Scott Casleton: Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of debate trying to define socialism. You have quoted Anton Pannekoek for saying socialism is “workers themselves being masters over production.” Can you elaborate on what this might look like?
Noam Chomsky: Pannekoek is voicing the conventional understanding of socialism in its early years, before it was transmuted to efforts to soften the harsh edges of capitalist oppression and came to be associated with the monstrous perversion of socialism in Bolshevik Russia. A genuine left Marxist and leading figure in the council Communist movement, Pannekoek was one of the “infantile ultra-leftists” against whom Lenin inveighed. The idea that workers themselves should be masters of production is a natural inheritor of core ideals of classical liberalism from John Locke to Thomas Paine to Abraham Lincoln and John Stuart Mill, all of whom regarded wage labor as a form of servitude that should not exist in a free society. The underlying conception was graphically expressed by the great humanist Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the founders of classical liberalism: “Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.” When the laborer works under external control, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is,” which is a tool in the hands of others, not a free person.
More significantly, this was the understanding of working people in the early days of the industrial revolution, many of them young women, “factory girls,” driven from farms to work in the mills. They had a lively independent press, in which they condemned “the blasting influence of monarchical principles [of capitalism] on democratic soil.” They recognized that this assault on elementary human rights will not be overcome until “they who work in the mills own them,” and sovereignty is in the hands of free producers. Then working people will no longer be “menials or the humble subjects of a foreign despot . . . slaves in the strictest sense of the word.” Rather, they will regain their status as “free American citizens.” Workers 170 years ago warned, perceptively, that a day might come when wage slaves “will so far forget what is due to manhood as to glory in a system forced on them by their necessity and in opposition to their feelings of independence and self-respect.” They hoped that that day would be “far distant.”
The solution was as clear to working people as to leading political thinkers. Mill wrote that “The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected to predominate is . . . the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers electable and removable by themselves.”
This thought evolved into Pannekoek’s workers’ councils and is hardly a utopian ideal. As philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has recently emphasized, most people today spend the bulk of their waking lives as subjects of private tyrannies in which their rights are restricted beyond the norm of totalitarian states—when they can go to the bathroom or talk to a friend, let alone play some role in determining the conditions of work or the goals of the enterprise. There are now successful worker-owned enterprises ranging from huge conglomerates such as Mondragon in the Basque country to small-scale firms in the old rust belt, with varying degrees of authentic self-management. There is also a proliferation of cooperatives, localism, and other initiatives that open the way to a revival of the consciousness and could flourish in more free and just societies.
SC: You’ve always considered yourself a traveler in the anarchist tradition. What does anarchism have to offer to a budding movement of younger people interested in socialism?
NC: I’ve always understood the core principle of anarchism to be the recognition that structures of domination and control are not self-justifying. They carry a burden of proof, and when that cannot be met, as is commonly the case, they should be dismantled, a principle that holds from families to international affairs. These general ideals, and their manifold applications, should have broad appeal, and serve as an impetus to action. […]
SC: Over the course of your life, you’ve commented on everything from the sad defeat of socialism and anarchism in the Spanish civil war to the atrocities in Vietnam. What keeps you working in the face of these miseries? And what sacrifices have you had to make to achieve your success?
NC: We have two choices: to abandon hope and help ensure that the worst will happen; or to make use of the opportunities that exist and perhaps contribute to a better world. It is not a very difficult choice. There are, of course, sacrifices; time and energy are finite. But there are also the rewards of participating in struggles for peace and justice and the common good.
wonkmonk's notes 