Chomsky’s Words Will Not Stop The Revolution
by Rick Gunderman
“Speaking to the Observer last week, (MIT professor and noted political analyst Noam) Chomsky has accused the socialist leader (Hugo Chavez) of amassing too much power and of making an ‘assault’ on Venezuela’s democracy.” –The Guardian, UK
Accompanied by a photo of President Chavez riding a horse and pointing skyward, flanked by three llanero-looking individuals, the UK’s Guardian ran an article entitled “Noam Chomsky denounces old friend Hugo Chávez for ‘assault’ on democracy”.
Aside from being an exhaustingly typical example of editoralizing through photographs, the article proceeds to go in depth on how Noam Chomsky’s friendship with Hugo Chavez (“Hugo Chávez has long considered Noam Chomsky one of his best friends in the west”) has been compromised by the imprisonment of Venezuelan judge María Lourdes Afiuni, head of the 31st Control Court of Caracas.
The Guardian’s explanation of why Afiuni was jailed:
“Afiuni earned Chávez’s ire in December 2009 by freeing Eligio Cedeño, a prominent banker facing corruption charges. Cedeño promptly fled the country.”
Not a word more of detail, but conspicuously followed by:
“In a televised broadcast the president, who had taken a close interest in the case, called the judge a criminal and demanded she be jailed for 30 years. “That judge has to pay for what she has done.””
The casual reader could be forgiven for concluding that Afiuni’s detention was totally arbitrary and without cause.
Imagine if, in the Conrad Black case, or the Scooter Libby trial, a judge had not only allowed the accused to slip out of the back of the courthouse so they could escape to Mexico, but had personally summoned the accused for a hearing without notifying the prosecutor, all in order to allow the escape.
The judge would be arrested for assisting a fugitive, at the very least.
This is analogous to what happened in Venezuela. Eligio Cedeño, the prisoner illegally released by then-Judge Afiuni, was a Venezuelan banker arrested in 2007 for allegedly circumventing government currency rules to gain U.S. dollars. To the tune of $27 million USD. Cedeño is now living it up in Miami (no explanation necessary there).
According to Edward Ellis of Correo del Orinoco International (which, unlike the Carr Institute, actually operates in Venezuela):
“While it is true that Cedeño had indeed been held beyond the stipulated time for pre-trial detentions, it is also true that Afiuni’s rogue actions were made in violation of all judicial protocols and legal procedures. In fact, hundreds of trials in Venezuela fall victim to bureaucratic slow downs and judicial delays that prevent the timely delivery of justice in the country.”
And in fact, the judicial system managed to secure Afiuni’s arrest without any intervention from Chavez, although the Guardian would have it framed otherwise. Chavez went on television condemning corruption in the justice system, used Afiuni’s case as an example, and described how she would be punished, i.e. how the legal system works, which a president certainly ought to know. To the Guardian, this is proof of Chavez’s tyrannical ways.
Nor would Chomsky have us believe Venezuela’s judicial system is impartial:
“I’m sceptical that [Afiuni] could receive a fair trial. It’s striking that, as far as I understand, other judges have not come out in support of her … that suggests an atmosphere of intimidation.”
To Noam Chomsky, the lack of judges willing to speak out in favour of a corrupt public official who helped a known criminal escape justice must be a sign of the impending realization of Chavez’s totalitarian agenda. Implicitly, we should have expected this. All socialist countries destroy democracy and succumb to Stalinism sooner or later.
If one continues through the list of international human rights groups joining in the chorus of anti-Chavez voices that makes up the rest of the Guardian’s article, one arrives at the much-lauded Chomsky letter.
Helpfully enough, he sets off the Leninist reader’s radar in the second sentence by referring to the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University as the source of his alarm over Afiuni’s detention. The Canadian reader would be interested to know that the Carr Centre was headed from 2000-2005 by our very own Michael Ignatieff, former Liberal Party leader and open admirer of American imperialism.
Following this vain attempt to establish institutional credibility, Chomsky gets on his high horse and begins shedding crocodile tears for Afiuni’s situation. She has been in prison for a little over a year, and on top of having cancer was a single mother. Indeed, nobody doubts that this is a bad situation to be in. With poor health and young children to care for, one wonders why Afiuni would put herself in the business of assisting fugitives.
