Sunday, April 30, 2017
Apocalypse, Marxist catastrophe, Trotstkyite nightmare
NOAM CHOMSKY – REQUIEM FOR THE
AMERICAN DREAM – 2017
How can someone who is so keen on language and words, a
linguist mind you, use the word “Requiem” in his title ignoring – and I am sure
he knows about it – that a requiem is composed and performed for something that
is dead and has no future, no possible resurrection, or maybe Noam Chomsky has
become a Catholic who believes in the resurrection of the dead. The title is of
course a provocation both revealing and self-defeating. And that’s what I am
going to discuss now.
Ten principles, and it has to be ten to avoid all kinds of
symbolism, you know, six and Solomon or David, seven and the holy week of
Genesis or the Passion, eight and the Second Coming, nine and the Beast, the
hours of Jesus’ death, eleven is the number of disciples with Jesus after Judas
has left and twelve are the twelve apostles. No let’s stay mathematical, cold
and non-symbolical. So ten it is going to be and the decimal system, the basis
of numeration devised by physicists and mathematicians and proclaimed as the
end of barbarity by the French Revolution that established the metric system as
the future of the world and the real measure of reason and intelligence.
The first point has to do with American history and the US
Constitution. It opposes two founding fathers and/or framers. James Madison,
the aristocrat who wants to protect the minority of the opulent against the
majority of the non-opulent on one hand. And Thomas Jefferson the democrat who
believes the US Constitution is there to guarantee equality and democracy for
all free men. Naturally, Chomsky knows all this at the time was a real farce
since, as he recalls, “free men” were only free white men and they excluded all
non-free white men: indentured white men, and all men who had neither real
estate property, nor commercial property, nor farmland property, since to be a
free citizen you had to have some property and pay some tax for it. These free
white men also excluded all women, all Indians, all Blacks, slaves or not
slaves. In fact, the body of free white men who could be citizens in that
society was maybe a few percent of the whole society, maybe five like in
England at the same time. But history is vicious and in spite of all the crimes
of this old American history, we have genericized the meaning to a very wide
understanding today.
And the crimes were, as Chomsky reminds us,
1- “decimating the indigenous population” (note how he
avoids genocide or even holocaust: some speak of 90 to 95% of the native
American population exterminated);
2- “massive slavery of another segment of the society” (why
on earth does he avoid the terms Black or African American, since anyway 90 to
95% of these slaves were Blacks, and 100% in the South, but this identification
would have brought the idea that there were a lot of non-slave black men and
women in the North and in the slave states that had been French or Spanish
because of the rule of manumission, but that would have brought something that
is clear: only the British Protestant and Puritan colonists in the British
colonies and then the USA practiced –
and this is still true – the theory of one-drop-of-black-blood, replacing the
practice of slavery with the practice of mass racism that is still alive in the
USA);
3- “bitterly exploited labor” (and he forgets to explain
what May Day is, when and where it started and Sacco and Vanzetti are not
quoted: that art with which Chomsky remains generic on such questions is
unexplained and probably unexplainable, or at least it’s better it remains
unexplained);
4- “overseas conquests” (that’s the wrong word because
overseas conquests are rare: Porto Rico and Hawaii: it could have been better
to speak of American imperialistic interventionism in the world since the
Monroe doctrine expanded after the first world war and the second world war to
the entire world);
5- “etc.” (true enough the list is long from Mossadegh to
Lumumba, from Korea to Vietnam and to Korea again), not to mention the Middle
East.
And his reference to Aristotle is the traditional Western
hypocrisy and short memory. Aristotle spoke for a slave society in
which the majority of the population was in servitude and the Roman Empire will
not be better and Aristotle was rightly used by Calhoun, the Southern slave
theorist, to justify his project of a US society that would be a perennial
slave society forever. Chomsky of course forgets this reference that totally
disqualify the reference to Aristotle.
It is then simple to come to this vision of society that is
cut in two: the rich and the poor, the aristocrats or the plutocrats at the top
(just a few percent) who have all power and the democrats at the bottom, all
the others, all set under the umbrella of “the poor.” This vision is the vision
that many in the world under the name of socialism and under the older probably
obsolete name of communism still defend when advancing their political projects,
especially their populist political projects, be it from the left like in
Greece (note the lefty coalition managed to get rid of the most extreme branch
of their movement through elections), in Catalonia, in Spain, in Portugal,
Italy or in France; or be it from the right in Great Britain, the Netherlands,
France, Italy and many other countries, including the USA where that extreme
right populist movement was the Tea Party and still is the Freedom Caucus and
Trump himself, all of them in the Republican Party, Lincoln’s party mind you.
