In a widely read essay for the
Los Angeles Review of Books entitled “The
CIA reads French theory: on the intellectual labor of dismantling the cultural
left” (February 27, 2017), Gabriel Rockhill spins an intriguing yarn about
the CIA and their interest in keeping abreast of French political theory
throughout the Cold War. “According to the spy agency itself,” Rockhill
observed, “post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s
cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting
anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism…” Here the professor was making particular
reference to a recently declassified CIA report, authored in 1985, that focuses
on the intellectual milieu around Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques
Lacan.
Abundant evidence of course
exists of the CIA’s complex cultural interventions into French intellectual
affairs — but it is critical to recognise that it was the political
shortcomings of communist organizations themselves (i.e., Stalinists) that had
the determinant impact on the obscurantist trajectory of left-wing academic
ideas. The CIA’s own determined cold warriors were well aware of these problems
on the Left, and hence these are exactly the arguments they put forth in 1985
within their then internal document “France:
Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals.” This “research report” — referred
to within Gabriel Rockhill’s essay — is clear, the CIA sought to examine the
changing attitudes of French intellectuals so as to “gauge the probable
political impact on the political environment in which policy is made.” So
considering the intriguing theoretical focus of this report it is worth
dwelling upon some of the arguments presented therein, if only as a starting
point for exploring the failures of the most influential parts of the French
Left in the aftermath of World War II.
Certainly bearing in mind the
ferocity with which the CIA waged the intellectual war against the Left — with
the aid of assorted liberal elites (Foundations
of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the
Rise of American Power) — it is notable that the imperialist logistics of
this battle remain largely overlooked within the CIA’s own report. Leaving
aside this significant oversight, the anonymous CIA author does at least
emphasize that it was the repeated disillusionment of the working-class with the
French Communist Party (PCF) that undermined the popularity of Communist and
socialist ideologies. Indeed, time and time again the French working-class
sought out political ideas on the Left to help them in the critical task of
democratizing society, but all too often they were betrayed by Communist
intellectuals who ultimately had no faith in the working-class to change
society for themselves.
The CIA report thus touches
briefly upon the betrayal of the socialist Mitterrand government in the 1980s,
and Mitterrand’s backtracking from his party’s progressive economic policies
and “adopt[ion of] austerity measures that drew embarrassing criticism from
both the left and the right…” The intelligence author writes: “the dose of
austerity that these policies eventually forced rang the death knell of leftist
ideology for many informed observers.” This fatal reversal served to compound
the destructive and more “traumatic events of May 1968” which were
characterised by the PCF’s betrayal of a genuinely revolution movement of
working-class solidarity (yet again). Thus the CIA report accurately surmised:
“In May-June 1968, after
months of intensifying
protests, students threw up barricades in the university section of Paris
and initiated a period of guerrilla warfare in the streets of the Latin
Quarter. The protest spread to other university cities; students were joined by
7 million striking workers (who
occupied the factories); transportation and public services ground to a
halt; and the 10-year-old government of General de Gaulle tottered. Marxist
students looked to the Communist Party for leadership and declaration of a
provisional government, but PCF leaders were already trying to restrain worker
revolt and denounced the student radicals as woolly-minded anarchists. Many
students concluded that the PCF had made a deal with de Gaulle, who eventually
put down the riots.”
In the wake of the PCF’s
abandonment of the revolutionary uprising of May 1968, and the failure to
overthrow capitalism, it is rather unsurprising that conservative forces of
reaction would seize this opportunity to intensify their challenge to Marxism.
On this score, the CIA report refers to the success of the “New Philosophers,”
whose anti-Stalinist and anti-Marxist ideas were widely championed in the
mainstream media (throughout the 1970s) with the aid of Bernard-Henri
Levy’s highly influential Grasset publishing house. The CIA author then
describes how these New Philosophers had become disillusioned with the Left,
observing how “the traditional leftist parties’ pusillanimity during the
student revolt of 1968 tore the scales from their eyes, causing them to reject
their allegiance to the Communist Party, French socialism, and even the
essential tenets of Marxism.”
The report’s author goes on to
explain how “Raymond Aron, the revered dean of contemporary conservative
thought in France,” had worked long years in his efforts to discredit “the
intellectual edifice of French Marxism.” But importantly the report
acknowledges: “Even more effective in undermining Marxism, however, were those
intellectuals who set out as true believers to apply Marxist theory in the
social sciences but ended up rethinking and rejecting the entire tradition.” On
this score, the CIA analyst suggests:
“Among postwar French
historians, the influential school of thought associated with Marc Bloch,
Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel has overwhelmed the traditional Marxist
historians. The Annales school, as it is known from its principal journal,
turned French historical scholarship on its head in the 1950s and 1960s,
primarily by challenging and later rejecting the hitherto dominant Marxist
theories of historical progress. Although many of its exponents maintain that
they are ‘in the Marxist tradition,’ they mean only that they use Marxism as a
critical point of departure for trying to discover the actual patterns of
social history. For the most part, they have concluded that Marxist notions of
the structure of the past – of social relationships, of patterns of events, and
of their influence in the long term – are simplistic and invalid.
“In the field of anthropology,
the influential structuralist school associated with Claude Levi-Strauss,
Foucault, and others performed virtually the same mission. Although both
structuralism and Annales methodology have fallen on hard times (critics accuse
them of being too difficult for the uninitiated to follow), we believe their
critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences is likely to
endure as a profound contribution to modern scholarship both in France and
elsewhere in Western Europe.”
What the CIA author leaves
unmentioned in this concise historical statement is the role that US elites
played in nurturing the theorists of the Annales school as a central facet of
the cultural Cold War Thankfully this important moment in history is reviewed
in Kristin Ross’s book Fast
Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture
(1996).
“The French social sciences we
are familiar with now were thus a postwar invention, and in all aspects of
French modernization after the war their ascendency bore some relation to U.S.
economic intervention. To a certain extent the turn to this kind of study was
funded and facilitated by the United States in a kind of Marshall Plan for
intellectuals. A review of the literature makes a convincing case that the
foremost American export of the period was not Coca-Cola or movies but the
supremacy of the social sciences. In October 1946, the director of the social
science division of the Rockefeller Foundation proclaimed, ‘A New France, a new
society is rising up from the ruins of the Occupation; the best of its efforts
is magnificent, but the problems are staggering. In France, the issue of the
conflict or the adaptation between communism and western democracy appears in
its most acute form. France is its battlefield or laboratory.’ By expanding the
social sciences in Europe, American sought to contain the progress of Marxism
in the world.” (p.186)
Ross writes that the “main
tactic” employed the Western-backed intellectuals at the Annales school “was
that of cannibalism: encompass and absorb the enemies as a means of controlling
them.” She refers to this approach as a “Science of empirical and quantitative
sociology – the study of repetition – was erected against the science of
history, the study of event.”
“In the 1950s and 1960s
Braudel, Le Roy Laduirie, and others, ensconced after 1962 in the Maison des
sciences de l’homme, produced what Braudel called ‘a history whose passage is
almost imperceptible … a history in which all change is slow, a history of
constant repetition, ever recurring cycles.’ Their most formidable enemies
within the field of history lived across the street: the long lineage of
Marxist historians of the French revolution – Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul,
and the like – housed at the Sorbonne. For what is at stake in the erasure of
the study of social movement in favour of that of structures is the possibility
of abrupt change or mutation in history: the idea of Revolution itself. The
old-fashioned historians of the event par excellence of French history, each in
turn occupying the chaired professorship for the study of the French Revolution
institute by the Sorbonne after 1891, looked askance at their thoroughly
modernized, well-funded, and well-equipped (with photocopiers and computers)
colleagues across the way.” (p.189)
With specific relevance to the
CIA’s comments on the rise and rise of French structuralism, it is useful to
reflect upon Ross’s analysis of this field of study. As she states:
“[T]he rise of structuralism
in the 1950s and 1960s was above all a frontal attack on historical thought in
general and Marxist dialectical analysis in particular; its appeal to many
leftist French intellectuals after 1956 was overdetermined by the crisis within
the French Communist Party and Marxism following the revelations of Stalin’s
crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary
at the end of that year. After such messy historical events, the clean,
scientific precision of structuralism offered a kind of respite.” (p.180)
Other than Febvre and Braudel,
at this stage it is worth briefly reflecting upon the career of another famous
proponent of French structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss. This is because in
1941, while living in exile in America, Lévi-Strauss had been offered a job at
the New School
for Social Research in New York City, where with the aid of the Rockefeller
Foundation he helped found the École
Libre des Hautes Études with an official charter from de Gaulle’s
government in exile. After the war Lévi-Strauss then went on to work as
cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington, before returning to
France in 1948 whereupon he became the director of studies in anthropology
(1950-74) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études’ newly established VI
section. As Kristen Ross writes:
“A grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation in 1947 helped finance the founding of the VI section of the Ecole
pratique des hautes etudes under the directorship of historian Lucien Febvre,
who had seized the initiative from a rival group of sociologists headed by
Georges Gurvitch. Home to Fransois Furet in the early 1960s, this institution
would be central to the future of the social sciences in France: in 1962, when
Febve’s successor Fernand Braudel gathered all the various research
laboratories scattered around the Latin Quarter and housed them in a single
building on the Boulevard Raspaid, the Maison des sciences de l‘homme, the Ford
Foundation helped finance the operation. In 1975 the VI section would in turn
emancipate itself from the Ecole pratique and become the Ecole de hautes etudes
en sciences sociales, with university status and the authorization to grant
degrees.” (p.187)
The Ford Foundation’s
decision, in 1959, to finance of the Maison des sciences de l‘homme proved to
be a critical moment for the evolution of French social sciences as Ford’s $1
million grant certainly brought them great influence. Moreover shortly after
this grant was dispensed, Ford also helped Raymond Aron to launch his Institute
of European Sociology in Paris. Certainly it is not coincidental that Aron was
already playing a prominent role in the undertakings of the CIA-backed Congress
for Cultural Freedom – a famous anti-communist enterprise that had been set up
in Paris in 1950 with the full support of America’s most influential liberal
foundations.
Such assorted philanthropic
interventions into French affairs “were
complemented by support for the building of transnational institutions at
the level of the European Community and for the fostering of transatlantic
ties.” A key intellectual broker in this regard was French economist Jean
Monnet, who, while working hand-in-hand with American philanthropists, had
been one of the founding fathers of both NATO and the European Union. Monnet
enjoyed his own liaisons with economic and political elites at the Bilderberg
Club, and in the 1950s formed
his own Action Committee for a United States of Europe. Furthermore, on top of
such transatlantic efforts to consolidate capitalist interests, the “Ford
Foundation invested in American-style management education all over Western
Europe, and by 1960 the European Association of Management Training, with
Pierre Tabatoni as its president, acted as a roof organization for these
schools…”
Philanthropic projects seeking
to guide European academic enquiries away from Marxism were of course not limited
to the social sciences — a matter of influence that is expanded upon in John
Krige’s book American
Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (2008). In
reference to the development of French science most particularly, Krige points
out how Warren Weaver, who was the director the Division of the Natural
Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation (1932–55)…
“and the foundation were not
simply interested in supporting good science and new directions in France. They
wanted to use their financial leverage to steer French scientists along quite
definite lines. Weaver in particular believed that the French were parochial
and inward-looking. He wanted to transform them into outward-looking,
“international” researchers, using techniques and tackling questions that were
current above all in the United States. It was a vision inspired by the
conviction that, without a radical remodeling of the French scientific community
on American lines and the determined marginalization of Communist scientists in
the field of biology, the country could never hope to play again a major role
in the advancement of science.” (p.81)
Another integral part of the
ongoing post World War II battle for French minds was more fundamentally
concerned with defanging the mass organisations of the working-class themselves
— trade unions. This battle was eagerly taken up by the AFL’s Free Trade Union
Committee, with many American trade union officials proving themselves more
than ready to take up the war against Communism (and union democracy) by
covertly intervening in the day-to-day affairs of foreign trade unions. In
their developing connections with the Free Trade Union Committee the CIA was in
luck and “found
a dedicated and experienced ally, with extensive networks and years of
experience in the covert manipulation of international labor movements.” The
underhand nature of this long and undemocratic relationship is well summed up
by “a government memo, unsigned but attached to a November 1948 letter from
David Bruce, the Chief of the Special Mission to France addressed to Paul
Hoffman, the Administrator of the Economic Cooperation Administration”:
“[…] it
will not be enough to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into food,
machinery, coal, and raw materials. We must find a means of not only aiding
industry, of directly aiding the direct representatives of the workers. This is
very difficult. The unions will not accept any aid from a foreign government.
(If such aid does become available, it must be disguised and under no
circumstances can the people here know anything about it. The whole matter
therefore requires the utmost of discretion.) They will accept only trade union
aid.”
After administering the Marshall
Plan for imperial interests, Paul Hoffman then moved on from his role as
head of the Economic Cooperation Administration to become the president of the
Ford Foundation (1950-3) in America. The interrelated and sophisticated nature
of such sophisticated interventions into France’s political affairs are
usefully laid bare in Giles Scott-Smith’s incisive study Networks
of Empire: The US State Department’s Foreign Leader Program in the Netherlands,
France, and Britain, 1950-70 (2011). Scott-Smith surmises:
“The ability of the US to
interfere in French affairs was unparalleled during that first decade [after
the end of World War II], yet the governments in Paris were still able maintain
an independent outlook and steer their own course, benefitting from their
special place within US strategy towards Western Europe. The European
Cooperation Administration, with its headquarters in Paris, exerted a
tremendous influence on the French socioeconomic scene, yet it implemented it
via its own version, the Monnet Plan. US financial and military aid was
recycled to enable long-running colonial wars to be fought in Indochina and
North Africa. French reluctance to support an economic revival of Germany soon
became sublimated into structural plans for European integration, with Paris
leading the way. While the CIA supported the Force Ouvrière trade union and a
host of other anti-communist outlets like the Congress for Cultural Freedom in
Paris, French political elites willingly adopted their own strategies to
undermine communist influence. US influence was therefore constrained by French
political and social imperatives.” (p.327)
Returning to the analysis
presented in the CIA’s now declassified report, it is noteworthy that the
report’s authors downplay the fascist/traditionalist orientation of the New
Right forces that rose to prominence in the wake of 1968. In fact, the CIA initially
simply refer to these forces in their report as the “new liberals.” Later on
the CIA analyst states:
“Encouraged by writers and
publishers who are associated in some way with right-wing press baron Robert
Hersant, the New Right in France has taken up the ideas of reviving classic
European liberalism as the elixir that France needs to recover from Socialist
‘mismanagement’.”
