Socialism, Revolution and Capitalist Dialectics

“Big business is by no means antipathetic to Communism. The larger big business grows the more it approximates to Collectivism. It is the upper road of the few instead of the lower road of the masses to Collectivism.”—H. G. Wells.[1]

Marxism is widely known as including as a primary ideological premise the concept of dialectics, or “dialectical materialism” as the Marxists term their variation of the Hegelian theory. The Marxian dialectic is outlined in The Communist Manifesto; history is described as a progression of economic struggle for class primacy that goes through phases including those of primitive communism, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and ultimately communism.[2] Capitalism thus is an essential phase in the Marxist dialectic of historical progression towards communism. Where capitalism does not at first exist, this is seen as a hindrance rather than as a benefit to the development of socialism. The Marxist premise was that socialism must proceed from a capitalist economy.

Hence Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the modern of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish faster.[3]

Marx further stated:

Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities, and renders the contrasts between workers and middle class more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense do I vote for Free Trade.[4]

In Marx’s own day, he saw the then dominant and newly emerging Free Trade School as part of a necessary dialectical process of history that makes more acute the antagonism between the classes, internationalizes the proletariat and indeed as “precipitating the social revolution.”

Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy for the purpose of bringing Russia, hitherto still undeveloped industrially, into the stage of industrial development required as the prerequisite for building socialism, and opened the new Soviet state to foreign capital.[5] Today, the Chinese leadership can rationalize capitalist economic innovations on the basis that China must first develop a certain economic phase before proceeding to a fuller socialist economy. Vietnam at the moment, after having spent much of its history fighting for sovereignty against foreign domination, whether it be that of ancient China, or colonial France, or the American presence, now succumbs to the global economic development model and has entered the world economy, subjecting herself to World Bank and International Monetary Fund “guidance” and “advice”, and having 42% of its GDP serving debt, which the World Bank assures us is an acceptable debt level.[6] Here again Vietnam’s leadership is within the Marxian dialectical framework of building its economy through capitalist structures and debt as a prelude to socialism and ultimately to communism, assuming that a state once becoming part of the international financial structure can ever remove itself.

Capitalism and Dialectics

What is not generally recognized is that capitalism also has a dialectical approach to history. In this dialectical capitalism, the synthesis that is supposed to emerge is a “Brave New World” centralized world economy controlled not by commissars and a politburo but by technocrats and boards of directors. A strategy of dialectics means backing movements in the short term to achieve quite different, even opposite goals, in the long term. Hence the rationale behind capitalists supporting socialist and even communist movements, as will be shown. As stated above H. G. Wells opined—approvingly—at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution that Big Business and communism are both paths to the same end—”Collectivism.” The “socialistic” orientation of certain capitalists at the apex of the world economy is exemplified by a statement by the late Nelson Rockefeller of the famous capitalist dynasty: “I’m a great believer in planning. Economic, social, political, military, total world planning.”[7]

In terms of having backed socialism and other forms of social revolution or revolt, the dialectics of capitalism considers that a capitalist society cannot be achieved until a rural or economically anachronistic society has gone from its peasant stage into an industrial phase. In order to achieve this sudden and enforced industrialization of a peasant or rural society, certain capitalist interests have used socialism.

The capitalist dialectic in simple terms can be seen as the mirror image of the Marxist dialectic: Marxism states that socialism cannot be achieved from a rural society until it has become industrialized by capitalism; the capitalist dialectic postulates that capitalism can be more effectively achieved if a rural society is first industrialized by the dictatorial methods of socialism.

History has shown that the capitalist dialectic has been successful: certain business interests backed or at least welcomed socialist revolutions in Russia and China to overthrow traditional peasant societies. Once socialism had been used to achieve the industrialization of those societies, the next phase of the dialectic has been to introduce privatization and globalization to the economies of the former Eastern bloc; the present phase of the dialectic, while China’s economy seems to be proceeding along desired paths as part of the world economic system.

This theory is not as fanciful as might at first be assumed, when one considers that Marxist academics have long taught that fascism is part of a capitalist dialectic, having described fascism as nothing more than the “last defense of capitalism.”[8] The capitalist dialectic I am proposing here is somewhat similar; except that it is socialism, including Marxism, that has been the focus of a capitalist dialectic, and this dialectic is more readily observable in practice than the largely theoretical Marxist interpretation of a fascist-capitalist dialectic. The contention here is that socialism and other revolutionary movements have been used as a means of subverting traditional religious, rural societies to bring them suddenly and forcefully into a modern economy from which capitalism can proceed. Marxism has in such instances served capitalism in destroying not only those institutions that are obstacles to the development of the capitalism, but also the attitudes that plutocrats and technocrats regard as anachronisms and obstacles to the formation of a production and consumption mass society. In short, socialism has been a means of destroying what capitalism regards as anachronistic.

Between Two Worlds

Is there any evidence for such a dialectical outlook serving as the basis for corporate planners? I believe there is, and it has been particularly cogently expressed by a then up-and-coming young academic named Zbigniew Brzezinksi, who was to carve a name for himself in the highest echelons of political administration and within international business think tanks.

Brzezinski, who served as President Carter’s National Security adviser, and is a foreign policy adviser to President Obama, has been the North American director of the Rockefeller think tank the Trilateral Commission,[9] is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,[10] and a participant at the international conferences of The Bilderberg Group, wrote his Between Two Ages as a dialectical treatise on the process of internationalization, or globalization as it is now called. While he sees Marxian dialectics as too simplistic his own approach is nonetheless dialectical. Brzezniski considers – approvingly – the technocratic age as progressively destroying the nation-state and undermining traditional loyalties, out of which a global oligarchy would emerge. He wrote:

Today we are again witnessing the emergence of transnational elites, but now they are composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men, and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries, their perspectives are not confined by national traditions, and their interests are more functional than national. These global communities are gaining in strength and as was true in the Middle Ages, it is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advanced countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook.[11]

This “transnational elite … composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men, and public officials”, as Brzezinski describes them, have transcended and consciously evolved beyond traditional loyalties and prejudices, and would consider themselves the vanguard of a new enlightened age of capitalism. Brzezinski laments that most of humanity does not yet share the vision of the “elite”, writing:

The new global consciousness, however, is only beginning to become an influential force. It still lacks identity, cohesion, and focus. Much of humanity—indeed, the majority of humanity—still neither shares nor is prepared to support it.[12]