Atrocious history!
The worst part in this dichotomy, in this binary vision of
the world, history, and the USA, is that he here and there evokes a third
“party” but he never integrates it in his analysis of the society and the
political system, just as if the US Constitution had not been able to shift
from two parties, Democrats and Whigs to two parties, Democrats and
Republicans, with a new party in place of one that died. True enough, any
two-party system that is cast in reinforced shielded concrete like the one in
the US cannot develop a multi-party system. Let me say here that this political
system with indirect vote for the President and the frozen two party system is
worse, I dare say FAR WORSE than the one-party system of the USSR or China. But
Chomsky does not even consider any reform of it: get rid of the indirect vote
for President and make all elections two-round elections. Only one-party systems,
Great Britain and the USA, still have that archaic system of a one-round
electoral system. In England where they have a three or four party system the
winner can be elected with a meager 30% of the electorate if there are four
candidates. That is absurd. And it is the people who defend this system who
come and give lessons to other countries, the country where it has become
common to have a president elected with a minority of the popular vote if we
follow Wikipedia: 1824: John Quincy Adams; 1876: Rutherford B. Hayes; 1888:
Benjamin Harrison; 2000: George W. Bush; 2016: Donald Trump; plus 1960: John F.
Kennedy who is debated because it is impossible to determine with absolute
certainty the popular vote of the three candidates.
And yet you will find the ferment of this necessary “third”
possibility that should be this necessary “multiple” perspective. The
Counterforce as he calls it page 41; “those who are interested in an
independent progressive party,” page 102. And as he says page 42 “the only
counterforce is you.” But he is not
able to really capture what he says here in full contradiction with what he
says later on, towards the end of the pamphlet, page 126: “the idea is to try
to control everyone, to turn the whole
society into the perfect system. The perfect system would be a society based on
a dyad – a pair. The pair is you and
your television set, or maybe now you and your iPhone and the Internet.”
And he has trapped himself so much in his dyad, in his dual
thinking, in his binary vision that he does not see that “you and your
television set” (I hope with some programs, not just the set) has a “you” who
is passive, even if he has 100 channels and can zap from one vision to the
next; and on the other hand “you and your iPhone and the Internet” is a lot
more open and can be open to first some active participation, and then some activity in search and reception of
multiple points of view and opinions. He just forgets that Roosevelt was the
President elected with the radio, Kennedy with television, Obama with the
Internet and email networks, and Trump with social networks. He wants to reduce
everything to money and the weight of the big corporations. But he forgets the
impact of media and thus he does not see that Trump has captured the daily
practice of the discontents today: they use Twitter to express their rage that
does not need more than 140 characters to express itself, even often a lot less
like “F*** the P*****!” with the use of stars and other symbols to avoid four
letter words or non-politically correct entities. But more and more people use
their iPhones, their smartphones and the Internet to actually counterweigh the
forces of the financialized offshored outsourced system. Counterweigh with
information and training and education, all three self-engineered,
self-retrieved and self-learned if not actually self-taught.
But what he has completely wrong is his vision of the economy.
He more or less accept the division of society in, on one hand, the extreme minority
of the plutocrats who advocate plutonomy and plutocracy instead of democracy,
and on the other hand the vast majority of the “precariat,” the “precarious
proletariat.” The allusion to Marx is so obvious that his vision of the total
dictatorship, he says a ‘totalitarian” situation, echoing the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie of Marx. We expect the dictatorship of the proletariat, sorry
of the precariat. He does not go that far but his vision is just as dramatic as
that. He considers that for the first time in history (of course he only speaks
of the history of mankind after they invented writing, which is a very short
period of time because in the long run the Homo Sapiens species met with
survival as a species several times, the most recent ones being when the Ice
Age locked them up into running, retreating and trying to survive on reduced
territory and reduced resources, and then when agricultural division of labor
was introduced in the Neolithic or a couple of millennia before, after the Ice
Age any way, that reduced life expectancy to something around 20 or maybe 19
years which brought the reproductive possibilities to at the most three
children maybe four with more than a 50% death rate before puberty, some say
75%. If it were that dramatic then we would not be here to testify.
