Vijay Prashad is known not least for his collaborations with Noam Chomsky, whom the New York Times described at one point as ‘arguably the most important intellectual alive today.’ Now that Noam is incapacitated in his old age and not able to defend himself, Prashad has taken to turning him into a stepping stone for opportunistic grandstanding and self-promotion. He has done it more than once. In so doing, Prashad demonstrates why political marxists are not to be trusted.
Ben Debney || As the world continues our descent along the downward spiral into fascism and ecocide, we can always rely on ambitious personalities on the left like Vijay Prashad to undermine working class unity in the name of their own self-promotion. After writing two books with Noam Chomsky, Prashad has decided to start using him as a stepping stone for policing revolutionary morality and elevating himself publicly at Noam’s expense.
The fact that Noam is incapacitated at this point makes Prashad’s opportunism especially craven and venal. One would have to be desperate to pick on someone who is incapacitated, and, if his latest vicious antics are any indication, Vijay Prashad is clearly willing to stop at nothing. In fact he is a shining example of everything cowardly and destructive about bourgeois liberal idealism and identitarian groupthink.
I represent X. If I don’t like you, you’re the enemy of X now
The relationship between single-issue politics liberalism and weaponised identity politics is a continuing bugbear for the left, not least to the extent that vulgar leftism not only fails to distinguish itself from middle-class liberalism by rising above its myopia and magical thinking, but reverts to it as a way of dodging theoretical conflicts.
Political marxists, in their bolted-on authoritarianism, are typically at least as enthusiastic as liberals for using personality politics to shut down people whose perspectives they don’t like. Middle class political marxists and middle class liberals alike adopt the logic that ‘I represent X, if you doubt, question or challenge my judgement, you are an enemy of X.’ It is by no means surprising that they should show middle class solidarity.
Here, praxis becomes a matter of shutting down debate on the grounds that being doubted, questioned or challenged and being attacked are the same thing. Behind this autocratic illogic is the False Dilemma, the mentality that ‘you are either with us or against us.’ If you think for yourself, in other words, the terrorists win. Or, if you think for yourself, the communists win. Or, if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win. You can’t win. It’s almost like we’re not meant to be able to.
The False Dilemma is clearly a means of thought control when deployed by Zionists; apparently there’s a tyranny of woke that isn’t the mentality that saying bad things about crimes against humanity means you hate Jews–who knew. But the same logic works just as well on the left: if you doubt, question or contradict the self-appointed vanguard of the revolution, the self-appointed political marxist arbiters of revolutionary morality, you’re disloyal to the working class. If you don’t conform to Leninist orthodoxy, at best you’re a heinous deviationist. Otherwise you’re just a useful idiot of the bourgeoisie.
Political marxists need to police revolutionary morality because their project of revolutionary dictatorships is a resounding failure. Like many political marxists, Vijay Prashad has retreated to the neoliberal academy, whose technocratic outlook is sympathetic to the revolutionary bureaucratism bequeathed to the political marxist tradition by Leninist NEP State Capitalism, and vice versa. Like the neoliberal Professional Managerial Class, Prashad looks to resolve theoretical issues by attacking adversaries. In this sense, his attacks on Noam Chomsky hardly come from nowhere.
Instigating a Facebook pileon on James C Scott
Some time ago, your humble writer was still on Facebook. In 2024, anarchist anthropologist James C. Scott died. Prashad incited a pileon on Facebook targeting Scott with old smears once he was too dead to defend himself:
Prashad refused to engage with criticism of his post or any points of view that did not support his campaign of essentialising, demonising and morality policing–not least from errant voices pointing out variations on the theme that, that just because Vijay Prashad can’t change, learn, grow or evolve ideas, the same is not automatically true of everyone else.
As the reply from Doug Henwood tends to suggest, the purpose of the exercise was less to call Scott to account than to smear ideological heterodoxy and nonconformity. James C Scott made choices in favour of the empire before he got a clue and turned against it, therefore everything he ever achieved is redundant. Checkmate deviationists. We see from the screenshots here that all the very good points Brad Simpson brings up don’t matter when you need to morality-police someone else’s conduct because you want the spotlight taken of your own attitude and choices.
