(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 43)  | |||
| Summer 2002 |
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Issue 43 | |
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The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and post-war American hegemony
Giles Scott-Smith
London: Routledge/PSA 2002, £55
Tom Easton
This is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA-funded operation that ran for two decades after World War II of which Encounter magazine was the best-known British component. Giles Scott-Smith has added to the historical record well illuminated by Christopher Lasch, Peter Coleman, Frances Stonor Saunders and Richard Aldrich, but his main focus is to set the CCF in a theoretical framework.
He concludes:
'With the Congress, historical context is everything. In the 1950s it was dedicated to forming alliances between the American and European Non-Communist Left in defence of cultural-intellectual values, and as ideological support for the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic alliance. The time was right, in other words, for such an institution to succeed.
'By the 1960s, the CCF was an overextended institution attempting to secure a worldwide network of liberal-minded intellectuals in a period when American power was being harshly demonstrated in Vietnam, and the legacy of western colonialism made it a hopeless task. The CCF could no longer fulfil its hegemonic function in the changed historical circumstances.'
I am not qualified to assess Scott-Smith's debt to Gramsci or evaluate his contribution to thinking around hegemonic themes, and I suspect some of this book will likewise pass the non-specialist by. But there is much that is of great value to a general reader in opening up the whole discussion about the responsibility of intellectuals and the integrity of cultural and political discourse first sparked by Lasch way back in 1967 when the CIA funding was initally revealed.
I would add four very non-theoretical points which academics may one day like to follow up - preferably with a shorter time lag elapsing than with Scott-Smith's evaluation of the CCF
One: even if the author is right about the limited period of the 1950s within which the CCF could only operate effectively, this does not mean that the Congress did not have an influence long afterwards. Anthony Crosland was an important figure in CCF and its end of ideology leitmotif. His young assistant, David Lipsey, followed in his master's Atlanticist footsteps. Two decades after the demise of the Congress, Lipsey helped found the British American Project for the Successor Generation, a US-funded network to revive Atlanticism. He is now Lord Lipsey, a key figure in New Labour with its end of ideology, Third Way 'pragmatism'. His network of influence is just one of many of continuing significance in the political and intellectual world spawned by the Congress and its linked operations of postwar anti-Communism.
Two: Nye Bevan was right when he talked shortly before his death of the huge displacement power of the United States. His homely image of little siblings falling on to the floor when big brother turned over in bed was right then and remains true today. Of course Giles-Smith is also correct when he says: 'It is clearly a mistake to assume that the formation of the CCF was part of a master-plan for American international supremacy hatched by the CIA.' But such was and remains the relative power of the United States - from Hollywood to CNN, from American-driven social science to US-based religious fundamentalism - that it is difficult to mount any serious resistance.
Three: and related directly to it, is the question of money and what US dollars could buy, especially in the postwar world of rationing and limited travel opportunities in class-ridden Britain. As the Congress founders well knew, even a tiny drop siphoned from the booming US economy could buy huge influence through US travelling scholarships for British trade unionists, Ivy League places for impecunious young academics, trips to New England in the glorious Fall for Labour MPs and extraordinarily high fees for contributing to Encounter.
A few years ago in the John F Kennedy archive in Boston I came across some pleading letters from Roy Jenkins to his fellow Congress pal J. K. Galbraith seeking his help in arranging lucrative speaking platforms on a planned US tour. At one point Jenkins even complains to Galbraith that an upcoming UK general election may interfere with his money-raising scheme. US dollars mattered then as now.
Four: I wonder when academics are going to turn their attention to the present. A publication remarkably sim-ilar in content and even appearance to the CCF's Encounter started to appear on British bookstalls a few years ago. Prospect's articles, like those of Encounter, seem to find their way into other publications with as much ease as did those published by the CIA-funded journal of an earlier period of US dominance. In David Marquand and others, they even have some of the same writers. Hegemony is not just a matter of history. It's just a thought.....
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