Caleb Maupin
EDITED BY PATRICE GREANVILLE
Streams of clarity, irony, humor and wisdom seen & overheard on the Net
Dispatch dateline: Jun 8, 2022
Editor's Note:
For all his anti-imperialist rhetoric, Chomsky remains a controversial and deeply contradictory individual. Defining himself often as an anarchist—a form of adventuristic ultra-leftism—he is prone to criticise in harsh terms Lenin and Stalinism, that is any truly existing socialist government, be it China, Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, Venezuela, or the Soviet Union. In that way he ends up denouncing imperialism but canceling the denunciation by also attacking socialist nations under Imperialist attack. This is the "plague on both your houses" approach that is typical of many so-called "liberal progressives". Chomsky also has a terribly naive conception of how the working class can attain power. In his book Turning the Tide, he argues that socialism can be secured in the US via the ballot box. —PG
The Mainstream and the Margins: Noam Chomsky vs. Michael Parenti
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-11-at-11.57.10-AM.jpg)
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Lenin wrote tellingly of Russia in 1918: ‘reality says that state capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about state capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us’ (The Chief Task of Our Time). In his Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927), Mao admitted that the coming revolution would not be socialist: ‘To overthrow these feudal forces is the real objective of the revolution’. This is what Fidel said when urging Mexican businesspeople to invest in Cuba, in 1988: “We are capitalists, but state capitalists. We… Read more »