---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 18:19:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: MichaelP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "unlikely.suspects": ;
Subject: Susan George- How to Win the War of Ideas:
It's easier for me to find useful material than to think it out for
myself. That being said, I think it's rather important for me to make
sure more people see this stuff. As the author asks: why does the
progressive movement - or the multiple branches thereof - concentrate on
projects while the development and nurturing of ideas is left to the
conservatives ?
Cheers
MichaelP
===============================
---------------------------------------------------------
DISSENT / SUMMER 1997 / VOLUME 44, NUMBER 3
---------------------------------------------------------
How to Win the War of Ideas:
Lessons from the Gramscian Right
Susan George
In Greek the hegemon is the leader, and from there it's just a linguistic
hop, skip, and jump to the notion of rule, authority, and dominance
expressed by the word "hegemony." Traditionally, the term was reserved for
states. In the 1920s and 1930s, the great Italian Marxist thinker Antonio
Gramsci took the concept further, using it to explain how one class could
establish its leadership over others through ideological dominance.
Whereas orthodox Marxism explained nearly everything by economic forces,
Gramsci added the crucial cultural dimension. He showed how, once
ideological authority -- or "cultural hegemony" -- is established, the use
of violence to impose change can become superfluous.
Today, few would deny that we live under the virtually undisputed rule of
the market-dominated, ultracompetitive, globalized society with its
cortSge of manifold iniquities and everyday violence. Have we got the
hegemony we deserve? I think we have, and by "we" I mean the progressive
movement, or what's left of it. Obviously I don't deny the impact of
economic forces or of political events like the end of the cold war in
shaping our lives and our societies, but here I intend to concentrate on
the war of ideas that has been tragically neglected by the "side of the
angels." Many public and private institutions that genuinely believe they
are working for a more equitable world have contributed to the triumph of
neoliberalism or have passively allowed this triumph to occur.
If this judgment sounds harsh, positive conclusions may still be drawn
from it. The Rule of the Right is the result of a concerted, long-term
ideological effort on the part of identifiable actors. If we recognize
that a market-dominated, iniquitous world is neither natural nor
inevitable, then it should be possible to build a counter-project for a
different kind of world.
EXCLUSION AND IDEOLOGY The late twentieth century could be dubbed the Age
of Exclusion. It's now clear that the "free market," which increasingly
determines political and social as well as economic priorities, cannot
embrace everyone. The market's job is not to provide jobs, much less
social cohesion. It has no place for the growing numbers of people who
contribute little or nothing to production or consumption. The market
operates for the benefit of a minority.
The Age of Exclusion engenders myriad social ills with which various
humanitarian and charitable agencies, established in an earlier era,
vainly attempt to cope. Vainly, because they have failed to understand
that their projects and programs exist in an ideological context that
systematically frustrates their aims.
The now-dominant economic doctrine, of which widespread exclusion is a
necessary element, did not descend from heaven. It has, rather, been
carefully nurtured over decades, through thought, action, and propaganda;
bought and paid for by a closely knit fraternity (they mostly are men) who
stand to gain from its rule.
An earlier version of this doctrine was called "laissez-faire"; today
Americans speak of neoconservatism, Europeans of neoliberalism, and the
French of "la pensee unique" (the dominant or single mindset). I shall use
"neoliberalism," bearing in mind that the modern version of the doctrine
is far removed from that of such great "liberal" political economists as
Adam Smith or David Ricardo. Neoliberals pretend to follow these
illustrious predecessors, but in fact betray their spirit and ignore their
moral and social teachings.
A HALF CENTURY OF HISTORY The victory of neoliberalism is the result of
fifty years of intellectual work, now widely reflected in the media,
politics, and the programs of international organizations. Reaganism,
Thatcherism, and the Fall of the Wall are often credited (or blamed) for
this state of affairs and they have, indeed, made neoliberals more
arrogant, but there is much more to the story than that.
Fifty years ago, in the wake of World War II, neoliberalism had no place
in the mainstream political debate. Its few champions preached to each
other or in the desert -- everyone else was a Keynesian, a
social/Christian democrat or some shade of Marxist. Overturning that
context required intellectual tenacity and political planning -- but it
also took the passivity of a self-satisfied majority. If there are three
kinds of people -- those who make things happen, those who watch things
happen, and those who never knew what hit them -- neoliberals belong to
the first category and most progressives to the latter two. The left
remained complacent until, suddenly, it was too late.
The American founding fathers of neoliberalism thus held few cards at the
outset, but they believed in a crucial principle: Ideas Have Consequences
-- the title of a 1948 book by Richard Weaver that was to have a long and
fruitful career.
