Was it because it was an opportunistic hatchet job, using a personality wedge to police morality on behalf of the next NEP state capitalist bureaucracy the self-appointed proletarian vanguard will build on the ruins of working class self-activity?
Ben Debney || No one was more disappointed than yours truly to see a photo of Noam Chomsky in a jet with the planet’s most notorious pedophile. Personally, I first discovered Chomsky picking up a copy of Rolling Stone in the school library in my last year of high school; this was in the early 90s, well before the internet or cellphones were widespread. To say the least, it was a find. I photocopied that entire interview and pasted it into my school diary so others could read it, and they did. Chomsky has always been an ethical anchor in a sea of opportunism and apologetics for power.
To my mind this was why disappointment was the appropriate response, as opposed to the apparent jubiliation and glee from many apparently wont to nursing grudges about bad things Chomsky had said about their political ideology. Every Leninist and middle class liberal was obviously excited that Chomsky had finally made a mistake, and hasn’t the mob relished the opportunity for pounds of Chomsky flesh . . . yes they have. Why else would you go out of your way to ritually ignore the heartbreaking signs of his family breakdown that also came out in the Epstein Files.
The combination of the breakdown of his family relationships over inheritance and getting roped into the Epstein inferno by an opportunistic manipulator taking advantage of personal troubles the left made no time for precipitated an incapacitating stroke, meaning that Noam can’t even defend himself. What an appropriate moment for deviance producing and middle class moralism!
The suppression or belittling of facts inopportune to moral panic and moral grandstanding has been a notably consistent feature of the online pack-mobbing and moral inquisition; more on this to come. Suffice to say for the moment that the left that appears more than happy to mob Noam Chomsky from the safety of the internet, in recognition of a lifetime of service to the cause of truth and freedom–the main reason why anyone knows his fucking name in the first place–while dodging the issue of where it was the entire time Noam was falling into the clutches of a Jeffrey fucking Epstein in the first place. It’s almost as though we turn people we fail into moralistic stepping stones to dodge the issue of our own responsibilities and failures.
A great example of everything wrong with how the left dealt with its failures, leading to the great Noam Chomsky falling into the clutches of scum like Jeffrey Epstein, is the World Socialist Web Site, who like all liberals and Leninists seem habituated to assuming proprietary claims over the left (is the reason liberals and Leninists can’t get along because they’re more alike than either wants to admit?). Maybe this has something to with the way they responded to the news of Chomsky turning up in the Epstein Files with venom and glee rather than, you know, disappointment.
What seems particularly noteworthy about the WSWS contribution to the online moral panic and pileon disloyal turncoat and vanguardist backstabber Vijay Prashad instigated from Counterpunch is the changes they made to the original piece. The current version speaks of a “contemptible friendship”:
Which is funny, because the original version went straight to classic political marxist slanders of reconstructed, libertarian socialism:
We have to get onto archive.org to retrieve the original version of the article. The text appears mostly unchanged, though this doesn’t much help the cause of the WSWS. It does point to angling on the part of the Fourth International; in the heat of the moment, amidst the power rush of the morally superior, more-respectable-than-thou pilon perpetrated from behind the safety A of the internet and B middle class, morality-policing wolf-packs, the masks of civility were off and the knives were out. Did slightly cooler heads prevail after a day or two? It looks a bit that way.
Indeed, the content of Evan Blake’s piece is revealing insofar as it spends precious little time on the facts surrounding the Chomsky-Epstein association, lurching instead off into a general attack on anarchism. Blake begins,
Over the ensuing decades, Chomsky produced more than 150 books on politics, media and imperialism, including the 1988 work Manufacturing Consent. The book’s central thesis—that mass media functions as a propaganda system serving elite interests—was presented as a devastating indictment of capitalist democracy. But its underlying message was deeply pessimistic, arguing that the masses are passive victims of manipulation, and the best one can hope for is to expose the mechanisms of deception.
Blake has zero evidence to support this claim. Indeed, he spends the rest of the article attacking Chomsky’s anarchist politics, not needing to notice that he earlier argued Chomsky has nothing to say about the world beyond positively sacred social and class hierarchies, personal boundaries not so much. As much as he clearly wants to, though, Blake can’t have it both ways. He also fails to explain what the living fuck exactly this has to do with borrowing money from Jeffrey Epstein to pay his nominally adult children off with.
Lurching further away from the nominal issue at hand, Blake continues:
The pseudo-left have long treated Chomsky as a semi-deity.
