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Where there is open dictatorship there is always struggle, because open dictatorship is a first step toward accountability and genuine citizen participation. In the united $tates, there is the TV clicker or crack cocaine to cover for clandestine dictatorship. What is truly clandestine cannot be held accountable. As an example, we will take an intellectual who by all rights might have been expected to give the public a non-official view of the Soviet Union--Alfred G. Meyer.
Alfred G. Meyer was a Sovietologist and professor of political science at Harvard, Michigan State and the University of Michigan, where he retired. According to Meyer, Soviet troops literally liberated his brother in the nick of time from Auschwitz. For reasons of historical timing, if there were to be one intellectual or federal agent who would give the Soviet Union a fair shake, it would have to be Meyer, so this is why MIM uses him as an illustration of a best-case scenario regarding federal government control of the U.$. public's knowledge of international issues. Meyer died in 1998 at the age of 78.(1) Before he died, he managed to get into the "Red Squad" police files of Lansing, Michigan for a totally apolitical letter he sent to a newspaper. Meyer considered himself an "anti-anti-communist" and allowed that anti-communism had distorted U.$. politics from top to bottom. He joined Soviet Studies at a time when much of the U.$. public assumed that people undertaking such studies all had to be reds. Ironically it was also an accusation faced by members of the CIA in the McCarthy period.
Although he ended life frequently singing in Protestant churches as part of a choir, Meyer was Jewish and had to flee Nazi Germany where he lost his parents to the Holocaust during World War II. He volunteered to fight in World War II and ended up getting training in Russian and passing through British military intelligence as well. His start was with the Soviet Union as a military ally, again a concrete reason for his possibly having a different attitude toward Marxism- Leninism than people younger than himself.
Meyer offered a first-hand account of how implementation of the de- Nazification in Germany went wrong: it was his job and they bungled it according to him. His story very much matches up with what MIM has already said about the aftermath of WWII. Meyer admits that he was lenient on Nazis and even says his FBI partner was more interested in spying on German communists than doing their assigned job of de-Nazifying Germany. When Meyer was leaving Europe, he was offered a job finding rocket scientists to bring to the u.$. side, but he turned it down and instead worked into a State Department angle.
After the war, he went to college on the G.I. bill. His PhD adviser was opposed to interracial romance and Meyer argued for a sexually liberal position as a solution to race problems. Meyer remembered in Germany a prohibition against his dating Christians. His own ideas for racial mixing he later admitted did not work, but he argued at the time that if there were no anti-miscegenation laws, the Blacks and whites would work the rest out in bed.
Meyer also argued for liberalism for gays. He fought for a student that Harvard kicked out for being gay. In general, Meyer took the "de- repression" line on gender that MIM and Catharine MacKinnon much criticize, but MacKinnon was another 30 years into the future when Meyer was already arguing at Harvard on the topic. Sadly, most of the parties opposing MIM on gender questions take the same line as federal agent Meyer. For that matter, Meyer says that he went to the same federal office where Herbert Marcuse was working after Marcuse worked at the the predecessor to the CIA. Herbert Marcuse became perhaps the leading sexual de- repression theorist that so enamored young men of the 1960s. Marcuse was in the CIA predecessor OSS, then the State Department, Office of Research and Intelligence. In the 1980s, Meyer finally did have an unfortunate run- in with MacKinnon at a time when Meyer was fighting for de- criminalization of prostitution. On the whole, it is remarkable how the sexually Liberal de-repression line has links to the CIA and other forces out to break the revolutionary movement. Herbert Marcuse, Alfred G. Meyer and Gloria Steinem all had ties to the CIA.
When it came time for the CIA to find a directing liaison on Harvard’s Russian Research Center that Meyer was there for the beginnings of after World War II, Meyer was willing, but it was a time when security clearance was difficult. His views fit in readily with those of the Dulles brothers at the State Department and CIA. Meyer's adviser also had a hand on Henry Kissinger's career, fittingly enough, two State Department products from one supremely anti-communist professor.
