Workers World, Vol. 9, No. 5, March 3, 1967
No lasting benefit will accrue to the American people from the exposure of some of the activities of the CIA unless we can at least post the problem which is central to the many critical and complicated issues while it raises. Otherwise all the mass indignation and the bitter disenchantment of millions of people with “their” government as a result of the revelations will, like steam, slowly evaporate or more likely will be diverted into “safe” channels.
It was fear that the storm of protest over the exposure might go beyond the bounds of “safety” which forced Robert Kennedy to join President Johnson, and Senate Majority Leader Mansfield to join Richard Russell in a holy alliance to put the damper on any meaningful public inquiry about the CIA.
It would be the height of political naiveté to assume that the exposures were the result of mere courageous journalism such as exemplified by the article in Ramparts magazine
Unless we probe further, we shall find that in the end, the CIA revelations will be reduced to the status of a muck-raking episode in their effect on the minds of progressives, as so often has happened in similar cases in American history. All their deep significance will then surely be lost. Bourgeois ideology as a result will become stronger, rather than weaker. The crimes that will continue to be committee will be greater – not lesser – and the system as a whole will become more oppressive than ever.
The setting up of the CIA in 1947 came in response to a genuine tidal wave of world revolutionary development. It was plain that this tidal wave could cover the entire globe.
The special concern of the U.S. ruling class at that moment was the developing revolutionary situation in Western and Eastern Europe and the vigorous resurgence of militant political struggle in the U.S.
The U.S. ruling class at that historic moment was isolated abroad as well as at home, as it had never been before, with the possible exception of the early days of the Depression. Leading industrialists, bankers, their publicists and politicians felt the very destiny of capitalism was at stake together with their very survival as a ruling class.
The stronger and more reactionary section of the ruling class, at the same time saw its destiny in imperialist world domination. It could only carry out its objectives by a counter-revolutionary offensive under the façade of democracy and “the open society” while at the same time resorting to greater use of terror and intimidation.
The CIA was the inevitable product. The form for it was established many years earlier. The skeleton had been in operation under the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II.
With the failure of the Western CP leadership to utilize the new crisis for its own class ends, that leadership finally became a victim of revisionist opportunist politics. Similar developments, of course, took place in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.
At home the Communist, progressive and militant trade union movements were practically destroyed as effective forces. McCarthyism subsequently triumphed.
The maneuvers and full scale efforts by the Soviet leadership which formalized the capitulation of the Western CPs and the inauguration of neo-bourgeois reforms laid the basis for a retrenchment by the forces of reaction and a relaxation of some of its police measures.
Some of the CIA activities, as the Feb. 6 New York Times admits, could now be viewed as superfluous. This, however, is only part of the reason for the exposure. The greater part lies in the ever-increasing anti-war resistance and bolder and more militant struggle by the Black people.
The fact that all this occurs at a time when the bourgeoisie is in the midst of a mad military adventure abroad, has frightened a section of the liberal bourgeoisie and has impelled it to resist some of the “excesses and unwarranted intrusion” – as they put it – of the CIA.
But reactionary and liberal alike, they are all agreed in principle on the necessity for the existence of the CIA as an instrument of reaction at home and government subversion abroad.
The deeper problem, of course, is not the CIA as such. It is the problem of the modern state, its enormous and all-pervasive role in society and the magnitude of its colossal intervention – open no less than covert – in all fields of social life and human endeavor. It is the problem of the hidden class character of the state as a whole, as the instrument of the possessing class, of the exploiters against the exploited. The CIA is only one of a number of levers in the hands of the bourgeois state, which exercises overall domination and suppression in a multitude of ways and by a variety of means. It is not possible to consider the significance of the CIA revelations except in this framework.
All the more misleading is it to read in the lead editorial of The Worker of February 26, 1967, that the “CIA is the super-government of the U.S., above the Presidency, above the Congress, and above the Judiciary.”
Without desiring in the slightest degree to diminish the pernicious and hideous role of the CIA, it is necessary to say that such a characterization of it obscures rather than clarifies the problem. Aside from the effect it has of softening, even perhaps, of excusing the President, Congress and the Judiciary, it throws out of focus the actual relationship which exists between them and such organs as the CIA, the FBI, and the Military Intelligence.
The CIA is by no means a “super-government,” assuming that such a term has validity in Marxist sociology. The CIA under whatever name it may travel (or be reconstituted, as it very well may be), is a product of imperialist statecraft. It was born and fashioned by the very same class which dominates the Presidency, the Congress, the Judiciary, and the Military and Intelligence services. Through the use of an artful and ever-changing combination of these weapons in the armory of the capitalist state, the bourgeoisie is able to exert its will over society and enforce its class supremacy.
“The CIA, it is now clear to everyone,” says The Worker in the same editorial, “has only one purpose, to overthrow the democratic system and replace it by a dictatorial regime.”
The danger of a coup d’etat is always possible, as the Kennedy assassination shows. The unstable character of the imperialist system and the insoluble contradictions arising from its mad and adventurist foreign policy are good grounds for such a supposition.
