shag carpet bomb wrote:
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> I think what makes Chomsky a moralizer when he decides to veer off into
> questions of culture is this: . . .
All true, as is most of what Eric writes on Chomsky. But really not relevant, because it puts Chomsky in the wrong cubby-hole as it were or, in literary terms, it doesn't construe his genre correctly. Because it is true it needs to be said in limited forums such as lbo -- activists will find out that as they reach larger cnstituencies, as a given anti-war locl group grows for example, that the variety of positions in it is large, including those operating from ultimately false frameworks, such as moralizing or fact-obsessing, among whom there will _also_ be people desiring and capable of moving further. In such a context broadsiides such as shag or eric launch against Chomsky are not appropriate, say, for the group e-list but _are_ appropriate for personal conversations with those who are expanding their political reach.
And despite the accuracy of what shag and Eric argue, it is ALSO true that Chomsky has been, as someone called him, a National Treasure (though he mayn now have become merely a National Monument). You can't see that perhaps if you did not experience the excitement, back in the '60s, of coming across his article on Intellectuals and the War. I haven't reread it in deaces (it's reprinted in _The Mandarins_) and I suspect for most reading it today it would be a bit flat, even boring. But when it appeared in the NYRB it was virtually an intellectual nuclear explosion. "The Left," when one appears, will be a mansion of many rooms, most of them containing viewpoints rather repellant to residents of the other rooms. Nevertheless, unless you really support a Democratiac-Centralist Vanguard Party, that is what it will probably look like. And the necessity will be to have asmuch unity of PRACTICE (whatever the disparity of theories) of all those elements.
There is no way to will such a Movement of Movements into existence, and in this world so ruled by contingency there is no certainty that one will appear, but it is what we have to hope for, and train ourselves to recognize when it happens, whatever our concrete expectations or 'druthers are.
See an essay in Vol 8 of Lenin's works. Trotsky had published an article beginning with the declaration that there would be no more Father Gapons. (The implication being that all further agitation and organizing had to be carried on by Marxists). Lenin wrote (quoting from memory): "Why does Trotsky say thsi? He says it because he is a blowhard. If there is to be a revolution there must be hundreds of more Gapons. And so forth.
There must be at least a couple dozen more Chomskys if we are to have a powerful left movement.
Carrol