SPECIAL
For The Greanville Post—
A Comment on “Left Anticommunism: the Unkindest Cut”
Noam, Noam…must you bash the Soviet Union to maintain credibility? And if so, with whom?
Wherein one of our senior editors weighs in on a topic that never quite goes away, the frequent expression of anti-Sovietism and even anticommunism by people who define themselves as “left” (not merely liberals) in the United States and other parts of the developed capitalist world. As Michael Parenti and others have noted, the practice is so generalized as to constitute at times active de facto collaboration with the global imperialist system, and some of the biggest voices are not exempt:
Genuflection to Orthodoxy
“Many on the U.S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about “left intellectuals” who try to “rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements” and “then beat the people into submission. . . . You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy. You see later that power doesn’t lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We’re seeing it right now in the [former] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and [are] enthusiastic free marketeers and praising Americans” (Z Magazine, 10/95).”
Chomsky’s imagery is heavily indebted to the same U.S. corporate political culture he so frequently criticizes on other issues. In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of “communist thugs” who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger…(1)
________________
By Steven Jonas, TGP
The Greanville Post has recently re-published an excellent (and lengthy) column on “Left anti-Communism” by historian and political scientist Michael Parenti (http://www.greanvillepost.com/2012/01/01/left-anticommunism-the-unkindest-cut/),accompanied by a short but as always to-the-point introduction by our Editor/Publisher, Patrice Greanville. (There are also some very enlightening comments [and a few not-so-enlightening ones] at the end of the column). Prof. Parenti deals with those self-styled “anti-communist” leftists, such as Noam Chomsky, who, when presenting critiques of such subjects as U.S. imperialism never fail to inform their readers that whatever else they say, they have no use for any part of the Soviet experiment as a possible solution to the crisis of capitalism and that no one can outdo them in their condemnation of Stalinism. I do not have to repeat Parenti’s excellent critique of so-called “Left anti-communists,” who are actually allies of the Right. But let me add a few thoughts to that critique, and to his analysis of the Soviet experience. Continue reading »
Did you like this? Share it:
