Why Anarchists Shouldn't be Surprised by the Chomsky-Epstein Association
Jeffrey Epstein was perhaps the most salient embodiment of what feminists refer to as "rape culture" in the last few decades. A billionaire who ran in the circles of the rich and powerful while sex-trafficking young girls and women, who received a sweetheart non-prosecution deal in the late 2000s from Alex Acosta which enabled him to continue his sexually abusive activities. The fact that he and his partner/co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell were ultimately brought down (leading to Epstein's own suicide) does basically nothing to erase the fact that this man's access to wealth and power undeniably enabled him to abuse women for years. Rape culture, is one where victims of sexual assault are typically societally blocked from obtaining justice and accountability related to their victimization, thus empowering sexual predators over those they prey on.
Even after Epstein's death the political establishment continues to protect those in his inner circle over his victims, redacting the names of the former, but not the latter from recently released DOJ documents. Rape culture is one of the most violent aspects of the inhumane capitalist world-system which we are all forced to live in, and which we Anarchists seek to bring down and replace with a genuinely humane social order. Many Anarchists thus must be shocked to see the most famous self-identified Anarchist in the world, Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky, having been recently outed for his personal relationship to Epstein. While there is no evidence linking Chomsky to Epstein's sex trafficking Island, Chomsky maintained a very warm relationship with Epstein from which Chomsky received expensive gifts for he and his wife as well as insider information on world politics and economics. He even wrote to Epstein defending him from public scrutiny for the latter's sexual misconduct as late as 2019, seemingly connecting what he saw as public abuse of Epstein's character to "hysteria" about the abuse of women around the time of the MeToo movement demanding accountability for powerful sexual predators.
It is my contention that genuine Anarchists should not be surprised by these developments. Chomsky has always been a celebrity academic with little connection to the Anarchist movement and little understanding of Anarchist principles. It is clear that as a liberal intellectual first and foremost Chomsky was mostly interested in a vision of society in which public political power made people accountable to collective interests while providing the civic space for personal freedom and individual rights. This is why his main approach to political activism in his later years consisted mainly in extolling the virtues of holding one's nose and voting for democrats. In this way he misread Anarchism as a variant of "classical liberalism" (what Chomsky refers to as classical liberalism is more 20th century moderate left technocratic liberalism) in which self-organization in industry and community would be deployed to hold power accountable to public concerns.
For Chomsky Anarchism was thus only to be defined as questioning social hierarchies and dismantling those which cannot meet their burden of justification. This is a definition of Anarchism so vague as to classify essentially any political philosophy from Plato's Republic to Hitler's Mein Kampf as "Anarchist". Everybody who thinks about politics questions social hierarchies and advocates getting rid of those that are found wanting by their particular set of philosophical standards. Anarchism is the only political ideology ever to advocate the immediate dissolution of all social hierarchies to be replaced by free and equal associations. There is no publicly accountable political power in Anarchism because Anarchism rejects the definition of human societies as spaces of exclusive political sovereignty. Instead, Anarchists seek the radical deterritorialization of politics in a global class struggle that remakes the entire human world in a way that eliminates all sovereign power.
It is for this reason that Anarchists reject any obligation for the politically involved to vote for this, or that political party/politician because it is precisely the point of Anarchism to divorce political engagement for social change from the mechanisms of centralized, territorial political power. This allows Anarchists to form a critique of liberal intellectuals such as Chomsky. Such intellectuals act as the center-left arm of technocratic politics in liberal democracies. While decrying the rich and powerful for engaging in corrupt practices that violate the public interest, such intellectuals reinforce the very notion of a "public interest", that is a territorial collectivity which by definition belongs to a centralized political power. It is this very notion of human beings as tied to the interests of centralized political power which then gives corrupt actors the influence and resources to violate the supposed public interest, making corruption an ineliminable systemic problem.
For an Anarchist, whose imperative is to resist technocratic centers of wealth and power, association with and defense of a billionaire pedophile is unthinkable. For the liberal intellectual, however, it is perfectly reasonable to maintain an association with a rich benefactor if you can justify it from the point of view of intellectual public service and dismiss the accusations against him as hysterical women crying abuse. The files reveal that Chomsky himself said he thought this way. Anarchists should avoid the idea that anyone who is really an Anarchist wouldn't engage in abusive actions more consistent with the society Anarchists are fighting against than Anarchism itself. Many of us can testify to instances of people who otherwise believed in Anarchist ideals, but who nevertheless were interpersonally abusive in one way, or another. However, Anarchists can be reasonably surprised when they find out that someone, they thought to be a dedicated Anarchist turned out to be abusive. They at least shouldn't be surprised when liberal intellectual elites who claim Anarchism with no connection to the movement and no real understanding of Anarchist ideas turn out to be in a close association with abusive elites.
Sources
Notes on Anarchism, Chomsky
An Eight Point Brief for LEV, Halle and Chomsky
Anarchism, Honeywell
Politics, Tansey and Jackson
McPolitics, Post-Comprehension
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFvEajDgEcA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA8eLHP7lsM
Sexual Consent, Popova