But it is false because between the two extremes there is
the majority of the people that used to be called the middle class. But we have
to reanalyze it to requalify it as all the people who have jobs on the basis of
a partial or total college education, who are highly connected together in
family, acquaintance and local networks plus other global networks like
Facebook for sure, but more precisely as reviewers on Amazon and other
commercial sites, on LinkedIn and other professional sites, on Academia and
other independent research sites, on Reverbnation or Myspace and other musical
sites for people practicing music in a way or another, or on Medium and other
self-publishing sites. That’s the new middle class, the one that counts because
they are really representing the future of humanity, discussing, proposing and
confronting all kinds of new ideas. Trump was able to capture a section of this
new middle class who did not get from Obama what they were hoping to get, but
Trump essentially captured the old middle class: white, protestant mostly,
working in precarious or non-evolving jobs that can look like blind alleys, who
have a house and a mortgage, a couple of cars, and have a high school degree
and some of them a partial college degree or a short state university degree,
plus those in this group who have been made redundant and have been obliged to
accept a job that does not pay as well as before and has little future or is
precarious. What’s more he does not take into account the top layer of the new
middle class that has reached PhD level and have all kinds of executive positions
as university or college personnel including professors, or in average or large
private companies. That upper middle class is particularly active and dynamic
in hi-tech businesses, in startups, in the big new global companies like
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and many others. This new middle class is
not confronted to traditional unemployment like miners, particularly coal
miners, or car workers. These have been confronted with robotization and
automation for about ten to fifteen years, but the new middle class knows these
robots are also coming after their jobs, though most of these new middle class
people occupy jobs that would have employed three or more people before the
extension of robots and complex computer systems.
This revolution that is taking place under our noses is
going to put the plutocrats like Trump in the ditch because mines can be
reopened but they will be hi-tech and robotized. No jobs for humans, or very
few and highly qualified. Same thing with the car industry. Since people like
Chomsky or Trump have not done one single thing to think the problem through
and to imagine what is going to happen, they will be confronted with millions
of people getting redundant with robots and being fired. The USA are going to
face this tremendous transformation without any planning, preparation and
strategy. Whereas in China the one child family has been producing over the
last ten years and for decades to still come a labor movement that replaces
three or four low qualified jobs with one highly qualified job, in the west,
the USA and Europe, nothing has been done to face the problem except in
countries like Germany that have been facing labor shortage for several
decades. In the next few years the USA are going to be confronted to a dire
situation. If Ford does not open a factory in Mexico where they could have had
some workers still at a rather low salary and open it in the USA, they will
multiply by three or more the number of robots. In Flint General Motors had a
factory that employer several ten thousand people. The same production today
would work with at least ten times less workers and the difference would be
half the same number of robots. Chomsky does not see that, does not talk of that
at all.
So his announcement that the top plutocrats are not
capitalists since they negate the free open market economy that carries
capitalism is not going to improve the situation. His call to go BACK to the
free open market economy of capitalism is not going to bring a solution at all
to the robotization problem. In politics as I have already said he does not
propose any reform of the electoral system, of the political architecture in
the USA, an architecture that should be modified to enable more people to be
part of the democratic system that has to be improved and not invoked like a
catch word or a fetish.
His approach of the media is simply narrow minded. He
obviously does not know Marshall McLuhan who is the best inspiration you can
find to understand the effect of the Internet and smart phones on the psyche,
the behavior and the mental intellectual state of younger generations. The
Internet requires an active user who uses his mind to search and to find, to
extract, collect and restructure information. They are just doing that all the
time at work and it becomes a way for them to BE HUMAN in front of these
machines: use them creatively. The lowest common activity they practice on
their smart phones is communication with others. They have never been so much
social. Games and other lower activities are either for the uneducated minority
or for relaxing purposes. The few who spend hours playing poker on line are not
representative of what the younger generations are doing with the new media.
The worst part of the present wild financial capitalism we
are going through is the permanent debts people have that often exceeds what
you should have, and are able to really pay back, forcing them to get loans to
pay back due loans or debts, thus always remaining under this financial
dependence if not crushing weight. That will take a lot of time to “educate”
the public and to “regulate” the banking system to prevent such extreme
situations. The mortgage system has to be changed too and instead of the
capital being indexed on the real estate market, it should be frozen, and the capital
thus could go down month after month, and at most the interest rate could be
indexed on inflation or some other fair parameter or set of parameters. But
here we reach the main contradiction of this pamphlet.
