At the beginning of the 1970s, Chomsky, now in his early forties, continued to lecture, receive honors, and hone his linguistic works. He published Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar in 1972; he received honorary D.H.L.'s from Loyola University in Chicago and Swarthmore College in 1970, Bard Herrnstein's work College in 1971, Delhi University in 1972, and the University of Massachusetts in 1973. He also debated Michel Foucault on Dutch television in 1971, and criticized Richard Herrnstein's work (the early version of The Bell Curve) in the journal Cognition. On the political side, he was increasingly active, giving the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lectures in Cambridge in 1971, which were published the same year as Problems of Knowledge and Freedom. At War with Asia appeared in 1970, and For Reasons of State in 1973 (published in two volumes in Britain, For Reasons of State and The Backroom Bays).

The focus of much of his political work during this period, aside from the relationship between the intellectual and the state, was the Vietnam War. (Given the support of the intellectual community and the so-called doves for this conflict, at least at the outset, these two issues were strongly related.) In tackling the enormous issues arising from the war, Chomsky always worked from the assumption that the specific actions of a capitalist imperialist government are but symptoms of the larger problem: working classes and marginalized groups are being oppressed by an ever-shrinking minority, so movements must be founded that encourage people "to develop their own consciousness and initiative to free themselves" (Abramovitch 3 Apr. 1995).

In some of his political writings from this period onward, when he comments on specific interventions, Chomsky engages in a form of muckraking. (Not all of his political works fall into this category, however; exceptions include his analyses of the role of the intellectual in society, his studies of the history and ideology of the left, and some of his historical writings, including those concerned with Cartesian thought, the Spanish Civil War, World War II in the Pacific, and the Arab-Jewish relationship.) Muckraking is spreading the dung around in an attempt to make it more evident. The practice actually became a kind of movement with a history. In his autobiography, Lincoln Steffens recalls that he was once told by a professor of history: "You were the first of the muckrakers. If you will tell now how you happened to start muckraking not only will you contribute to our knowledge of an important chapter of American history; you may throw light upon the rise and the run of social movements" (357). In fact, Steffens refutes the "original muckraker"label, claiming that "the prophets of the Old Testament were ahead of me, and - to make a big jump in time - so were the writers, editors, and reporters (including myself) of the 1890s who were finding fault with 'things as they are' in the pre-muckraking period"

(357).

Furthermore, Steffens claims that his contribution to history was but "a story, a confession of innocence"because "I did not intend to be a muckraker; I did not know that I was one till President Roosevelt picked the name out of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and pinned it on us; and even then he said that he did not mean me" (357). Chomsky, as well, rejects the label (as he does virtually all labels), because it is used to undermine those who speak out against the powers that be: "We don¹t call critical discussion of the Soviet Union 'muckraking.' The term, with its connotations of gossip and unseriousness, serves as one of the many devices used by Western power to protect itself from scrutiny, in my opinion" (30 May 1994). Distancing himself even further, he writes:

"There is another activity - political analysis, diplomatic history, social and intellectual history, etc. - which is sometimes called 'muckraking' if it departs from the doctrine and the style that is used by professionals to make simple things look obscure and profound. But it's not a terminology I favor. . . and [I] do virtually nothing of that sort" (8 Aug. 1994). And Edward S. Herman responds to the suggestion that Chomsky's work has a muckraking element with words of caution:

(I) n dealing with Noam Chomsky as a muckraker, I would urge giving weight to the scholarly component, intellectual power, and originality of much of his political writing. Time and again he has taken up a subject like the Cold War, Haiti, the Central American peace process, East Timor, and even western colonialism (chapter 1 of Year 501) and produced original materials, laid out with remarkable exhaustiveness, in a compelling frame that is very convincing. His dredging up the 1954 and 1965 documents on U.S. policy in Central America (see his Managua Lectures) is a case in point; his sections in Necessary Illusions on "Demolishing the Accords," and "On Critical Balance," are devastating. He has to be ignored because he can't be handled by honest debate. (2 Aug.1994)

But what concerns Chomsky first and foremost is the danger of losing sight of what is truly important in a given situation. If, for example, one criticizes the individual decisions of a particular government administration, one implies that some decisions are better than others within the existing framework of that administration, and therefore tacitly endorses it. The goal should be to test the ideological soundness of the framework, to free oneself from its limitations and constraints. There is an echo here of the hard-science-versus-social-science debate:

political analysis is situated in the realm of the obvious; virtually anybody who stops watching television, paying attention to sporting events, or playing the stock market, and concentrates, instead, on the society in which he or she lives, could, in Chomsky's view, effect an appropriate political critique. He writes: "Intellectuals try to make it look difficult; postmodernism carries this to extremes, in my opinion. But outside the hard sciences and mathematics, there really isn't a lot that is beyond the reach of people without special training" (8 Aug. 1994).