Meyer went through the usual research routine after a stint co-working on the Hilger State Department project. Hilger was a senior Nazi diplomat. (Meyer also had State Department money to go to Romania in 1960.) His next source of major money was the Rockefeller Foundation and he went to the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Eventually, Carnegie money established the Russian Research Center at Harvard where Meyer spent his early academic years. Money there was used to buy off communists and socialists in addition to anti- communists. An example of the fishing in troubled waters that Harvard did was Ruth Fischer. One-time German communist and eventual ultra-leftist out of synch with the Comintern, Ruth Fischer became a paid "informant" and also testified before the House Committee on Un- American Activities in 1947, including against her two brothers. She had received money from Harvard at least as early as 1944 for her papers. In other words, Harvard was serving as a front for CIA money that resulted in creating the kind of people who cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee: Meyer himself in retrospect said that people like himself who were "left of center" did not do enough about the McCarthy period. His view had support inside the CIA as well.
Anyway, intellectual creation of strategies to defeat communism was not the only task of these area studies centers: buying off would-be proletarian leaders was literally another job. In this way, the U.S. Government could offer communists much more respectable jobs than they would appear to have if they simply became CIA agents directly. The CIA policy was to buy off all comers, as long as they repented of Stalin, a subject for another article. Meyer also considered Stalin a "mass murderer" and "despicable tyrant."
So from the beginning, the Russian Research Centers had a CIA mindset. One might think Hilger should have been shot or hanged, but the State Department had other plans. In fact, Meyer seems to have stumbled onto active Nazis shipped to Brazil after WWII, a story he says he never delved into, but he surely knew that CIA was bringing hordes of Nazis to work for it. A Carnegie (Carnegie was a U.$. capitalist who left a foundation for "charitable" work.) manager actually opposed Meyer for work at the RRC, but a CIA man supported him. (CIA was then known as OSS and it was an OSS man with a Japan background that headed the RRC.)
At the end of life, Meyer himself spilled the beans in his memoirs: "From the very beginning, the hidden connections to the Federal government made themselves felt in the form of ideological screening. One of the graduate student fellows, a historian, turned out to have had left- wing associations, and quickly lost his appointment; and the Assistant Director, a brilliant historian, was removed from his job because during the 1948 election he supported Henry Wallace and his Progressive party."
The Director of the RRC admitted that most of his memos to the RRC came from the CIA. Meyer became Assistant Director.
Even so, Meyer made a point of saying the Navy program at MIT for Russia was even more stultifying, a point we at MIM do not doubt. Meyer also said, "those engaged in these studies believed that they were serving an important national intelligence function; so, obviously, thought those that had created and financed institutes like the Russian Research Center. So also thought the students who nicknamed my courses the 'Know thy enemy' courses." Many who read MIM's website are also from the military and have the same goal.
Soon the Air Force would also come calling for Meyer and his colleagues: "That project was 'target research' financed and sponsored by the U. S. Air Force; they, quite understandably, were interested in our exploring the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet society. Simultaneously, the U. S. Navy was financing a similar project headed by Margaret Mead. They wanted her and her colleagues to apply psychological and anthropological techniques to predict Soviet behavior under stress; a typical question they wanted answered was how Soviet submarine crews might be expected to react when bombarded by depth charges."
MIM will back up Meyer on the point that some research especially for State Department auspices did dispel the "totalitarian" theory that came to dominate. "Pluralist" theories carried the day in the State Department, the same State Department that Mao came to worry about so much with its theory of "peaceful evolution." Meyer opposed pluralist theory, but MIM would say he never came up with a way to leave its orbit. Meyer says the CIA took to financing the MIT center, and it was dishonest in his opinion. Air Force allowed more of the State Department view at Harvard.
Meyer defended Owen Lattimore in the State Department and Harvard’s John Fairbank. Today they would be red-baited by Ann Coulter.
So the picture of Meyer as a young man was an ardent anti-fascist fighter, a member of military intelligence, military counter- intelligence, a worker for the State Department and a willing recruit for the CIA that did not immediately take him "into the party," but did accept him as a "cadre" at the RRC. He was 19 when he arrived in the united $tates during WWII. Not many scholars in the business would have the same confluence of historical background events.