At the end when he evokes the role of trade or labor unions
in the past that “were a very educational force” (page 149) he apparently does
not capture his contradiction since that’s the only solution he puts on the
table, though since unions hardly exist nowadays we can wonder how he is going
to do this education. But the contradiction is with what he said before about
propaganda and education. One author he calls for help on the subject is Edward
Bernays and the document is from 1928. At the time only two media were working:
the radio and the cinema and the talkies were just starting to appear on the
silver screen (the telephone was still marginal). So let me consider this
author is not very helpful in modern times. But since Chomsky invokes him in
support of his point of view on the role of education to turn the “bewildered
herd” into “spectators, not participants” let me quote what this author says
about the subject:
“Is this
government by propaganda? Call it if you prefer government by education. But
education, in the academic sense of the work, is not sufficient. It must be
enlightened expert propaganda through the creation of circumstances, through
the high-spotting of significant events, and the dramatization of important
issues. The statesman of the future will thus be enabled to focus the public
mind on crucial points of policy, and regiment a vast, heterogeneous mass of
voters to clear understanding and intelligent action.” (page 133)
In the present situation this approach is all wrong. People
are bombarded with all types of data and information, some propaganda, some
real knowledge or reflection, and they have to sort all that out all by
themselves. In other words, the “statesman of the future” is not enabled to do
anything in the line of bringing real and intelligent understanding and action
to the “masses” that are regimented for sure but on the basis of what they
think, what they feel, what they have experienced, what they have all-sensorially
as McLuhan would say received and absorbed. It is no longer propaganda but
direct manipulation of people’s emotions and fear and resentment and even
hatred.
And as for labor unions Chomsky should reflect on the role
they played in building what Chomsky calls “class consciousness,” a concept he
borrows from Marx again, this concept coming from a political dyad: there are
two basic antagonistic classes in society: the bourgeoisie and the working
class. Right now we are living under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. We
have to unite to bring the socialist revolution that will get rid of this
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and we will be able to impose the dictatorship
of the proletariat under the guidance of the avant-garde party that will bring
together in direct action the active class consciousness elite of the
proletariat.
Chomsky cannot be that blind. But he is so pessimistic that
for him there is no hope, except a dream. What is strange is that the American
Dream he had buried in his title, is replaced by some formless, backboneless
and unorganized dream:
“There’s is a lot
that can be done [Note the irritating passive that is a very negative may to borrow Obama’s
motto, “Yes we can,” and make it a totally blind, submissive and abstract
phenomenon that does not even depend on our doing: if we demonstrate then a
miracle can be performed: how, by whom, when, where?] if people
organize – struggle for their rights as they’ve done in the past – and we can
win many victories.” (page 150)
And he concludes with Howard Zinn:
“What matters is
the countless small deeds of unknown people, who lay the basis for the
significant events that enter history.” (page 150)
Rosa Parks sure did a small little act one evening after
work but if there had not been someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., and a
whole network to inform him and bring him on the scene she would have died in
prison or even worse she would have been lynched. We need to have people who
are able to use modern media to get in touch with both the new middle class and
the old disappointed and discontented middle class and get them into an
alliance with all type of active minorities, ethnic, sexual, gender, cultural
or whatever to build a majority movement with clear objectives and based on
permanent action. I must say the Democratic Party right now is NOT the organization
that can take the leading position in this field, though they can play an
important role in the grassroots movement that may block some of the suicidal
reforms Trump is trying to bring through, not to mention his perilous and
absurd foreign policy only founded on military force and naked violence.
P.S. As a linguist who has followed Chomsky’s whole career,
I am not surprised by the dichotomic vision and thought he develops here. His
linguistics, since the very first publications of his in the mid-1950s till his
latest publications at the end of the previous century and the beginning of the
present century have been dominated by one formula he has never questioned or
modified: S = NP + VP. Without discussing this a priori principle, let me say
simply that the simplest of all sentences is composed of three elements (The
door is red.); that all languages except the most analytical languages like
European languages consider the verb as the center of the sentence that
projects its mental structure on the sentence that is of course at least three
functional elements; and when there are only two then the only nominal element
holds two functional positions. This Chomskyan dictum has in fact blocked many
possible developments: being unable to make translating machines effective,
then Google and others tried to develop such machines with practical automatic
mapping of the corpus of one language onto the corpora of other languages
considering correspondences established in such a way provide scientific
translation. It is good enough for a hotel booking form, but certainly not for
a poem by T.S. Eliot.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:33 PM 