Chomsky and the Guardian fail to mention that even among the bureaucratic mess that is the judicial system the Attorney General managed to intervene to have her transferred first to isolation from the general population to ensure her safety (she was sharing a cell block with inmates she had sentenced) then to house arrest so she could receive cancer treatment. Some “cruelty”.
Nor is it evidently worth noting that neither Afiuni nor Cedeño were known to be supporters of the opposition, which compromises the claim that this is a case of political persecution.
Communists should not take lightly the influence that Noam Chomsky has on the petit-bourgeois left. His books are widely available at Chapters and Indigo (why capitalist publishers would print literature with true subversive potential, and why capitalist bookstores would sell them is a rather glaring contradiction), and every university has one political science professor who salivates at the mention of Chomsky’s name. That Chomsky is an arrogant, bourgeois critic-of-everything while having made seemingly few contributions to real activism and revolution is of little relevance – he speaks the truth.
It is this kind of mentality that we as communists must stand against. Not for our own benefit – we already can sniff opportunism from miles away – but because it is poisonous to our allies, the masses, and the entire movement. It is a liberal, petit-bourgeois attitude, no matter the actual class of the individual who holds it.
The mentality can be summed up as “it’s a war of information – we win the revolution through education!”
This is a noble slogan, with a perfect place as a maxim for our media and newsletter staff. Or for a socialist bookstore, or education centre. But it is useless as a slogan that is central, defining or paramount. It can be useful as a very specific slogan for a very specific group or campaign, but only for that.
This, the mentality of the liberal progressives who we often work alongside confines our roles and duties as activists to debates, demonstrations and maybe the occasional leaflet. Without real mobilization of large numbers of people, under the leadership and initiative of the most dedicated activists who can make real demands to the right people to get real victories achieved for the masses (i.e. free education, universal health care including dental and preventive care, changes in government labour policy, unionization of workplaces, etc.), it is a plain fact – nothing gets done.
The organization grows or shrinks, but in any case becomes irrelevant. The policies of government, education and business become more vicious, more reactionary, and more damaging to workers, youth, students, women, visible minorities, recent immigrants, children, First Nations peoples, etc.
That is the practical effect of the Noam Chomsky mentality, of the liberal progressives. Romanticized “political prisoners”, the likes of which they have made disgraced judge María Lourdes Afiuni out to be, seem to pale in comparison.
For we know that the 5.7 million members of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela/Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), and their thousands of comrades in the Communist Party of Venezuela/Partido Comunista de Venezuela (PCV), will not put the brakes on the progress of their revolution just because an MIT professor, high in his ivory tower, shouts at them.
But here at home, where we’re in the embryo stages of getting things going, the liberals in our ranks keep stopping to ask directions from the enemy.
40 Helpful Tips For Becoming a Successful Anti-Communist
by J. Slavyanski
1. Constantly insist that Marxism is discredited, outdated, and totally dead and buried. Then proceed to build a lucrative career on beating that supposedly ‘dead’ horse for the rest of your working life.
2. Remember, any unnatural death that occurs under a ‘Communist’ regime is not only attributable to the leaders of the state, but also Marxism as an ideology. Ignore deaths that occur for the same reason in non-Communist states.
3. Communism or Marxism is whatever you want it to be. Feel free to label countries, movements, and regimes as ‘Communist’ regardless of things like actual goals, stated ideology, diplomatic relations, economic policy, or property relations.
4. If there was a conflict involving Communists, the conflict and all ensuing deaths can be laid at the feet of Communism. Be careful when applying this to WWII. Fascist movements who fought against the Soviets or Communist partisans are fine, but try not to openly praise Nazi Germany. Save that for private conversations if you must do so.
5. You decide what Marxism “really means”, and who the rightful representatives of Communism were. Feign interest that Trotsky was somehow robbed of power by Stalin, despite the fact that you hate him as well.
6. Constantly talk about George Orwell. Quote from Animal Farm or 1984. Do not worry about the fact that he never set foot in the Soviet Union and both of those books are novels.
7. Quote massive death tolls without regards to demographics or consistency. 3 million famine deaths? 7 million? 10 million? 100 million deaths total? You need not worry about anyone checking your work, which is good for you seeing that you probably haven’t done any.
