No Outside Position: The Deconstruction of Chomsky’s Revolutionary Subject
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| MIT Great Dome. AI image |
The 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault is often remembered for its confrontation between rationalism and historical critique. Yet some of its most philosophically suggestive moments occur not during the exchange between the two thinkers, but in the questions posed by the audience. One such intervention, concerning Chomsky’s employment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, exposes a tension that unsettles the very framework through which he imagines political transformation.
Chomsky repeatedly grounds the prospect of social change in those engaged in what he calls the “productive work of society.” At first glance, this formulation appears to sustain a familiar distinction between creative labour and the managerial structures that organize exploitation. A closer reading, however, suggests that the opposition cannot remain intact once the institutional location of the revolutionary intellectual itself comes into view.
Rather than refuting Chomsky’s position, this moment reveals a deeper structure: political agency emerges not outside relations of power, but within the very institutions it seeks to contest.
Productive Labour as the Site of Political Agency
When asked which groups might conduct a future revolution, Chomsky responds by shifting away from the classical Marxist vocabulary of the proletariat toward a broader category:
“the revolution… will have to be conducted by certain categories of human beings, and those will be… the human beings who really are involved in the productive work of society.”
This group spans manual labourers, engineers, scientists, professionals, and many service workers. What binds them is not class identity in the nineteenth-century sense, but participation in the material and intellectual reproduction of social life.
Opposed to this sphere are those engaged in “the management of exploitation,” the manufacture of artificial consumption, and the development of mechanisms of destruction. The distinction is not merely descriptive; it performs an ethical function. Without some boundary separating emancipatory activity from oppressive coordination, the idea of directed political change would lose coherence.
The binary therefore stabilizes responsibility. It identifies agents capable of reorganizing the conditions of work while preserving the intuition that domination is neither accidental nor anonymous.
Why the Distinction Matters
Chomsky’s political thought depends on the possibility that individuals involved in meaningful production retain a degree of autonomy from centralized power. His emphasis on creativity — the human impulse to build, explore, and inquire — reinforces this expectation. Social transformation becomes imaginable because the capacities required for it are already present within everyday practices of labour.
At this stage, the opposition appears both intelligible and normatively necessary. Yet the debate takes an unexpected turn when a participant raises a pointed question:
“how can you, with your very courageous attitude towards the war in Vietnam, survive in an institution like MIT, which is known… as one of the great war contractors and intellectual makers of this war?”
The inquiry does more than challenge personal consistency. It relocates the distinction between creativity and domination inside the figure of the revolutionary intellectual.
The Moment of Coexistence
Chomsky’s reply is striking for its refusal of schematic judgment:
“Now these things coexist. It’s not that simple, it’s not just all bad or all good.”
MIT is indeed a center of military research. Yet it also embodies libertarian commitments to academic freedom and individual rights. The institution capable of producing weapons is simultaneously willing to tolerate, even encourage, dissent.
The implication is difficult to ignore: the space from which critique is articulated is structurally entangled with the order it opposes. The boundary separating productive agency from oppressive management can no longer be drawn along institutional lines.
What emerges is not a reversal of the original distinction but its complication. Oppression and emancipation are not distributed across separate domains; they inhabit the same organizational forms.
Using the Resources of What One Resists
Chomsky reinforces this insight through an unexpected comparison. Critics who urge radicals to dissociate from compromised institutions, he suggests, would have had to conclude that Marx should not have worked in the British Museum — itself a repository of imperial extraction. Marx was right, Chomsky argues, to employ:
“the resources and in fact the liberal values of the civilisation that he was trying to overcome, against it.”
Political critique thus appears less as an external assault than as an immanent practice. It depends upon the intellectual freedoms, infrastructures, and traditions generated within the very societies it challenges.
The revolutionary subject is therefore neither pure nor fully separable from structures of power. Its efficacy presupposes a form of implication.
No Exterior Position
Seen from this angle, the earlier distinction between productive workers and agents of domination acquires a different texture. Intellectual labour can align itself with technocratic control, yet it can also participate in collective resistance. The deciding factor is not location but identification, whether one acts as a social manager or as part of the workforce.
Such instability does not invalidate the normative aspiration guiding Chomsky’s argument. Rather, it reveals that political life unfolds within mixed institutional terrains where freedom and coercion intersect. The desire for a position uncontaminated by power proves untenable.
This does not signal resignation. On the contrary, it shifts the meaning of responsibility. Action must proceed without the reassurance of exteriority.
Conclusion
The MIT exchange exposes a structural feature often obscured by binary political language: transformation begins from within the arrangements it seeks to alter. The revolutionary intellectual is neither outside the institution nor reducible to it, but situated in a field where critique and complicity remain inseparable.
What the debate ultimately suggests is less the collapse of Chomsky’s framework than its deepening. If oppression and liberty coexist within the same structures, then the task of political thought is not to locate a space beyond power, but to negotiate the tensions that make resistance possible in the first place.
The question is no longer who stands outside the system. It is how one inhabits it.
References
Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (1971). Human nature: Justice versus power. In F. Elders (Ed.), Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind. Amsterdam: Souvenir Press.
Derrida, J. (1978). Cogito and the history of madness. In Writing and Difference (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (2006). History of madness (J. Khalfa, Trans.). Routledge.
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