Sorry, I'm not satisfied with this excuse. It suggests that the American intelligence was a viable vehicle for the defeat of fascism. To the contrary, the US intelligence services saved leading fascists, recruited them and secured the surviving capitalist class against the obvious conclusion of their collaboration with the Nazis. Under the American occupation of West Germany, the OSS rebuilt the German labour movement and the SPD as tame, pro-capitalist and pro-western insitutions. That is the campaign that Marcuse was participating in. I don't see any occasion when it is justified to collaborate with the security services, not for Marcuse any more than for Orwell.
>
>and
>
>'My main task was to identify groups in Germany with which one could
>work towards reconstruction after the war; and to identify groups
>which were to be taken to task as nazis. There was a major
>de-Nazification programme at the time. Based on exact research,
>reports, newspaper reading and whatever, lists were made up of
>those Nazis who were supposed to assume responsibility for their
>activity. Later it was said that I was a CIA agent. Which is
>ridiculous, since the OSS wasn't even allowed near the CIA. They
>fought each other like enemies.'
>("Conversation with Habermas and Others: Theory & Politics," _Telos_
>38, pp. 130-131.)
The OSS was the FBI's foreign wing and pre-cursor to the CIA. Inter- service rivalry hardly adds up to an honourable position. Marcuse seems blithely unaware that the intelligence he was gathering was put in the hands of people who were not to be trusted with the process of 'denazification'. In their hands 'denazification' became a process of securing the German ruling class against the wrath of their victims, detaining only the most obvious scapegoats, and recruiting the nazi cadre to work for the CIA. And that was the purpoise to which any intelligence for American secret services had to be put.
>
>according to Henry Pachter, HM:
>
>'bombarded Secretary of War Stimson with plans for a post-war Germany
>that would give democratic socialism a chance...' (_The Legacy of the
>German Intellectuals_, p.36)
'Democratic socialism' is a euphemism here for reconstructing the discredited SPD, whose vacillations and pro-captialist policies had facilitated the victory of the Nazis in the first place.
>
>and H. Stuart Hughes wrote of HM:
>
>'it has seemed deliciously incongruous that at the end of the 1940s,
>with an official purge of real or suspected leftists in full swing,
>the State Deparment's leading authority on Central Europe should
>have been a revolutionary socialist who hated the cold war and all its
>works.' (The Sea Change, p. 175)
'Deliciously incongruous' is a phrase that masks scabbing in an aesthetic of irony. Surprisingly for an intellectual Hughes (who worked under Marcuse) makes a simple mistake. There was nothing incongruous about the recruitment of leftists by the establishment in the war years. (see for example Peter Hennesy's paper 'How Hitler Reformed Whitehall'). In Britain EP Thompson, Peter Nichols and Basil Davidson all worked for the British service (also called OSS) in the Balkans; George Orwell worked on the BBC's broadcasts to India; Marxists John Strachey and Stafford Cripps were brought into the govt.; Comintern member Rajani Palme Dutt was sent on speaking tours in India to counsel nationalists there too postpone demands for independence till after the war. In the US, people like James Rorty were recruited to the Voice of America broadcasts in the far east; other former Trotskyists like Clement Greenberg (who advised the CIA on their rather surprising policy of promoting abstract expressionism in Europe) were recruited and so on. Far from being 'deliciously incongruous', Marcuse's recruitment to the US secret service was dully predictable: Many left intellectuals were disoriented by the defeats of the working class movements in Europe and fell for the foolish choice of the 'lesser evil' - in this case the US as opposed to the German state. At the same time the expansion of US influence into Europe and the mollification of the remnants of the European labour movement made such left-wing tinsel an attractive wrapping for the domination of the 'Free West'.
>
>as for spiking Grossman's career, that may make HM a cad and heel
>in this instance, but hardly constitutes grounds for the other
>allegations made against him...Michael Hoover
I agree, but I think it is in keeping with the trajectory of the Frankfurters that as they gravitated towards the US state department, they supressed the explicitly Marxist elements in their thinking. Grossmann - lacking Adorno or Horkheimer's opportunism - was an obvious target, falling foul of their revisionism just as he was being attacked by the Stalinist for refusing to go along with Varga's revision of Marxism.
I should say that whatever Marcuse's political morality, I agree that his work is substantially superior to Horkheimer's and Adorno's. Indeed it is painful to read the recently published papers, since they clearly express a desire to account for the failures of the left in materialist terms. But in preferring Horkheimer's analysis to Grossmann's intellectually, just as he preferred the social vehicle of the US secret services to that of the working class, Marcuse fails.
-- Jim heartfield