8. Everyone ever arrested under a Communist regime was most likely innocent of any crime. Communists only arrested harmless poets and political prophets who had a beautiful message to share with the world.
9. Everything Stalin did or didn’t do had some sinister ulterior motive. Everything.
10. Keeping with the spirit of #9, remember that Stalin was an omnipotent being, perhaps an incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu, who had full awareness of everything going on in the Soviet Union and total control over every occurrence which took place between 1924 and 1953. Everything that occurred during that time was the will of Stalin. Stalin knew the exact details of every criminal case that took place during that era and out of his boundless cruelty, had tons of innocent people shot for no reason regardless of where they were or their position in life. Being omnipotent, he was not dependent on information passed up from tens of thousands of subordinates.
11. Constantly attack ‘Communist’ regimes for actions that occur in capitalist regimes up to this very day.
12. Claim that Marxism is utopian because of its description of a possible future society. Alternately claim that Marxism failed because it never gave a detailed description of how a Communist society would look. Do not pay attention to the massive contradiction here.
13. Start referring to Marxism as being some kind of religious faith, Messianic, or whatever other spiritualist bullshit you can come up with. When people point out that you can draw similarities between virtually any political ideology and other religions, ignore them.
14. Remember the one-two anti-Communist attack: Attack the post-Stalin system on economic grounds, and claim it just doesn’t work. Since an informed opponent will most likely point out that actual socialist economics did indeed work during the Stalin era, and in fact worked very well, attack that era on human rights grounds.
15. Two words- Human nature. What is human nature? For your purposes, human nature is a quick explanation why political ideas or systems you don’t like are wrong.
16. Bolshevik revolutions were carried out with violence and bloodshed. Bourgeois revolutions were all carried out by democratic referendums, and there was no violence whatsoever.
17. Use words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ constantly. Do not accept any challenge to define these terms.
18. Communists can be for or against whatever is popular in your particular area. If you are preaching to a right-wing crowd, Communists are for degeneration and homosexuality. If you are preaching to a more mainstream audience, Communists were homophobic. Essentially, Communists are for moral degeneration and puritanical prudery at the same time. Again, do not notice the contradiction.
19. Constantly flog Stalin over the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, while totally ignoring massive support and collaboration with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan on the part of America, Britain, and France, long before the war and even after in some ways. As usual, do not allow your opponent to examine the context of the non-aggression pact.
20. Praise the newfound “freedom” of Eastern Europe. Ignore the massive depopulation via migration, plunging birthrates, huge alcohol and drug problems, political instability, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, sex trafficking and child prostitution, organized crime, high suicide rates, unemployment, disease, etc. Who cares about all that when you have freedom of speech?!
21. Constantly talk about the culture of fear in Communist nations, about that ‘knock on the door’ in the middle of the night. Ignore the ‘kick in your door in the middle of the night, stick a shotgun in your back, and haul your ass out of bed etc. because you are suspected of dealing,’ a normal occurrence in the American War on Drugs.
22. Attack Communists for suppression of religion. Attack Islamic fundamentalists for not being secular. What contradiction?!
23. Do not notice the irony that the US is currently fighting an incredibly expensive, losing war against an opponent which it funded, supported, and even handed its first victory in Afghanistan.
24. What should you say when confronted with all the continuing and often worsening problems in the world today, and asked for a solution? FREEDOM!! (Repeat as necessary until your opponent goes away)
25. Nothing from “Communists” can be trusted. Unless it somehow works in your favor, ala Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ from 1956, or anything Trotsky wrote.
26. Communist leaders were ‘paranoid’ for devoting so much time to security against counter-revolution. Ignore the mountains of evidence, including the restoration of capitalism in the East Bloc, that this threat was indeed real.
27. Communist regimes were never popular. If proof is presented in various cases to show otherwise, claim that the people were brainwashed. Make no effort to consider the budgetary and logistic constraints on such an undertaking.
28. Communist propaganda is crude and primitive. If someone mentions Red Dawn or worse, mentions the J. Edgar Hoover-endorsed comic book series known as The Godless Communists, run away.
29. Praise secularism in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘pluralism’ until faced with a Communist. Then play the religion card.
