Capitalist Culture Wars
Morning Comrades! Again, I wanted to extend my sincere thanks to everyone that shared this newsletter and this past weekend’s drop through their channels. I’ve got two new pieces dropping this coming weekend, provided I get to take pictures this week. Due to your help I can increasingly ignore that blasted Zuck app and focus on digging deeper into subjects that matter on here. Admittedly, I let my ADHD have the better of me over the weekend and used the damn app but for nothing of note other than lighthearted entertainment. With that, now is a good time to jump into our Telegram Group., especially for quick links that no longer work over on the Zuck Hole anyhow.
Speaking of which, here is the link to this week’s playlist. You can tell that we are on the brink of darker, colder days with more and more darker tunes creeping in here - yet, with this one we are still somewhat holding on to light-hearted vibes as well. This one grooves between some deep cut soul jams, some hip hop but also dips heavy into some darker electro goth post punk jams, some post-hardcore for good measurements, a solid selection of latin jazz - the danceable kind and some new tracks as well. Enjoy this one and remember, hit shuffle! There is no order to this madness.
I have written about the subversion of Socialist work in Europe and Central / South America post-WW2 via the CCF, the Cultural Congress for Freedom aka the CIA a number of times in here and I wanted to briefly revisit it today. I came across a great selection of images over in twitter over the weekend that reminded me and clearly wanted to share them with you. For those that missed it, The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950. At its height, the CCF was active in thirty-five countries. In 1966 it was revealed that the CIA was instrumental in the establishment and funding of the group.
Historian Frances Stonor Saunders writes (1999): "Whether they liked it or not, whether they knew it or not, there were few writers, poets, artists, historians, scientists, or critics in postwar Europe whose names were not in some way linked to this covert enterprise." The shit hit the proverbial fan in 1966 when the NYT ( of all papers ) ran a series of stories exposing the CIA to behind the CCF and that front was dissolved.
Through the CCF, as well as by more direct means, the CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War — the closest thing that the U.S. government had to a Ministry of Culture. This left a complex and disturbing legacy, paving the way for U.S. interventions. The CIA was also responsible for secretly financing a large number of “civil society” groups, such as the National Student Association and many socialist European unions, in order to counter the efforts of parallel pro-Soviet, pro-communist, and global peace organizations.
One of the main reasons I bring this back up is that the CIA/CCF’s play here wasn’t to be openly anti-communist but in a most brutal Gramscian Cultural Hegemonic way, financed a more tolerable “socialist” movement outside of the Soviet Union to essentially become “Socialists Against Communism”. US tax money was effectively used to build up, pamper and give power to a huge group of “socialist” intellectuals around the world to influence the mainstream narrative against communism and the sentiment that revolutionary power—people’s power—was somehow authoritarian and totalitarian; that socialism must remain forever an ideal.
Again the reason I bring this up is because this ruse never stopped. Yes, the massively influential CCF was shut down, but the effective policies employed never stopped. Just look around, no matter what country you are in, the “kind” “social” power structures employed by power and capital will always offer us an “option” to only have our real power taken away, “by the process”. The US is a prime example of this post Reagan, and more recently with the so-called Progressive Caucus.
Real power starts and ends with us. There is no changing the system from within. We build our own horizontal structures and the sooner we realize that, yes, it is work, yes, it is our responsibility and yes, by voting away said responsibility to give someone else autonomy over you, shit ain’t going to change, the better. The CCF / CIA history goes deep, and it is fascinating, by all means drop me a line if anyone wants more links.
On that note, the Observer dropped a good article over the weekend that extends into this history, specifically, showing through declassified documents that in 1965, the British Foreign Office played a role in inciting anti-communist massacres in Indonesia that killed hundreds of thousands and paved the way for a brutal 32-year military dictatorship. Read that below.
Since it is Monday and I promised to keep these ones shorter, here are your hot shots to share far and wide.