Chomping Chomsky

 “Who Rules the World” by Noam Chomsky, 2016

This title might have you reflect on prior books that analyze the transnational capitalist class, the holdings of various private equity and banking firms, their world-spanning political and economic organizations, their military arms, even their hold on culture.  Books in that line have been written about the U.S. too.  But Chomsky doesn’t go there.  Here he engages in his consistent method of looking at history, current political events, journalistic malpractice and linguistic tricks to illustrate the U.S.’s long record of hypocrisy and military intervention.  While alluding to shadowy groups of wealthy people and bankrolling corporations, he keeps it almost purely on the political plane. 

This is a problem exhibited by certain anarchists and left-liberals who downgrade and ignore capitalist economics in their ‘hot takes.’  As if a military and journalistic establishment doesn’t have an economic base.  He does have a chapter on the sorry state of the domestic union movement, but this will remind you that everything in this book has been written about by dozens of others before and after 2016.  He has a chapter on the mis-directions of the top ruling-class paper, the New York Times, an investigation which has been done to death too. If this is all new to you, be my guest and buy the book.  For the rest of us?  

While the problem here might be the 'age' of the book, yes, it's view is basically inaccurate.  Chomsky implies that the U.S. ‘rules the world’ as a nation-state, even though he says that rule peaked after WWII, 71 years earlier, now 80 years ago. He doesn’t think the collapse of the USSR, the U.S.’s main class opponent, made any difference.  This might be because he identifies every state as ‘state-capitalist,’ including the USSR and China.  By identifying a ‘nation’ as the ruler, he hides the capitalist class ruling that nation. This is a common activist framing, but for a professor, it’s a bit short in the pants. Class is not his thing.

At the very end of the book Chomsky admits in a brief aside that while it is ‘conventional’ to view world politics through a national lens, the real ‘masters of mankind’ are the merchants and industrialists that control states. Yet his book remains exclusively focused on the conventional.   

What is horrifying about this collection of essays – which is the style Chomsky writes in now – is that every problem discussed in the book has only gotten worse since 2016.  Israel and Palestine, Gaza, Iran, nuclear confrontation, refugees, the Republican Party, evangelical Christianity, the weak Democrats, climate change and the military conflict with Russia were all here 9 years ago.  It ends with an afterward about the Trump election in 2016, framing it as the triumph of a Republican Party that is now a ‘radical insurgency’ not a regular party, and which threatens the future of mankind due to its position on global warming.  As if capitalist oil, plastics, retail, military, meat and now computer tech companies have nothing to do with their politics.   

The book catalogs – like many others do – the prior coups, assassinations, cover-ups and wars carried out by the U.S. for overt claims of ‘humanism,’ fighting terrorism or communism, for ‘freedom’ or just plain because the U.S. is the chosen nation, bringing the light of its archaic democracy to the world.  None of this nonsense is unfamiliar to leftist readers. It’s like a very large and verbose collection of predictable Facebook posts. What is Chomsky’s solution to his dire warnings? He mentions ‘opportunities for change,’ as “popular mobilization and activism, properly organized and conducted, can make a large difference.”  Chomsky has no program except the vaguest and most well-worn leftish cliché.

This book was on the NYT best-seller list when it appeared.  Capitalism is barely mentioned.  Economics is nearly always hidden.  It acts as if pointing out history and hypocrisy in an intellectual way will somehow sway society.  It’s like he’s a lawyer. His bit on the two groups of intellectuals – those who orient to social issues and those who serve in technical capacities – reveals that even the former, as he styles himself, have severe limitations.  As one of the most prominent ‘public’ intellectuals in the U.S. it is quite a disappointment.  He’s no J.P. Sartre or any number of ‘intellectual’ Marxists. Chomsky is a doorway to a more profound analysis, and just that.   

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Chomsky,” “Trump,” “NATO,” “nuclear,” “environment,” "Who Rules the World?"   

And I bought it at May Day Books, which carries other books by Chomsky.

Red Frog / August 19, 2025