Many people look back at the 1945-1975 period as a golden age when the middle class in the West flourished and the arts were thriving. For those who lived through that time, that standard of living and that artistic culture were normal and they believe they should be achievable again. Most people had job stability and expectations that the good life would last. Painting, cinema, theater, literature, and music from this era are all considered to be classic and emblematic of the 20th century. But there has been nothing like them since.

The economist Mark Blyth described the period as a complete anomaly in the history of capitalism. In an interview he gave in 2017, he said that after 1945…

… fifty million were dead just from World War II, plus twenty million dead from World War I, the chaos of the 1920s, the 30s, and the rise of fascism. Everything had fallen apart. The U.S. was 60% of the world GDP, 60% of world finance, or 50% of GDP… Along with its allies at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 they said, “We can’t go back to just free markets and people doing whatever they want because that was disastrous.” If you let money, particularly finance, just do whatever it wants, it causes huge instabilities. It chases profits in the wrong places… So what they needed to do was create national economies. Those national economies would restrict the flow of finance and would enable us to tax and spend, and create a kind of hothouse that would force domestic investment to a higher level. And the policy target became full employment. We were not going to allow the unemployment of the Great Depression (1929-1941) to come back because that leads to communism and fascism, and that ultimately is bad, bad, bad for business, so that was the target… If you want to think about capitalism as computer hardware, it can run various software programs, and the 1945 to 1975 software program was all about full employment, and that created inflation, and that created the investment collapse, and that created the conditions for businesses to say we need new software. The new software was the neoliberal software. They were going to do the exact opposite. They were going to target price stability. They were going to care about inflation more than anything else. They were going to allow banks to do whatever the hell they want. Get rid of the New Deal regulations. Get rid of silos. Get rid of all that stuff, and they were going to create a world of globalized markets, and capital flows, and supply chains, and it was going to be awesome… Both the way the world worked from the 1940s to the 70s and the inflation of the 70s were unique, weird, historical events. Where we are now is more like where capitalism has always been.

This comment about the anomalous nature of the “economic software” can also be applied to the institutional forces promoting the arts. It is seldom acknowledged how much the artistic rebels were officially promoted through private and public support, regardless how much their work was despised by socially conservative elements. The motivation of the establishment was to show how free the system was in contrast to the way the Soviets supposedly used art only for propaganda and suppressed all other artistic expression. No matter how “useless” or decadent modern art appeared to be, or how much it angered conservatives, the pointlessness and offensiveness was the point. The capitalist class was holding a potlach to display to its socialist rivals that its system was so free and prosperous that it could afford to be offensive and frivolous and it could take any criticism from within.

Some of the funding was covert and its sources were concealed from the artists, but, for the most part, everyone knew it was Rockefeller and government money promoting abstract expressionist painters and artists in other fields. Institutions farther down the food chain (publishers, galleries, film studios etc.) just thought they were following the popular mood of the times.

After reading the chapter on American painters in The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (pages 212-233), I realized that the arts probably declined after the 1980s for the same reason wages and social spending declined. Capitalism no longer had a competitor to which it had to prove that it could deliver the goods to the common man. The potlach was over. The support given to abstract expressionist artists was similar to the promotion of modern literature and music—starting with beat literature and Elvis in the 1950s. No matter how much domestic conservatives complained that it was degenerate and un-American, it served the purpose of illustrating freedom of expression, and, as a bonus, it was ideologically neutral, pacifist, and against tyranny and nationalism of any kind. The American communist party that had had a certain amount of influence and freedom to operate before WWII was now suppressed, and no one in the counter-culture movement sang the praises of material progress in China and the Soviet Union. An illustration of the official support of the arts can be seen in what President Eisenhower wrote in 1954:

As long as artists are at liberty to feel with high personal intensity, as long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be healthy controversy and progress in art… How different it is in tyranny. When artists are made the slaves and the tools of the state; when artists become chief propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested and creation and genius are destroyed. – Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, October 19, 1954.

Speaking of such official support and covert and overt funding is not to say that there was, for example, an explicit order given from on high to publish Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957, but it is curious that a fringe movement labelled beat literature was covered so widely in the popular media. Some force was behind it, making it a topic of discussion in popular magazines and thus public consciousness. The bohemian underground had always been there, so why the sudden interest? Were publishers catching on to the new zeitgeist, or were they creating it? This literary movement could have been easily sidelined or ignored, as it would be in contemporary society.

I conclude this commentary with (1) some thoughts of William S. Burroughs about the cultural revolution, (2) a random blog comment about “heroes,” (3) some relevant excerpts from The Cultural Cold War, and (4) a quote from Max Parry’s review of a book that examined this theme of subversion of the left by the capitalist class.

1. William S. Burroughs described the influence Jack Kerouac’s work had on 20th century global culture. Source: Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdams (directors), “What Happened to Kerouac” (1986; New Yorker Films). See the segment here.

Well, of course, [Kerouac] started a cultural revolution, of an unprecedented worldwide extent. He didn’t acknowledge it, but he was one on of the people instrumental in starting it. The whole beat movement, which has become a worldwide cultural revolution, [was] absolutely unprecedented. There has never been anything like it before, penetrating the Arab countries which is really a hermetic society, and then their affiliation with the political activists, all that went on in the sixties. Although the beats were originally non-political, others who were political were really following the beat movement to its logical conclusion. He was completely apolitical. I don’t think he ever took part in a demonstration or signed a petition, but he started it. Jesus Christ said, “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their disclaimers.”