Weaver's conservative writings were published by the University of Chicago
Press, as were the works of exiled Austrian philosopher-economist
Friedrich von Hayek and the brilliant young economist Milton Friedman.
Today the "Chicago School" is famous: its economic, social, and political
views have spread throughout the world. In General Pinochet's Chile,
Chicago-trained economists were the first to apply el tratamiento de chock
(shock treatment) based on freedom for business but repression for labor.
Clearly, ideas have consequences -- after all, Margaret Thatcher proudly
proclaimed her allegiance to the ideas of Hayek, and most economics
students who go on to occupy policy positions have been trained in the
neoliberal curricula. One conservative scholar sums up the doctrine thus:
"Individual freedom is the ultimate social ideal; governmental power,
while necessary, must be limited and decentralized. Interventionism is
baneful and dangerous. Economic freedom, that is, capitalism, is an
indispensable condition for political liberty."
Neoliberals reject the notion that individual freedom might depend on
democracy and the rule of law, guaranteed by the state. For them, such
"guarantees" are nothing but chains. To be free is to be free from the
state. The individual is entirely responsible for his economic and social
fate; this implies that disparities will necessarily exist. But this is
good. As Thatcher put it, "It is our job to glory in inequality and see
that talents and abilities are given vent and expression for the benefit
of us all."
In the early days of the neoliberal renaissance, such ideas may have
seemed utopian, since they were antagonistic to the spirit of the New Deal
and the welfare state. Neoliberals understood, however, that to transform
the economic, political, and social landscape they first had to change the
intellectual and psychological one. For ideas to become part of the daily
life of people and society, they must be propagated through books,
magazines, journals, conferences, professional associations, and so on. If
some ideas are to become more fashionable than others, they must be
financed: it takes money to build intellectual infrastructures and to
promote a worldview.
When these foundations have been carefully laid and built upon, views that
once seemed minoritarian, elitist, even morally repugnant will gradually
become predominant, especially among decision makers. Press, radio, and
television can be guided to follow the lead of the more specialized or
erudite media. Imperceptibly, nearly everyone will come to feel that
certain ideas are normal, natural, part of the air we breathe.
MANUFACTURING IDEOLOGY The neoliberals thus conceived their strategy,
recruiting and rewarding thinkers and writers, raising funds to found and
to sustain a broad range of institutions at the forefront of the
"conservative revolution." This revolution began in the United States but,
like the rest of American culture, has spread across the world. The
doctrines of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the
World Trade Organization are indistinguishable from those of the
neoliberal credo. Here are some capsule profiles of some of the most
influential intellectual institutions or think tanks.
* The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) was founded in 1943 by a
group of anti-New Deal businessmen. It pioneered intellectual public
relations in the 1950s and 1960s, working directly with members of
Congress, the federal bureaucracy, and the media. In the 1980s, AEI's
average budget was $14 million; it employed some 150 people. One of its
most successful fund-raising campaigns was launched by the Secretary of
Defense in the Pentagon dining room. In the 1990s, the annual budget has
dropped to around $8 to $10 million, but AEI still produces a steady
stream of books, pamphlets, and legislative recommendations, and its
pundits are frequently heard from in the mass media.
* The Heritage Foundation is the best known think tank because of
its close association with Ronald Reagan. A week after his electoral
victory, Heritage's director handed Reagan's staff a thousand-page
document of policy advice, called Mandate for Leadership, the fruit of the
labors of 250 neoliberal experts. Their recommendations were duly
distributed throughout the new administration; most became law.
Heritage, the collective brain behind Reagan and George Bush, was
founded in 1973, spends a third of its $18 million annual budget on
marketing, and produces some two hundred documents a year. Its Annual
Guide lists fifteen hundred neoliberal public policy experts in seventy
different areas-the harried journalist need only telephone to get a quote.
President Reagan himself launched a major Heritage fund-raising drive,
telling the audience, "Ideas do have consequences: rhetoric is politics
and words are action."
Heritage's success has inspired the creation of thirty-seven
mini-Heritages across the United States, creating synergy, an illusion of
diversity, and the impression that experts quoted actually represent a
broad spectrum of views.
* Smaller think tanks include the venerable Hoover Institution on
War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford University in California in
1919 to study communism. In 1960, it added an economic program to its cold
war vocation. The Cato Institute in Washington is libertarian, advocating
minimalist government and specializing in studies on privatization; the
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, founded in 1978 by William Casey,
who later became director of the Central Intelligence Agency, specializes
in the critique of government income-redistribution programs.
