Noam Chomsky on Leninism

Watch "Tsar to Lenin". After the 1917 revolution, all the Western armies attacked Russia to prevent communism and reinstall bourgeois and/or feudal reign. And here is Chomsky questioning that the Bolsheviks wanted an army of workers?

"lenin was a right wing deviation from the socialist movement" biggest amount of brainrot i've EVER heard

Video every tankie should watch

Good old class traitor chomsky. Always remember he went on epstein island so no wonder he follows the CIA line on socialist projects and their defenders.

he has abs no idea what he is talking about. what a joke of history. if it wasnt for the ussr there wouldnt be free education, free healthcare, free all kinds of things. but hey chomsky is in academia and has to take a trockist position. what a f moron

national treasure. he's speaking off script with no "ums" "likes" or pauses. Just calm pure historical facts out of vast knowledge.

I dunno, it seems like he is trying to tell everyone "shut up and vote for democrats"

Chomsky hopefully read some more Lenin, because this is a monologue of a stupid anarchist.

Can you imagine college students today posing such information and opinion packed questions to any speaker before them?

Chomsky supports Putin. He's a punk

I am 86 years old and never understood why he has spent his entire life on the sidelines to critique but never got in the arena to actually do anything. If he is so smart why does he not have some actual position to do something?

Chomsky was and remains a champion of infantile, passé notions with no redeeming value.

indeed... Lening = Stalin... never understood the need to flirt iron curtain communism/socialism... DON'T DO IT.

One sentence for the context, one sentence for the question. If you can't do that, you've not come prepared. If they need more context to your question, they will ask for it.

The "Mainstream Marxists" didn't build anything and actually opposed the October revolution. Lenin built and guided the Bolsheviks who won. He was A MARXIST.

I didn't know I was such and egg-head, but my senior paper was comparing the Marxist ideal to the implementation in government by Lenin. I wish I had been listening to Chomsky at that time, would have been a better paper.

what a question ?

In his speech about the dictatorship imposed by Lenin, Chomsky does not mention the context of what is happening.
A context that radically changes the situation.
This context is the civil war in Russia and the invasion of Russia by the Entente - 14 major world powers including the British Empire, the United States, Canada, Japan, China, and so on.

Democracy implies internal political debate. And debate implies disunity between parties.

During war, this disunity is destructive.
During war, social cohesion is necessary.
And this can only be achieved through dictatorship (in a hard or soft form)

Freedom during war is impossible, if only for the reason that the enemy will bribe his enemies, bringing even more confusion into their ranks. As the Roman Empire did.

During the First World War, the number of all the dead, among all the participating countries, was approximately 10 million soldiers.
During the civil war and foreign intervention in Russia, 12 million people died.

You can say: "Nobody knows what would have happened if Lenin had not suppressed freedom and brought everyone to the same denominator!"
But we actually know.
History knows this. Namely, the Great French Revolution.
This is what would have happened if the Bolsheviks had lost.
The British Empire (which at that time was the largest and most powerful empire of its time) would have returned the Romanovs to the throne and returned the monarchy to Russia.

I would like to ask people who agree with chomskys line a few questions.
Why didn't the left marxists win, where are all the left marxist revolutions across the world?
His critcism of leninism whiping the masses into the society that they chose is somewhat illegitimate, like there were masses of people mobilised for bolshevism, so much of them that they defeated the white army and their imperialist allies, denying the agency russian people played in their revolution is simply ahistoric.
Also Lenin made his position about the necessity of the dictature of the proletariat with the leadership of the party very clear in much earlier works such as What is to be done(1901).
Also this sort of left communist and anarchist criticism is what lenin meant when he called them infantile.
Screaming: Socialism now! And condemning anything that doesn't fit this requirement as counter revolutionary is infantile.
For the achievement of the long term goal of workers control of production it is required to do things like state
repression of reaction which inevitably leads to horrible excesses. Tbh I don't know the exact motivation for disempowering the soviets in these times, should read into it more.
At the end of the day the soviet union with all it's flaws was a glorious first attempt at building socialism, and brought a backwards feudal society to an advanced industrial spacefaring one in an insanely short time, all while providing social programs and worker authority unimaginable to us today.

Succinct and insightful

True. However, since Marxist doctrine holds that the transition from capitalism to socialism involves violence against the bourgeoisie, both physical and psychological, there is little moral ground to be gained by Marxists differentiating themselves from Leninism, just as Leninists strive to distinguish themselves from Stalinism.

What year was this speech?

❤

My question to such Socialism purists is always, 'Well, if the Soviet Union wasn't real socialism, neither was Mao's China, can you give at least one example of where real socialism was implemented, and survived, for even five years? Because if a theory of society has never been successfully implemented, anywhere, well that is itself sufficient proof of its unworkability.'