2. Comment by “George Mc” on this blog post (March 29, 2024)

Isaiah Berlin once said of Marx: “All his life he detested two phenomena with peculiar passion: disorderly life and histrionic display. It seemed to him that bohemianism and deliberate flouting of conventions was but inverted philistinism, emphasizing and paying homage to the very same false values by exaggerated protest against them, and exhibiting therefore the same fundamental vulgarity.” I can think of no more accurate summary of the kind of “hero” elevated by the media ever since the rise of “youth culture” in the 1950s. This would seem to be also a description of the god of the anarchist movement, Bakunin. And this confirms Hal Draper’s well-founded reservations about anarchism as a movement that always had the effect of fragmenting oppositional groups.

3. Excerpts from The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, by Frances Stonor Saunders (1999, 2013), pages 212-233.

One of the extraordinary features of the role that American painting played in the cultural Cold War is not the fact alone that it became part of this enterprise but that a movement which so deliberately declared itself to be apolitical could be come so intensely politicized. “Modern painting is the bulwark of the individual creative expression, aloof from the political left and its blood brother, the right,” the art critic Paul Burlin had declared. For critic Harold Rosenberg, postwar art entailed “the political choice of giving up politics… Yet in its politically shrewd reaction against politics, in its ostensible demonstration that competing ideologies had depleted themselves and dissipated adherents… the new painters and their supporters had of course become fully engaged in the issues of the day.”

…

It is hard to sustain the argument that the Abstract Expressionists merely “happened to be painting in the Cold War and not for the Cold War.” Their own statements and, in some cases, political allegiances undermine claims of ideological disengagement. But it is also the case that the work of the Abstract Expressionists cannot be reduced to the political history in which it is situated. Abstract Expressionism, like jazz, was—is—a creative phenomenon existing independently and even, yes, triumphantly apart from the political use which was made of it. “There’s no doubt that we need to understand all art in relationship to its time,” argued Philip Dodd [in 1994]. “In order to make sense of Abstract Expressionism, we need to understand how it was made during an extraordinary moment in European and American relationships. At a political level these were a generation of radicals beached by history, and at a national level they emerged just at the moment when America became the great cultural imperium of the postwar period. All these things need to be understood in order to be able to assess their achievements. But their art cannot be reduced to those conditions. It is true that the CIA were involved—I lament that as much as anybody else laments it—but that doesn’t explain why it became important. There was something in the art itself that allowed it to triumph.”

Jackson Pollock was killed in a car crash in 1956, by which time Arshile Gorky had already hanged himself. Franz Kline was to drink himself to death within six years. In 1965, the sculptor David Smith died following a car crash. In 1970, Mark Rothko slashed his veins and bled to death on his studio floor. Some of his friends felt that he killed himself partly because he could not cope with the contradiction of being showered with material rewards for works which “howled their opposition to bourgeois materialism.”

“The country is proud of its dead poets,” says the narrator of Humboldt’s Gift [by Saul Bellow, 1973]. “It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering… The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs… So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle.”

4. Max Parry, “A New Book Warns of the Imminent Danger of a Kamala Harris Presidency,” The Greanville Post, October 13, 2020. Review of Kamala Harris and the Future of America: An Essay in Three Parts, by Caleb Maupin.

Maupin […] uses Harris and her Berkeley upbringing to explore the history of leftism in the United States, tracing the New Left’s ceding of leadership roles to students and marginal groups while discarding labor rights and the class struggle back to the influence of the Frankfurt School of Social Theory. The philosophical movement of intellectuals and academics associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, otherwise known as ‘critical theory,’ put forward that both capitalist societies and Marxist-Leninist states like the Soviet Union were equally rigid “totalitarian” systems…

Maupin emphasizes that the intelligentsia of the New Left were actively supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through its clandestine Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) program during the Cold War, which sought to subvert the sympathies of liberals and the non-communist left with the Soviet Union through the covert funding of prominent literary magazines, journals, international conferences, modern art exhibitions, and other cultural activities. The objective was to promote an intellectual consensus on the Western left that the Soviet Union was to be opposed as much as capitalism and it was indisputably successful. Meanwhile, the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commissions of the 1970s exposed how in the previous decade the CIA had played an enormous role in introducing drugs to the counterculture as part of its domestic espionage against the anti-war movement in Operation Midnight Climax, a sub-program of Project MK-Ultra, where the Bay Area became a petri dish for its human experimentation. With the drug culture came the popularization of eastern mysticism and eventually, the New Age movement…

Some on the left will inevitably try to dismiss his analysis by likening it to the right-wing canard of “cultural Marxism” spoken of by paleoconservatives simply because of the overlap in mutual subjects of criticism. Nonetheless, there is a small kernel of truth at the heart the right’s mostly fictitious narrative of Western Marxism’s control of academia but unfortunately, what they misinterpret as a plot to “subvert Western culture” was hatched at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia—not the former Soviet Union. Today’s pseudo-left which recoils working people is truly an imposter generated by the CIA’s cultural cold war program to replace actual Marxism, the real casualty of the pervasiveness of Western Marxism in universities.

Related Sources

O’Neill, Tom. Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (Little, Brown and Co., 2019). See this interview with the author.

Potash, John L. Drugs as a Weapon Against Us: The CIA’s Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists (Trine Day, 2015).

McGowan, David. Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops, and the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream (Headpress, 2014). Author’s website.