In a more revealing appendix
to their report, entitled “Cultural aspects of New Right thought,” the CIA
however go on to point out how:
“Conservative writers, many of
them associated with the group for Research and Study of European Civilization
(GRECE)
and the Clock Club (Club de l’Horloge)… have found an outlet for their
arguments in Hersant publications, notably Figaro Magazine, which is edited by
GRECE kindred spirit Louis Pauwels.”
Here the CIA also draw
attention to “the anti-egalitarian and even anti-Christian elements of GRECE/Horloge
thinking”, but only to observe, how in recent years, this element of their
thinking had apparently been toned down to better spread their toxic ideas.
That said, the CIA report at least admits that GRECE were not really “new
liberals,” as they point out that even:
“Raymond Aron, the revered
dean of contemporary conservative thought in France, detested the New Right
intellectuals, often equating their elitist anti-egalitarianism with the worse
antidemocratic strains in French conservativism.”
Nevertheless in the wake of
1968 it is clear that the capitalist establishment in both America and France
sought to do everything in their power to undermine the national and
international unity of working-class struggle. Expressed in a blunt form this
led a renewed focus on excluding certain left-wing voices from the mainstream
media. Here a good example of such practices is provided by the activism of
right-wing financier Sir James Goldsmith who in 1977 purchased the left-wing L’Express,
a popular newspaper which the new owner had previously identified as “the
source of intellectual sickness of France”. Sir James’ first move upon
acquiring this newspaper was to impose Raymond Aron upon the papers staff. On a
more mundane academic level, elite funding agencies also continued to support
scholarly efforts to learn more about the threat posed by an increasingly
militant trade union movement across Western Europe.
Ultimately, however, despite
many notable gains and inspiring victories, left-wing forces were tragically
beaten back by a resurgent and coordinated neoliberal assault upon democracy
worldwide. As in France, this process of neoliberal transformation was made
easier by the willing collaboration of the Communist Party with members of the
ruling-class, and by the stark betrayals of the working-class by left
reformists like Mitterrand. It was in these unfavourable conditions that the
intellectually debilitating but well-funded postmodern theories of French
post-structuralists subsequently gained an unwelcome foothold within both
academia and to some extent the mainstream media. As the Marxist literary
theorist Terry Eagleton argues in his book Literary
Theory: an Introduction (1983):
“Post-structuralism was a product
of that blend of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation and dissipation,
carnival and catastrophe, which was 1968. Unable to break the structures of
state power, post-structuralism found it possible instead to subvert the
structures of language. Nobody, at least, was likely to beat you over the head
for doing so. The student movement was flushed off the streets and driven
underground into discourse. Its enemies… became coherent belief-systems of any
kind – in particular all forms of political theory and organization which
sought to analyse, and act upon, the structures of society as a whole.” (p.142)
Of course these dead-end and
intellectually incoherent currents of ‘leftist’ retreat did not remain confined
to France — as exemplified by the Ford Foundation’s support of a two-year
program of seminars in the mid-1960s which gave a boost to French structuralism
on American shores. Yet in spite of such academic set-backs for those on the
Left, the possibility of emancipatory working-class struggles developing are
once again visible on capitalism’s inhumane horizon. Early signs of this
revival can be seen by the resurgent popularity garnered for socialist
political candidates like Bernie Sanders (in America), Jean-Luc Mélenchon (in
France), and Jeremy Corbyn (in Britain).
No doubt, the ruling-class and
their intelligence agencies will, at this very moment, be frantically drafting
up new “research reports” so that they may orientate their political activities
in a vain attempt to neutralise this growing mood of resistance. So this time
around we have to ensure that we have learned the appropriate lessons from
history. First and foremost we must refuse to allow any new socialist leaders
to mislead us in our bid for freedom. And so we must be clear that if our leaders
are not up to the task of helping us build a democratic and socialist
alternative to the bankrupt status quo then we must be ready to replace them,
and ultimately be willing to seize power for ourselves.
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