Sounds like Natalie Wood.

Chomsky leaves out Jacob Schiff's role in Lenin coming to power and Schiff's role who Lenin placed in control of industries which should be called crony capitalism.

A brilliant and fluent answer from Professor Chomsky.

I have admired Noam Chomsky for decades, and I have participated in the anarchist movement for decades, however, in the past ~10 years I have looked at the FACTS, as Noam Chomsky talks of doing, and I have discovered that the evidence shows this:

the USSR & all other really existing socialist countries made a huge positive difference to humanity (the Bolshevik govt & people developed the USSR from a mostly peasant economy to an industrial superpower which was able to defeat 80% of nazi forces in WW2, directly raising huge numbers of people out of poverty and indirectly lifting many more people out of poverty by convincing other govts to adopt free health care & other leftwing policies to prevent socialist revolutions in their own countries).

Furthermore, the evidence shows that the USSR & all other really existing socialist countries caused far fewer deaths than capitalist countries have caused. The anti-communist "Black Book of Communism" claims that communist movement caused ~96 million deaths from 1917 until 1991, while capitalism causes ~100 million deaths from poverty every 5 years.

Therefore, I certainly support the USSR & all other really existing socialist countries more than any capitalist systems. E.g. when people advocate building up capitalist militaries and "containing" China, I point out that China has not waged war on another country since 1979, while the USA is constantly waging wars & proxy wars of aggression & I point out that the South China Sea is next to CHINA, so the navies of the USA, UK & Australia have no business there, unless they are there to threaten China, which is an action that provokes war.

I also point out that China makes win-win deals with other countries which develop other countries as trade partners, while the USA & other first world countries make exploitative deals with other countries, that move ~US$640 billion net wealth each year from Third World to first world countries.

For details on the things I've written above, I recommend checking out videos & writings by the CPGB-ML, Michael Parenti, Benjamin Norton, Caleb Maupin, etc..

I'm pretty unnerved with Chomsky's America-centrist view on foreign policy, where he's waving through all kind of regimes as long as they challenge the USA, but this one was nevertheless pretty good.

"Lenin was a right wing deviation..." this bloke is a joke.

"I am the walrus?"

And Chomsky worked for many years at MIT - a CIA controlled institution.

I absolutely hate when statement and questions are blended? There's no clarity when opinions are part of political opinions? I dont care what you think ,i care what the speaker thinks

yes noam chomsky is a marxist this explains of course his fanatical hatred of america

He’s such an idiot oml

We in India consider Lenin as the saint sent by the God to rescue the people of the world from colonialism.

and as if you hadnt lied on the "non-insignificance" of JFKMLKRFKillers ass-ass-i-nations change altering negatively to al of one racing hu(e)man species ..is real od Israesl antisemtic Hitlerian ways backed by support of US /British Rothchildean plutocrats oligarchy's kakistocracy

The oligarchy in the US, the controlling class is the public employees.

This woman was a "left" leaning fascist who thought Lenin was a Saint.

😂

Just a couple of remarks.

- You can't talk about political leninism. Politically Lenin was an opportunist who tried several different policies during his stay in power. He ended up returning to... the market economy. It's generally forgotten that Lenin's government launch a so called 'New Economic Policy' (NEP) which allowed for small private ventures, stock exchanges and so on. The USSR was a market economy till early 1930s when it switched to planning.

- Reducing powers of worker councils can hardly be called an evil. An institution becomes functional if it exists for years or decades. Worker councils in Russia existed for several months only and caused economic mayhem. They were by no means a functional political institution.

- Later on the Soviets would boast high degree of workers' involvment in decision making. When the USSR broke up and many ex-soviets were finding employment in the west, the general issue was that they showed a tendency to advise they superiors on how the job should be done - to the great dismay of the latter. There were numerous cases of ex-soviet employees fired in the US for criticizing their management.
This is indicative of the fact the Soviets had high degree of workers' involvment in enterpise management.
If such an involvment failed to produce desired economic results - it's the problem of the socialist system in general, not of its implementation.

The obsession that mostly Americans have with this baldie needs to be studied.

verbal diarrhea

Very interesting

So many people don't actually bother to read the history of the Soviet Union. They just coast on what commentators have told them. We live in the future that educators have been warning us about for a century, in which so little history is known that the public is easy prey for propagandists. It's so depressing. Even purportedly educated people do this.

The irony is that Lenin was a critic of fascism ,and used it as a tool against his politician opponents while himself turned fascist in his style of governing" the fascist fighting fascism, what a joke! 'Absolute Power' corrupts Absolutely "

3/15/89