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From Anti‐Communism to Anti‐totalitarianism: The Radical Potential of Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Dick Howard
Dick Howard*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Stony Brook
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Extract

The Very Nature Of Democracy Makes Its Defence Difficult. In a democracy, the majority has the right to be wrong and the opportunity to make public its private passions while acting on its personal interests. What is more, democratic tolerance of pluralism and legitimation of social conf lict ensure that democracy will be characterized above all by self-criticism. As a result, when it is threatened, its enemies will find at least some domestic support from those who despair of democracy, or at least of this democracy, and who convince themselves that a better, more substantial or less superficial, democracy can be brought into being. Such critics of the really existing democracy are convinced that they are acting in the name of real democracy. So it was, for example, that the American Communist Party could claim to incarnate ‘twentieth-century Americanism’ following the same logic used by Marx a century earlier to criticize the ‘merely formal’ nature of bourgeois democracy. But so it was too when the CIA took it upon itself to finance not only political opposition to Soviet inf luence but also to support and encourage what Francis Stonor Saunders's recent study of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters revealed. The shared logic of the CIA and the communists turns out, as the saying goes, to be no accident.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , October 2002 , pp. 551 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2002

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References

1 New York, The New Press, 2000. The British edition was published as Who Paid the Piper?, London, Granta, 1999.

2 This shift was given explicit recognition at the December 1966 Convention of SDS in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, when the members present agreed to remove from the organization’s statement of principle the clause stating that it stood opposed to ‘totalitarians of the left and the right’.

3 Paris, Fayard, 1995.

4 Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 2000.

5 I do not mean to criticize her research, which is often impressive and thorough. It is the use to which she puts it that seems to me revealingly weak.

6 In his ‘Souvenirs: Paris 1956–7’, La Revue Tocqueville/The Tocqueville Review, 21:1 (2000), Daniel Bell points out that ‘none of this was surprising’, and insists that ‘[t]he Congress was never a puppet organisation of the CIA’ (p. 20). Some of the funding came via the Ford Foundation, he continues, which also financed in part the creation of the Free University in Berlin and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris: ‘does that make them CIA tools?’, asks Bell rhetorically.

7 Numbers in parenthesis refer to the American edition of The Cultural Cold War.

8 Coleman’s, Peter earlier study The Liberal Conspiracy. The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Post-War Europe, New York, The Free Press, 1989 Google Scholar, recounts this story, as his title indicates, from the standpoint of political liberalism.

9 Cf., in this regard, Martin Jay’s review of Alexander Stephan, Communazis. FBI Surveillance of German Emigré Writers in The New York Times Book Review, 28 January 2001. Jay concludes his article with a rather pertinent question: ‘Why, one wonders after reading this book, when the names of former Gestapo or Stasi heads adorn no governmental buildings in Berlin, is the FBI headquarters in Washington still named, despite all we now know of his sordid career, after J. Edgar Hoover?’

10 A recent French publiation, Kotek’s, Joël La Jeune Garde. La jeunesse entre KGB et CIA, 1917–1989, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1998 Google Scholar, gives an overview of the financial as well as organizational involvement of the USSR in the cultural wars both before and after the period discussed here. From the standpoint of foreign policy, Gaddis’s, John Lewis We Now Know. Rethinking Cold War History, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997 Google Scholar, is invaluable.

11 Stonor Saunders does describe the entire historical existence of the Congress. But she does not analyse it. She recognizes, for example, that Koestler was soon marginalized, and she describes the process by which the American group led by Sidney Hook was ultimately eliminated as its anti-communism came to entail support for McCarthy. But she does not ask herself what these exclusions signify about the project of the anti-communist left. Instead, she suggests that the presence of such rabid anti-communists is only a sign of the original sin involved in the very conception of the project. Pierre Grémion’s study is more satisfying in this regard, as will be seen in a moment.

