Linguist Noam Chomsky is known for mincing no words about the corruptions of political power. Yet when asked whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people is just a sham” at the end of an interview by John Rachel for CounterPunch (August 27), Chomsky insists that it is only “if we let it be,” and that Americans could instead “choose to exercise” their ability to turn their nation into a “cooperative commonwealth.”

This is at odds with Chomsky’s preceding replies, which detail how the United States wages war in ways that not only contradict popular opinion but violate its own laws. Chomsky’s 1973 book For Reasons of State took its title from a passage by Mikhail Bakunin about how “the State is the organized authority, domination, and power of the possessing classes over the masses.”

Chomsky holding out hope in 2021 that the people can and should “take the reins of government into their own hands” likewise ignores Bakunin’s observation that the state’s use of force necessarily “shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest.”

Chomsky himself documented in Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship how the “organs of power and administration remained separate from the central Republican government” in the social movements fighting the fascist seizure of power during the Spanish Civil War, yet he reinforces what Larry Gambone calls “the myth of socialism as statism,” the very conflation of popular and political power for which Chomsky famously took mainstream historians to task.

Modern-day popular movements seeking an end to social warfare could do well to rediscover the forms of voluntary socialist organization noted by Chomsky and Gambone. They should also revive Bakunin’s vigilance against the “bold plunder” and “shabby betrayal that [is] daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states.”

Correction: In the original version of this op-ed, John Rachel was misidentified as John Roberts.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “More Reasons of State, More Troubles” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, September 3, 2021
2. “More reasons of state, more troubles” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, AZ News, September 3, 2021
3. “Sham Government?” by Joel Schlosberg, Salt Lake City Weekly, September 8, 2021 (both online and print)
4. “More reasons of state, more trouble” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], Madill, Oklahoma Record, September 9, 2021
5. “More reasons of state, more trouble” by Joel Schlosberg, Sidney [Montana] Herald, September 11, 2021
6. “More Reasons Of State, More Troubles” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, September 12, 2021
7. “More Reasons of State, More Troubles” by by Joel Schlosberg, Roundup Record-Tribune & Winnett Times [Montana], September 15, 2021

History is littered with social and political movements which, while failing to survive as movements, largely achieved their goals.

The Prohibition Party’s national conventions could take place in a phone booth these days, but its disastrous single policy proposal was adopted as a constitutional amendment, mutated into the equally disastrous war on drugs, and continues to torment the modern marketplace with draconian regulation.

Most “socialist” parties have either disappeared into the dustbin of history, or find themselves reduced to glorified supper clubs featuring loud arguments over whether the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic deformation or a degenerated workers’ state. But Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas’s 885,000 votes in the 1932 presidential election arguably led to FDR’s “New Deal” and the modern welfare state.

Few people remember, or ever learned about, the technocracy movement of the 1930s. That movement failed in its formal goal of replacing democratic legislatures with boards of “experts” to run society (including the economy) in accordance with “science.”

But over time, the concept took root in America’s regulatory apparatus. Nearly every aspect of our lives has, for several decades, been subject to scrutiny and oversight by “experts.” The food we eat. The drugs we take. The cars we drive. The securities we invest in. You name it, there’s a government bureau somewhere full of whirring computers and nerds with slide rules, figuring out what we may or may not do, or  in what way we may do it.

While most of us gripe about particular technocratic edicts, few question the premise itself. It’s just taken as obvious that the man in the lab coat knows more about air bags and crop yields than the Honorable Representative from Minnesota.

Technocracy took root. And with the COVID-19 pandemic, it blossomed … into the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors.

Starting last year, “public health” technocrats (with, of course, the assistance of opportunistic politicians) seized control over huge parts of our lives — mass house arrests without charge or trial, mask mandates, vaccine mandate and “passport” schemes, etc. — then proceeded to vacillate and scrap among themselves over the divvying up of their new power, as more than 600,000 Americans died and the economy tanked.

To add insult to injury, the parts of the country where the “experts” enjoyed less deference seem to have fared no worse, and in some cases better, than areas where politicians slavishly and without question enforced every technocratic edict.

Technocracy finally got its big shot at proving itself, and failed miserably. Why? Because “public health”  technocracy isn’t about the health of the public. It’s about policy, which is about politics, which is about power.

The technocrats exercised their power abusively — and ineffectually too boot. It’s time to take that power away.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY