To this Sidney Hook added:
Our conviction was that we were already in fact if not de jure, engaged in a defensive war with Communism - - the war was actually raging in Korea -- and our fears that its flames would spread and engulf Western Europe. We were in daily contact with a stream of refugee intellectuals, whose harrowing tales of persecution not only moved us deeply but gave us a sense of guilt. Yes, there was an element of deception in not making public what we knew or suspected [about the CIA funding -- AJ]. In war even more deplorable deceptions are accepted even by the most honorable. ( . . . ) Our conviction that in all likelihood we would soon be involved in a European war, triggered by the advance of the Red Army or an attempt by the Communist party in France or Italy to take power, accounted for the stilling of uneasiness about our funding.5
These memoirs, as I read them, describe a tragic Faustian Pact with Mephistopheles/"the West." They do not amount to "pipers" bought and paid for and "playing" CIA tunes.
"Cold War Rhetoric"?
ANOTHER TROUBLESOME ASPECT OF THE BOOK is that it coquettes, perhaps unwittingly, in places, with some mental reflexes and ways of thinking that sustained the old pro-Russian left and which still threaten the intellectual health of the left today.
Stalinism dissolved the left as an independent force not only by torture, murder and the Gulag but also by forcing on it mental reflexes which destroyed its capacity for independent thinking. Truth and justice were held at a distance, arrived at cautiously, instrumentally, once the consequences for your favored "camp" -- one state power or another -- had been worked out. Left- wingers schooled in this way became inveterate self-deceivers and pollutants of the culture of the left. Sartre's convoluted apologia for tyranny, which began this review, would be a case in point. The shameful response of much of the left to Solidarnosc would be another. Why did many socialists eulogize Pablo Neruda (composer of Ode to Stalin) but say nothing -- scared of being accused of "Cold War rhetoric" perhaps -- about Osip Mandelstam (the great poet who perished in the Gulag because he wrote a poem with the line "His cockroach whiskers leer/And his boot tops gleam")? Do not such "socialists" bear responsibility for Mandelstam's fate? And how many Osip Mandelstam's were there?
We have to broach these questions, painful as they are. We have to plumb the gists of what -- in our theory and practice, our ethics, our conception of socialism -- made such disastrous accommodation to totalitarian power possible. In the absence of our comprehensive democratic socialist account the gap is being filled by the "Red Genocide" framework of the 800 page Black Book on Communism produced by the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique in Paris, which traces an unbroken line of criminal continuity from Marx to Pol Pot.
A simplistic ex cathedra dismissal of those socialist and social-democratic intellectuals who "chose the West" in the 1940's and 1950's will prevent us critically reappropriating what remains valuable in their legacy. Elements of that legacy might yet contribute to clearing up the theoretical and normative confusion about what socialism is and has been. This confusion predated Stalinism and can be traced back to the fact that socialism has always meant two very different things -- the authoritarian imposition by an elite of a blueprint for a planned society, necessarily anti-democratic, illiberal and doomed to stagnation, and popular democratic control of society, "of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority": the two "souls of socialism." But Stalinism made that chronic historic confusion about the meaning of socialism into an acute, full-blown, near- fatal crisis. The majority of "socialists" throughout the world became exactly what the liberals said they were: authoritarians.
Our retrieval of liberty and democracy as constitutive of socialism -- a necessary condition for the future viability of socialism as a political project -- has a long way to go. It will not be helped by a mental reflex, which Saunders book might unwittingly strengthen: the fear of giving succor to "the" enemy that stops us speaking the truth. For example Saunders routinely labels as "Cold War rhetoric" the statement of Alfred Barr that "The modern artist's non-conformity and love of freedom cannot be tolerated within a monolithic tyranny and modern art is useless for the dictator's propaganda." But what Barr said was true. Another example of this mental reflex is Jason Epstein's view, invoked by Saunders, that, "Come Vietnam and . . . anti- Stalinism gets used to justify our own aggression. These people get into a real bind now. They're caught with their pants down: they have to defend Vietnam because they've toed the anti-Communist line." We have to realize just how disastrous this argument has been for the left. Its "logic" (which the example of Mary McCarthy, to mention only her, refutes) is that anti-Stalinism=anti- Communism=support for the Vietnam War. The argument relegates the left to the status of satellite, destined to revolve in the orbit of one state power or another.
