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The epstein thing is not what makes chomsky wrong about lenin, but it does explain why [kkf…

Egor Kotkin · · ·10 min read
Commentary by Hex Index staff

The Chomsky Contradiction

Egor Kotkin's essay cuts through decades of leftist debate with a sharp claim: Noam Chomsky's criticism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks reveals not just intellectual error, but selective blindness tied to power and patronage. The Epstein files didn't change Chomsky's politics—they exposed why his materialist analysis worked for Hamas and failed for Moscow.

What Chomsky Said About Lenin

Kotkin begins with Chomsky's position on the Bolsheviks, a statement that has haunted leftist circles for years. "Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement," Chomsky asserted, framing the Soviet project as fundamentally corrupted from its origins.

The epstein thing is not what makes chomsky wrong about lenin, but it does explain why [kkf…

Kotkin argues this judgment violates basic historicism. Egor Kotkin writes, "to say that Lenin, the Bolshevik Party, and the USSR ultimately turned out to be a right-wing version of Marxist socialism is correct." But the crucial word is "ultimately"—the Soviet regime moved rightward through historical pressure, not because it began there.

As Egor Kotkin puts it, "Stalin's reactionary turn in the 1930s was undoubtedly a fascistization of the regime, caused by the struggle for survival against literal fascism." The Bolsheviks faced civil war, foreign intervention, and a revolutionary working class in the West that never arrived. Survival required choices that contradicted founding principles.

One can't play football if one team comes onto the field with balls and the other with swords.

Kotkin's metaphor is blunt. An isolated socialist experiment, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers, cannot maintain pure ideology while fighting for existence. The need to defend oneself according to the rules of the old world makes building something new within that framework impossible.

The Epstein Connection

Here Kotkin turns sharper. The Epstein files revealed Chomsky's private relationships with wealthy elites—relationships that, Kotkin suggests, shaped which historical subjects received honest materialist analysis and which received selective condemnation.

Egor Kotkin writes, "none of them moonlighted as advisors to pedophile grand dukes or held a candle to aristocrats hunting ballerinas." The contrast is intentional: Bolshevik leaders faced existential threats without elite patronage; Chomsky enjoyed comfort while judging them.

The selective blindness becomes clear when comparing Chomsky's treatment of different movements. As Egor Kotkin notes, "The difference is that Hamas is far from being in power and threatening the Western world order." Chomsky could exercise full Marxist analysis on movements that didn't threaten his benefactors. The USSR was too real, too powerful, too close to Western elite interests for equally honest treatment.

Egor Kotkin writes, "The way Noam Chomsky was exposed in the Epstein files says something not only about Chomsky himself, but also holds a mirror up to the Western left, reflecting the limits of their advocacy they have chosen since being on the same side of the Cold War fronts and still with the largest capitalists, investors and beneficiaries of the Western-led world order to this day."

The False Schism

Kotkin's broader aim is reconciliation within leftist politics. He argues the tankie-versus-democratic-socialist divide dissolves under dialectical examination. Lenin's project was theoretically as democratic as Bernie Sanders' or Zohran Mamdani's. Bolshevik Russia after the revolution was as progressive as modern liberals dream—on cultural issues, queer rights, social liberalism.

Egor Kotkin writes, "there is no 'right' or 'wrong' socialism. Socialism is a universal project that unites all of humanity, and there is no 'someone else's' responsibility for a flawed socialism." The failure wasn't ideological purity—it was attempting world revolution alone against the most developed capitalist powers.

Critics might note that Kotkin's dialectical defense of Bolshevik trajectory risks excusing choices that were genuinely ideological, not just circumstantial. The repression, the centralization, the murder of original Bolsheviks—these weren't only external pressures. They were political decisions with alternatives available.

Critics might also observe that the Epstein-Chomsky connection, while suggestive, doesn't fully explain Chomsky's intellectual positions. Chomsky criticized the USSR long before Epstein files existed. The patronage theory is compelling but incomplete.

Bottom Line

Kotkin's essay forces a uncomfortable question: why did Chomsky's materialist analysis work for some movements and fail for others? The Epstein files suggest patronage shaped judgment. The dialectical defense of Bolsheviks demands historical honesty about pressure and survival. But the call to bury leftist schisms requires accepting that socialism's failures were collective, not someone else's responsibility. Verdict: provocative, partially persuasive, and necessary for leftist politics to move forward.

Sources

The epstein thing is not what makes chomsky wrong about lenin, but it does explain why [kkf…

by Egor Kotkin · · Read full article

Guest essay from Egor Kotkin. Support Egor’s work on Substack and Patreon. Follow him on UpScrolled, Twitter and YouTube.

The way Noam Chomsky was exposed in the Epstein files says something not only about Chomsky himself, but also holds a mirror up to the Western left, reflecting the limits of their advocacy they have chosen since being on the same side of the Cold War fronts and still with the largest capitalists, investors and beneficiaries of the Western-led world order to this day.

Noam Chomsky’s position on the Bolsheviks and the USSR: “Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement,” has long haunted me.

I don’t think the question of whether Chomsky is ideologically right or wrong is long settled: of course not. But this was not the case for the first couple of years; for me, in my personal political evolution, the question he posed was of fundamental importance. His critique seemed valid, and I kept it in mind until I’d formed my own and understood where Chomsky was wrong and what the catch was that made his argument dishonest. Below, I will explain how Chomsky’s assertion, judging participants in historical processes based on the outcomes of historical processes, violates the basic rules of historicism and logic, and why, in my view, he was deliberately dishonest.

As is often the case with the most dangerous lies, Chomsky’s accusation is half true and half false. The true half: to say that Lenin, the Bolshevik Party, and the USSR ultimately turned out to be a right-wing version of Marxist socialism is correct. But the way I have formulated it (“ultimately turned out to be”) includes and takes into account the implication of historical process, dynamics; it implies a contradiction with the starting position (Lenin and the Bolshevik Party *became* a right-wing, more reactionary version of socialism *in the course of* the historical process), making a referral to the dialectical nature of the historical process.

I regularly and relentlessly argue with those who claim that Stalin’s USSR was a fascist regime. False equivocation of socialism/communism even in their worst historical shape with fascism/nazism was and remains a fascist self-report.

But I would not argue with the assertion that Stalin’s USSR had some directionally fascist tendencies, i.e. developed an unfortunate (and ultimately self-defeating) right-wing bias in its cultural and, in part, national policies, most notably. Because, in such a formulation, there is ...