A revolving door between government and conservative think tanks
allowed former Nixon or Reagan/Bush staffers to find homes outside of
government during the Carter and Clinton presidencies (although one
wonders why they needed to move: Clinton's position on welfare is
virtually indistinguishable from that of the neoliberal think tanks,
constituting another victory for them).
* Outside the United States, the neoliberal network is less formal
but no less effective. London houses the Centre for Policy Studies; the
anti-statist Institute of Economic Affairs; and the Adam Smith Institute,
which has probably done more to promote privatization than any other
institution anywhere. The Adam Smith Institute brags that over two hundred
measures developed in its "Omega Project" were put into practice by
Thatcher. Its experts have also advised the World Bank extensively on
privatization programs in the bank's client countries.
* One ofthe most important think tanks has no fixed address. The
Mount Pelerin Society. founded in 1947 by Friedrich von Hayek, first
brought American and European conservatives together in a village near
Lausanne. It has remained an international club for neoliberal thinkers
ever since; its four-hundred strong membership met most recently in Vienna
in 1996. Milton Friedman says that "Mount Pelerin showed us that we were
not alone" and served as a "rallying point," inspiring friendships,
networks, and joint projects. Membership in the society is by invitation
and members' names are not disclosed; it is, however, known that Czech
prime minister, Vaclav Klaus, the former French finance minister Alain
Madelin, Boris Yeltsin's chief advisers, and Margaret Thatcher belong.
FINANCING IDEOLOGY Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent over
the past fifty years to keep these and many other neoliberal institutions
alive and well. Where does the money come from?
In the early days, the William Volker Fund saved the shaky magazines,
financed the books published at Chicago, paid the bills for the
influential Foundation for Economic Education and funded meetings at U.S.
universities. Americans at the first Mount Pelerin Society meeting
traveled to Switzerland on Volker money.
This fund could not, however, cover all the needs of a growing movement,
which sought other financial backers early on. The director of the
American Enterprise Institute was jubilant when in 1972 he convinced the
prestigious Ford Foundation to give AEI $300,000 -- a significant sum at
the time. This grant opened doors to other institutional funders.
For at least a quarter-century, many conservative American family
foundations have poured money into the production and dissemination of
their ideas. Although smaller than philanthropic elephants like Ford,
these funders use their money strategically. The Bradley Foundation spends
nearly all its annual income ($28 million in 1994) on promoting neoliberal
causes, including major gifts to Heritage, AEI, and conservative magazines
and journals. As the Foundation's director puts it, "We're in this for the
lo ng haul." According to the Foundation's literature, the Bradley
brothers believed that "over time, the consequences of ideas [are] more
decisive than the force of political or economic movements."
Foundations like Coors (brewery), Scaife or Mellon (steel), and especially
Olin (chemicals, munitions) finance chairs in some of America's most
prestigious universities. Their occupants are carefully chosen, in the
words of critic Jon Wiener, to "strengthen the economic, political and
cultural institutions upon which . . . private enterprise is based." Olin
has spent over $55 million on these efforts and the list of its grantees
reads like a Who's Who of the academic right.
An anecdote recounted by Wiener illustrates how the ideological
self-promotion system works. In 1988, Allan Bloom, director of the
University of Chicago's Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and
Practice of Democracy ($3.6 million grant from Olin) invites a State
Department official to give a paper. The speaker proclaims total victory
for the West and for neoliberal values in the cold war. His paper is
immediately published in the National Interest ($1 million Olin subsidy)
edited by Irving Kristol ($376,000 grant as Olin Distinguished Professor
at New York University Graduate School of Business).
Kristol simultaneously publishes "responses" to the paper: one by himself,
one by Bloom, one by Samuel Huntington ($1.4 million for the Olin
Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard). This completely artificial,
engineered "debate" is then picked up by the New York Times, the
Washington Post and Time magazine. Today everyone has heard of Francis
Fukuyama and The End of History and the Last Man, a best-seller in several
languages.
Even in the early 1970s, William Simon, then and still president of the
Olin Foundation, was exhorting his business associates to support
"scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists" and to give
"grants, grants and more grants in exchange for books, books and more
books."
Simon knew what he was talking about: not only can well-targeted money
create "debates" out of thin air; it can also define which areas deserve
study and which do not; it can promote personal notoriety and ready access
to decision makers and to the media for selected neoliberal spokespersons.
The editor of the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review appears to find this
almost unseemly:
Journalism today is very different from what it was 10 to 20 years
ago. Today, op-ed pages are dominated by conservatives. We have a
tremendous amount of conservative opinion but this creates a problem for
those who are interested in a career in journalism. . . . If Bill Buckley
were to come out of Yale today, nobody would pay much attention to him. He
would not be that unusual . . . because there are probably hundreds of
people with those ideas and they have already got syndicated columns.
