Tuesday 16 October 2018

Noam Chomsky - Keeping The Rabble In Line

KEEPING THE RABBLE IN LINE –
NOAM CHOMSKY

By denouncing their practises, methods and tactics, Noam Chomsky may have blotted his copy book with some of our black-clad brethren in Antifa but does that mean in return his whole canon should now be dismissed? Of course not. Chomsky's now in his nineties and though he may still be as sharp as a needle when compared to most, at his age we can forgive him for a few lapses in judgement because after all – he's earned it. So yes, Chomsky's still worth reading if only for food for thought and that's something he's always been a good provider of.


Keeping The Rabble In Line is another one of those books published by AK Press composed of interviews with Chomsky by writer and broadcaster David Barsamian. The first thing to consider about it is the title. Who exactly is the rabble and why is it important to keep them in line? Well, the rabble is me and you, basically. It's the general population, the general public, or as writer and political commentator Walter Lippmann put it, the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders”.
According to Chomsky, any holders of concentrated power, and that includes corporations of course, do not want any external constraints on their capacity to make decisions and act freely, so to these ends they want the general public to be mere spectators, not participants. Democracy acts simply as a way of legitimizing the power held by those whom it benefits most, which means in elections it's typically representatives of dominant sectors who stand and their actions on being elected serve only to maintain the status quo.

Democracy and casting a vote every few years maintains the illusion that concentrated power and authority can be controlled through the ballot box but as the old anarchist maxim says: 'Whoever you vote for, government wins' – and it's true. It's a very simple truth.
That's not to say liberal democracy and voting is entirely ineffectual because it does at least give the general population the opportunity to choose their prison guards and that in itself counts for something. At the end of the day, however, they're still prison guards. What would you rather have: A racist, sexist, bullying leader or representative who hates you (in either business or government) or a benign leader who is anti-racist, anti-sexist who tells you they love and care for you? It's the good cop bad cop scenario but at the end of the day they're still both cops.

As Chomsky explains, it's possible that there could one day be a colour-free society and that the glass ceiling for women is removed but this wouldn't actually change the political economy at all. For this reason you often find the business sector quite happy to support efforts to overcome racism and sexism because they know that these things don't matter much. Some white male privilege might be lost but that's not all that important in the scheme of things. On the other hand, basic changes in the core institutions would be bitterly resisted, that's if they ever even became thinkable.


So if the general public is the rabble, then who are the holders of concentrated power? Well, though they're definable it's no easy task as their faces and names keep changing. Chomsky refers to them as the 'ruling elite' though that term's been criticised for conferring too much dignity upon them. Interestingly, he shies away from using the word 'class' as in 'ruling class' due to its various associations. As he explains: 'As soon as you say the word 'class', everybody falls down dead. There's some Marxist raving again.' Or nowadays some Right-wing zealot raving.
Alternatively, Chomsky suggests they can be referred to as 'the masters' who in the words of economist and philosopher Adam Smith follow their own 'vile maxim', namely 'all for ourselves and nothing for other people.' Or at best, crumbs from the table for other people, I would say. Again, it's a very simple truth.

At one point in Keeping The Rabble In Line, Chomsky discusses Ghandi and questions whether non-violence should be an absolute principle? Apparently in 1938 Ghandi suggested that German Jews ought to commit collective suicide so as to arouse the world and the German people to Hitler's violence. Chomsky emphasises that what Ghandi was suggesting was a tactical proposal, not a principled one but at the same time finds it somewhat grotesque. What Ghandi should have been emphasizing, Chomsky says, is for the world to do something to prevent the Jews from being massacred:
'Powerless people who are being led to slaughter can't do anything. Therefore it's up to others to do something for them. To give them advice on how they should be slaughtered is not very uplifting, to put it mildly. You can say the same about other things all the time.'
And indeed you can. Just name your poison. But before you go chasing rabbits and liaising with hookah-smoking caterpillars, just make sure you're not going off on some crazy wild goose chase which is going to involve you in extremely detailed microanalysis and discussions of things that don't matter. Conspiracy theories, in other words.
'If it's too hard to deal with real problems, there are a lot of ways to avoid doing so. One of them is to go off on wild goose chases that don't matter. Another is to get involved in academic cults that are very divorced from any reality and that provide a defense against dealing with the world as it actually is.' And this, of course, can mean anything from the assassination of JFK, the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11, to the question of how modern day linguistics provide a new paradigm for discourse about international affairs that will supplant the post-structuralist text.... For example.

In amongst such food for thought as provided by Chomsky you're going to find the odd fly in the soup and the odd bite that's unappetizing (such as when he states that 'Europe is an extremely racist place' compared to America) but that's only to be expected. Overall, Keeping The Rabble In Line is a good, four-square meal and Noam Chomsky is a very, very good cook and at the end of the day, dining out with him makes a pleasant and nourishing change from McDonalds. And again, that's a very simple truth.
John Serpico

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