Saunders book unwittingly chimes in with this mental reflex because its piper/tune framework suggests militant opposition to Russia was the antechamber to the CIA check- book and neo-conservatism. For example, Saunders tells us Malcolm Muggeridge's truthful account of the Soviet Union, Winter in Moscow (1933), "marked the beginning of his political transformation into an agent for MI6." Despite Saunders intentions, such statements might be read as saying that it was the very fact of his militant truth-telling about Russia which led him into the arms of MI6, the British spying organization. I think this matters, today, because the mental reflex itself is alive and well and as damaging as ever. How many failed to face the truth about murderous Serbian sub- imperialism, or to rouse opposition to it, because their overriding concern was to "give no comfort to NATO"? How many effectively became critical supporters of NATO, refusing to oppose the bombing of Serbia, because their overriding concern was to "give no comfort to Milosovic"?
This "campist" mentality is unwittingly indulged by Saunders. For instance she quotes approvingly the cold contempt of Deutscher for George Orwell ("a Freudian sublimation of persecution mania") while what we really need is a sober realization that Deutscher -- still near-universally eulogized on the left -- was a man who opposed all the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe and said "Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland and East Germany) found itself on the brink of bourgeois restoration at the end of the Stalin era; and only Soviet armed power (or its threat) stopped it there."
Another example is Saunders's treatment of the famous 1948 Russian backed and fellow- traveller-organized Waldorf Astoria "Peace Conference." A small ad hoc group, Americans for Intellectual Freedom, led by the still youngish Sidney Hook, disrupted the Waldorf conference by raising in session after session the question of Stalinist abuses of human rights, exposing the hypocrisy of the sponsors and the fellow- travellers who attended, and pointing out that the real purpose of the event was political warfare for the Soviet state. Yet Saunders seeks to enlist us, emotionally, to the side of the conference organizers and supporters such as Arthur Miller. She sneers at the Hook group and finds their behavior "appalling" for embarrassing the Russian visitors. The faux naïf words of Arthur Miller are passed on a good coin, "The conference was an effort to continue a good tradition." What good tradition can he mean? The power- worship of the intellectual? The selfish refusal to face disillusionment? Apologetics for "Uncle Joe"? One has such a choice.
When one considers the actual exchanges at the Waldorf conference it becomes odder and odder that sympathy should be extended to its organizers and contempt poured on those who tried to challenge them (I suspect Saunders is here following the lead of Garry Wills' dreadful introduction to Lillian Hellman's book, Scoundrel Time). A typical exchange went thus. An AIF supporter stands up at the panel on "Planning and Building" and proposes a resolution calling on Russia to rehabilitate eighteen architect- victims of the purges. The Chair dismisses this as unconstructive and moves on. A left that finds it hard to take sides when it looks back at this exchange does not deserve a 21st century future.
Anti-Stalinism Was Not Quixotic
SAUNDERS BOOK COULD THEREFORE BE READ AS DENYING the very possibility of an anti-Stalinism independent of the U.S. government's patronage or political orbit. Yet this "Third Camp" tradition did exist.6 Political warfare was waged against Stalinism in ways that gave no succor to Washington. Orwell in 1946 proposed a democratic international and a new "League for the Rights of Man" to defend human rights and intellectual freedom. There is the noble failure of the Europe-America Groups led by Dwight Macdonald. It can be found in the collaboration between the U.S. Workers Party -- which coined the slogan "Neither Washington Nor Moscow but the Third Camp of Independent Socialism" -- and French anti- Stalinists organized in the Rassemblement Democratique Revolutionnaire (RDR). It can be seen in the International Day Against Dictatorship and War, organized by David Rousset. Even in Berlin in 1950, at the launch of the CCF, there were still those who said political warfare meant first a fight for social justice, prosperity and, probably, European federation. These forces tended to think, with varying degrees of consistency and sophistication, in terms of a two-front fight by a Third Camp. It was the collapse of the EAG, the RDR, Politics and Horizon, and the marginalization of the revolutionary socialist Third Camp voice in Europe and America, which made it easier for the CIA to move in and yoke the non-Communist left "to Washington's version of political warfare against Moscow, transfer the operation to Paris, dump Lasky, bring in Josselson, and gradually increase the CIA influence."7
Yankee Doodles?
SAUNDERS CLAIMS THAT THERE WAS A "really deep connection between abstract expressionism and the cultural Cold War." Again, though the connection is undeniable, her too-small "piper/tune" framework is incapable of grasping the tragedy and pathos of the story.
