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The Circle Broadens In his later teens, Chomsky's circle of influences broadened to include a number of compelling figures. Among them were Dwight and Nancy Macdonald, publishers, from 1944 to 1949, of the New York magazine Politics. Norman Epstein claims that Politics "had an enormous influence" on him and "most of my friends and, I daresay, also on Chomsky" (4 Feb. 1995). Chomsky did, in fact, read Politics in his late teens and found that "in some respects [it] answered to and developed" his interest in "anarchism, American involvement in the war and so forth" (qtd. in Whitfield 113). The chief contributors to the magazine were, with the exception of Paul Goodman, all immigrants: Andrea Caffi (Italian-Russian), Nicola Chiaromonte (Italian), Lewis Coser (German), Peter Gutman (Czech), Victor Serge (Belgian-Russian), Niccola Tucci (Italian), and George Woodcock (English, and eventually Canadian).

Dwight Macdonald, (biographical note)

In 1946, the magazine dropped its Marxist orientation "to whore after the strange gods of anarchism and pacifism," as Dwight Macdonald put it(Memoirs 27); and it managed to maintain its respectable but money-losing list of five thousand subscribers. Macdonald, who was also a libertarian critic, pamphleteer, and author, notes: While I was editing Politics I often felt isolated, comparing my few thousand readers with the millions and millions of nonreaders­ such is the power of the modern obsession with quantity, also of Marxism with its sentimentalization of "the masses." But . . . I have run across so many nostalgic old readers in so many unexpected quarters that I have the impression I'm better known for Politics than for my articles in The New Yorker, whose circulation is roughly seven times greater. This is curious but should not be surprising. A "little magazine" is often more intensively read (and circulated) than the big commercial magazines, being a more individual expression and so appealing with special force to other individuals of like minds. (27) Chomsky could perhaps be described as one of these "nostalgic old readers," for almost twenty years after its final issue he mentioned the magazine in a piece called "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" (1966), in which he discussed a series of articles published in Politics that deal with this subject.

Hiroshima: Was it necessary?

These articles, although written so many years earlier, had "lost none of their power or persuasiveness" for him, particularly one by Macdonald himself concerning the question of war guilt. In this piece, Macdonald tries to assess the extent to which the German or Japanese people were responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments, and then goes on to ask to what extent the American or British people were responsible for Allied atrocities such as the bombing of civilian targets, the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other war crimes. Chomsky writes: "To an undergraduate in 1945 ­ 46 ­ to anyone whose political and moral consciousness had been formed by the horrors of the 1930s, by the war in Ethiopia, the Russian purge, the `China incident,' the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi atrocities, the Western reaction to these events and, in part, complicity in them--these questions had particular significance and poignancy" (American Power 324). In his book about Macdonald, Stephen Whitfield points out "the resemblances between Macdonald's and Chomsky's criticism," and claims that "Chomsky sought to uphold the Politics tradition `that the policies of governments should be judged by their effects and not by the reasons advanced to justify them'" (114, 115). There was a certain cohesion to Chomsky's ever-widening milieu at this time; many of those individuals whose work had commanded his attention were bound together in a web of interrelations. Prime examples are Macdonald and George Orwell. In a letter to Philip Rahv, written on 9 December 1943, Orwell mentions that "Dwight Macdonald has written telling me he is starting another review [Politics] and asking me to contribute. I don't know to what extent he will be in competition with PR [Partisan Review]" (Collected Essays 3: 53). Then, in his "As I Please" column for the Tribune, Orwell declared: "One cannot buy magazines from abroad nowadays, but I recommend anyone who has a friend in New York to try and cadge a copy of Politics, the new monthly magazine, edited by the Marxist literary critic, Dwight Macdonald. I don't agree with the policy of this paper, which is anti-war (not from a pacifist angle), but I admire its combination of highbrow political analysis with intelligent literary criticism" (Collected Essays 1: 172). Orwell eventually contributed a number of articles to Politics, and Chomsky, as we have seen, admired the work that was published there.

