderous anti-vaccine campaigns now going on, making sure that there are serious efforts to deal with the climate crisis, mobilizing against the bipartisan commitment to increase dangerous military spending and provocative actions against China, which could lead to a conflict nobody wants and end up in a terminal war.
You just have to keep working on this. There is no other way.
Street: Thumbs up to “other popular movements” and mobilizing agaist terminal war, but the call for “reviving” a past US labor movement is distressing. With all due respect for the Molly Maguires, the Haymarket Martyrs, the Industrial Workers of the World, Sacco and Vanzetti (all brutally crushed), and the leftish labor offshoots that NC fondly recalls from the US mass production and New Deal eras, the dominant trend in US-American labor history by far and away has been what the onetime University of Wisconsin economist Selig Perlman called “job conscious” and “pure and simple” trade unionism. Organized U.S. labor – now down to less than 1 in 10 US employees – has long been mainly about the economistic pursuit of a better wage and benefit deal within the capitalist-imperialist system for workers with strategic marketplace and workplace bargaining power. It’s been mainly about getting a slightly bigger if small slice of the imperialist pie for a fraction of the nation’s wage-earners. This has reflected and encouraged imperial and nationalist chauvinism on the part of its bureaucratic officials and much of union membership. Labor misleaders have long worked to marginalize and purge those working-class activists who wanted the labor movement to be about social justice, anti-imperialism, democracy, and environmental sanity, not to mention revolution. The US labor movement has never been about seriously challenging the underlying unelected and interrelated dictatorships of capital and empire, the leading oppression structures that create the four horseman the Barsamian-NC discussion started with.
US labor history has validated Lenin’s critique of the trade union mindset, which seeks more crumbs for workers under the dominant capitalist-imperialist system when the real task – as Lenin (who NC mistakenly calls a “counter-revoltionary”) argued — is to enlist the proletariat in the cause of liberating humanity. Revolutionary Marxists, Lenin explained in What is to be Done?, aspire to be “people’s tribunes” who “react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears” rather than social democratish “trade union secretaries” who focus on getting an incremental bit “more” (to use the leading US labor aristocrat Samuel Gompers’ actual description of “what labor wants”) for (some) working-class people under the capitalist empire.
“Education and organization”…for the (futile) pursuit of meaningful reforms within the reigning class rule order and its multiple “intersectional” oppression systems – a slightly better cut for some oppressed people – or for the revolutionary overthrow of the system that is wrecking livable ecology, spreading pandemics, re-enslaving women (more on that in Part 2), fueling racial and ethnic division, bringing us to the brink of nuclear war, and moving world history’s most powerful and dangerous nation from constitutional bourgeois democracy to not-so “proto-” fascism?
“We just have to keep working on this.” Really? Let’s ask the “Dr. Phil question”: how’s that been working for us? It’s long past time to take a ruthlessly honest look at how far (not very!) the old economistic, workerist/revisionist, reformist, and frankly passive, anti-revolutionary and anti-communist ways of “working on this” have gotten us. It’s not a pretty story: these ways — and the bloodless Mandarin remove (and the related cowardice) of many intellectuals and academics — are parts of how we now stand on the precipice of annihilation at the hands of the four horsemen.
When what is to be done gets largely reduced to reviving a largely mythical past US “social justice” labor movement (a movement whose former workplace and community social bases have for the most part disappeared) you know that left sights are being disastrously lowered. Surely we can and must aim for more daring and revoltionary heights as the capitalist-imperialist system brings us to the brink of annihilation.
On the Capitalist Dems
Barsamian: In the background is extreme inequality, which is off the charts. Why is the United States so unequal?
Chomsky: A lot of this has happened in the last 40 years as part of the neoliberal assault on America in which the Democrats, too, have participated, though not to the extent of the Republicans.
Street: Whatever we call its changing eras – and neoliberalism has real historical meaning and coherence – this is capitalism, which is by definition about the upward concentration of wealth and power. The bourgeois system creates the basic underlying context for fascism by rendering politicians’ democratic promises laughable while at the same creating an endless series of crises that call for big government intervention. (Please see my most recent previous Substack for elaboration on this problem.)
Saying that the Dems have not participated in “the neoliberal [capitalist] assault” to the same extent as the Republicans probably obscures more than it illuminates. A basic calling card and defining hallmark of capitalism’s neoliberal phase in the US is the nearly complete capture of the formerly New Deal Democratic Party by corporate and financial power. That capture, consolidated under Bill Clinton, the champion of welfare “reform” and NAFTA, is probably the more decisive participation. It also provides critical context for the Republicans’ qualitative leap from bourgeois democracy (more on that term below) to not-so “proto” fascism in this century, for the Democrats’ swallowing up of much of the rightmost major party’s centrist business and professional class ballast helped compel the Republicans to move further and disastrously to retain partisan relevance and identity.
Stay tuned for Part 2 next Thursday morning.
Suggestion for Paul street: the use of “proto-fascist” gives some room for discussion, developmentally speaking, where “fascist” seems to end the discussion.
Would you please provide your definition of Facism. I read the 'this and this' but didn't see anything about the underlying way facism works. My understanding of the word, historically, is that facism is when gov'ts and business colude to stomp out the individual.
Fascism="Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini.
It's the boot on the face for eternity. But to me, these posts focus on one single word, dictatorial leader (Trump 2024 ->) and nothing of the rest of it.
From my perspective, being unvaxxed unmasked and having been fully censored for showing a different perspective (one which I read in the polls that show alot of new converts too). I've been living in facism the past two years. Our government has been in collusion with an FDA that has been hijacked by big Pharma to demonize, ostracize and take away individual rights. That is fascism.
From the past two posts here, it seems to have morped into being a trope.
M&W. Facism: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.
I am not a Trumpie. I am one of those who has been through the polarized bs, and see right through it now; most of our politicians are Uniparty, despite the charade. The reason why the polls show close races is because of the undecided. You can look to NJ in 2021, the Gov race, to see how it breaks. People don't want Republicans, but Democrats are not giving them a choice.
80% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans believe that the other political party poses a threat that, if not stopped, "will destroy America as we know it," per the NBC News poll. I don't believe there will be any sort of civil war. What will happen is that Republicans are going to starve the Dem controlled cities, and it will feel like civil war to those living there.