Over pages 31 to 33 of Between Two Ages Brzezinski considers the dialectical progression of human consciousness towards internationalism, starting with the spiritual universalism of the Church, through to the secularization of this universal outlook with the rise of (liberal) nationalism and the French and American Revolutions, to Marxism which further internationalized and de-sacralized man’s consciousness, to the present state of “global consciousness” heralded by this “elite”. Brzezinski explains the process. It is worth quoting at length:

With nationalism, the distinction between the inner contemplative man, concerned with his relationship to God, and the external man, concerned with shaping his environment, became blurred. Nationalism as an ideology was more activist; man’s relations to man were objectivized externally by legal norms and were not dependent, as was man’s relation to God, on personal conscience; yet at the same time the definition of man as a “national” was based largely on abstract, historically determined, and highly emotional criteria. This outlook involved considerable vagueness and even irrationality when used as a conceptual framework within which relations between nations and developments within nations might be understood. Nationalism only partially increased men’s self-awareness; it mobilized them actively but failed to challenge their critical faculties; it was more a mass vehicle for human passion and fantasizing than a conceptual framework that made it possible to dissect and then deliberately reassemble our reality.

Ideological Universalism

That is why Marxism represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision. Marxism is simultaneously a victory of the external, active man over the inner, passive man and a victory of reason over belief: it stresses man’s capacity to shape his material destiny—finite and defined as man’s only reality—and it postulates the absolute capacity of man to truly understand his reality as a point of departure for his active endeavors to shape it. To a greater extent than any previous mode of political thinking, Marxism puts a premium on the systematic and rigorous examination of material reality and on guides to action derived from that examination.

Though it may be argued that this intellectually rigorous method was eventually subverted by its strong component of dogmatic belief, Marxism did expand popular self-awareness by awakening the masses to an intense preoccupation with social equality and by providing them with both a historical and a moral justification for insisting upon it. More than that, Marxism represented in its time the most advanced and systematic method for analyzing the dynamic of social development, for categorizing it, and for extrapolating from it certain principles concerning social behavior.

…In this sense, Marxism has served as a mechanism of human “progress,” even if its practice has often fallen short of its ideals.[13]

…Moreover, Marxism has decisively contributed to the political institutionalization and systematization of the deliberate effort to define the nature of our era and of man’s relationship to history at any given stage in that history.[14]

Here Brzezinski is very clear as to the dialectical nature of Marxism as a “further creative and vital state” in a world historical process leading towards a new “technecratic age.”

Capitalism and Revolution

The assumption that Big Business would universally look with horror and dread upon the triumph of socialism is incorrect. As indicated by the opening quotation from H. G. Wells, certain capitalists saw in socialism and even Bolshevism a means of creating a more ordered environment in which to do business. Wells was referring at the time to the presence in Russia of Frank A. Vanderlip, chairman of the National City Bank, New York, representing a US business consortium.[15]

A similar view was more recently expressed by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller, who in their study of the multinational corporations, based on interviews with corporate executives, stated: “…Indeed, as one corporate strategist told us, socialism, far from being ‘the end of the world’, is a ‘big help’ because it ensures ‘stability’ over large areas of the world.”[16] To be sure, this is not the view of all corporate strategists, but there is a certain faction of international capitalism that sees socialism as a control mechanism, among other factors.[17]

As for specific examples, the obvious place to first consider would be with the most tumultuous of the modern revolutions, those that took place in Russia. Big Business would with good reason regarded Czarist Russia as an anachronism in the 20^th century, a land of religious superstition, with a mass of uneducated peasants, ruled by an autocracy that was tradition-bound and surrounded by advisers, many of whom were adverse to modernization and industrialization. Hence when the Czar was overthrown with the March Revolution, the response of Wall Street, London, and other financial capitals was enthusiastic in seeing the possibilities of Russia at last being opened to large-scale foreign commerce.

The groundwork for revolution in Russia had been laid during the Russo-Japanese war when American journalist George Kennan was funded by Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and Co., New York, to propagandize Russian POWs in the Japanese internment camps. Kennan was to claim that 50,000 revolutionary cadres had been recruited by this method, when a dozen years later he was celebrating the March Revolution:

“The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love”, he said, referring to Mr. Schiff, “and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.” Then was read a telegram from Jacob H. Schiff, part of which is as follows: “Will you say for me to those present at tonight’s meeting how deeply I regret my inability to celebrate with the Friends of Russian Freedom the actual reward of what we had hoped and striven for these long years.”[18]

While Schiff was a well-known and generous financial patron to Jewish humanitarian causes, and part of his support for revolutionary movements against the Czar can be explained by the pervasive anti-Semitism in Russia, Schiff was also acting as a capitalist in funding the revolutionary movement, as explained in a letter to The Evening Post:

Replying to your request for my opinion of the effects of the revolution upon Russia’s finances, I am quite convinced that with the certainty of the development of the country’s enormous resources, which, with the shackles removed from a great people, will follow present events, Russia will before long take rank financially amongst the most favored nations in the money markets of the world.[19]

Here Schiff is clearly reflecting the hopes of an international financier in seeing Russia brought from an anachronistic economy into a modern financial system.

Schiff’s reply reflected the general attitude of London and New York financial circles at the time of the revolution. John B Young of the National City Bank, who had been in Russia in 1916 in regard to a U.S. loan, stated in 1917 of the revolution that it has been discussed widely when he had been in Russia the previous year. He regarded those involved as “solid, responsible and conservative.”[20] In the same issue, The New York Times reported that there had been a rise in Russian exchange transactions in London 24 hours preceding the revolution, and that London had known of the revolution prior to New York. The article reported that most prominent financial and business leaders in London and New York had a positive view of the revolution.[21] Another report states that while there had been some disquiet about the revolution, “this news was by no means unwelcome in more important banking circles.” [22]

While these attitudes refer to the March Revolution, the November Bolshevik Revolution also had as many proponents among Big Business, who saw the Bolsheviks as providing the stability and economic development that the Kerensky regime could not provide. We have already considered the recommendations of William Sands of American Interventional. Two well-placed individuals from widely divergent backgrounds arrived at similar conclusions in regard to pro-Bolshevik attitudes among certain business interests: American labor leader Samuel Gompers, and conservative editor of The London Times, Henry Wickham Steed.