At the end of his career, Meyer proudly and openly worked to create "revisionism" and explained why revisionism of Marxism was a good thing. He was a big fan of Bernstein who argued that motion in the movement was everything and the goal nothing. Although MIM considered the Soviet bloc to be led by revisionists already, Meyer called the so-called communist parties of the post-Stalin Soviet Union and Eastern Europe "orthodox," as a matter of marketing while he also said that he knew no Soviet officials gave a damn about ideology or theory. He wanted to work Liberal influences into those parties through the excitement of "revolutionary," "Marxist" or "liberal Marxist" ideas.
Meyer specialized in finding obscure Eastern European wimmin authors to promote as "revisionists." In a collection he edited, he literally spoke for "liberalizing Marxism," a mismarriage for certain. On the topic of feminism, he was interested in using it to create networks in Eastern Europe equivalent to the Polish Solidarity for workers.
MIM has argued against his position on this question, because "autonomy" for wimmin would only be necessary because they were not already running the vanguard party in those societies. The "autonomy" position, while having some basis in Mao's dialectics, is usually an admission that wimmin cannot be politicized to run society overall; although, Meyer would point that same accusation against the Soviets. With Mao saying "wimmin hold up half the sky," we would say we had no short-term need for Meyer's ideas about autonomy until after 50% of the vanguard party became wimmin and there was still evidence of patriarchy. In Eastern Europe, wimmin had not achieved the 50% mark in the ruling parties and focus should have remained on getting wimmin to take control of society as a whole through joining the party.
Meyer lived to see the Soviet Union collapse, but it instantly made his most central work to create revisionism much less meaningful. He won his dispute within bourgeois academia, even if the public does not know it yet. "Totalitarian" theory said that the Soviet Union could only collapse politically via an external war. That did not happen. There was much more pluralism and less conformity to a single guiding principle in the USSR than war propagandists painted. The Dulles brothers proved closer to the mark than more simple-minded propagandists.
In a 1982 Time Magazine story, Harvard's and Michigan's Russian centers came in for quick mention after CIA complaints of a shortage of Soviet specialists.(2) As director of Michigan's Center for Russian and East European Studies, Meyer headed an agency which managed to perfume its CIA funding when it was renamed to Department of Education sources. As of 2007, Michigan's Center for Russian and East European Studies does not hide that it is an extension of the federal government. By the end of his career, the Soviet Union and Cuba had refused entrance to Meyer as a spy. They said he posed as a scholar but was a professional anti-communist.
It is common to say that scholars from the 1970s started to challenge the intelligence-dominated area studies programs. MIM would say the opposite. People such as Meyer who experienced first-hand meeting Soviet military officials and fighting on their side were to become the exception. Meyer was an intelligence official, but those coming after him would only have fewer and fewer reasons to be favorable to the Soviet Union. The reach of intelligence hiring expanded and expanded and the historical background became evermore hostile for Chinese and Soviet studies. Now we also have anti-"terrorist" paranoia in Third World studies to boot, with some scholars previously funded by intelligence agencies losing the money in anti-Islamic scares. Though tactical victories can be won against state control of international issues, on the whole, the state bureaucracy only grows relative to the civilian component of politics and research.
As an individual, Alfred G Meyer makes sense: flee the Holocaust at 19; go fight in World War II; end up in intelligence because of his white collar skills; look around and see no one else interested in Soviet Studies and no one teaching about Marxism in the elite universities; offer to work for the State Department as a grad student and simultaneously work in a newly arising CIA project called Russian Research Centers. Then volunteer to be CIA liaison. Up to a point, Meyer's own decisions cannot be questioned. It is not his fault that he was 19 when WWII came calling and he had to be a soldier. Nor is it his fault he happened to know German and was good social material for certain tasks assigned him.