The facts are well known. Despite a philistine assault on the abstract expressionists in the U.S. Congress, led by George Dondero, the CIA realized the potential of abstraction to be manipulated as a tool in the cultural Cold War as an embodiment of western freedom contrasted sharply against grey Stalinist conformity. Bypassing the U.S. Congress, the CIA worked with the Museum of Modern Art to promote the abstract expressionists, funding touring exhibitions in Europe. President Eisenhower himself, no fan of Still, Rothko, Newman or Pollock one suspects, endorsed MoMA, and its modern art program, as "a pillar of liberty."
According to Saunders it was for political -- not aesthetic -- reasons that abstract expressionism was promoted by MoMA. She reduces abstract expressionism to its Cold War context. She writes, of Jackson Pollock, "In his splurgy, random knot of lines which threaded their way across the canvas and over the edges, [Pollock] seemed to be engaged in the act of rediscovering America," and upholding "the Great American myth of the Lone Voice." Saunders finds "eerily prophetic" a yahoo-philistine attack on the abstract expressionists carried in the Stalinist magazine Masses and Mainstream in 1952 titled "Dollars, Doodles and Death." This is all in line with the "art criticism" of Serge Guilbaut, the author of How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (the anti-Americanism and Gallic nationalism of sections of the French left is beyond parody). This book crudely reduced abstract expressionism to a tool of U.S. foreign policy. (Of course, Guilbaut promoted the Stalinist socialist-realist tool Andre Fougeron, a true Zhdanovist who attacked Picasso for the lack of reverence in his portrait of Stalin.) Saunders' sneer at Pollock's "splurgy, random knot of lines" appears in a chapter titled "Yankee Doodles." She also passes on as a penetrating insight Ad Reinhardt's jibe that Pollock was just a "Harpers Bazaar bum," and implies abstract expressionism was a giant fraud played out on the public. We are told, via the voice of Jason Epstein, "this stuff is rubbish."
There are political, aesthetic and historiographical problems with all this. First, why is it so hard to admit that abstract expressionism was proof of the greater cultural freedom of "the West"? Take the year 1948. In Russia, Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural policeman, gathered together composers and critics and issued his cultural edicts and orders and banishments. In response, Shostakovitch, criticized for his Ninth Symphony, duly composed a piece in praise of Stalin's forestry plan as an apology.8 In the same year Clyfford Still painted 1948-D, Philip Guston The Tormentors, Barnett Newman, Onement 1, Robert Motherwell's magnificent Spanish Elegies series was underway, and Jackson Pollock painted his masterpiece Number 1A. It was a moment of remarkable human artistic power and creativity. That's what the CIA saw! That's why they could use it!
Saunders reduces all this to "random," "splurgy," "doodles" and CIA cash. We are, thankfully, spared the cliché, "a five year old could do it." The best antidote to anyone infected with this philistinism is to get him or her to spend five minutes in front of Pollock's masterpiece Lavender Mist. Those lines are not random. I suspect that lurking in Saunders account is a sheer disbelief that the USA (of all places!) could produce the greatest art movement of the mid-twentieth century.
The tragedy of abstract expressionism lay in the political impossibility of that aesthetic project at that historical moment, and here is the real parallel to the CCF intellectuals, I think. They were driven, said the late Peter Fuller -- listen to the echo of the Howe and Hook memoirs quoted earlier -- "by what they felt as the necessity of bearing witness to their experience of that terrible moment of history through which they lived." The real connections between the abstract expressionist artists and CCF intellectuals lie here, first, in the impulse to take a stand for individual personality and freedom in an age of tyranny and conformity, This impulse was absorbed into the "official" culture via the fatal embrace of state patronage, prestige, wealth and success. They failed to maintain their independence. Second, both were isolated from a social agency or a political project that consistently stood for freedom and was able to sustain a movement, artistic or intellectual, not dependent on one form or other of state patronage. Unable to see any alternative to a spiritually bankrupt consumer-capitalism and a totalitarian "socialism" both retreated: the artists to the "ancient" the "timeless" the "mythical" and the private cultivation of the "self," and to alcohol (not to the "rediscovery of America" as Saunders says), the intellectuals to a notion of "freedom," which shut its eyes to the un-freedom of corporate power, American imperialism and McCarthyism. Their respective Faustian pacts with Power -- theorized by Clement Greenberg for the abstract expressionists, for the CCF by Hook and others -- produced over time a descent into, respectively, "art officiel" and "house intellectual" and a decline into mere mannerism.