30. Atrocities and other bad things that happen under non-Communist regimes are the fault of individual ‘bad people’. Anything bad that happens under a ‘Communist’ regime is the fault of the ideology and system. And Stalin.
31. Being an anti-Communist means not having to have any sort of ideological consistency whatsoever. Preach populist left-wing pseudo-socialism 90% of the time, and then compare the capitalist system to “Stalin’s Russia”(if you never really studied the subject, just read 1984 and Animal Farm). Bitch about capitalism 99% of the time, but balk when someone suggests Communism as an alternative. Far right wing Fascist? Constantly bitch about cultural degeneracy under capitalism, while remaining fanatically opposed to Marxism for no discernable reason save for your affinity for historic nationalism.
32. If you’re an anarchist, keep pointing out the ‘failure’ of Marxism while ignoring the fact that your ideology has a 100% failure rate throughout its entire history. Blame those failures on Communists, or stronger military powers. Ignore the fact that the most wonderful society is worthless if it can’t defend itself from reaction.
33. Neo-Nazi? Communism is Jewish!! Debate over.
34. Neo-Hippy? Tibet!
35. Constantly condemn the genocide that allegedly occurred under Mao, while ignoring the US’ relations with China established by Nixon, and the massive role capitalist China has played in the modern US economy. When you want to talk positively about China, it’s a capitalist country. If you need to criticize it, it’s still ‘Communist’.
36. Claim Marxism is not empirical. Neither are neo-liberalism, ‘democracy’, or ‘freedom’, but don’t worry about that.
37. Always insist that despite the location, country, historical era, past experience, and all other factors, Communists must want to recreate a modern-day copy of Stalin’s Russia, and all that entails according to you. Do not notice the inherent idiocy in this concept, such as your particular country being already industrialized, and not having a historical problem of severe backwardness.
38. Learn to use the magic word ‘totalitarian’. This word allows you to link two ideological opposites, Communism and Fascism.
39. Ignore the fact that socialist states experienced more economic problems parallel to the number of market reforms they made.
40. When challenged about numbers or historical context, resort to labels like “ruthless tyrant”, “cruel murderer”, and such. Remember, people like Stalin were mass-murderers because of all the people they killed, and we know they killed all those people because they were mass-murderers. It totally tracks!
What Lies Ahead for the Communist Party of Canada?
“Why vote Communist?”
A question I am frequently asked as a Communist Party candiate in Ontario’s provincial election. A vote for the Communist Party is a vote like no other.
When you vote Liberal, PC, Green or NDP, you vote for capitalism. You vote to accept that the system we have now, whether it is working presently or not, is good for the people.
When you vote Communist, you vote for capable worker-politicians. You vote for dedicated activists whose work among the people, for the people, gives us a unique quality. We know how government policies affect the people, how they play out on the ground, and how the people can be organized into the engine that turns the wheel of history.
We are not a party who takes its advice and cues from big business, small business, or foreign business. We learn from, and develop policies for, the working and oppressed people in this land.
Our aim is a socialist Canada, brought about by a large coalition of peoples’ and democratic forces under the leadership of the Communist Party. As the most dedicated activists, we aim to be the most strong-willed and capable leaders. We aim to keep the people firmly grounded in our position in the struggle, directly facing the exploiters and oppressors. We wish to marginalize and weed out those leaders of the people that preach retreat and concession when advance and determination is the order of the day.
Big business in Canada and their talking heads in the media advance anti-communism because communism is bad for them, not bad for the people. When they talk of communism, they focus on leaders and countries far detached from the current realities of Canadian life. When we talk about communism and craft our policies and positions, we base it all on nothing but the realities of that life. They demonize socialist countries for things that are present in our society, and often to a worse degree.
Forget what they say about “economic stability”, about “freedom and democracy”, about “trickle-down economic” or “rising tides lifting all boats”. Forget the business section of the newspaper – it is not neutral or unbiased. No news or information is. All news and information serves a purpose and is spoken from a certain bias. Anybody who says anything to the contrary is not accepting reality. And the business section, the financial advisors on camera, the “wisdom” taught to economic students…all of this serves the interests of the capitalist class.
