In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx says: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Let us compare two intellectuals—one who understood Marx’s words and another who was a captive of a “pure socialism” which existed only in ideals.
Michael Parenti passed away recently and Noam Chomsky fell from grace after his association with Jeffrey Epstein. Noam Chomsky was one of the most cited intellectuals, who gave us great insights about how power works and on how media manufactures consent to justify the ruling class. But Chomsky, who advocated transparency and honesty in public life, was exposed for his hypocrisy. Yet our concern is not about Chomsky’s personal choice of friends or his cozying up to corridors of power. Our priority is to revisit the critiques he made as a “left” intellectual, particularly about the Communist parties, and what caused the intellectual restraint in viewing the Soviet Union based on the historical context.
Noam Chomsky, ever a “pure socialist” who caricatured every revolution that succeeded, is the polar opposite of Michael Parenti, who understood and defended existing socialism with all its weaknesses, and risked everything he had for the solidarity with organised working class movements. Parenti says “pure socialism” is ahistorical and cannot be tested against the actualities of history. He defined the Soviet Union in terms of its success while acknowledging its weaknesses. On the other hand, Chomsky ‘threw the baby out with the bath water’ and portrayed the Soviet Union as a blemish on “pure socialism”—a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration. While the likes of Chomsky evaluated an ideal against an imperfect reality, Parenti understood the historical context and the reality of material conditions present in the Soviet Union.
Capitalism cannot survive by coercion alone; it has to maintain its hegemony by consensus as well. Universities and intellectuals provide the tools for this cultural hegemony. Noam Chomsky, the “left” intellectual, said that “the fall of the Soviet Union was an occasion for rejoicing for anyone who values freedom and human dignity”—a critique which was ahistorical. Chomsky practised left McCarthyism which prevented generations from looking at the Soviet Union in a historical context, and he did not care to explain what benefit the fall of the Soviet Union brought to the advance of “true” socialism in the post-Cold War era, nor why it did not bring the peace it promised and the equality among nations. It is not surprising that a useful critique cannot come from a person who does not have an honest representation of facts.
The Soviet Union was not perfect, but to target it without stating the context and the challenges it faced to protect the revolution—from the attack of other capitalist countries (Winston Churchill said “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib”); a civil war; and famines caused by wealthy landlords—is uncharacteristic of an intellectual. The centralisation of power was not a desire of the communists but was a necessary choice in protecting the socialist relations, without which counter-revolutions would overthrow the revolution. It was more a hatred for socialism that succeeded, which actually worked for millions of people, gave hope for the national liberation struggles against imperialism and defeated fascism.
Noam Chomsky does not say how perfect socialism can be created from the imperfect conditions it inherited. The “Marxists” in the West were co-opted and made compatible with imperialism. The anarchists like Chomsky made sure that the working class did not look towards the Soviet Union for inspiration by equating Stalin and Hitler and placing fascism and communism on the same pedestal. Chomsky does a disservice to the working class by equating fascism and communism, thereby obscuring the class basis of the two ideologies. Fascism is a form of government which uses extreme coercion to serve capital, and the Soviet Union cannot be placed in that category by any stretch of imagination.
We discover the abominable association of a “left” intellectual Chomsky with a Zionist sex trafficker—who created a disgusting world of paedophilia—who at the same time enjoyed the limelight as one of the most cited individuals in history. Contrary to that, Parenti was made an outcast from academia, funded by the CIA, which supported the anti-Soviet propaganda.
Parenti, a true Marxist, deserves our applause for sacrificing personal accolades, choosing obscurity, for believing in class struggle and battle against all forms of oppression anywhere in the world.
Rest in power, Comrade Michael Parenti.
