Ideology and Power
Barbash, Jack
Ideology and Power by JACK BARBASH Here is a collection of books which have a common—but not exclusive—concern with the uses and the evolution of ideologies. The most comprehensive is the massive...
...It became increasingly plain that the test of factional survival was not its capacity to make headway in the American scene but the ability of the faction to pick the winner in the ebb and flow of Soviet power rivalries...
...but socialism in the books considered here begins with the theme set out by Marx and Engels and then moves to the variations which range from pure exegesis all the way over to the rationalization of absolute power...
...Here again we observe the same theme: unswerving commitment to received ideology...
...My impression is that the counter-ideology of "people's capitalism" is not adequate to this task...
...Draper puts this very well: "American Communism has been torn between the conflicting demands of political orthodoxy and mass influence...
...this is a research undertaking of enormous magnitude and complexity, winding through materials in diverse fields and languages with great intellectual power...
...In the first Draper book the protagonist, and perhaps the hero, was Lewis Corey, born Louis Fraina...
...The break-off point "from thaw to deluge—institutional and ideological diversity" is symbolized by Stalin's death...
...Saposs is a pioneer student of radicalism in the American labor movement and politics...
...Brzezinski sees some creative force in ideology and will not go all the way—although he goes most of it— in asserting that ideology is nothing more than a cynical manipulation of words and concepts to suit the needs of power aggrandizement...
...Landauer is at his best as he guides us through the intellectual paths that led to Marx and Engels, and the forking of the roads after Marx...
...Harvard University Press...
...The fact that Lovestone is still active, albeit in a posture that completely repudiates his Communist past, lends a special interest to the Draper work...
...There is, of course, ideological content in all idea systems, in the sense of a "class angle...
...collectivized the total society...
...But as some of the satellite countries developed autonomous power—most notably Tito's Yugoslavia—they began to assert their independence and to see a prevision of diverse roads to socialism...
...He characterizes the first phase as institutional and ideological diversity...
...opportunism has invariably paid off in increased membership, sympathizers, and influence...
...The acknowledgement of error is made when it is strategically expedient, which may not be for several yean after the events...
...This is the subject of David Saposs' Communism in American Politics...
...all were political instruments of wholesale coercion through which the U.S.S.R...
...and the other members of the bloc over time are: (1) the inadequacy of Marxism-Leninism in providing an indisputable body of "utopian" blueprints as an operational guide for economics along a spectrum ranging from Soviet Russia to Soviet China...
...But just as there were liberalizing influences, there were authoritarian responses to the Marxian system that grew out of feudalistic soils, and here Marxism was used as a road map to absolutist revolutionary power...
...Saposs shows that Communist parties somewhere along the line invariably acknowledge errors, but the process by which error is revealed is in the form of a movement of mass debasement, rather than in the interplay of running criticism that prevails in a democratic organization...
...7.75...
...In the generation immediately following Marx, the socialist revisionists Bernstein and Jaures sought to infuse Marxism with a liberal humanitarian ethic and a pluralistic theory of the mainsprings of social action...
...The ideology which occupies the center of the stage is socialism...
...Even Karl Kautsky, the fountainhead of Marxist wisdom after Marx, sought to tone down the hardness of historical materialism because, by this time, socialism was no longer pure speculation but aspired to responsibility as a democratic movement in many countries of Europe...
...Political orthodoxy, however it may be denned at the moment, has invariably condemned them to sectarianism, isolation, and independence...
...Only Brzezinski undertakes to define ideology in a formal way...
...I don't know...
...I cannot for myself see this creative force of ideology in 1959, but the author comes by his judgments responsibly...
...The same forces of Bolshevization and infiltration are seen at work in the attempts of the American Communist Party to infiltrate the indigenous left-wing political movements in the depression Thirties and thereafter...
...It stems from its great power as a creed, as an "ism...
...The relationship then entered the second phase, institutional and ideological uniformity, marked by the organization of the Cominform as an attempt to solidify U.S.S.R...
...Draper's second volume explores the nooks and crannies of party intrigue in the American movement, as contending groups sought positions of power...
...Many revolutionary critics saw the authoritarian potential in Marxism in Marx's own lifetime...
...Is there a middle ground between a playing-it-by-ear pragmatism on the one hand and a rigid ideology on the other...
...558 pp...
...I want to underscore here the accent which ideology puts on an action outcome as its end product, because the action program is so inextricably tied in with the theoretical analysis...
...This is a good definition...
