Village Pillage

[Craig Clark]

Steelhead writes:

> ...[snip]...
> On many issues Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan
> aren't that far apart. Look at NAFTA, GATT, the CIA, the FBI. The strongest
> critics of these incursions are often groups on what we would call the far
> right.

I suspect there's a real difference between why Buchanan opposed NAFTA 
and GATT and why Chomsky did, and I think it's disengenuous for Steely to 
pretend otherwise. To take an example from South Africa: in the early 
1980s white supremacists opposed the introduction of the Tricameral 
Parliament to South Africa, as did the African National Congress and 
other (in those days) left-leaning groups. The Tricameral parliament 
granted a semblance of parliamentary democracy to two other minority 
ethnic groups ("Coloureds", ie persons of racially-mixed descent, and 
"Asians"). Both these groups were allowed to vote for representatives 
who sat in a seperate "parliament" and whose decisions could be 
over-ruled by the "white" parliament. To conservative white South 
Africans, this was unacceptable: it meant that inferior races were 
being allowed to rule themselves rather than be subject to the benign 
paternalism of the white government. To anti-apartheid South 
Africans, this was also unacceptable because it continued the ethnic 
balkansiation of South Africa's population and because it still denied a 
mere 85% of the population any say in their own future whatsoever. 
The fact that both groupings opposed the same measure does not 
suggest that they were reasonably close together: in fact they were 
poles apart, and it was only the pro-Tricameralist propaganada of the 
apartheid state which suggested otherwise.

Now I'm not accusing Steely of having a sinister agenda as did the 
apartheid regime in that instance, but I think he's wrong to suggest 
that Chomsky and Buchanan are not too far apart. A simple gloss of 
their positions would probably be that Buchanan, for all his attempts 
to mobilise on a populist base, opposed GATT and NAFTA because they 
were a threat to a conservative, pro-capitalist conception of the 
relationship of the rights of the American bourgeoisie to property. 
Chomsky opposed GATT and NAFTA because he believed they 
entrenched capitalist hegemony, with the USA as the dominant political
entity in the international capitalist system. A world of difference 
indeed.

> I believe TRP to be basically libertarian in his politics. I can't think of
> one instance in TRP's writings were the State has acted with benevolence...
> [snip] ... If the State has a role, it is to protect the individual from the 
> predations of corporations. But since the corporations _are_ the State
> (this is the nature of fascism and an important lesson of GR), seeking more
> powers for the State will only come back to haunt the individual--by individual
> I mean people, families, communities, etc.

The position which Steely describes here, which I take to be his 
own, and which I would agree is consistent with what I believe TRP to 
be saying, is more properly labelled as "anarchist" rather than 
"libertarian." The latter term, for me at any rate, conjures up images 
of foax spouting Ayn Rand and ignorantly conflating "state intervention
in the market" with "socialism" (a term which refers only to worker 
control of the means of production). Again, in SA we had a libertarian 
movement at one point which tried to pretend that a country in which the 
majority of the working class were denied the right to mobilise or 
form trade unions was nonetheless "socialist" because several key 
state enterprises were owned by an elitist state.

Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"