In 1922, The New York Times reported that Gompers, reacting to negotiations at the international economic conference at Genoa, declared that a group of “predatory international financiers” were working for the recognition of the Bolshevik regime for the opening up of resources for exploitation. Despite the rhetoric by New York and London bankers during the war that a Russian revolution would serve the Allied cause against Germany, Gompers noted that this was an “Anglo-American-German banking group” and that they were “international bankers” that did not owe any national allegiance. He also noted that prominent Americans who had a history of anti-labor attitudes were advocating recognition of the Bolshevik regime.[23]

Similarly, Henry Wickham Steed, in a first-hand account of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, stated that proceedings were interrupted by the return from Moscow of William C. Bullitt and Lincoln Steffens, “who had been sent to Russia towards the middle of February by Colonel House and Mr. Lansing, for the purpose of studying conditions, political and economic, therein for the benefit of the American Commissioners plenipotentiary to negotiate peace.” Steed states specifically and at some length that international finance was behind the move for recognition of the Bolshevik regime and other moves in favor of the Bolsheviks, and specifically identified Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., New York, as one of the principal bankers “eager to secure recognition”: “Potent international financial interests were at work in favor of the immediate recognition of the Bolshevists….”[24]

Big Business had in fact gone into Russia in the midst of the revolutionary upheaval in 1917 to examine what business opportunities the Bolsheviks might provide at a time when a Bolshevik triumph was far from certain. This was undertaken under cover of the so-called American Red Cross Mission led by Col. William Boyce Thompson, director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, among other interests. The Mission was funded mainly by Thompson and by International Harvester, which gave $200,000. The so-called Red Cross Mission was primarily comprised of business personnel, and was according to Thompson’s assistant, Cornelius Kelleher, “nothing but a mask” for business interests.[25] Of the 24 members of the Red Cross Mission, five were doctors and there were two medical researchers. The rest were lawyers and businessmen associated with Wall Street. Dr. Billings nominally headed the Mission.[26] Sutton states that the Red Cross Mission provided aid for the assistance of the revolutionaries: “We know from the files of the U.S. embassy in Petrograd that the U.S. Red Cross gave 4,000 roubles to Prince Lvoff, president of the Council of Ministers, for ‘relief of revolutionists’ and 10,000 roubles in two payments to Kerensky for ‘relief of political refugees.'”[27]

Such was Thompson’s enthusiasm for Bolshevism that he was affectionately nicknamed “the Bolshevik of Wall Street” among the denizens of the New York financial district. Thompson gave a lengthy interview with The New York Times just after his four-month tour with the American Red Cross Mission, lauding the Bolsheviks. The article is an interesting indication of how Wall Street viewed their supposedly “deadly enemies,” the Bolsheviks, at a time during which the Soviets were still far from secure. “His opinion was that Russia needs America, that America must stand by Russia,” states The New York Times, which further states:

Colonel Thompson is a banker and a capitalist, and he has large manufacturing interests. He is not a sentimentalist nor a “radical.” But he has come back from his official visit to Russia in absolute sympathy with the Russian democracy as represented by the Bolsheviki at present.[28]

While Thompson did not consider Bolshevism the final form of government, he did see it as the most promising step towards a “representative government” and that it was the “duty” of the USA to “sympathize” with and “aid” Russia “through her days of crisis.” He stated that in reply to surprise at his pro-Bolshevik sentiments he did not mind being called “red” if that meant sympathy for 1,70,000,000 people “struggling for liberty and fair living.” Thompson, like Sands, praised the Bolshevik Government as being the equivalent to America’s democracy, stating: “The present government in Russia is a government of workingmen. It is a Government by the majority, and, because our Government is a government of the majority, I don’t see how we can fail to support the Government of Russia.”

Thompson in what might be seen as a dialectical outlook, saw the prospects of the Bolshevik Government being transformed as it incorporated a more Centrist position and included employers. If Bolshevism did not proceed thus, then “God help the world,” warned Thompson. The Times article ends: “At home in New York, the Colonel has received the good-natured title of ‘the Bolshevik of Wall Street.'”[29]

It can be seen that Thompson regarded the Bolshevik revolution as part of a phase, rather than an end, that would hopefully develop into a new synthesis. As history transpired less than a decade later, the new synthesis that did emerge under Stalin was something different from that hoped for by the kind of business interests represented by Thompson, Sanders, Vanderlip, et al; despite the renewed optimism that was monetarily encouraged by the Allied alliance with Stalin during World War II, which turned out from Stalin’s perspective to be strictly a marriage of convenience and limited duration.

However, in 1923 the think tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which Grosse in his “semi-official history” describes as the USA’s “East Coast foreign policy establishment”, issued its first report on Soviet Russia. Grosse writes:

Awkward in the records of the Inquiry[30] had been the absence of a single study or background paper on the subject of Bolshevism. Perhaps this was simply beyond the academic imagination of the times. Not until early 1923 could the Council summon the expertise to mobilize a systematic examination of the Bolshevik regime, finally entrenched after civil war in Russia. The impetus for this first study was Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which appeared to open the struggling Bolshevik economy to foreign investment. Half the Council’s study group were members drawn from firms that had done business in pre-revolutionary Russia, and the discussions about the Soviet future were intense. The concluding report dismissed “hysterical” fears that the revolution would spill outside Russia’s borders into central Europe or, worse, that the heady new revolutionaries would ally with nationalistic Muslims in the Middle East to evict European imperialism. The Bolsheviks were on their way to “sanity and sound business practices,” the Council study group concluded, but the welcome to foreign concessionaires would likely be short-lived. Thus, the Council experts recommended in March 1923 that American businessmen get into Russia while Lenin’s invitation held good, make money on their investments, and then get out as quickly as possible. A few[31] heeded the advice; not for seven decades would a similar opportunity arise.[32]

What is instructive here is both the pro-Bolshevik attitude in trying to allay popular fears that the Bolsheviks represented a revolutionary threat outside Russia, and in particular the assessment that the regime was pursuing “sound business practices” of which business should take advantage before the possibility of change.

