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
material 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.
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