Between 1990 and 1993, four neoliberal U.S. magazines received $2.7
million from different foundations ( National Review, the Public Interest,
the New Criterion, and the American Spectator). In contrast, four
progressive U.S. magazines with a national audience (the Nation, the
Progressive, In These Times, and Mother Jones) were given ten times less
over the same period.
In the war of ideas, any movement is in trouble if it cannot renew its
ranks of professional researchers, thinkers, and writers. Neoliberals
don't mind financing white men if white men happen to be best at
delivering the intellectual goods. But they are also funding a great many
women, African-Americans, and other minority thinkers and writers; as well
as dozens of college newspapers, thousands of graduate students, and a
small armada of journals. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars are
spent every year on purchasing present and future right-wing intellectual
clout.
WHO'S WHO, AND WHAT? A somewhat astonishing conclusion can be drawn from
all this: the right is a hot-bed of Marxists! Or at least of Gramscians.
They know full well that we are not born with our ideas and must somehow
acquire them; that in order to prevail, ideas require mat erial
infrastructures. They know, too, that these infrastructures will largely
determine the intellectual superstructure: this is what Gramsci meant by
capitalism's "hegemonic project." Defining, sustaining, and controlling
culture is crucial: get into people's heads and you will acquire their
hearts, their hands, and their destinies.
Alas, progressives can't seem to tell a hegemonic project from a hedgehog.
What has the "side of the angels" been up to all these years? Has it spent
its time and money promoting the ideas it believes in? Precious little.
Not only do progressive institutions appear complacent as to their side's
intellectual superiority, but they've been cruising along as if there were
no need to justify their positions, nor even to worry about the nearly
hegemonic intellectual hold of the right.
The "angels" have, rather, seen their task as funding projects and
programs for the poor and disadvantaged; focusing on the grass roots,
enhancing "community empowerment." Laudable goals all -- but what happens
when government subscribes, instead, to structural adjustment that utterly
devastates the lives of the poor in the South, or passes antiwelfare,
antiworker legislation in the North? What happens when the World Trade
Organization has more to say about community survival than the communities
themselves? Or when public funds for health, education, housing,
transport, the environment, and so on dry up?
Without intellectual ammunition to defend them and to create the context
in which they can flourish, worthy projects and programs collapse. They
cannot exist in a vacuum.
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS AND THE PLAGUE OF THE PROJECT So far, I've not
bothered to declare an interest. I assume readers know or have guessed I
have one, since I am a professional researcher, writer, and, when I can
manage it, thinker. So yes: I have all too often heard or read the dread
phrase: "Your proposal is very interesting but we don't fund research and
writing."
The point is not private disappointment, but mass denial. Progressive
donors have sent out vanloads of rejections in response to proposals for
intellectual work. I have no reason to doubt that the goals of these
donors are social equity, poverty alleviation, human rights, conflict
resolution, and sustainable development. So I am mightily perplexed by
their behavior.
Why, I'm driven to ask, do progressive funders devote so much of their
time and money to "projects" and so little to intellectual infrastructure
and institution building?
Why have we not learned from the single-mindedness of the right? Why can
we not see, for example, that the destruction of welfare in the United
States or the threats to trade union achievements in Europe would have
been impossible without the creation of an intellectual climate making
such onslaughts appear not morally repugnant but natural and inevitable?
Why is the "project"' approach not seen as self-defeating? As
neoliberalism dismantles the gains of the past fifty years and ever
greater numbers of its victims are cast adrift, the pressure to fund only
"projects" will grow, pushing us into a self-reinforcing procession toward
the definitive dysfunctional society.
JUST IN CASE . . . In Spanish they say no protestas sin propuestas or,
freely translated, quit complaining if you don't have anything to offer.
Well, obviously I propose that progressive foundations and any other
financing sources begin to devote large amounts of money to regaining our
lost intellectual initiative. They should sit at the feet of the
neoliberals who have proved they know how the game works: let us learn
from the masters!
Assuming that this proposal is somehow recognized and acted upon, I have
several subsidiary recommendations. The first may be a bit hard to
swallow, so I may as well say it straight out: funders are not the best
judges of the work that progressive intellectuals ought to be doing.
Why not? Because they are likely to be attracted to issues that have
already reached the mainstream. I have witnessed this again and again, for
instance when I first tried to attract financing for work on third world
debt. It was then too early, although five or ten years later, numerous
organizations were falling over each other to work on the issue. The task
of the progressive thinker is to be outside the mainstream, to foresee
developments that will become crucial in the future.