12 The analysis of the French left is not Grémion’s primary concern. Ulrike Ackermann’s account helps to make explicit what is often implicit in Grémion’s study.

13 Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983.

14 All three critics came from the anti-communist left. Greenberg, the most influential of the three, was a former Trotskyist whose theorization of the superiority of abstract art was based on an historical vision rooted in Marxism (whose vocabulary he avoided). On this latter point, cf. Kuspit, Donald B., Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1979 Google Scholar.

15 In Guilbaut, op. cit., pp. 202, 204.

16 Ibid., p. 195. Guilbaut notes that the 1962 republication of Schlesinger’s book ‘used abstract art to symbolize the balanced center position … Thus it occurred to at least one book designer in 1962 that abstract expressionism represented the new liberalism’ (p. 247, n. 23).

17 These are the titles of the first four chapters of the book, whose concluding chapter is ‘Freedom: A Fighting Faith’. Along the way, Schlesinger deploys a remarkable knowledge of anti-totalitarian theories, including those of the Frankfurt school. His half-century-old book still bears reading.

18 Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1999.

19 Numbers in parenthesis in this part of the text refer to Grémion, op. cit. It should be noted that the facts cited by Grémion are not absent from Stonor Saunders’s account. Indeed, her interviews with many of the participants are a useful supplement to Grémion’s more sociological account.

20 The accusation against the ‘end of ideology’ theory recalls strangely that which was addressed 30 years later to those who saw in the fall of communism the triumph of democracy. The assumption was that, in effect, history had come to an end, and with it the need for political or critical activity.

21 This brief sketch is elaborated in several chapters of my study, The Specter of Democracy, New York, Columbia University Press, 2002.

22 Ackermann, Ulrike, Sündenfall der Intellektuellen. Ein deutsch-französischer Streit von 1945 bis heute, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta Verlag, 2000 Google Scholar. Citations are given in parenthesis in the text.

23 A more detailed discussion of the implications of this argument is found in Grunenberg, Antonia, Antifaschismus — ein deutscher Mythos, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt Verlag, 1993 Google Scholar.

24 The euphemism, ‘really existing socialism’, that Rudolf Barho introduced when this sort of language became difficult to accept could be interpreted either as the expression of a resignation that implies that this is the best that we can do, and that we should be content with it, or it could imply that just because this system exists, that does not mean that it cannot be criticized.

25 It should be said that this accusation does not hold in the case of Habermas, although he never did devote a full-scale analysis to the specificity of Soviet-type communism. Cf. footnote 28, below, and my discussion in The Specter of Democracy, op. cit.

26 Schlesinger’s book is subtitled, ‘Our purposes and perils on the tightrope of American Liberalism’. He writes in his Foreword that ‘The experience with Communism has had one singularly healthy effect: it has made us reclaim democratic ideas …’.

27 The citation is from Sperber’s Anpassung und Widerstand. Úber den unvernünftigen und vernünftigen Gebrauch der Vernunft, 1994, cited by Ackermann at p. 242. (My translation and my italics.)

28 There were members of the Frankfurt School who did move from anti-fascism to anti-totalitarianism without accepting the totalizing pessimism of the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. My reference here is only to Horkheimer and Adorno, and in part to Habermas’s admission, in a 1993 interview with Adam Michnik, that he had not written about communism because he did not think it was important! The interview appeared in Die Zeit, 53, 1993; it is cited here from an article by Daniel Cohn-Bendit which carries the telling title: ‘Wer vom Totalitarismus schweigt, sollte auch nicht über die Freiheit reden’ (Who says nothing about totalitarianism should also not talk about freedom), published in Kommune, 3 (2000).

29 The citation is found, significantly, in the chapter on ‘The Activity Present in all Parts of the Political Body in the United States: The Influence that it Exercises on Society’, which stresses the influence of the political republic on the social activity of the individual. The citation is found in De la démocratie en Amérique, I, Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1961, Vol. 1, p. 254.