It’s utterly impossible to take this criticism seriously coming from a Political Marxist. No anarchist need be told; Nestor Makhno explained the problem with the Marxist-Leninist cult of personality as well as anyone. Indeed, at the end of his piece, Blake concludes that workers must “turn to the revolutionary optimism of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky—the conviction, grounded in the entire experience of the class struggle, that the international working class, organized and led by a conscious socialist vanguard, can overthrow capitalism.”
In other words, then, the Political Marxist project is proved–despite all of the history to the contrary–because Noam Chomsky took money from Jeffrey Epstein, who jumped into the space left open by the failures of the left to show solidarity and mutual aid with one of its own leading light, to pay his kids off with.
Is this opportunism? It looks like it. Not content with using Noam Chomsky’s personal misfortunes and embarassment to grandstand and virtue-signal on the internet, Blake starts name-calling:
Chomsky could appear as a giant only to intellectual Lilliputians steeped in the anti-communist environment of the past half-century, who have no connection with or understanding of the heritage of Marxist thought and genuine revolutionary activity rooted in the struggles of the working class.
Again, what the hell this has to do with Epstein, Blake does not bother to say. The binary logic typical of the false dilemma is hard to miss: you either agree with our moral judgements of Noam Chomsky, and conform to our judgemental mentality more generally, or you’re also a symptom of petit-bourgeois decay and a fake socialist. More to the point, you might as well be the next target for the Leninist Inquisition.
This is the same kind of weaponised personality politics Vijay Prashad invoked to kick the whole thing off in between fucking pigs: I represent X; anyone who doubts my judgement is the enemy of X. Both Blake and Prashad are clearly inspired by Engels’ dialectical binary between “Scientific” and “Utopian” Socialism; science means invoking an exclusionary narrative between Self and Other that essentialises and demonises ideological heterodoxy and nonconformity with the 19th century dogmas of Marxism-Leninism.
By the same count, recognising with Lord Acton that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” or recalling the history of the Soviet bureaucracy, which appeared long before Stalin, is Utopian deviationism or outright heresy. The aggression of Political Marxists is a direct inheritance of Engels’ bourgeois idealism, combined with Lenin’s proclivity for smearing the commentary of Kollantai for example around working class self-activity as an “infantile personality disorder.” Anyone who doesn’t conform to bourgeois idpol and bourgeois morality policing is a symptom of bourgeois political decay though–at least until somone gets worried their agenda is too obvious.
Again, any commentary to explain what this has to do with the nominal topic of the article remains elusive, lending further weight to the impression that Blake’s concern for the many victims of Jeffrey Epstein runs a distant second to running a hatchet job on a public figure whose efforts surpass his own by an order of magnitude (Blake who?).
This impression is no way allayed as Blake continues to grab at anything he might be conceivably be able to use as an attack. Following on from Prashad, Blake invokes the writing of
British anthropologist Chris Knight
to whose work Chomsky has replied:
If Blake isn’t worshipping the deities of Political Marxism like his fellow traveling turncoat Vijay Prashad, why doesn’t he treat both sides of the debate, as would be intellectually honest? Is it for the same reasons he and a bunch of other moralistic pack-wolves on the internet don’t examine either the root causes of the Chomsky-Epstein association, or the culpability of the left for leaving him to the mercy of predatory abusers in the first place?
Blake’s habitual intellectual dishonesty leads him into increasingly grandiose claims that, again, have as little to do with the issue at hand as they are clearly on a mission to demonstrate the ‘petit-bourgeois decay’ at the heart of anarchism. The assumption appears to be that, because Political Marxists have no personal identity apart from the objects of their cult worship, anarchists and the working class must be the same. Blake’s obvious desire to essentialise, demonise and destroy Chomsky produces outright idiocy:
For all his voluminous writings against the ruling class, Chomsky always saw power as residing with the elites, not the working class. Opposing Marxism and Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party, he rejected the need to politically educate and organize workers for revolutionary struggle. Chomsky’s aim was never to raise the consciousness of the working class but to influence the thinking of the ruling class and its intellectual representatives.
Evidence to the contrary is hardly short:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHsgrAnppig
Take down Chomsky then, apparently, take down everyone who aligns themselves with the same worldview; if there’s one thing true of anarchism, it’s the notorious anarchist cult of personality that divides Bakuninists from Kropotkinists and Goldmanites and splits them up into 57 different sects each vying to be the one to corral the working class into a straitjacket of NEP state capitalism and revolutionary bureaucrats.
