Chomsky on Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

Author:Noam Chomsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2010-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Marx saw this not as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization, but rather as a feature of capitalist relations of production. The society of the future must be concerned to “replace the detail-worker of today…reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours…to whom the different social function…are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural powers.”19 The prerequisite is the abolition of capital and wage labor as social categories (not to speak of the industrial armies of the “labor state” or the various modern forms of totalitarianism or state capitalism). The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a specialized tool of production, might in principle be overcome, rather than enhanced, with the proper development and use of technology, but not under the conditions of autocratic control of production by those who make man an instrument to sever their ends, overlooking his individual purposes, in Humboldt’s phrase.

Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism, to create “free associations of free producers” that would engage in militant struggle and prepare to take over the organization of production on a democratic basis. These associations would serve as “a practical school of anarchism.”20 If private ownership of the means of production is, in Proudhon’s often quoted phrase, merely a form of “theft”—“the exploitation of the weak by the strong”21—control of production by a state bureaucracy, no matter how benevolent its intentions, also does not create the conditions under which labor, manual and intellectual, can become the highest want in life. Both, then, must be overcome.

In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control over the means of production, the anarchist takes his stand with those who struggle to bring about “the third and last emancipatory phase of history,” the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second having made wage earners out of serfs, and the third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act of liberation that places control over the economy in the hands of free and voluntary associations of producers (Fourier, 1848).22 The imminent danger to “civilization” was noted by de Tocqueville, also in 1848:As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of many other rights, it was easily defended—or rather it was not attacked; it was then the citadel of society while all the other rights were its outworks; it did not bear the brunt of attack and, indeed, there was no serious attempt to assail it. But today, when the right of property is regarded as the last undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when it alone is left standing, the sole privilege is an equalized society, it is a different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts of the working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It is true that they are less inflamed than formerly by political passions properly speaking; but do you not see that their passions, far from being political, have

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