The CFR was correct in warning that the opening up of the USSR to exploitation under the amiable regime of Lenin and Trotsky might be short-lived. Four years later Stalin had consolidated absolute authority. Armand Hammer, head of Occidental Petroleum, reminisced that he had intimately known every Soviet leader from Lenin to Gorbachev—except for Stalin. In 1921 Hammer was in the USSR concluding business deals when he met Trotsky, who wanted to know whether financial circles in the USA “regard Russia as a desirable field of investment?” Trotsky remarked to Hammer that “capital was really safer in Russia than anywhere else” because capitalists who invested there would have their investments protected even after the “world revolution.”[33] Hammer states that Trotsky remarked to him that “no true Marxist would allow sentiment to interfere with business,” comments that supposedly “startled” Hammer at the time, “but they wouldn’t surprise me today.”[34] In contrast, Hammer said he never had any dealings with Stalin and that by 1930 “Stalin was not a man with whom you could do business. Stalin believed that the state was capable of running everything without the support of foreign concessionaires and private enterprise.”[35]

If prospects for the USSR turned sour during the Stalinist reign and never quite returned to the days of Lenin, the communization of China might be seen to have paid off certain dividends—in the long term: Firstly in terms of helping to contain the USSR[36]; and, secondly, as a dialectical method of re-organizing China comparatively quickly from a peasant state to a centralized, industrialized state which has become very much part of the global economic system. Indeed, the killing of some 70,000,000 Chinese in process of modernization, communist-style, is better suited to commissars than to corporate executives.[37]

The USA was never adverse to Mao’s rulership of China, and insisted on Chiang Kai-shek negotiating with Mao. It was Mao who rebuffed U.S. overtures in favor of a debilitating “friendship treaty” with Stalin, which was designed to turn China into a humiliated vassal state.[38] Gen. Marshall had told Chiang in 1946 that U.S. military support would stop if he continued to pursue the Red Army into Northern Manchuria, a move that was crucial in what became the outcome for the struggle for China.[39] In 1953 Mao sought an alliance with the USA on the death of Stalin, however the Korean War made any such overtures impossible to sell to the American people. [40]

However, the long-term interests of certain business concerns in the USA, centered primarily on the Rockefeller dynasty, came to fruition in 1970. The self-described “East Coast foreign policy establishment,”[41] the CFR, played a significant role in normalizing relations between the USA and China, opening the way for economic relations that were to become so extensive that Niall Ferguson has described the US and Chinese economies as now existing in “interdependence.”[42] Grosse relates the Council’s role:

The Council turned in earnest to the problem of communist China early in the 1960s. Various Council publications had started developing the idea of a “two-China” policy—recognition of both the Nationalist government of Taiwan and the communist government on the mainland. This, Council authors suggested, might be the least bad policy direction. Professor A. Doak Barnett published a trail-blazing book for the Council in 1960, Communist China and Asia. A major Council study of relations between the United States and China commenced in 1964, the year China exploded its first nuclear bomb; the group met systematically for the next four years. “Contentment with the present stalemate in relations with the Chinese is not statesmanship,” declared Robert Blum of the Asia Society[43], the first director of the project. “American impatience and the strong currents of political emotion often make it impossible to plan ahead to manage our policy in a persevering but flexible way.”[44]

Taiwan presented a problem for the globalists insofar as the USA had guaranteed Taiwan’s security in the supposed line-up of the Cold War. The CFR therefore formulated another dialectical solution of seemingly supporting a “two China” policy that in practice would mean that Taiwan could be ditched by the USA while seeming to not have abandoned her. That in reality is what happened, as the USA used the “two-China policy” formulated years before within the CFR to secure China’s entry in into the United Nations, and to sideline Taiwan. The CFR approach was one of gradual promotion of the Mao regime, decrying the so-called “strong currents of emotion” that were holding back the globalist relationship with China, just as the CFR had in 1923 decried the anti-communist “hysteria” (sic) that was preventing the development of commerce with Bolshevik Russia. However the intentions were clear enough, and Grosse is explicit regarding the CFR attitude towards Mao’s China:

This seemed just the sort of political stalemate that the Council on Foreign Relations, free of electoral and partisan constraints, was endowed to repair. Midway through the project, the Council published an analysis of public opinion called The American People and China by A. T. Steele, who reached the unexpected conclusion that Americans were more willing than many of their elected officeholders to forge new relations with China. This study argued that it was only a steady diet of hostile public statements that had made Americans “disposed to believe the worst of communist China and they [the Chinese] the worst of us.”

In 1969 the Council summed up the project under the title, The United States and China in World Affairs, publication came [sic] just as Richard Nixon, a longtime and outspoken foe of Chinese communism, became president of the United States. (Some months earlier, Nixon himself had chosen Foreign Affairs[45] as his forum for exploring a fresh look at Asia in general, and China in particular.) Tilting at the long-prevailing freeze, the Council’s project defined a two-China policy with careful analysis. It advocated acquiescence in mainland Chinese membership in the United Nations, and argued that America must “abandon its effort to maintain the fiction that the Nationalist regime is the government of China.”[46]

Grosse concludes by citing Kissinger and Cyrus Vance in their pivotal roles in regard to opening up China:

Kissinger, acting as Nixon’s national security adviser, embarked on a secret mission to Beijing in 1971,[47] to make official, exploratory contact with the communist regime. Nixon himself followed in 1972. The delicate process of normalizing diplomatic relations between the United States and China was completed in 1978 by Kissinger’s successor as secretary of state, Cyrus R. Vance, a leading Council officer before and after his government service.[48]

The normalization of relations between the USA and China were soon followed up in 1973 by a business delegation headed by David Rockefeller. Rockefeller returned from China in an optimistic mood reminiscent of Thompson’s attitude towards Bolshevik Russia in 1917. In an article for The New York Times Rockefeller wrote: “The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in history.” Rockefeller goes on to praise the “sense of national harmony,” and “more efficient and dedicated administration … whatever the cost of the revolution.” In the same year he founded the Trilateral Commission with Zbigniew Brzezinski, a member of the CFR, who, as related above, had early in his academic career outlined a dialectical method of historical analysis from a capitalistic viewpoint.[49]

Domestic and Foreign Revolutionaries

That certain factions of international capitalism look favorably on certain forms of socialism is indicated not only by the favorable reception some of these Big Business luminaries gave the Bolshevik Revolution and how they viewed the prospects of business with China under communism, but also by the backing given to domestic left-wing movements, again from what would seem to be dialectical motives.

One of the primary institutions that received patronage from some of the largest financial interests was – and is – the London School of Economics (LSE). It should be recalled that the LSE was founded by Fabian Socialists, with Sidney Webb playing a particularly significant role. Among the original patrons of the LSE was Sir Ernest Cassel, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb and Co., and in the armaments firm of Basil Zaharof, Vickers. Cassel, whose humanitarianism might be open to suspicion, nonetheless backed the LSE as a means of training a “socialist bureaucracy.” Prof. J H Morgan K.C., wrote of Cassel’s support for the LSE:

When I once asked Lord Haldane why he persuaded his friend, Sir Ernest Cassel, to settle by his will large sums on … the London School of Economics, he replied, “Our object is to make this institution a place to raise and train the bureaucracy of the future Socialist State.”[50]

Other funding came from the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, the quintessential international capitalists. The relationship can be readily determined by Sir Ernest Cassel’s having established the chair of “economic geography”; and of Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild having been a Governor of the LSE.