All this is rather more complicated than a piper playing a tune. In fact what David Anfam has said -- in irritated response to Guilbaut's notion that New York "stole" modern art and turned it into a weapon of the Cold War -- could stand as a criticism of Saunders notion that the CIA played the intellectual opposition to Stalinism like a Wurlitzer. Pointing out the "unrelenting narrowness" of Guilbaut's thesis Anfam asked "What might Marx himself have made of these foreclosed horizons whereon bad faith masquerades as acuity. Firstly, the art [or, here, the ideas of the CCF -- AJ] is turned into a cipher because it receives little serious attention. Once effaced, its features then mirror solely those of the original Cold War climate and its ambient political strategies."9
Brightlier, Build It Again
THIS REVIEW BEGAN WITH GOETHE'S Faust and his fateful pact with a demigod and there it can end. Phyllis Jacobson, writing in New Politics in 1976, reviewing Lillian Hellman's book about McCarthyism, Scoundrel Time, pointed out the baleful consequences for the left when it opts for one demigod or another:
Lillian Hellman has more in common with her reactionary anti-Stalinist enemies than she realizes. Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook and friends practice the kind of politics dear to Hellman's heart. Having opted for "the West" they are loud and clear in their defense of the victims of Stalinism with barely a word about those persecuted by U.S. imperialism and its client countries. They have not "come forward" to defend Smith Act or McCarthy victims. We hear nothing from them today about those persecuted by the CIA and the FBI. Lillian Hellman having chosen "Stalin Communism" never came forward to defend or support the victims of Stalinism. On the contrary, in her Stalinist zeal she attacked them. She defended and supported only the victims of Western imperialism. Both practiced the vulgar politics dictated by the notion that the enemies of my enemy are my friends. As camp followers they were mirror images of each other."10
Indeed. And one way to read Faust is as a morality tale about the importance of self- reliance and the dangers of putting faith in demigods. Goethe has a Chorus of Spirits observe Faust strike his pact with the Devil. They warn Faust: "Woe! Woe!/ Thou hast it destroyed/ The beautiful world/With powerful fist/ In ruin tis hurled/By the blow of a demigod shattered!" But then, in words I find relevant for the left today -- as we stand amid the rubble of the "workers states" but with the glorious green shoots of a global anti-capitalist movement poking up around our feet -- the Chorus of Spirits urges on Faust the possibility of an alternative based on self-reliance: "Brightlier/Build it again/In thine own bosom build it anew/ Bid the new career/ Commence, / With clearer sense/And the new songs of cheer/Be sung thereto!"
Notes
*Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders, London; Granta Books, 1999, 509 pp. return
Sweezy is quoted in Irving Howe, "Authoritarians of the Left," in his Steady Work. Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism, 1953-1966, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1966, p. 300. return
For an argument that "Sidney Hook's assault on civil liberties and academic freedom represented a force for McCarthyism, freed of the liabilities of McCarthy," and that "The American Congress for Cultural Freedom as a whole, along with most of its leading personalities were apologists for McCarthyism, some promoting it more aggressively than others," see Julius Jacobson, "Revising the History of Cold War Liberals," New Politics, (New Series) No. 28, 2000. return
Saunders' reductive treatment of the Congress is reinforced by a tendency to treat her CIA sources rather uncritically. Surely CIA operatives, when reporting to their superiors, have an interest in overstating their influence and control over "assets"? return
See David Caute, The Fellow Travellers, Quartet Books, London, 1977; Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims, Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1983; Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, Penguin, London, 1980 (1953). return
And it is not just a question of 1948. The brute fact is that when Sidney Hook called Christopher Lasch's 1969 essay on the Congress for Cultural Freedom "profoundly ignorant" about the realities of life inside the Soviet Union he was right. Such ignorance played a role in the sudden collapse of "French Marxism," in the late 1970's, one reading of The Gulag Archipelago washing much of it away overnight. return
Alan Johnson, "The Third Camp as History and a Living Legacy," New Politics (New Series) No. 27, 1999. return
See S. A. Longstaff, "Dwight Macdonald and the Anti-Stalinist Left," in New Politics (New Series), No. 18, 1995. return
Leszek Kolakowski, The Main Currents of Marxism Volume III: The Breakdown, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978, p.123. return
David Anfam, "Of War, Demons, and Negation," Art History, Vol. 16. No. 3., 1993, p. 480. return
Phyllis Jacobson, "A Time of Assorted Scoundrels," New Politics (First Series) Vol. XI, No. 4, 1976. p. 24. return
Contents of No. 31
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