Chomsky's disdain for those who practice this type of obfuscation, who divert public attention from what is essential, is often palpable:

(Theodore) Draper's work on Iran-contra (A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs (1991)] is, to answer your question, a good example of "muckraking," highly respected although it scrupulously ignores everything important - such as the fact that the sale of U.S. arms to Iran via Israel with Saudi Arabian funding began in the early 1980s, when there were no hostages, and the reasons were clearly and explicitly explained by high Israeli officials and fit precisely within standard operating procedure for overthrowing civilian governments; and that the illegal funding of the contras was well known as well, but suppressed until the shooting down of the Hasenfus plane made suppression impossible.

[Such an approach is] standard, and entirely understandable in a corrupt intelectual culture. (31 Mar. 1995)

To go beyond political critique, to go beyond muckraking, one must have an understanding of the mechanisms - economic, psychological, legal, sociological - that limit our ability to comprehend, or act in favor of, a left-libertarian society. From the standpoint of adherents to radical critique, these mechanisms are extremely complex and require a general analysis of the conditions (sociopolitical, for example) that promote certain kinds of behavior, rather than the details of particular events. Chomsky, however, does not pretend that such deeper analysis is, at present, possible. He applies himself to exposing the events that he considers to be not very well understood, or else distorted by (for example) the media. As Abramovitch has remarked:

I always enjoy reading stuff by these muckrakers; one of the best recent examples is I. F. Stone, and the things that he discovered about the Vietnam War are really mind-boggling. Not that anybody should be surprised that governments are capable of doing these things; it is always interesting to read about them and to have these events exposed. That is something that Chomsky does very well in terms of American society. But that is only one aspect. The other aspect is trying to understand more fully, if one can, how society functions; more specifically, what kinds of crises will society undergo? Will society be able to circumvent complete breakdowns of their structures? Until now they have been able to survive; many radicals predicted for so long that "the end has arrived," and tomorrow morning a new society will emerge. That does not seem to happen. This suggests that society has a way of temporarily resolving some of its problems so that it can maintain its momentum or its existence or its structure. It would be interesting to try to discover whether this is a nonending type of process. (12 Feb. 1991)

In Chomsky's opinion, there are no theories that can address such issues: "I'm not aware of the existence of any theories, in any serious sense of the term, that yield insight in the analysis case, including work on the nature of totalitarianism, internal filtering, and all the rest." This, of course, separates him from theoreticians with whom he would otherwise be sympathetic, in terms of their interests, such as Erich Fromm or Herbert Marcuse. In fact, he continues, this kind of work "seems to me pretty obvious, and frankly, I get irritated when intellectuals dress it up as something more than that. Furthermore, I think we can give an analysis of that as well: that's the way you become a respected public intellectual, who can preen before others of the same type. But if there is anything that can't be told to high school students in monosyllables, I haven't yet heard it" (18 May 1995).

This all raises a perhaps unresolvable distinction. One could claim that Chomsky's political efforts, initiated in the late 1960s and clearly on course by the early

1970s, are designed to alert the population to crucial events about which they know very little because they have been successfully diverted by highly organized propaganda campaigns and numerous other consciously, and sometimes unconsciously, employed tactics. Or, alternatively, one could claim that Chomsky's political work is built upon particular precepts that are explained with regard to individual issues (Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East), but that it implicitly poses, without fully answering, questions such as: Why we are at this point in our political history? How is change possible in the face of such powerful impediments? What steps can we take to free ourselves from manifestly oppressive structures?
 
 

Chomsky will not tell us how to act. We are faced with the problems of determining what is appropriate action at a particular historical juncture and deciding what kind of work should be undertaken in order to encourage the creative possibilities inherent in all human beings: these problems may prove to have the saine solution. Ken Coates suggests, in a 1973 pamphlet entitled "Socialists and the Labour Party," that neither complex political philosophy nor accessible, straightforward prose is the Lanour Party' sufficient; what workers must do in order to Ken Coates, take control of their lives is to work in 1973 both areas. Beginning with the argument that workers can learn from particular movements (the revolutions in China or Russia are good examples, but his list does contain a few dubious choices) and that workers require an international leadership and perspective, Coates goes on to claim that workers also need both a philosophical and a practical point of entry into debates concerning their own interests:

It is obviously implied in all this that we need to study Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Luk~cs, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao and many other great figures in the history of socialist thought: but it is equally implied that we need to think for ourselves, and that this is a most difficult task to perform in the manner required to help ordinary workpeople in their struggles, if we remain artificially disengaged from all the major problems which confront the working-class movement, as it is constituted at present, in the organizations which it has evolved in the attempt to meet those problems. (7)

Where the emphasis should lie, and what relation exists between "socialist thought" and efforts to encourage workers to think for themselves is unclear, but Coates does offer a context in which to negotiate the seemingly insurmountable distance between, say, Che Guevara and Theodor Adorno.