A good progressive intellectual worker produces subversive knowledge. This
knowledge, by definition, will be unwelcome to the Establishment and to
the mainstream. Yet someone does have to pay for the months or years of
work before the books come out, before the "hot topics" are recognized and
the "subversive knowledge" becomes part of the debate. Funders should
accept a division of labor and trust the intellectual workers they choose
to support without trying to define their agendas. Otherwise, they will
inadvertently prevent those workers from doing their job.
Funders should give up the "project" approach in favor of institution
building. Donors, understandably, want to discuss the substance and the
politics of a project with the person who will be carrying it out. But for
that person, this process can be counterproductive, preventing him or her
from getting on with the intellectual work. Drafting several project
proposals, defending them separately, in different countries, before
different audiences, following up with correspondence, additional
information, progress reports, accounts -- all this is hugely time
consuming.
When I was fund-raising for the Transnational Institute (on "projects,"
naturally, since no other approach would have been accepted in the donor
community) I published only short pieces. Sustained endeavors like books
are (at least for me) impossible when time is constantly broken up with
fund-raising activities. Researchers, writers, and speakers who have to
cater to this mentality in order to get any work done at all are prevented
from devoting their energies to research, writing, and speaking, and from
renewing their own arsenal of ideas. Project funding, as opposed to
institution building, offers no hope for an end to the cycle of low
productivity.
Donors should fund not just the intellectual work itself but the means for
making sure it will be widely used. The Heritage Foundation spends fully a
third of its comfortable budget on outreach, yet few progressive funders
want to pay for spreading the word. Consequently, idea-producing
institutions that are only allowed to spend for items specified in the
project budget (with a modest overhead) can't afford translations, can't
develop a "Features Service" for a network of newspapers and magazines in
many countries, can't turn articles into radio programs, books into
television films, and so on.
Grants for institution building are also important because they allow
progressive researchers and writers to prepare for the future and keep up
the momentum. Smart, dedicated, idealistic young people often want to work
for progressive organizations and are willing to make material sacrifices
to do so, but the core funds to employ them simply aren't there.
By focusing almost exclusively on projects, progressive funders have
helped to ensure right-wing dominance of the debate. We used to laugh at
the idea that market mechanisms could solve social problems: such things
are now said every day with a straight face. Issues we used to take for
granted, including the third world itself, have almost vanished from the
debate.
Donors can make the leap of faith from projects to institutional and
intellectual movement building. They can identify institutions and
individuals in both North and South who are producing original and
distinguished work and whose record shows they can be trusted -- and then
trust them. This includes research/policy institutes, journals, and
independent intellectual workers inside or outside of universities.
Remarkable institutions and individuals deserve long-term support that
alone can allow them to do their best work. Donors should set aside a
respectable portion of their disposable funds to endow worthwhile
institutions. Formulas providing guarantees and flexibility to both donor
and recipient could be readily negotiated.
AND FINALLY . . . What if we lived in a society in which the system of
justice rested on the postulate that only two-thirds of its members were
fully human; the remaining third not deserving of the same rights, except
when arbitrarily granted? Such a society would spontaneously and instantly
-- at least in the West -- be called unjust.
The exclusion of a third or more of their members is, however, precisely
the situation that obtains in societies regulated almost exclusively by
the "laws of the market." There is a dangerous semantic slippage from
"law" to "laws of the market"; from the body of democratically established
rules for the proper functioning of society to the blind operation of
economic forces. Neoliberals want "market law" to become the sovereign
judge of the rights of persons and of societies as a whole.
Hegel claimed that the only thing history teaches us is that nobody ever
learns anything from history. Recent history, if we are attentive, might
still teach us that a society can go from law based on the equality of
persons to the laws of the market; from relative social justice to deep
and chronic inequalities within a few short years. The neoliberals'
onslaught continues and their intellectual hegemony is almost complete.
Those who refuse to act on the knowledge that ideas have consequences end
up suffering them.
Susan George is an author and associate
director of The Transnational Institute in
Amsterdam.
---------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1997 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social
Ideas, Inc. Readers may redistribute this article to other individuals for
noncommercial use, provided that the text, all HTML codes, and this notice
remain intact and unaltered in any way. This article may not be resold,
reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior
written permission from the author. If you have any questions about
permissions, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED], or write to Dissent, 521
Fifth Avenue, Suite 1700, New York, NY 10017.
=================================
*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. ***
--
For MAI-not (un)subscription information, posting guidelines and
links to other MAI sites please see http://mai.flora.org/