In 1923 the first contribution from the Rockefeller Foundation (via the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fund) of $1,000,000 was made to the LSE[51]. From 1929-1952 the Rockefeller Foundation donated $4,105,592 to the LSE.[52]

The archival history of the London School of Economics and Political Science is instructive in respect of the political motivation and funding of the LSE. A synopsis of the Archives held by the British Library of Political and Economic Science,[53] a department of the LSE, states:

The London School of Economics and Political Science was officially opened in the autumn of 1895. It owed its existence to the will of Henry Hunt Hutchinson, a provincial member of the Fabian Society, who had left a significant sum of money in trust for “propaganda and other purposes of the said [Fabian] Society and its Socialism and towards advancing its objects in any way they [the trustees] deem advisable.”

The Archives confirm that largesse came from Rockefeller and Cassel funds:

The appointment of Sir William Beveridge in 1919 marked a period of rapid expansion in all areas of the School’s activity. The Commerce Degree (BCom) was instituted, attracting both applicants and finance. The School was able to expand the Clare Market site into Houghton Street, building the “Old Building” (1920) and the Cobden Library Wing, and expanding the Passmore Edwards Building to incorporate the Founder’s Room. Beveridge also used new funding from the Cassel Fund and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund to make numerous academic staff full-time and permanent, and create chairs in subjects including Political Economy, Social Anthropology and Statistics. New departments were created, notably International Studies, and emphasis placed on social science research.[54]

It might be asked what individuals regarded as epitomizing the free market, and the institutions connected with them, were doing subsidizing overtly socialistic causes? Dialectics seems to answer the paradox, and H. G. Wells’ comment on the convergence of capitalism and communism as forms of collectivism seems to offer an explanation. The alternative would presumably be that these capitalists are too stupid to understand what they are doing; that they are self-destructive, which would seem to be unlikely, given that it is they who are triumphing while Lenin’s ideal lays in ruins and is being superseded by what appears to be another phase in the capitalist dialectic.[55]

It is the same dialectical process that has seen the luminaries of capitalism and their Foundations patronize sundry socialistic institutions other than the LSE, including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and the New School for Social Research.[56]

In the USA, certain business interests seem to have followed a dialectical strategy in their patronage of the “New Left”. Is there any convincing evidence for this other than what might be thought of as an implausible conspiracy theory? Again, turning to Brzezinski, the “New Left” also comes under dialectical scrutiny:

The long-run historic function of the militant New Left depends largely on the circumstances in which it will eventually either fade or be suppressed. Though itself ideologically barren and politically futile, it might serve as an additional spur to social change, accelerating some reforms. If it does, even though the New Left itself disappears, its function in the third American revolution[57] will have been positive; if not, it will have been a catalyst for a more reactionary social response to the new dilemmas.[58]

Thus Brzezinski is cogent in explaining his view that the “New Left” would serve as either a dialectical means of generating “social change”, or it would result in an antithetical reaction. History showed that with the failure of George Wallace for example, it was the “social, change” of the type desired by Brzezinski and his employers that prevailed. Subsequent efforts at the presidency by Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan for example have been easily rendered futile.

Brzezinski was himself recruited as part of the CIA’s strategy to co-opt the Left against the USSR and was a major figure in the CIA-sponsored US delegation to the 1962 Helsinki Youth Festival, under the leadership of another long-serving Marxist CISA operative Gloria Steinem.[59] The CIA counter-Soviet offensive among the Left began in 1949 when the Agency sponsored American Trotskyist Dr. Sidney Hook, and his Americans for Intellectual Freedom was transformed into the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CIA quotes Hook as stating:

Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses—yes, even among the soldiers—of Stalin’s own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people.[60]

The dialectical purpose for the financial patronage of the domestic New Left by American Big Business Big Business seems to have been to make certain agendas and policies that the American public would perceive as unacceptably “Left-wing” appear to be moderate and mainstream by setting up the “extremists” by way of comparison. Several of the New Left leaders were aware of the manner by which the “Establishment” was attempting manipulate them. One of those involved with founding the Students for the Democratic Society (SDS), James Kunen, states in his memoir The Strawberry Statement that Big Business sought to channel funds to the SDS as part of a dialectical process:

In the evening I went up to the University to check out a strategy meeting. A kid was giving a report on the SDS convention. He said that at the convention men from Business International Roundtables, the meetings sponsored by Business International[61] for their client groups and heads of government—tried to buy up a few radicals [sic]. These men are the world’s leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the boys who wrote the Alliance for Progress. They’re the left wing of the ruling class.

They agree with us on black control and student control….

They want [Eugene] McCarthy in. They see fascism as the threat, see it coming from [George] Wallace. The only way McCarthy could win is if the crazies and young radicals act up and make Gene look more reasonable. They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago.[62]

We were also offered Esso (Rockefeller) money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the center as they move to the left. [63]

This Big Business involvement with the New Left is confirmed independently by another participant. Gerald Kirk, when a student at the University of Chicago, became active in the SDS, the DuBois Club, the Black Panthers, and the Communist Party, as an informant for the FBI. Kirk broke from the Left in 1969. The following year, he testified before the House and Senate Internal Security panels:

Young people … have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they’re fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don’t realize that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes…. [64]

How this process operated can be seen in 1968 when the SDS Columbia chapter instigated a student revolt and take-over of the University. Revolutionary leadership was soon taken out of the hands of the SDS and was taken over by the Students for a Restructured University (SRU)[65] that had been funded with a $40,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.[66] It is of interest to note that during the time the Ford Foundation was funding the SRU amidst the Columbia University riots, McGeorge Bundy was the president of the Foundation. In 1949 Bundy became a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Corporation, 1990–1996. It cannot therefore be claimed that a liberal run Foundation was simply conveying funds to a liberal cause. The Ford Foundation, as with other such Foundations, is generally under the control of individuals associated with Big Business. Ford states of this period:

At Columbia University, which was severely disrupted by student demonstrations in the spring, grants were made to three groups studying and redefining the roles of faculty, students, administrators, and trustees. They included a faculty committee and a student organization that was active in the demonstrations but is dedicated to restructuring, not overturning, the university.[67]

It is interesting that the Foundation report cryptically mentions “a student organization” active in the New Left demonstrations with the SDS, Black Panthers and others, referring here to the Students for a Restructured University, without naming the SRU as the recipient.

The New Left had to a significant extend been spawned by the National Students Association which had long been receiving subsidies from the CIA as part of its counter-Left agenda against the USSR, which financed this and students groups in Europe. One commentator remarked of this period:

In subsequent findings from other newspapers such as the New York Times it turned out that the CIA had backed many non-communist youth and student movements, such as the International Union of Socialist Youth and various labour unions…. The NY Times calculated that the CIA had backed the ISC with as much as USD 400,000 every year.