The fact of the matter is that Prashad and Henwood’s beloved Bolsheviks not only worked for thought police themselves, they controlled and were state thought police. Does this bear mentioning? Prashad completely ignores that most obvious fact when I bring it up. It’s almost the though the point of Prashad’s vile antics were to not notice these very obvious facts about the totalitarian inferno of Soviet Russia, but to sweep them under the rug and to reposition himself as the opposite of thought police by making a scapegoat out of Scott when he was too dead to defend himself.
Like most political Marxists, Prashad hates Scott because his work demolishes Marx’s 19th century pseudoscience around alleged ‘iron laws of capitalist development’ and the ‘Asiatic mode of production,’ which ironically enough is based on a reading of world history not dissimilar to that of the Scottish Enlightenment. It bears equally poorly on Engels’ “Scientific vs Utopian Socialism” binary, which naturalises Marxist Orientalism in the name of science–both of which were the seeds of the Soviet Bureaucracy and Stalinism.
- More sympathetic to Marx: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/7969_the-idea-of-commercial-society-in-the-scottish-enlightenment-review-by-paul-raekstad/
- Less sympathetic to Marx: https://jacobwilliamwilkins.medium.com/karl-marx-stole-some-of-his-ideas-8ded934cbb33
Engels was a factory owner and exploiter of wage labour in the same manner as he spent a lifetime critiquing; Lenin’s idea of the transitory state was NEP state capitalism. Does this bear mentioning? It seems more like it bears dodging; it is anarchism, not Leninism and its NEP state capitalism and revolutionary bureaucracy, that is a Tool of the Man. It was so decided by the revolutionary praxis of the Facebook algorithm. This appears to be the great appeal of bourgeois personality politics for vulgar leftists like Prashad.
The more-revolutionary-than-thou Left
With his Facebook attacks on James C. Scott as preface, Prashad turns on Chomsky in the same way. Left politics are no longer a battle of ideas, but a mission to renew the left by purging ideological impurities. Just as Stalin alleged to purify Soviet Russia by purging Leon Trotsky, so do the acolytes of the latter demonstrate just how much they have ever learnt from their own defeats by trying to turn people of the order of Noam Chomsky into renegades and deviants.
The photo of Chomsky with Epstein has been circulating for some months now; it was definitely not part of the latest release. Prashad writes of this photo that has been circulating for months, ‘I am heartsick.’ He sure has been carrying these feelings around until an opportune moment arose to make hay out of them. Prashad’s identitarian assault on Chomsky begins with a strong emotive appeal to bourgeois identitarianism:
As a young boy, I experienced horrific sexual violence, which I have written about before and which continues to mark me even decades later. It means that I cannot tolerate anyone who exploits young children in a way that is not merely moral but physical: I am utterly repulsed by anyone who harms children and shudder when I hear anyone who even disciplines a child.
If you haven’t experienced horrific sexual violence as a child, then you’re not qualified to speak, apparently. Prashad is very far from the only person on the planet however who has experienced childhood sexual assault; some of us are born and bred in the religious jurisdictions of the likes of George Pell. It’s a bullshit argument anyway, like you can’t hate murder more than someone who is a murder victim because you’re still alive enough to hate murder. The point of the identitarian appeal, however, is to silence opposition.
On this count, the sleazy smear campaign proceeds thus:
But of course, it was impossible to ignore the emails between my friend and collaborator Noam Chomsky and Epstein. I have read what I can, and I have seen what I need to see. Noam has been a great mentor for me, and we have made two books together (the last one, his final book). Both books were written around the time that he was in correspondence with Epstein.
Prashad fails to note whether Chomsky knowing and corresponding with Epstein had any effect on his professional work; one would assume it did not. Chomsky was no more likely to platform anything Epstein stood for than he was likely to platform US imperialism; the same could hardly be said for the likelihood of Prashad platforming bourgeois identitarianism, online pileons and what CLR James called ‘social fascism.’