All the more necessary is it to maintain theoretical clarity on the character of the state. By deliberately inflating the antagonisms which exist between this or that organ of the capitalist state and by investing one with a “democratic” and the other with a dictatorial mission, The Workers falsifies the true character of the struggle. It lays the foundation for the support of the lesser-evil policy so dear to its heart and so disastrous to the cause of the working class struggle.
It is true that there is constant warfare going on between the different branches of the bourgeois state, reflecting the internecine struggle of warring imperialist cliques and dynastic financial and industrial groupings. But the dispute is within the framework of the same class dictatorship and the issue is how best to exercise that dictatorship – how to dominate and exploit the people – and has nothing whatever to do with the preservation of “democratic rights” or the struggle against dictatorial methods. Only the working class, the oppressed Black people and their allies among the progressive people can carry out such a struggle.
If The Worker was as confident of its analysis as its rhetoric implies, one would think it would propose serious, resolute measures capable of meeting the danger it describes. On the contrary. To combat the behemoth, it summons forth a mouse.
Says The Worker: “The people have the right to demand of their elected representatives in Congress that they make a thorough investigation of the activities of the CIA. To guarantee that such a probe be objective, all members of Congress who have been involved in the work of the CIA – such as the Armed Services Committee, Appropriations Committee, Ways and Means Committee – should be disqualified from serving on such an investigative committee.”
To the imminent threat of “the overthrow of the democratic system” The Worker proposes – what? – A congressional investigation! Can anyone possibly believe that a “super-government, above the Presidency, above the Congress, above the Judiciary,” as its own words describe it, will be amenable to the demands of a mere congressional committee?
Such a cook-book recipe in the struggle against a takeover by the “super-government” spells out nothing less than political prostration before the very behemoth which it seeks to combat.
But do the CIA exposures actually signify? It is important that the question be formulated from a Marxist point of view. Do they herald a sharpening of class antagonisms as The Worker editorial implies, but badly distorts, or do they signify a softening of the general class antagonisms, as the New York Times-Walter Lippmann liberal school of imperialist apologetics claims?
Walter Lippmann, in his syndicated column of February 21, explains the CIA revelations as the development of “... the Big Thaw, which has been under way in Europe for several years, and has now reached America. The ice of the cold war is breaking up, and, as the climate is changing, the landscape is changing too. The older and more permanent features of the American scene are reappearing.”
That is why some of the more odious aspects of CIA activities are being exposed! Since tensions between the East and West are being relaxed, there is no need for some of the excesses practiced by the CIA and the more “permanent” (presumably democratic) features are reappearing.
Undoubtedly there is an element of truth in this analysis as there is in The Worker editorial. But taken separately or jointly, these commentaries add up to a gross deception.
Democracy is reappearing! The gestapo is disappearing! That is what they are saying. But nothing could be more illusory. Nothing could be more deceptive.
Lippmann bases himself on the total abandonment of the perspective of proletarian revolution and the triumph of revisionist politics in both the leadership of the Soviet Union and the Western CPs as one key concession to Western imperialism. (The Worker dares not bring all this into it analysis.) Another no less serious concession is the neo-bourgeois restorationist trends both in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. A third is the growth of reformism and the corruption of class consciousness of the workers in Western Europe, America, and to a lesser extent in Japan.
The totality of these concessions, reckon Lippmann, Kennan and Co. and their school, is of a sufficient magnitude to reasonably satisfy the objectives of the bourgeoisie and stabilize its shaky system of exploitation. The guarantee for this is the presumed stability of the U.S.-USSR alliance. In the present world situation, they think they “have it made.”
As always, Lippmann and his school, which represent the liberal bourgeoisie, are reckoning without their host.
First, the U.S.-USSR alliance has yet to be tested in the crucible of important events. Second, the growth and development of the revisionist social grouping in the USSR is a highly unstable phenomenon whose future even Lippmann will not guarantee. Third, the stability of capitalism in Europe, partly as the result of collusion between the Soviet leaders and the Western imperialists, has not ended the class antagonisms there, but merely transferred them to the world arena and shifted the struggle from the European continent to Asia. The brutal prosecution of the Vietnam War by the U.S. is a product of that shift.
What if proves is that the appetite of the Western imperialists has not been satisfied by the enormous concessions wrung from the Soviet leaders but has merely been whetted by them.
While a temporary retreat at home by the forces of witch-hunt and repression has been evident for some time now, it is more the product of the ever-growing resistance to the war in Vietnam and its economic hardships on the mass of the people, especially the poorest – the Black people – than it is a conscious effort by the bourgeoisie to democratize its organs of suppression and intimidation. It may have been forced to lift the curtain on some of the CIA activities, but it has evidenced no desire to either dismantle or discredit its agency.
The veritable united front shown by Robert Kennedy and President Johnson on the one hand, and Senate Majority Leader Mansfield and Armed Services Chairman Richard Russell on the other, is a crystal-clear proof that the entire official bourgeois establishment stands squarely behind the CIA.
A similar united front should prevail in the efforts of the working class, the liberation forces, and progressive organizations generally. But the unity of objective should be based on the realities of class warfare as it is being fought all over the world today and not on the superstitious incantations of pacifist priests and deceitful capitalist politicians, who urge class conciliation instead of the prosecution of the class war to a successful conclusion.
Last updated: 11 May 2026