The revelation struck the ISC as a bomb. Only an inner circle within the NSA and the ISC were aware that the funding they got came from the CIA. When the magazine hit the streets, it became world news and the response was of course fury from the member NUSes. One by one, the NUSes left the ISC, and the money from the CIA -backed foundations stopped….[68]

Both the New Left and the support for communism as an extreme modernization process in nations with anachronistic economies and values were of course not the final phase in the dialectical process. Brzezinski’s comments that the New Left would pass away while its legacy would likely have contributed to such a dialectic, has been noted. Likewise, communism itself became an anachronism, and had served its purpose in the modernization process. The dialectical process would enter a stage of subverting the Soviet bloc in order to introduce the next stage, that of the market economy, globalization and privatization. Here again certain financial interests have been the backers of such “regime change” under the guise of the “open society”, the “color revolutions” and “democracy.”

The basis for subverting the former Soviet states had already been established during the Cold War, with Trotskyists playing leading parts. This network primarily centers on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established in 1983 at the prompting of Tom Kahn, by an Act of Congress. Kahn who as the AFL-CIO’s director of international relations had been active in supporting anti-Soviet socialists such as Solidarity in Poland. He and others believed that what has being called the “global democratic revolution” needed support from a source other than the CIA. Kahn was a follower of Max Shachtman, as is the founding president of NED, Carl Gershman, a luminary of the Social Democrats USA.[69] The influence of Shachtman is significant as he was one of the primary leaders of American Trotskyism, who broke with the Fourth International and indeed with Trotsky himself, over the “official” Trotskyist position of conditional support for the USSR on the basis that it retained a nationalized economy. Shachtman and his supporters, which included Trotsky’s widow Sedova, on the contrary believe that the USSR represented a bureaucratic dictatorship and had become the primary obstacle to world socialism.[70] This anti-Soviet premise developed into a hawkish position in support of US foreign policy, and many of today’s so-called “neo-cons” such as Wolfowitz, et al got their political start as young Trotskyists.[71]

NED is funded by Congress and supports “activists and scholars” with 1000 grants in over 90 countries. NED describes its program thus:[72]

From time to time Congress has provided special appropriations to the Endowment to carry out specific democratic initiatives in countries of special interest, including Poland (through the trade union Solidarity), Chile, Nicaragua, Eastern Europe (to aid in the democratic transition following the demise of the Soviet bloc), South Africa, Burma, China, Tibet, North Korea and the Balkans. With the latter, NED supported a number of civic groups, including those that played a key role in Serbia’s electoral breakthrough in the fall of 2000. More recently, following 9/11 and the NED Board’s adoption of its third strategic document, special funding has been provided for countries with substantial Muslim populations in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.[73]

Working in tandem with NED is the similar international network of George Soros, the currency speculator, operating through the Open Society Institute and Soros Foundations. Again, the concentration is on the former Soviet bloc, and the effort is primarily directed toward preventing the resurgence of nationalistic or Orthodox religious ideas[74] that might intrude upon the development of the open market economy. In 2003, the year Soros targeted Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze for removal, the Canadian Globe and Mail carried a succinct article on the Soros network, stating that in response to Georgian complaints about Soros network activities in that state, Soros had replied: “This is what we did in Slovakia at the time of [Vladimir] Meciar, in Croatia at the time of [Franjo] Tudjman and in Yugoslavia at the time of Milosevic.”[75]

The Soros-backed “color revolutions” follow a readily identifiable pattern of supposedly “spontaneous” demonstrators against what is claimed to be a tyrannical regime. The demonstrations generally begin as youthful, and student based and spread to large sections of the middle class. Again turning to the statements of an international think tank, a report of the Club of Rome considers the “youthful rebelliousness” of the present “color revolutions” to be a positive sign in a dialectical sense, in terms reminiscent of Brzezinski’s references to the New Left of his time. A major Club of Rome report co-authored by co-founder Alexander King, states:

The picture is rather grim but we can point to some positive signs that are emerging. Young people are good at starting revolutions, no matter how soon they are reintegrated into the mainstream.[76]

…The myriad of strands of change constituting the world revolution have to be understood, related, opposed, encouraged, diverted to other channels or assimilated.'[77]

Here King and Schneider are expressing what would seem to be a dialectical approach to revolution, stating that youthful rebellion can be co-opted and manipulated into what they call a “world revolution”, and indeed what George Bush in a speech to NED called a “global democratic revolution”[78] that long ago took the place of the international proletarian revolution of Trotsky’s dream.

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[1] H G Wells, Russia in the Shadows, Chapter VII, ‘The Envoy’, 1920. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602371h.html

[2] Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians,’ pp. 40-60.

[3] Ibid., p. 71.

[4] Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, “Speech on the question of free trade delivered to the Democratic Association of Brussels at it public meeting of January 9, 1848”, Collected Works, Volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976).

[5] Armand Hammer (son of a veteran communist who combined revolution with an opulent lifestyle) remained on friendly terms with every Soviet leader – except Stalin – and remarked at the time of the implementation of the NEP in 1921 ‘It seemed as if it meant nothing other than the abandonment of communism and the restoration of capitalist methods. As Lenin stated at the time and as events were later to prove, NEP was not the acknowledgment of complete failure which the enemies and critics of the Soviet called it. It provided for State Socialism rather than Communism…’ Armand Hammer, Hammer: Witness to History (London: Coronet Books, 1988), pp. 136-137. Hammer relates that Lenin told him: ‘The New Economic Policy demands a fresh development of our economic possibilities. We hope to accelerate the process by a system of industrial and commercial concessions to foreigners. It will give great opportunities to the United State.’ (Ibid., p. 143).

[6] The World Bank: ‘Vietnam: Country Brief,’ http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/VIETNAMEXTN/0,contentMDK:20212080~menuPK:387573~pagePK:1497618~piPK:217854~theSitePK:387565,00.html (accessed 28 February 2010). The World Bank report states that Vietnam is pursuing a ‘path of transition towards a market economy with socialist orientation… Vietnam has become increasingly integrated with the world economy and has become a member of the World Trade Organization.’

[7] Nelson Rockefeller, Playboy, October 1975, cited by: Gary Allen, The Rockefeller File (Seal Beach, California: ’76 Press, 1975), p. 137.