Apparently Epstein helped Noam out when he was having money troubles after his wife died; Prashad can talk to him anytime he wants to find out what his thinking was. If he was so upset about his mentor talking to someone who was able to help him financially, but also turned out to be a pedophile, maybe Prashad could be asking himself what he might have done to help his mentor so he didn’t need to associated with the likes of Epstein. Nevertheless,
Since Noam cannot speak or write and explain his relationship with Epstein, the matter is fraught. There is nothing to say on his behalf. When the photos and emails appeared, I was immediately disgusted by Epstein’s paedophilia, and so by Noam’s friendship with him. There is no defence for this, in my view, no context that can explain this outrage.
Noam can’t talk about it, so Prashad can’t discuss it with him, but instead of letting it rest, he’s writing about it for Counterpunch. Again the outrage is concocted; Prashad has no problem perpetrating his own on Facebook when he thinks no one is taking screenshots.
If his incredulity isn’t enough, Prashad goes for the ‘no true Scotsman’ and ‘appeal to authority’ to try to essentialise and demonise Chomsky:
I asked Jeffery St. Clair, the editor of CounterPunch, what our common friend Alexander Cockburn would have made of these revelations. ‘Alex would have been troubled, I think’, Jeffrey wrote, ‘about Noam having such a close relationship with an ultra-Zionist, and probable Israeli agent…Seriously bad judgment from someone who usually makes such considered and thoroughly reasoned decisions’.
This is St. Clair’s opinion; Prashad leaves us to guess as to why we should take this as holy writ. Common sense tells us Chomsky had plenty of people to associate with out of choice; from all accounts, he was doing so for reasons where his choices were complicated by the death of his partner and money issues. This is anyone’s business, much less grounds for moral piety and judgemental self-righteousness, why?
In any event, the liberal press with whom Prashad shares a worldview were happy enough to turn his grandstanding into news, though they did manage some balance:
Chomsky, 97, has not spoken out about the latest document release. The famed linguist has previously acknowledged knowing Epstein, but claimed their relationship primarily revolved around financial dealings. When asked by the Harvard Crimson in 2023 if he regretted meeting with Epstein, he responded: “I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.”
This attitude is proper for a grown adult; talking to people only means you’re associated with their values and acts under conditions of an inquisition or witchhunt, where ideas are on trial (‘anarchism: tool of the man’ ) and guilt is established by association. Chomsky talked to the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak; therefore apparently he is defined by who he knows, not what he has accomplished.
This is a handy mentality for the likes of Vijay Prashad, who is not defined by similar accumplishment, but who does know people of the stature of—drumroll–Noam Chomsky.
The more-revolutionary-than-thou vanguard
Political marxism has run out of ideas. Intellectual mediocrities of the order of Vijay Prashad and Doug Henwood need to attack the persons of their intellectual betters, the James C Scotts and Noam Chomsky of the world, because personality politics is all they have left. Mark Neocleous writes about the police power constructing the social order by criminalising the disinherited, such that the state can reconstruct itself as a solution to problems of its own making.
Political marxism is no different. As Vijay Prashad’s antics well demonstrate, the political marxist vanguard will stop at nothing to reconstruct itself a solution to conflict it creates though its unreconstructed ahistoricism and dogmatism by adopting the judgemental moralism and piety of its nominal adversary amongst the liberal middle classes. Opportunists like Prashad will happily exploit the Facebook algorithm and the misfortune of his patrons to push his own barrow. We know the name Vijay Prashad because Noam Chomsky helped promote him; now Prashad has the knives in his back.
If this is not instructive in terms of what political marxism represents for the fortunes of working class unity in the struggle against the autocratic constraint embodied in the commodity-form and its fetish, nothing is. Prashad, Henwood and their ilk are the tools of the man they accuse anarchists of being; the mud they throw tells of what they fear most about themselves. They and their mindless capture-bondlings are as much an obstacle to emancipation from positively sacred social and class hierarchies, personal boundaries not so much, as everything they claim to oppose.
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