Edward S. Herman.
This is not to say that Chomsky’s characterization of press subservience is wrong but rather to put the criticism in perspective. Within the framework of ideological conformity and institutional obedience that Chomsky rightly deplores, a body of dissent developed during the 1960s which has continued to influence the conduct of America foreign policy and the structure of international relations in the present decade. Who would have thought ten years ago that the anti-American revolution in Iran, the linchpin of America’s imperial interests in the Middle East, would not trigger an immediate American military intervention? Who would have believed that the 25,000 military “advisors” in Africa’s civil conflicts in the 1970s would be Cubans rather than Americans?
Consider, too, for a moment, Chomsky’s misleading comparison of the Soviet and American presses as “mirror images.” In fact, the ignorance imposed on the Soviet public by government-controlled media and official censorship is mind-boggling by Western standards. At a bare minimum, the information necessary to carry on a public debate over government policies in areas such as foreign policy and defense is not available to the Soviet citizen (who would be forbidden to use it, if it were). Censorship is carried to such an extreme that the Soviet citizen may be uninformed about such noncontroversial threats to his wellbeing as natural disasters, man-made catastrophes or even military provocations by the United States. When Washington mined Haiphong Harbor and dared Russian vessels to challenge the blockade, a crisis—compared at the time to the 1962 confrontation over Cuban missiles—ensued. For twenty days during this crisis, the Soviet people were not informed that the mining had taken place. (The purpose of the blackout was to allow the Soviet leadership to capitulate to the American threat without domestic consequences.)
Why bring this up? Why dwell on the negative features of the Soviet system (or of other Communist states) which in any case are widely reported in the American media? What is the relevance? These are questions the apologists of the left raise when they are confronted by the Soviet case. Unfortunately, the consequences of ignoring the flaws of practical Communism are far-ranging and real. To begin with, the credibility of the left’s critique is gravely undermined. Chomsky’s article is a good example. The American press does not look inordinately servile when compared with its real-world counterparts—and especially its socialist opposites. Only when measured against its own standards and the ideals of a democratic society does it seem so. Yet it is Chomsky who raises the Soviet comparison, precisely because the United States and the Soviet Union are in an adversary relationship—a political fact of prime importance that the left often prefers to ignore, when it suits their purposes—and he does so in a misleading way. The result is that his argument is vitiated, or at least seriously weakened, for anyone who has not internalized the special expectations of the left that a future socialist press would be really independent, critical and accurate.
Latent in Chomsky’s critique is a comforting illusion: namely, that the left’s failure to sustain itself as a political force with a radical alternative social vision is due to the absence of socialist journalists in the capitalist media, rather than to its own deficiencies—the failure of the left’s ideals in practice; its moral inconsistency; its inability to formulate and fight for realistic programs; in short, the fact that it cannot command moral and political authority among its constituencies.
The blind-spot toward the Soviet Union provides a good instance of the left’s lack of political realism. The Soviet Union is one of the two predominant military powers in the world. That alone makes it a crucial subject of any contemporary political analysis that claims to be comprehensive. Radicals often seem to think that Western policy can be explained independently of Soviet behavior by reference to the imperatives of the system, the requirements of the “disaccumulation crisis,” etc. This was always a weakness in the radical perspective; but now, as a result of the continuing development of Soviet power in the last decade, it has passed a critical point and has become crippling.
During the 1950s, and even in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was significantly weaker militarily than the United States. The celebrated “missile gap” was all on the other side. Hence, whatever Soviet intentions, Washington’s influence on the dynamics of the arms race and the cold war was preponderant. This is no longer the case. The Soviet Union has now achieved nuclear parity with the United States for the first time since the onset of the atomic era. This profoundly affects, among other things, the Soviet ability to intervene in political and military conflicts outside its borders. The political pendulum has also swung in its favor. In an earlier day, John Foster Dulles used to attack the nonaligned states for “immoral” neutrality. At the recent conference of nonaligned countries in Havana, the policy of Washington’s representatives was to keep the participants neutral (i.e. not aligned with the Soviet bloc).
These changes and the trend they represent make a realistic analysis of Soviet policies crucial for any political movement. Yet in a special issue of The Nation concerned with the problem of military interventions (June 9), only one of ten articles was even partially devoted to the Soviet Union.66 That article, by Michael Klare, employed a comparative analysis of U.S. and Soviet military forces to discount the impression that the Soviet Union is now or intends to become an interventionist power.
Another, by Gareth Porter, however, did admirably deal with Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia.
Klare achieved this feat in two ways: by defining “interventionist forces” in such a restrictive manner as to exclude the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the occupation forces it maintains there; and by describing Soviet intervention in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as “aid” to “beleaguered allies”—in short, by taking a page from the apologists for American intervention. When Klare was compelled under his own ground-rules to admit that some Soviet missions had the look of interventionist forces, he quickly denied the implication, saying, “. . . but it is important to remember that the units involved are seen by Moscow as being ‘on loan’ from their normal, defensive mission, and so would be recalled the moment they were needed at home.” So, presumably, would the U.S. “advisers” that began America’s involvement in Vietnam, if they had been needed at home.
Failure to appreciate the world role of a major power—the depressing history of leftist apologias for that power aside—would be serious enough. But the Soviet Union, despite all the qualifying circumstances of its origins and development, is the country in which the revolutionary socialist solution—state ownership of the means of production—has been tested and found wanting. For this reason, far more than for the others, it requires radical attention. The point was forcefully made a few years ago by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski:
Why the problems of the real and the only existing Communism, which Leftist ideologies put aside so easily (“all right, this was done in exceptional circumstances, we won’t imitate these patterns, we will do it better” etc.), are crucial for socialist thought is because the experiences of the “new alternative society” have shown very convincingly that the only universal medicine these people have for social evils—state ownership of the means of production—is not only perfectly compatible with all disasters of the capitalist world, with exploitation, imperialism, pollution, misery, economic waste, national hatred and national oppression, but that it adds to them a series of disasters of its own: inefficiency, lack of economic incentives and, above all, the unrestricted role of the omnipotent bureaucracy, a concentration of power never known before in human history.
Can the left take a really hard look at itself—the consequences of its failures, the credibility of its critiques, the viability of its goals? Can it begin to shed the arrogant cloak of self-righteousness that elevates it above its own history and makes it impervious to the lessons of experience?
In a previous essay, Kolakowski wrote that the left was defined by its “negation” of existing social reality. But not only this: “It is also defined by the direction of this negation, in fact by the nature of its utopia.” Today, the left’s utopia itself is in question. That is the real meaning of the