[8] For example: ‘The bourgeoisie immediately took fascism into paid service in their fight to defeat and enslave the proletariat.’ Resolution of the Third Enlarged Executive of the Communist International Plenum on Fascism, 23 June 1923.

[9] David Rockefeller is listed as the ‘Founder and Honorary North American Chairman (1977-1991) of the Trilateral Commission,’ The Trilateral Commission, http://www.trilateral.org/MEMB.HTM (accessed 5 February 2010). In the Question & Answer section the Commission states of Rockefeller and Brzezinski: ‘David Rockefeller was the principal founder of the Commission. He has served on the Executive Committee from the beginning in mid-1973 and was North American Chairman from mid-1977 through November 1991. Zbigniew Brzezinski played an important role in the formation of the Commission. He was its first Director (1973-76) and its major intellectual dynamo in those years. Dr. Brzezinski rejoined the Commission in 1981 and served on the Executive Committee for many years…’ http://www.trilateral.org/moreinfo/faqs.htm (accessed 5 February 2010).

[10] CFR Membership Roster 2009, p. 3.

Peter Grosse, in his ‘semi-official’ history calls the CFR ‘the East Coast foreign policy establishment’. Gross, ‘X Leads the Way’, Continuing The Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996, (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2006). http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/index.html (accessed 27 February 2010).

[11] Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), p. 29.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Brzezinski, op.cit., pp. 33-34.

[14] Ibid., p. 34.

[15] The consortium was the American International Corporation, in which J P Morgan interests predominated. American International had adopted a pro-Bolshevik policy as early as 1918, when the Corporation’s executive secretary William Franklin Sands expressed the view, at the request for an assessment of the Russian situation by Secretary of Sates Robert Lansing, that the USA has already been too long in recognising ‘Trotzky.’ Sands made comparisons between the American and Bolshevik Revolutions. (US State Dept. Decimal File, 861.00/961, William Sands, 16 January 1918, p. 9). His attitude is similar to that of William Boyce Thompson, and other Wall Street luminaries, as will be considered below.

[16] Richard J Barnett, Ronald E Muller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 93.

[17] Indeed, Barnet at least, as a prominent academic with the long running Left-wing think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, would probably have preferred not to contemplate a more far-reaching nexus between Big Business and some forms of socialism. It is however interesting to note that the IPR was itself established with financial patronage from James P Warburg of the famous banking dynasty, and continues to receive financial patronage from the Ford Foundation, and has had among its trustees well connected businessmen such as Michael Gellert.

[18] New York Times, 24 March, 1917, pp. 1-2.

[19] “Loans easier for Russia”, The New York Times, 20 March 1917. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9B04EFDD143AE433A25753C2A9659C946696D6CF (accessed 12 January 2010).

[20] ‘Is A People’s Revolution,’ The New York Times, 16 March 1917.

[21] ‘Bankers here pleased with news of revolution,’ ibid.

[22] ‘Stocks strong – Wall Street interpretation of Russian News,’ ibid.

[23] Samuel Gompers, “Soviet Bribe fund Here Says Gompers, Has Proof That Offers Have Been Made, He Declares, Opposing Recognition. Propaganda Drive. Charges Strong Group of Bankers With Readiness to Accept Lenin’s Betrayal of Russia”, The New York Times, 1 May 1922. Online at Times’ archives: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E00E3D81739EF3ABC4953DFB3668389639EDE

[24] Henry Wickham Steed, Through Thirty Years 1892-1922 A personal Narrative, ‘The Peace Conference, The Bullitt Mission,’ Vol II.  (New York: Doubleday Page and Co., 1924), p. 301.

[25] Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (New Rochelle: Arlington House Publishers, 1974), p. 71.

[26] Ibid., p. 75.

[27] Ibid., p. 73.

[28] ‘Bolsheviki Will Not Make Separate Peace: Only Those Who Made Up Privileged Classes Under Czar Would Do So, Says Col. W B Thompson, Just Back From Red Cross Mission,’ The New York Times, 27 January 1918.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Predecessor of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[31] Grosse’s reference to ‘a few’ corporations getting into Soviet Russia at this early stage is an understatement, or at least if ‘a few’ did get in they were of significant magnitude.  Cf. Charles Levinson, Vodka-Cola (Essex: The Anchor Press Ltd., 1980). Levinson comments in his exhaustive study on East-West relations: ‘…Business contracts continued throughout the period of apparent ideological antagonism. American capitalists travelled to Russia to trade in the twenties and thirties on a steady individual basis.’ Levinson, ibid.,  p. 11. Cf. Antony Sutton, op.cit.

[32] Peter Grosse, op.cit., ‘Basic Assumptions.’

[33] Armand Hammer with Neil Lyndon, Hammer: Witness to History (Kent: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), p. 160.

[34] Ibid., p. 201. It is doubtful whether Hammer was genuinely ‘startled’ by Trotsky’s attitude then either. Armand’s father Julius had played generous host to the Trotsky family during their brief sojourn in New York. See: Richard B Spence, ‘Hidden Agendas: Spies, Lies and Intrigue Surrounding Trotsky’s American Visit, January-April 1917’, Revolutionary Russia, Volume 21, Issue 1 June 2008, pp. 33 – 55.

[35] Ibid., p. 221.

[36] K R Bolton, ‘Russian and China: An Approaching Conflict?,’ Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Washington, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2009, pp. 182-185.

[37] Cf. J Chang and J Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathon Cape, 2005), pp. 534- 547.

[38] K R Bolton, op.cit., p. 156.

[39] J Chang, op.cit.,  pp. 304-311.

[40] Ibid., p. 601.

[41] Peter Grosse, op.cit.

[42] ‘Far from being strategic rivals, the two empires have the air of economic partners. ‘ Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2004), p. 261.

[43] It is interesting to note that Robert Blum, head of the CFR China team, was also with the Asia Society, another Rockefeller think tank that had been founded in 1956 by John D Rockefeller III. The by-line of the Society is: ‘Preparing Asians and Americans for a shared future.’ http://www.asiasociety.org/about/mission.html (accessed 2 March 2010).

Asia Society Trustees currently include: Charles P. Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller IV. The chairman of the Asia Society’s Executive Committee is Richard C Holbrooke, former US Ambassador to the UN, who is a member of the CFR, and the Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller.

[44] Peter Grosse, op.cit.,  ‘X’ Leads the Way.’

[45] The CFR’s journal.

[46] Peter Grosse, op.cit.

[47] Grosse mentions in a Note that: ‘Accompanying Kissinger on this momentous flight was his personal aide, Winston Lord, a former Foreign Service officer. Lord, … became president of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1977…’

[48] Ibid.

[49] Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, op.cit.