To be destroyed, we need to understand that Noam Chomsky is actually the worst person alive:
In recent decades, Chomsky became increasingly explicit in his pessimism about any possibility of revolutionary change. In a revealing 2021 interview with Jacobin, when asked whether socialism remained a useful political horizon for addressing the climate crisis, he responded bluntly: “We’re not going to overthrow capitalism in a couple of decades. You can continue working for socialism—but you have to recognize that the solution to the climate crisis is going to have to come within some kind of regimented capitalist system.” This amounted to an admission that, whatever his theoretical criticisms of capitalism, Chomsky had concluded that the existing order would persist and that radicals must accommodate themselves to it.
How is anyone pessimistic about the prospects for revolutionary changes with Political Marxists running hatchet jobs on people who can only be made targets because everyone knows about their lifetime of courageous dissent, that everyone has benefited from? How is the morale of the left destroyed with more-revolutionary-than-thou power-seekers running character assassination campaigns on their own side as an opportunity to big-note themselves?
Obviously all of the problems with the left, including having been left in the lurch by the left such that Jeffrey Epstein was the fallback, are the fault of Noam Chomsky. We should all want to spend all our time around the Political Marxist and liberal lefts because of how understanding and compassionate they are, how adept the left is at not embodying all the moralistic hypocrisy it alleges to oppose.
The history of Epstein’s criminally abusive conduct did not trouble Chomsky.
Blake needs to lie at this point, knowing he’s taking advantage of Noam Chomsky’s family and health troubles to use him as a moralistic stepping stone. As Valeria Chomsky wrote after Vijay Prashad incited the internet mobbing,
Noam and I recognize the gravity of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and the profound suffering of his victims. Nothing in this statement is intended to minimize that suffering, and we express our unrestricted solidarity with the victims.
No attempt at minimising either the gravity of Epstein’s crimes or the profound suffering of his victims is enough for the WSWS answer to the Moscow Show Trials; Chomsky is a Fake Socialist and needs to be purged from the Community of the Revolutionary Chosen like Trotsky and Bukharin (it sure is weird that Trots never learn from the example of their own persecution huh; are they like Zionists on that count?).
Since Noam Chomsky is, by now, the worst person alive, it figures then that
This helps account for Chomsky’s readiness to cultivate relationships with figures like Epstein, Barak and Bannon. He sought proximity to power because, despite all his rhetoric, that is where he believed consequential decisions were made. The man who told workers that capitalism could not be overthrown found himself increasingly at home in the company of those who ruled it.
This is all Chomsky’s appearance in the Epstein Files has to tell us in the end, apparently. The details about his family life go down the memory hole because they must; the left has nothing to answer for leaving its own to desperate measures they can be embarrassed with later. The Red Internet’s answer to the Moscow Show Trials gives no quarter for age, for root causes, for obvious sadness and pain which has been known to cloud judgement, for human fallibility, for heath, for potential embarrassment at being lead down the garden path by a monster,
Political Marxism is a relic of a bygone age, an ideological fossil good only for the wastebin of history. The craven opportunists of Political Marxism, be they Counterpunch or the World Socialist Web Site, respond to news of the misfortunes and errors of others with relish and glee, not because they care about ethics but because they like personality wedges and the power and status of the wolf-pack.
Marc Neocleous writes about the endless mission of the state to reconstruct itself as a solution to class conflict of its own making; Jenny Holzer summarised the logic with her classic shot of the big screen in Times Square reading “Private Property Created Crime.” The NEP state capitalists of Political Marxism are not much different in the end; if you can’t convince the working class that altrustic outcomes (socialism, workers’ control) can be had from selfish means (the capture of state power), convince them that all the doubters and naysayers are heinous deviants and false idols (unlike the legit idols of the Political Marxist personality cult). There are any number of other examples of this kind of personality politicking around Political Marxism: John Bellamy Foster attacking Jason W. Moore, or Socialist Alliance entryists attacking Australian Wobblies. It’s almost as though Political Marxist ad hominems are a habit; we are all Utopian Others after all, no doubt.
As Noam has pointed out himself, “The person who throws the mud always wins, because there is no way of responding to those charges.” He might have also added, the mud middle-class Political Marxists and upper middle-class liberals throw in the process of trying to reconstruct themselves solutions to problems of their own making tells us more about them than their intended targets. Who then is the symptom of petit-bourgeois decay? Is this a problem that can be solved by trying to bury a lurching into saying the quiet part a little bit too loudly on archive.org? It doesn’t much seem like it.
More to come, mofos. Keep posting your shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EScpPTz6-5M
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