...In The Roots of American Communism, Draper showed with dramatic force the diversity of left-wing elements that went into the making of the American Communist movement in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm after the Russian Revolution and how soon the Soviet interest asserted itself to become the main force in the doctrinal and tactical orientation of the U.S...
...Landauer probes the wellsprings of Marxian socialism with great intellectual power...
...And if they are rendered in ideological terms, will we have thereby subverted the force of these values in the truly free society...
...In this book, he investigates the effect of a piece of power ideology known as the United Front...
...470 pp...
...These assertions include an explicit guide to action outlining methods for changing the situation, with some general idealized notions about the eventual state of affairs...
...The cast of characters populating the American Communist movement is revealed with considerable effect: the secret Comintern representative pulling the strings behind, and sometimes in front of, the scenes, the Party functionaries bowing and scraping for the blessings of the Soviet leaders, the party front organizations set up by the Communists and then destroyed when infiltration ceased to serve whatever the purpose happened to be, the disciplined Communist cadres operating in the unions and front organizations...
...but more than that, we must find a way of communicating a respect for ethical and moral values that will have something of the power and the meaning to the underprivileged peoples of the world that they seem to attach to ideology...
...For the most part his investigation concerns the political movements in the states of Washington, New York, and Minnesota, and, on the national front, the Progressive Party of 1948...
...University of California Press...
...Whatever the ultimate twist which Marxian socialism took as a system of power, its origins run deeply in the classical liberal's concern with the inhumanity of man to man...
...In the ideal Communist world, piety and power would always go together, but in the United States where the Communists must compete in the open political market, they have most often obtained power at the price of piety and piety at the price of power...
...Ideology accompanied by power seems to become a handmaiden of absolute totalitarian control...
...Marx's great achievement was that "he was the first to make all these ideas the component parts of a system...
...Zbigniew Brzezinski (The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict) has written a study of the interactions between ideology and power European Socialism — a history of ideas and movements, by Carl L. Landauer...
...In American Communism and Soviet Russia, the protagonist—I'm not sure whether he is a hero or not in Draper's eyes—is Jay Lovestone...
...Socialism in Marx's day was in the main line of humanitarianism in its concern with the dehumanizing effects of existing economic relationships...
...It was a system of power accumulation...
...These four studies might be called a series of undertakings to illuminate the uses and evolution of ideology...
...It is not a closet definition that he advances but one rooted in the raw materials of history: "Modern revolutionary ideology is essentially an action program derived from certain doctrinal assumptions about the nature of reality and expressed through certain stated, not overly complex, assertions about the inadequacy of the past or present state of societal affairs...
...The excitement, scholarship, and insights of his earlier book (The Roots of American Communism) infuse the present work in equal degree...
...The key to this period is a certain flexibility in economic organization and the degree of ideological conformity to meet the diversity of circumstance...
...Theodore Draper, in American Communism and Soviet Russia, continues his historical analysis of the American Communist Party and brings it up to 1929...
...Communism in American Politics, by David J. Saposs...
...Marx was critically important, as Landauer tells us, in integrating the labor movement with socialism, and in so doing he gave the European worker a sense of uplifting mission which no other "exploited" class had ever had...
...In this period Yugoslavia pursued its own road...
...This is a searching examination of socialism as theory and as politics...
...6.50...
...Communist Party...
...Brzezinski examines the posiure of ideology and power in another context, in the conflicts between the U.S.S.R...
...But the same soils that produced a Lenin also produced the Mensheviks and, specifically, a Plekhanov, who rejected the Leninist anti-democratic formulations...
...Socialism, for Landauer, also means tracing its influences on Fascism and Communism in power...
...here Chinese Communism is accelerating its pace toward Communism in contrast to the Soviet model, at the same time that it parades its ideological orthodoxy in the tradition of Marxism-Lenin-ism...
...1,894 pp...
...And without the intellectual movement of Western civilization which came to be known as the Enlightenment there would have been no Marxian socialism...
...258 pp...
...and the Soviet bloc...
...Almost all of the ingredients of Marxian socialism were derivative, with the possible exception of what Marx did with the theory of surplus value to lead him into the falling profit rate and "the elements of the business cycle theory...
...Brzezinski marks out three phases in the relationship of the Soviet Union to the other members of the bloc...
...There is much more to Landauer's historical analysis...
...In this sense, it dovetails neatly with the post-World War I political enterprises which Draper examines...
...The fourth phase—1957-1959 —is the Communist commonwealth —institutional diversity and ideological uniformity...
...Lenin, of course, was the main interpreter who drew from Marxism its full ideological implications as a totalitarian system of power...
