[Peace-discuss] Gabriel Kolko

[David Green]

This is in response to a recent post by Mort regarding Kolko, especially this excerpt from "Searching for Enemies":
 
"In every nation, in every branch of life – military, political, cultural – there are a sufficient number of adventurers, opportunists, egomaniacs, psychotics, or destructive individuals who create or accept disorder. In the case of the US, James V. Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, jumped out of the window of a naval hospital – to which he was confined for paranoia – in May 1949, allegedly because he believed war with the USSR was imminent. Other types – sheer opportunists such as the neoconservatives crucial in the Bush Administration – wish to accumulate power alone. Ideologies are very often merely a disguise for ambition. This limit, again, exists everywhere, not just the United States, and regardless of whether the party in power calls itself “socialist,” “capitalist,” or whatever."
 
 
While Kolko obviously is not averse to impugning our leaders at the level of character, I think that nevertheless his work--as incisively as any of the leftist historians--is grounded in a structural analysis of the relationship between capitalism and politics. On the other hand, I don't get the impression from reading his work that his focus on either capitalist structure or political leadership is meant to diminish the responsibility of the population to govern itself in its own (and each other's) interest.
 
An illustrative  (although dense) excerpt is from his indispensable work Main Currents in Modern American History, first published in 1976 with an epilogue in the 1984 edition, none of which is not prescient regarding the quarter century since, and obviously relevant to our current discourse:
 
"The extraordinary aspect of corruption in the United States is that it scandalizes and outrages public sensibilities, though in fact any generalization on the broad historical pattern of politics makes it inevitable to conclude that such corruption is predictable and systemic, and both the means and ends of politics as a vocation. The Nixon administration scandals of 1973-4 involved standard operating procedures well known to most of its more successful critics, and hence the artificiality of the entire Washington crisis of confidence. If it were the mere discovery of corruption and kickbacks that justified the removal of Vice Presidents and Presidents from power, then hardly any of their detractors also in office would remain employed. A Congress that voted funds to drop 15 million tons on explosives on Indochina but reacted strongly only to the infinitessimally smaller crimes of Nixon Administration peculations in fact was an integral part of the
 entire political system which sustained press attention examined closely in only one of its more visible manifestations. Hence the instinctive, realistic public opinion, at the 1974 peak of Watergate controversy, which gave both Congress and the President an equally low rating of 29% who felt the two major institutions of national affairs were operating in an "excellent" manner.
 
"What was dangerous about the system on which such mass skepticism was registered, and from which the inherent organizational and financial rules of politics had excluded them, was the routine, systemic, and acceptable aspects of it, and the very purpose of the political structure of American capitalism at every level after the Civil War. While it does that politics a disservice to dismiss the chicanery, evil, and damage which some men can resort to, to reduce the causes of political failures to personalities rather than to the premises of a systematic politics that produces successions of men responsive to the same forces and interests of American life is the most common, naive liberal error of all.
 
"Politics in America, surely at the national level, had since the end of the 19th century become an arena in which competing power constituencies sought different solutions to problems and distincitive satisfactions for their desires--often at the expense of one another. Such a rivalry presumed conflict up to a point, but it was one in which only the wealthy and well-placed could participate, and it was this economic qualification that ultimately united them against those without property. In this fashion, the concept of "public interest" became a utilitarian justification for actions benefitting some, though usually not all, private ends. The history of the American political economy has amply proved that fact. That the two parties cultivated a certain minimal set of contrived distinctions which effectively channelized the votes of the masses who voted alone is sufficient justification for their claiming a genuine difference betweeen the two. Yet what
 unites them, not merely in terms of "bipartisanship" or interchangeable officials, is immeasurably greater than that which divides, above all during the seasonal electoral charades. Indeed, as the shift of businessmen from one party to the other during the Presidential elections of 1896, 1932, and 1972 showed, or as with the critical assistance Truman gave to Eisenhower in the effort to make him the 1952 Republican nominee and guarantee continuity in United States foreign policy, flexibility transcended riltual party allegiances whenever necessary. Yet beyond principles, which were common and profound regardless of regardless of the concrete ways that individual constituencies wished them applied, were the similar organizational structures as they had developed in a parallel manner during a century's development. Oligarchic and premised on on organized apathy, elite-led and financed, systematically and predictably corrupted, desirous of only carefully
 controlled and directed two- or four-year mass mobilizations, parties had become a critical reinforcement of the larger structure of power in America."


      
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