Living Marxism online

Paul Mattick and Karl Korsch, who often combined their efforts for various causes, were also discovered by Chomsky during the late 1940s, as he entered his twenties. Chomsky knew Mattick personally, and declared him to be "too orthodox a Marxist for my taste"; nevertheless, it is essential that we understand what theorists such as Mattick and Korsch were saying about the events surrounding Chomsky's youth if we are to comprehend Chomsky's developing attitudes and beliefs (8 Aug. 1994). Mattick (1904 ­ 80) immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1926. He emerged from the Council Communist movement in Germany, and he eventually edited two journals, Living Marxism (with the collaboration of Korsch) and New Essays, that were important sources for the young Chomsky; another journal that Chomsky read in his late teens, International Council Correspondence, also benefited from his input. Sam Abramovitch, a source of much information about the period, remembers both Mattick and Korsch very well, and recalls that Living Marxism and New Essays "dealt with political issues, and the contributors were Marxists . . . of the non-Bolshevik variety. Some of the people from the Frankfurt School, when they were in the United States, also had contact with this group" (12 Feb. 1991). Mattick wrote a number of important texts concerning Marxism from a non-Bolshevik perspective, including a book called Anti-Bolshevik Communism, which described Marxist alternatives to the totalitarian Bolshevist rule, such as Council Communism (Gorter, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Pannekoek), the German labor movement (Otto Ru«hle), Revolutionary Marxism (Korsch), and so forth. The journals Mattick was involved with and others like them were vibrant with urgent political debate; their contributors were driven by an unflagging desire to conceive an alternative social order. They refused to glorify popular figures or compose apologies for contemporary political structures. In them, authors' names are not highlighted to ensure academic promotion (often only initials are used); there are no inflated bibliographies; there is a spirit of sobriety and a sense that strict attention is being paid to the facts at hand. A perusal of a single issue of Living Marxism provides insight into what Chomsky was reading in his teens; it is even possible to trace, in this magazine, some of the theoretical foundations for opinions that he would later come to hold. The fall 1941 issue featured "War and Revolution," by Karl Korsch; "Stages of Totalitarian Economy," by H. Bruggers; and a long article called "Two Men in a Boat ­ Not to Speak of the 8 Points" (beginning with an examination of the Churchill-Roosevelt Conference of 1941, and moving into long discussions of "Hitler as Peace Angel," "British Imperialism," "The End of Appeasement," "The Struggle for England," "The German-Russian War," "America-Germany-Japan," "German Europe," and "Hitler's `Secret weapon'"), by Mattick. Living Marxism routinely took contemporary issues (fascism, imperialism, war, Bolshevism) and reflected upon them within their historical, social, and philosophical contexts. So, even in 1941, in the midst of the war with Germany, Korsch was writing about the real issues at stake in this conflict: "The struggle for the new order of society does not take place on the battlefields of the capitalist war. The decisive action of the workers begins where the capitalist war ends" ("War and Revolution" 14). Bruggers, foreshadowing much of what Chomsky would later say about monopoly-capitalist practices, describes the dominant economic system as a "`corporate community' in which state and party officials share in property and managerial functions"; a "`Keynesian economy' in that the state is the greatest consumer and pyramid-building represents a considerable percentage of national output"; a "`war economy' in that problems of autarchy and of establishing new large-scale industries are resolved with the help of the state"; and "a capitalism based on `conditioning measures' in so far as its development and expansion, as well as the forms and symptoms under which the abstract laws of capitalist economy are allowed to become manifest, are determined by state intervention and the monopolistic agreements of corporations." If we substitute "Cold War" for "war" in Bruggers's second description, we may see how valuable articles such as this one were. And, indeed, they continue to be relevant, despite the huge shifts that have occurred since 1941. Looking at Bruggers's definition of "managerial capitalism," the totalitarian nature of the corporation past and present ­ as described in our time by Chomsky ­ becomes clear as the basis for a merger of political and economic power is laid out: "the totalitarian system as we know it today may also be called `managerial capitalism,' since the decisions dictated by technical and economic considerations are no longer hampered by the rights of ownership and title holders. Yet it should be emphasized--speaking of `managers' ­ that the true technical directors have nowhere acquired the disposing power of technocrats; the real power rests mainly with economic and business managers" (23). Mattick's Living Marxism article sums up the issues at stake in World War II in a way that once again anticipates many of Chomsky's views of contemporary international politics. Here, for the word "war," we could substitute "any war in which First World powers play a part," or even "any invasion undertaken by large powers": If all the other issues of this war are still clouded, it is perfectly clear that this war is a struggle between the great imperialist contestants for the biggest share of the yields of world production, and thus for the control over the greatest number of workers, the richest resources of raw material and the most important industries. Because so much of the world is already controlled by the small competitive power groups fighting for supreme rule, all controlled groups in all nations are drawn into the struggle. Since nobody dares to state the issues at stake, false arguments are invented to excite the population to murder. The powerlessness of the masses explains the power of current ideologies. (79)

Visit the Discussion Salon on anti-Boshevik marxismsm

Many other passages of Mattick's article bolster Chomsky's anti-Leninist, anti-Stalinist, anti-Bolshevik stance, and his more general belief that the revolution in Russia had simply led to the establishment of another autocracy, this one with lofty sentiments and totalitarian practices. Other options to that autocracy did, of course, exist ­ options that clashed with what the Bolsheviks wanted. Granting Soviet workers direct participation in the new system, eliminating private property, and eradicating privilege based upon class are all positive steps that could have been taken towards a "good society." Unfortunately, the ruling classes in the Soviet Union were far more interested in maintaining their own power than in forming a union of Soviets according to the principles just described. The Soviet Union was, and still is, falsely referred to and condemned as a communist or Marxist state by historians, journalists, and political scientists. It was, in fact, a Bolshevik state led by ironfisted totalitarian leaders and supported by a powerful and omnipresent army committed to upholding interests and power structures that would never have been permitted to exist in a truly communist state.