The US left in the Cold War

Negative conspiracy theory

The year is 1954. The Second Red Scare is underway, and Joseph McCarthy is working to decimate what is left of the Communist Party USA, which issued hundreds of thousands of membership cards in the first half of the 20th century.

The Young Socialist League meets to discuss its position on a major geopolitical question. Reading If I Had a Hammer, by Maurice Isserman, I came across this remarkable passage:

In his memoirs [Michael] Harrington self-mockingly described a debate on Indochina at the first “plenum” of YSL in 1954.

"What, precisely should we say to the workers in Saigon and Hanoi? Should we advise them to create a new movement which would fight both the French colonialists and the Stalinists within the Viet Minh? Or should they enter into the Viet Minh and contest with Ho Chi Minh for leadership?”

Appropriate questions from the Bolshevik classics were brandished by both sides and in the end, late at night, the YSL resolved that “the Indochinese proletariat should organize independently.”

Whether Harrington was engaged in a bit of self-mockery or not, this was indeed the YSL position: “We must declare that this is a reactionary war on both sides, this war between French imperialism and the Vietminh.” It must be remembered that this was not the late 1950s, when you could pretend that independent Vietnam was split on the direction it should take; nor was it the 1960s, when you had to deal with the politically explosive reality that Vietnamese fighters were killing American soldiers. In 1954, they were using esoteric left-wing theorizations to draw moral equivalency between a national liberation movement and the European colonizer trying to reconquer its territory in Asia. The Vietnamese people had to create a secret third thing if they wanted the support of (this faction of) the US left. As James Miller points out, this was a “sophisticated Marxist variant of conservative Cold War dogmatics.”¹

At the beginning of Bullshit Jobs David Graeber briefly introduces what he calls “anti-conspiracy theory,” which I always found to be an intriguing formulation. Anti-conspiracy theory is not the opposite of conspiracy theory; it does not assert that conspiracies do not exist, or that powerful elites do not shape outcomes. It deals with a different way that they can shape outcomes. While a conspiracy theory might posit that a group of actors got together in secret to plan something specific, anti-conspiracy theory claims that powerful forces have made everything impossible except for a small range of outcomes. When problems appear for the rich and powerful, Graeber writes, “the rich and powerful will step in and do something about the matter.” What you end up seeing in the real world, as a result of this dynamic, is whatever can make it through the gauntlet. Maybe elites were hoping for one particular outcome; maybe they don’t care what happens at all, as long as their interests are not threatened. You might also call it negative conspiracy theory, since it deals with the things that do not occur.

So, conspiracies exist. In 1954 the CIA secretly planned a coup d’etat in Guatemala. If you had speculated this was happening at the time you would have been, narrowly speaking, a conspiracy theorist. But when it comes to the position on Vietnam cited above, the “conspiracy theory” explanation might go something like this: the FBI created a domestic version of leftism that did not threaten US geopolitical interests. In addition to being very simplistic, this would just be wrong. The “Shachtmanite” tendency had existed for years, and they believed sincerely in this interpretation of history. What is unique in the United States is not that a little group like this exists; the difference is that these people end up playing a serious role in the history of the national left. Why? Because everything else was destroyed. The very next sentence in If I Had a Hammer is illustrative: “Despite its deeply inbred sectarianism, the YSL began to grow—slowly, to be sure—but that it grew at all made it stand out on the campus Left in the 1950s.”

To complete the story, we do have to return to the world of conspiracy. The groups that made it through the gauntlet were not simply tolerated. In secret, the CIA provided funding to magazines with a left-wing but anti-Soviet orientation, and most of the writers and editors had no idea. And the FBI monitored everyone anyway.

I brought up the quoted passage above with a Brazilian friend, as we compared political vocabularies in North and South America (in Latin America, she said, a left that is geopolitically aligned with the United States government is a contradiction in terms). In addition to the Cold War context, she added, “surely all of this is related to American exceptionalism.” If you are the most powerful society on Earth and believe that God has imbued your nation with unique moral qualities, you might only feel the need to offer support to movements that are more perfect than anything that has ever existed. Objectively speaking, most students in the US in the 1950s could look forward to very comfortable lives if they stayed out of trouble. Why take a risky and morally complicated position? Conversely, there may also be a specifically US American tendency (left, liberal, right and center) to pretend that every foreign movement we do support is flawless. If it were not, how could we be supporting it?

1. Democracy is in the Streets, 1987. The image is taken from the cover