[50] J. H. Morgan, The Quarterly Review, January 1929, pp. 187-188.

[51] In describing the history of its International Relations Department, LSE comments on the funding of the department’s building: ‘How fast International Relations could grow would depend upon Beveridge’s success in tapping the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund for the building work in Houghton Street.’ http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:W4qVXWjupl0J:www2.lse.ac.uk/internationalRelations/aboutthedepartment/historyofdept.aspx (accessed 15 January 2010).

[52] Reece Committee, Congressional Hearings (1953) ‘Tax Exempt Foundations’, Staff Report #4, p. 703.

[53] British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics and Political Science Archives, 1894-2000, Administrative/Biographical history [description]. http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:N_NBx6kWeJkJ:www.aim25.ac.uk/cats/1/3261.htm (accessed: 15 January 2010).

[54] Ibid.

[55] This next phase is that of the so-called ‘democratic revolutions, or ‘colour revolutions’ that are being funded to subvert what remains of economic sovereignty in the former Soviet bloc, and to ensure that there will not be a rebirth of nationalism or tradition-bound morals. This matter will be considered briefly.

[56] A perusal of the websites of both institutions will readily establish the funding sources.

[57] Brzezinski defines the “second American revolution” as a process of changing America beginning with the Civil War and completing in Roosevelt’s New Deal.

[58] Brzezinski, op.cit., p. 90.

[59] Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), p. 37.

[60] Sidney Hook, 1949, quoted on the CIA website: ‘Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50’; https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v38i5a10p.htm#rft1 (accessed 26 January 2010).

[61] Business International has associations with the CIA. According to a co-founder the corporation had provide covers for CIA operatives. “CIA Established Many Links To Journalists in US and Abroad”, New York Times, 27 December 1977.

[62] The 1967 Chicago riots against the Democratic Party National Convention, of which the above cited Hayden was a leader.

[63] James Kunen The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, (New York: Avon, 1970), pp. 130–131.

[64] ‘Investigation of SDS 1969,’ Committee on Internal Security, 91st Congress, 1st Session,

Pt. 5, pp. 1654-1705 of hearings.

[65] Students for a Restructured University presented themselves as the ‘moderate’ wing of the student uprising, the strategy being to threaten that if their ‘moderate’ demands were not met, the University administration would have to deal with the SDS and other extremists.  ‘Columbia University – Students for a Democratic Society – Unrest,’ ABC Evening News, 19 September 1968, Vanderbilt Television News Archive, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:hQs-Ccu5i1IJ:tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/program.pl (accessed 3 February 2010).

[66] One of those who was involved with fund-raising and organising the student revolt at Columbia University, Dwight Macdonald, in an exchange of letters with Prof. Ivan Morris, stated at the time that, ‘The SRU has received a grant of $10,000* from the Ford Foundation to study and formulate proposals for reform, and something may come of this.’ Ivan Morris and Dwight Macdonald, ‘An Exchange on Columbia II,’ The New York Review of Books, Volume 11, Number 3, 22 August 1968. This Foundation support for the ‘moderates’ of the SRU seems to verify the theory put forward by both Jerry Kirk and James Kunen that Big Business was promoting Left-wing extremism to move the centre of political gravity among the American people to what they would perceive by contrast as ‘moderate’ Leftism, or what we might call social democracy.

*An article in a leading British Leftist magazine puts the amount given by the Ford Foundation to SRU at $40,000. Mike Marqusee, ‘1968 The mysterious chemistry of social change,’ Red Pepper, 6 April 2008, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:Qu0dvzQ7RuIJ:www.redpepper.org.uk/1968-The-Mysterious-Chemistry- (accessed 3 February 2010).

$40,000 is also the amount stated by Joel Geier, Associate Editor of the International Socialist Review, ‘1968: Year of Revolt,’  talk at the University of Illinois, Champaign, IL on March 26, 2008. Geier was a leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkley during the 1960s and witnessed the 1968 Paris riots. International Socialist review, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:Tw1lGIjtOAgJ:links.org.au/node/335+ (accessed 3 February 20100.

[67] ‘Higher Education: Academic Reform,’ Ford Foundation Annual Report 1968, http://www.fordfound.org/archihttp://www.fordfound.org/archives/item/1968/text/045ves/item/1968/text/045 (accessed 4 February 2010).

[68] Thomas Nilsson, ‘Analysis: Students as Cold Warriors: The International Student Movement during the Cold War (1946-1969),’ESU, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:Vw8e40OnJw0J:www.esib.org/index.php/component/content/article/121-issue-28/137-analysis-students-as-cold-warriors (accessed 3 February 2010).

[69] Rachelle Horowitz, ‘Tom Kahn and the Fight for Democracy: A Political Portrait and Personal Recollection,’ Dissent Magazine, pp. 238-239.

[70] Max Shachtman, ‘The Congress of the Fourth International: An Analysis of the Bankruptcy of “Orthodox Trotskyism”’, New International, Vol. XIV, No.8, October 1948, pp.236-245.

[71] K R Bolton, America’s “‘World Revolution’: Neo-Trotskyist Foundations of U.S. Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy Journal, 3 May 2010, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/05/03/americas-world-revolution-neo-trotskyist-foundations-of-u-s-foreign-policy/

[72] ‘About NED’, National Endowment for Democracy, http://www.ned.org/about (accessed 7 March 2010).

[73] David Lowe, ‘Idea to Reality: NED at 25: Reauthorization’, NED, http://www.ned.org/about/history (accessed 7 March 2010).

[74] That international business luminaries are nervous about the resurgence of nationalistic and religious fervour in the former Soviet bloc is indicated by a statement by David Rockefeller, where he alluded to there already being in the former Soviet bloc ‘powerful forces at work that threaten to destroy all of our hopes and efforts to erect an enduring structure of global cooperation.’ [74] David Rockefeller, acceptance speech for the annual medal at the 28th Annual United Nations Ambassador Dinner, September 14, 1994, Business Council for the United Nations Briefing; Vol. 8, Issue 2, Winter 1995, p. 1.

[75] M McKinnon, ‘Georgia revolt carried mark of Soros,’ Globe & Mail, November 26, 2003, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031126.wxsoros1126/BNStory/Front/

[76]Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome (Orient Longman, 1991), ‘Intimations of Solidarity,’ p. 80.

[77] Ibid., p. 88.

[78] Fred Barbash, ‘Bush: Iraq Part of “Global Democratic Revolution”: Liberation of Middle East Portrayed as Continuation of Reagan’s Policies’, Washington Post, 6 November 6, 2003.