We, not just the Communist Party but all progressive forces in society, are marginalized. We own no mass media; we do not write the history or economics textbooks; our only resource is the people and their determination to escape the mindlessness, misery and alienation of life under capitalism. Capitalism breeds no solidarity, no peace and certainly no justice. Capitalism breeds division, hate, isolation, and neverending conflict.
Socialism – that which we fight for – puts the people, their views, their needs, their interests and their culture, ahead of the interests of the elite. We work at the grassroots to bring power from the grassroots.
Canada in 2011 is not Russia in 1917, China in 1949, or Cuba in 1959. The means used to achieve and consolidate revolution in those countries will not be the same as used here, just as they were not the same among themselves. But however we bring about a socialist state, whose aim will be to bring all working people into running the country and conversely to knock the capitalist class out of power and out of existence as a class, we must bring it about.
To that end, we advance a program that is progressive to its core that calls for immediate action to improve the lives of working and oppressed people in Canada. We do so to rally all progressive, grassroots organizations around our party’s leadership. The mass organizations and trade unions are the social and economic foundation of socialism; the Communist Party and its allies are the political foundation.
It is the Communist Party that will guide the revolution, but the people and their mass organizations that will make it happen – it is they who will consolidate the revolution at every level of society.
This revolution will not come out of nowhere, or be a matter of the spontaneity of the masses. For this revolution to be a possibility, the Communist Party must achieve trusted leadership among the people. Our members are today working as leaders of the trade union, peace, democratic, farmers, student, youth, LGBTQ, women’s and national liberation movements in Canada. But our leadership needs to be expanded, brought together, and working cohesively. We are working always to achieve this goal.
The necessity of securing firm, committed, unrelenting, Marxist-Leninist leadership over the peoples’ movement has rarely been more pressing. As the presently-dominant social democratic leadership wavers and retreats, the forces of reaction grow stronger. The victory of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives at the federal level, various right-wing mayors exemplified by Rob Ford in Toronto, and the impending possibility of Tim Hudak becoming premier of Ontario, reactionary politicians, activists and businessmen are overjoyed. They have already started the war on the people, and to fight back against that is the duty of every progressive person. It is the duty of every communist to take up the leadership of that fightback.
Worse yet, the signs of nascent fascism are rearing their ugly heads everywhere. Seemingly-isolated incidents like Gary McHale’s antagonism of the Six Nations people fighting to protect their rights, the unleashing of state violence on peaceful protesters at the G20 and Montebello summits, and increasingly aggressive attacks by police on immigrant and guest worker communities are in fact connected to the rise of the reaction in Canada.
The nature of the right-wing is a reaction to progressive forces. In France, the revolution of 1789 met with hostility from the monarchs and lords who wished to preserve their feudal privileges. In America, the revolution of 1779 saw elements loyal to the British Crown battle for years before fleeing to settle in Canada. In interbellum Germany, the Nazis rose as a reaction to the strength of the Communist Party in the country – at the time, the German Communist Party was larger than the Soviet Party.
When capitalism is in extreme decay, and the forces of liberalism no longer enjoy the confidence of the people, fascism enters to fill the void. When that happens, the decisive question becomes a matter of life and death – we must do everything possible to resist the rise of fascism. We cannot do that by conceding, as the Social Democrats fatefully tried to do in Germany.
Politics is the expression of economics through the state. In a moment of extreme crisis, three political options are present:
-Fascism takes over in the interests of the most reactionary elements of capital, and their most subservient and treacherous members of the underclasses;
-Liberalism regains its footing and gains a new lease to rule as a system of class collaboration;
-The working class overthrows liberalism, crushes fascism, and begins to wage a protracted struggle against capitalism to construct socialism, led by their communist party.
The recession of 2008 was a minor speedbump for liberalism, not any sort of real threat to its ability to rule. However, if we are on the cusp of a crisis much worse than the ’08 recession, we may find that the option of liberalism disappears before us.
If that happens, it will only be the widespread faith of the people in the Communist Party’s ability to lead them to power that can prevent fascism’s rise. It will require that at the decisive moment when we must choose one path or the other, that the Communist Party issues correct leadership and makes the right decisions.
Whether we will soon be confronted with this task or not, we must work tirelessly to ensure that when we are confronted with it, we will be ready for it.
*originally written and posted on Facebook on September 24, 2011.
