While not wanting to disagree with Michael on the precise facts, some of his distinctions seem a bit fine to me. The OSS was forerunner of the CIA. The 'anti-fascist' work of the former and the anti-Communist work of the latter are not quite such polar opposites. In both cases the OSS/CIA was the intelligence wing of US imperialism. Under the guise of fighting Fascism, Marcuse was writing intelligence manuals about how America's military occupation of Europe should be handled (one of which is reproduced in the Keller edited collected papers).
Now, of course it is entirely fair to say that many good people were swept up in the 'People's War' to work for the secret services. George Orwell worked for the BBC, and moved closer to the Secret Services (eventually handing over a list of Reds not to be trusted), Communist Rajani Palme Dutt toured India on behalf of the Colonial Office telling Indians not to press for independence during the war, historian Basil Davidson worked for the British OSS in the Balkans, historian Asa Briggs worked in the British code breaking service at Bletchley Park. Many more lent their services to the ordinary army. The point, though, is that the war was a period when the left's support for the war effort bound many of them close to security forces that they should not have trusted. After all, while all this noble anti-fascist work was going on, American and British imperialism were re-structuring the colonial domination of much of the third world.
>
>Marcuse's post-WW2 work was in Central European Branch of Office of
>Intelligence Research of US State Dept. He can be criticized for
>thinking that he could have some impact in preventing the Cold War
>pull of US foreign policy and for remaining in job until 1951. He
>wrote about isolation and unhappiness of this period in _Revolution
>or Reform?_.
Yes, I think he can be criticised. But personal rectitude is hardly the issue. What is staggering is that this considerable intellect should become so utterly naive when it came to US foreign policy, imagining that it could be redirected in a positive way. His dramatic leftism in the sixties is difficult to square with Marcuse's identification of the progressive role of US tanks.
>HM answered those who used his US intelligence service to taint him as a
>CIA agent:
>'If critics reproach me for that, it only shows the complete ignorance
>of these people, who seem to have forgotten that the war then was a
>war against fascism, and that, consequently, I haven't the slightest
>reason for being ashamed of having assisted in it.' (_Revolution or
>Reform?_, p. 59)
Yes, well, here's the problem. the war was a war against fascism? Then how was it that the British and America forces disarmed the Greek partisans and reinstalled a fascist regime there? The allies deliberately withheld from the European theatre until Hitler had completed the job of destroying the partisan movements in Italy and elsewhere. It was only when Russia threatened to defeat Germany that America and Britain joined in the war. Their role was to save German capitalism from the Soviet Troops. The form of the conflict was a war against fascism, but in substance, the war effort that Marcuse signed up for was one of saving imperialist rule in Europe, now under US tutelage.
>
>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.)
With the benefit of hindsight we can now see how the de-nazification programme fared. The allied occupation achieved the following results: It narrowed political responsibility to Nazi figureheads, while saving the core of the regime - its capitalist and administrative class - from retribution by the German people. Furthermore, under the pernicious doctrine of 'collective guilt' attempts by German workers to establish soviets in Berlin were broken up, and all attempts at creating popular organisations were frustrated (in the Collected Papers, Marcuse formulates a modified version of the 'Collective Guilt' thesis which became the ideology of the West German elite throughout the post-war reconstruction). The American Secret Services acted along with the AF of L to restructure the German trade union movement as a Cold War institution as too was the SPD reorganised, stripped of its Marxist politics. And finally Marcuse's colleagues in the Frankfurt school were re-exported to Frankfurt nicely re-modelled with the ideology of Cold War liberalism.
As Kellner says 'Marcuse and his colleagues consistently argued that German Trade Unions were an important part of democratisation and should be supported by the allied forces'. The real meaning of that, of course, was that the allies restructured the unions as an instrument of Cold War politics and the division of Germany. Marcuse writes in his precis report 'Status and Prospects of German Trade Unions and Works Councils' (27 May 1946) that he was looking at the 'prospects of the German labour movement in relation to US policy and to the international scene' and that 'economic and socio-psychological analysis was used in order to determine the tendencies prevalent in the German labour movement'. 'The Study was to contribute to the discussion of possible changes in US policy towards organized labor.' (Collected papers, pp196-7). The outcome of these discussions was that the allies crushed the spontaneous formation of workers councils in Berlin and reinvented the Trade Unions as an arm of the West German government and Nato.
This was the regime that Marcuse assisted in the construction of. The fact that he later endorsed the revolt against the system is in part to his credit, but he avoided the obvious fact that when German students denounced the state as a cross between American imperialism and its closet fascist allies, Marcuse was amongst the architects of that system.
As I see it, Marcuse exaggerates the differences between the OSS and the CIA. Kellner writes that the OSS was a forerunner of the CIA in the introduction.
>
>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)
This was little more than a debate over how military intelligence would present the restructuring of West German society by American imperialism. Most of us Europeans understand the meaning of the euphemism 'democratic socialism', common among the Encounter crowd in the Cold War years. It is code for 'anything but the Soviets'.
>
>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 one way of putting it. Deeply hypocritical is another. After all, Marcuse was hardly unique in selling his soul to the devil.
>
>Marcuse told Habermas that he did not have the impression that what he
>did was of any consequence (which could give reason to criticize his
>remaining for the time that he did), saying:
>'Those whom we had listed first as "economic war criminals" were very
>quickly back in the decisive positions of responsibility in the German
>economy.' (Telos interview cited previously)
This is putting it mildly. It was not that Marcuse failed to move the military occupation to a positive end. Rather it was that he succeeded in giving US intelligence a fully rounded understanding of how they could save German capitalism. The fact that the agent didn't agree with all of the policies that flowed from his intelligence work does not detract from the fact that he made it possible. -- Jim heartfield