The USSR was dominated by a bureaucratic ruling class. High level bureaucrats and party members got rich while the lower class was poor, in the first several decades extremely poor. The economy was all controlled by the state, and those in the upper levels of the state hierarchy used their control of the state to gain privilidges and wealth for themselves. They exploited the working class, extracting a surplus and living off the workers' & peasants' labor. It was much like having a single giant corporation monopolize the entire country and control everything. Allexandra Kollontai was the only senior Bolshevik leader to support Lenin's april theses from day one. In her pamhplet at
http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/koll.html she provides ample information to support this.
The reason this ruling class was created is because they created a workers' state/dictatorship of the proletariat. All states are instruments of minority rule, attemtps to create states controlled by the majority always result in states controlled by a minority. This is what happened in Russia and every other time it was tried. The solution is to go straight to stateless communism.
"Dual Power" was originally invented by Lenin. He claimed the period prior to October was a period of "dual power" where a workers' state & a bourgeois state existed side by side.
Anarchists later co-opted the term to describe a completely different idea. Basically, dual power theory in the anarchist sense is a new version of the "building the new world within the shell of the old" idea. Building alternative organizations in the here and now that undermine the old order and create a new system. See http://www.dualpower.net Anarchy magazine had a critique of the idea a while back, check their online archives.
There are some things Chomsky is wrong about, like his endorsement of Kerry, but his basic theses about the media & US foreign policy are correct. Rightists can't refute it so they spread these smears about Chomsky being an anti-semitite, supporting Pol Pot, etc.
The claim that Chomsky is an anti-semite is absurd, Chomsky is a Jew. Chomsky is not a holocaust denier and has repeatedly condemned the holocaust. Chomsky just defended the free speech rights of holocaust deniers, which right-wingers distort to smear him.
The Cambodia part is also a smear. Chomsky's work on Cambodia focused on the media's treatment of it. He pointed out that the media would believe any allegation of atrocities in Cambodia no matter how little credibility it had. He contrasted this with the media's treatment of the genocide in East Timor, which happened at the same time. This was supported by the US and recieved far less attention from the media, in contrast to the genocide in Cambodia. He also contrasted this to the US assault on Cambodia prior to the seizure of power by the Khmer Rouge, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, and with the period after Vietnam threw pol pot out of power, when the US supported Pol Pot. In each case, the media emphasized the atrocities of the enemy while downplaying or ignoring the atrocities of the US & allies. He said:
“When the facts are in, it may turn out that the more extreme condemnations [of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge] were in fact correct. But even if that turns out to be the case, it will in no way alter the conclusions we have reached on the central question addressed here: how the available facts were selected, modified, or sometimes invented to create a certain image offered to the general population. The answer to this question seems clear, and it is unaffected by whatever may yet be discovered about Cambodia in the future.” - After the Cataclysm, p. 293
“In the case of Cambodia there is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression” p. 135
“The record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome” p. 136
This article by Horowitz doesn't really attempt to refute any of his claims, it just calls him names, restates claims which Chomsky already attacked and adds in a few distortions of his claims. For example, Chomsky has never claimed that "America is the Great Satan; it is the fount of evil in the world." Chomsky supported the US in WW2 and his critique extends beyond American imperialism, but Horowitz prefers the standard "if you disagree with me you hate Amerca" BS.
There's a refutation of
DeLong's piece
here. Of course DeLong has an "allergic reaction" to Chomsky. DeLong is a former clintonite official who's complicit in many of the crimes Chomsky criticizes. It's pretty hypocritical for him to criticize Chomsky about Cambodia considering his support for Clinton, who killed at least as many people as Pol Pot (mainly via sanctions on Iraq).
"You say you're an anarchist. Maybe you shouldn't take any benefits
from the state?"
"That view is published, repeatedly. For example, I remember a book by
Norman Podhoretz, some right-wing columnist, in which he accused academics in
the peace movement of being ingrates because we were working against the gov-
ernment, but we were getting grants from the government. That reflects an ex-
tremely interesting conception of the state, in fact a fascist conception of
the state. It says the state is your master, and if the state does something
for you, you have to be nice to them. That's the underlying principle. So the
state runs you, you're its slave... Notice how exactly opposite that is to
democratic theory. According to democratic theory, you're the master, the
state is your servant. The state doesn't give you a grant, the population is
giving you a grant. The state's just an instrument. But the concept of democ-
racy is so remote from our conception that we very often tend to fall into
straight fascist ideas like that, that the state is some kind of benevolent
uncle, ... it's not your representative, and of course it's true, but it's not
supposed to be; and therefore if your benevolent uncle happens to give you a
piece of candy, it's not nice not to be nice to him back. But it's a strictly
fascist conception. That's one of the reasons why fascism would be so easy to
institute in the United States. It's deeply rooted in everybody's mind al-
ready."
--Noam Chomsky, interview on 1/28/88, printed in _Language and Politics_, pp. 747-8
Democracy, meaning absolute majority rule, is wrong. In a democracy white people could vote to exterminate black people. Fifty-one percent of the population should not get to dominate the other 49%.
The claim that "all complex civilizations have had money" isn't true, in many pre-capitalist civilizations markets were marginal and not used as a major means of coordination. Ancient Egypt, for example.
It turns out that the
terrorism alerts issued last Sunday was based on
three years old information. Laura Bush and her daughters
held a photo-op at the Citbank center in New York City, which was one of the buildings allegedly targetted, on Monday. If there was a real threat Bush wouldn't be putting his own family in danger. Its now become blatantly obvious that this "war on terrorism" is just a
PR operation. This isn't limited to Bush's
use of it to
win reelection for himself, but is a general mechanism used to shore up support for the ruling class & state,
scaring people into submission and into accepting various policies they would otherwise oppose. It's a perfect excuse to justify invading oil rich countries, restricting freedoms, and many other things. Anti-US terrorism isn't the major threat to the average American its made out to be. 3,000 people died in 9-11, but 40,000 Americans die from car crashes every year. Your'e far more likely to be killed by a car than by Al-Qaeda, yet there is no war on cars. The reason for this is that lots of rich & powerful people, including the heads of the media, government and industry, can benefit from this (by increasing their power, wealth and so on) and so they line up behind the idea, whereas a war on cars doesn't benefit them much and so they don't support it. Since they control the media & government, those institutions tend to whip up fear in support of it. The "war on terrorism" is just a bunch of scaremongering which serves the function of reinforcing the position of the power elite.
The
Calculation Arguement, whether applied to central planning or libertarian communism, is circular: how do you know that money & the market measures the most efficient way to produce something? In order to determine that you need a way to measure how efficient production is and see if markets lead to maximum efficiency. A moneyless economy can simply use that measure of efficiency. How are you supposed to tell if a market economy is efficient or not if you can't measure it apart from money? Your measurement assumes your theory is correct. There is no possible way to test the theory. That's not economics, it's theology.
There's no reason to assume that market prices necessarily reflect the most efficient use of rescources & labor. How do you know that markets are more efficient than randomly selecting prices, or using astrology? It could be that capitalism causes companies to do things which aren't the most efficient use of rescources & labor but which generate the most profit for the company. Externalities are a classic example of this. Advertising is another. Of course some things are subjective - is more chairs worth destroying a beautiful forest? This is the case even in a capitalist economy, but decisions are aribtrarily stacked in favor of profit for the rich.
The problems with War Communism had little to do with the absence of money (which was never a real gift economy). See
Russia: Revolution, Counter-Revolution
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