Chomsky Is Not A Leftist

I love how people with very limited understandings of political philosophy throw around dichotomous political labels as if they were epithets and not actual descriptors. Take, for example, Noam Chomsky. Many people who do not understand political philosophy, economics, and the nature of power label Chomsky as a dirty leftist, a Marxist/Leninist who seeks the dis-assembly of Western-style capitalism, only to be replaced with a people's collective (or some such nonsense). This straw man tends to work against Chomsky (and other so-called "radicals"), mainly because most people don't read past the headline.


Well, that well known leftist rag known as the Wall Street Journal would disagree:

"His body of work deserves more serious treatment. The interesting yet overlooked aspects of his political philosophy cannot easily fit into the left-right dichotomy. What makes Mr. Chomsky unique is that his criticism of the capitalist economic order takes its point of departure from the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment. His heroes are not Lenin and Marx but Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He argues that the free market envisaged by these thinkers has never materialized in the world and that what we have gotten instead is a collusion of the state with private interests.

Moreover he has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand in hand. The rich, he claims, echoing Adam Smith, are too keen to preach the benefits of market discipline to the poor while they reserve for themselves the right to be bailed out by the state whenever the going gets rough. As he puts it: "The free market is socialism for the rich. Markets for the poor and state protection for the rich." He has spoken positively about the work of Peruvian liberal economist Hernando De Soto who sees the problem of poverty in the Third World as being related to the fact that the poor usually lack clearly defined property rights."

--Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2005

Just for the record, standing up to the government does not make one a Leftist (or any other convenient label). My hope is that people will eventually see that the world is not divided into Left/Right or Liberal/Conservative or even Rich/Poor, but rather Those With Power/Those Without (and that just because one is without power does not mean that one seeks it).