...As a kind of sociology of ideology it is un-equaled by any contemporary research I know about...
...Environmentally and intellectually, socialism was a direct response to the "realities of early capitalism" and a "reaction to the philosophy which justified these realities . . . Without Adam Smith and Ricar-do, there would have been no Marx, for the methods of economic analysis which the classicists had established were an instrument which Marx had to use in his investigation in the nature of capitalism...
...The most comprehensive is the massive two volume work by Carl L. Landauer, European Socialism—A History of Ideas and Movements...
...Is there a synthesis possible which combines the optimum freedom of action, respect for human difference, and an integrated view of society that has the power of moving peoples suffering from a profound feeling of injustice...
...Ideology gives an explicit bias to the theoretical analysis...
...His performance is a work of art in its own right...
...The power of ideology, and particularly of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology, in the new nations arises out of its power to appeal to the victims of injustice, who do not care particularly about its obvious and by now commonplace falsity...
...In the pre-power stage, socialist ideology has had a way of making social forces meaningful and subject to change...
...2) a compulsive need on the part of the Soviet Union to demonstrate beyond question its own power and ideological primacy in the socialist camp...
...Ideology in the American Communist model had no substantive content...
...He impressed upon whole generations of economists the necessity of examining their institutional presuppositions and upon generations of historians and sociologists the significance, from the viewpoints of their own fields, of economic theory...
...It is precisely because the power program is integral to the theoretical analysis that Marx has become an "ism" but Keynes has not been followed by "Keynesism" nor was Adam Smith followed by "Smithism...
...The meaning of all of this for the non-ideologists — committed to the "bourgeois" virtues of truth and democracy—is to keep hammering away at ideology's essential lack of truth...
...But for many of the same reasons Marx's emphasis on class struggle and the class origins of morality made it easier to rationalize the use of total power and violent conflict as the means to justify the socialist end...
...control and Stalinist primacy...
...Throughout the work there is the commendable, and from my viewpoint successful, effort to keep the prodigious materials from running away with the central themes...
...The massiveness of size is fully matched by the intellectual performance...
...Two volumes...
...The Brzezinski definition can also be improved by directing attention to the claim which ideology invariably makes to provide a total explanation of "the nature of reality" which tolerates no rival claims, even if the rival claim is a matter of accent and emphasis...
...His field of vision is the whole of European socialism with the exception of Great Britain, which he felt is adequately treated in existing works, and certain countries of eastern Europe where language difficulties made original materials inaccessible to him...
...In work among Negroes, in political work, in trade union activities, the programmatic frame of reference turned out to be not a tough assessment of the American circumstances but an ideology fabricated to suit the see-sawing of power relationships in the Soviet Union...
...The uses of ideology are illuminated by Draper and Saposs, who investigate the American Communist movement as it responded to the needs of the particular Soviet oligarchy in power in a particular period...
...Marxism moved under Lenin from the dictatorship of the proletariat to the dictatorship of the party to the dictatorship of the party elite and the cult of personality under Stalin...
...But diversity has great dangers for a totalitarian system because it has a way of getting out of hand, and it did...
...But this ideological model differs profoundly from the American model, where the American Communists have always been supplicants...
...rivalries within the "socialist camp" of the Soviet Union and its satellites...
...The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict, by Zbigniew K. Brzezinski...
...Viking Press...
...Above all, what Draper calls "the Bolshevization" of party structure revealed the operational heritage of revolutionary ideology which the Communists took over...
...The satellites started out as Soviet supplicants but moved into positions of power as they became spokesmen for sovereign nations—always, to be sure, in varying degrees of dependence on Soviet largesse...
...For many millions the power of the ideology stems from its great thrust to achieve meaningful change...
...The pay-off ultimately went to the forces that had Stalin's blessing...
...There may be a real question as to whether these humane values—the respect for individual difference, the scientific temper—can be rendered in ideological terms...
...It is, of course, no great feat to find the disparity between ideology and reality...
...But the power of ideology in the modern world is not in its ability to provide a scientific design and prognosis...
...The lessons of the historic relationship between the U.S.S.R...
...David J. Saposs (Communism in American Politics) probes the adventures of the American Communist Party in the indigenous, left-of-center movements in the United States...
...Public Affairs Press...
...American Communism and Soviet Russia, by Theodore Draper...
...3) the manipulation of ideology to protect legitimacy for one power interest or another...
...Hungary and Poland sought their own roads as well, to the point of going to the barricades...
Vol. 25 • February 1961 • No. 2