The trouble comes when we look at Soviet Studies as a whole and find that Meyer is not the exception. Military intelligence, CIA and State Department-- the federal government dominated. There were not non-government citizens interested, and again, we cannot blame Meyer as an individual, but we can blame Amerikkka as a society. Meyer should have returned after WWII to a U.$. academia where civilians already dominated studies of Marxism and the Soviet Union. Instead, Meyer went from one government-sponsored event to another.
At times, the CIA and Russian Research Centers took everyone except the pro-Stalin people. So there were purges, but the Amerikans would argue that those purges are limited. Yet the false claims do not stop with carrying out the same purges as societies that are being criticized by the U.S. federal government.
Also unfortunate is that the government's influence does show up in every aspect of Meyer's work, at the most profound intellectual level. So it's not just a question of who is purged to begin with, but also there is the problem that once the people remaining jostle in apparent so-called freedom, they raise the questions on the federal government's agenda.
Mixing together Marxism and Liberalism makes as much sense as mixing together Darwin and Noah's Ark or Newtonian mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity or Stalin and Trotsky. For intellectual purposes it is often differences that are useful for exploration. There is no intellectual reason for Meyer to make his life work "liberalizing Marxism." It was not going to help any students understand concepts better, quite the contrary. We would not expect a teacher to mush together creationism and evolution into one. However, there is one clear beneficiary of the idea of "liberalizing Marxism," and that was the federal government of the post-WWII era. The goal of the U.$. government was to infiltrate the Soviet parties and governments and organize opposition to the Soviet Union as the leading U.$. enemy. For that purpose, "revisionism" and "liberalizing Marxism" made eminent sense. Ironically, though Meyer persynally opposed anti-communism as smushing the U.$. political spectrum, his mushing together of Liberalism and Marxism would undoubtedly confuse many of his students who could then take to monarchism or even fascism as something separate.
Combining Liberalism and socialism was the project of countless intellectuals before and after Marx and Meyer had knowledge of these. He could have made his life goal promoting those intellectuals, today called social-democratic or democratic socialist. Even Noam Chomsky is a "libertarian socialist" and we respect his open opposition to Marxism. However, Meyer had to pursue combining Liberalism with Marxism for reasons of state. Marxism was the stated ideology of many states that Meyer sought to help the U.$. Government bend.
Meyer admits that his research spilled into his teaching this way: "I have tried to show my students that the unorthodox Marxists were challenging, while the orthodox ones usually were boring." In other words, Meyer confused his students on the difference between Liberalism and Marxism, because it was the federally-sponsored project that interested him.
In a bourgeois world, the best one can hope for is that universities will be separated from the government; otherwise, capitalist so-called democracy is the worst of both worlds. The profit, family and national motivations for greedy anti-social behavior are not gone, but the means to attack them are put under federal control and that won't work since the federal government is inevitably dominated by the most powerful self-interests. The communist dictatorships of Lenin, Stalin and Mao were open and sought to eliminate the underlying causes of anti-social behavior.
In a capitalist world, those doing military research should go to military academies; those seeking to come up with intellectual means of manipulating the politics of other countries should be in the State Department. Alas, contrary to the self-image of a "free country," there is no place for learning or intellectual development independent of the federal government. Likewise, authorities in the mass media and elite universities tend to come from the clandestine government agencies.
The most profound enemies of Marxism are those spies who pose as Marxists. These police come to realize that with better training, they can spout Marxism. Then they realize that they can spout Marxism and then change it slightly without anyone noticing in order to lead parties into pro-government directions. Even if they do not lead in pro-government directions, the mere fact of spouting makes it possible to spout-and-split genuine Marxist organizations. Alfred G Meyer was a high-level intellectual assisting in the disappearance of Marxism. In the long run, intellectuals of this sort are a greater threat than bullets. Proletarian counter-intelligence means knowing what Marxism is and whose interests a project like Meyer's serves. Although Meyer has admitted where his pay stubs came from, it was not necessary to know that to know from Marxist theory why Meyer was undertaking the work he did.
Notes:
1. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3333/is_199909/ai_n8046446
2. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,955110-2,00.html
3. http://www.namebase.org/books01.html