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In the April 1999 Monthly Review (50, no. 11:40-47), Robert McChesney gives what amounts to an encomium to Noam Chomsky. McChesney credits the MIT professor with (a) leading the battle for democracy against neoliberalism, (b) demonstrating "the absurdity of equating capitalism with democracy" (44), and (c) being the first to expose the media's complicity with the ruling class. I would suggest that in these several areas credit for leading the way goes to the generations of Marxist writers and other progressive thinkers who fought the good fight well before Chomsky made his substantial and much appreciated contributions.
More important is the question of Chomsky's politics. McChesney says that Chomsky can be "characterized as an anarchist or, perhaps more accurately, a libertarian socialist" (43). "Libertarian socialist" is a sweeping designation, safely covering both sides of the street. Of course, the ambiguity is not McChesney's but Chomsky's. As far as I know, Chomsky has never offered a clear explication of his anarcho-libertarian-socialist ideology. That is to say, he has never explained to us how it would manifest itself in organized political struggle or actual social construction.
McChesney says that Noam Chomsky has been a persistent "opponent and critic of Communist and Leninist political states and parties" (43). I would add that, as a "critic," Chomsky has yet to offer a systematic critique of existing Communist parties and states. (Not that many others have.) Here is a sampling of Chomsky's views on Communism and Leninism:
In an interview in Perception (March/April 1996), Chomsky tells us: "The rise of corporations was in fact a manifestation of the same phenomena that led to Fascism and Bolshevism, which sprang out of the same totalitarian soil." Like Orwell and most bourgeois opinion makers and academics, Chomsky treats Communism and fascism as totalitarian twins, offering...