THE SIMPLE INTELLECTUAL

The Life and Critique of the Anarchist and Linguist Noam Chomsky

By Jens Petz Kastner

[This book review of Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky, Libertarian Dissenter, 1999 and Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights, 2000 was originally published in: graswurzelrevolution 252, October 2000 and is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.graswurzel.net/252/chomsky.shtml.]

“LIBERTARIAN DISSENTER”

Noam Chomsky is one of the most quoted living intellectuals worldwide. As a twelve year old, he wrote his first essay about Barcelona during the Spanish revolution. Enthusiasm for anarchist ideas is not lost to the American linguistics professor who is over 70 today.

The first biography of the scholar and political activist has now appeared. Robert F. Barsky wrote it and is partisan in favor of Chomsky. Barsky helps make Chomsky’s complex substantive positions understandable. The second strength of the book is connected with this partisanship. Chomsky is described in his scholarly and political environment, discussions and arguments. Wherever Chomsky moves in the public, there are conflicts around his work and his person. Early political influences from Spanish anarchism and Zionist groups in the US are portrayed along with his scholarly development into a trend-setting linguist.

An intellectual who prefers to speak to simple people then to an expert public is depicted, a critical intellectual to whom the social criticism of the Frankfurt school is too fancy and post-modern theory hardly more than obscuration of simple facts. The gentle man is shown who defends his convictions with the greatest passion. More stubbornly than stoically, he rejects the criticism of his abstract idea of freedom of speech lodged against him because of his engagement for the freedom of speech of the French Auschwitz denier Faurisson. For Chomsky, this is the same struggle against silenced and the subtle suppression of news against which he has fought in the last decade as a media researcher.

“THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF HUMAN RIGHTS”

Whether Chomsky actually has a theory of the media or merely makes a few clever thoughts into a theme cannot be analyzed in Germany without knowledge of English and the most complex book-lending procedures. Unlike his linguistic works, hardly one of his political books has been completely translated into German. Again and again we grapple with collections of essays or merely excerpts from speeches and interviews. Chomsky criticizes selective reporting as a journalistic defect. The essay volume from the Trotzdem publisher, “The Political Economy of Human Rights”, presents several unpublished Chomsky texts from the late 90s.

Chomsky’s knowledgable attacks against US foreign policy go beyond media criticism. Like hardly any one else, Chomsky unmasks the doctrine and praxis of this policy. For both areas, he shows in a sober, levelheaded way that the US has led worldwide in relativizing human rights. Rejecting the part of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” concerning social and economic rights and denying its authority are part of this doctrine. Practically this has immense consequences. Chomsky demonstrates numerous examples of military interventions from the most difficult periods in office – from Kennedy to Clinton, from Cuba and South Vietnam to Nicaragua and Libya to Iraq. Chomsky’s skilful listing and interweaving of plain facts is always a frontal intellectual attack on this policy.

Alongside the human rights discussion, Chomsky’s involvement in the debates around neoliberalism is another focal point of the essay volume. The forced chase for profits produces a kind of “superfluous population”, people who live in the metropolises and the “third world” and cannot be exploited any more. At the same time the social spending on one side is constantly reduced while on the other side the number of persons in prisons has risen enormously since the Reagan era. Greater social inequality entails growing social control. In Chomsky’s eyes, the welfare state is not so much the preserver of social and civilization achievements as for other intellectuals in the struggle against neoliberalism.

Unlike Pierre Bourdieu for example, Chomsky still regards the state as a cage. Tearing this cage apart in the moment when a predatory animal named “free market” runs wild outside would be foolish for Chomsky. However against an anti-intellectual state fixation, he points out that “free trade” does not really exist. The ideology of the “free market” is a state-promoted fraud that ultimately aims at keeping poor countries in economic dependence on US corporations. This perspective in the example of relations between the US and Haiti refutes the reproach against Chomsky that his criticism rises only from the paranoia of an extremist.