For social scientists it is a sobering and useful exercise in self-understanding to
attempt to see clearly how the direction of our scientific exertions, particularly in
economics, is conditioned by the society in which we live, and most directly by the
political climate (which, in turn, is related to all other changes in society)....
Responding to that cue [from the sphere of politics], students turn to research on issues
that have attained political importance.... So it has always been. The major recastings of
economic thought ... were all responses to changing political conditions and
opportunities.
-- Gunnar Myrdal in Asian Drama
Are we then to conclude that Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Gunnar Myrdal and Peter Bauer must
be regarded as "Right" and A.G. Frank, Dudley Seers, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and
the Pope as "Left"? Or is it the other way around?
-- H. W. Arndt
My "contribution" to this issue is inspired by Chalmers Johnson's "The
CIA and Me"; but since I never attained or aspired to his lofty heights, I can only
offer my lowly worm's eye view of political conditions, opportunities, and responses á la
Myrdal from the ground up. My sympathies do lie with Bruce Cumings. However my own
experience -- and apparently also that of Arndt -- reveals that the political
"science" issues in "Area Studies and International Studies during the Cold
War" did not appear with quite as much "virtue of clarity" (Barlow) as
Cumings now sees them with 20-20 hindsight. Alas, my experience echoes some of the
confusion in Stanley Heginbotham's and Arndt's renditions, both during the Cold War and
since.
My personal life and experience was long and intimately shaped by the cold war and its
relation in turn to "area studies" especially of the Soviet Union, Latin America
and "Third World development" policy and studies generally. Therefore, my own
experience is an ineluctable prism (prison?) for me. But both may also contribute
something to the general political sociology of knowledge of this period, much of which
still remains to be analyzed and written, of which more below. My pacifist novelist father
had taken me out of Nazi Germany when I was four years old in 1933. In the 1950s, he wrote
his autobiography under the title Links wo das Herz Ist (translated as Heart on
the Left). I went to Ann Arbor High School and then to Swarthmore College in the
United States, where I studied economics and became a Keynesian. Many years later I would
ask my ex-fellow student (now the publisher) Myron Sharpe why he did not save me years of
wandering through the woods by telling me about Marxism and Communism four decades ago,
and he answered "you would not have listened."
1950. Not knowing what I was letting myself in for, I started a Ph.D. in economics at
the University of Chicago, which has since become the oracle of the right (that is wrong!)
and the bible of Reaganomics. I studied economic theory with Milton Friedman, who in the
political climate of the time did not yet have the opportunity to preach his monetarist
gospel to many more than his capite student audience. I also remember Friedman's
dismissing Kenneth Galbraith, who then still had more opportunity, as a mere
"popularizer" rather than an economic "theorist". I passed my
comprehensive exams in economic theory and public finance after less than a year at the
Ph.D. level (the other possibilities were the MA level or failure). Despite that, I
received a letter from the Chicago Economics Department advising me to leave, because of
my unsuitability or our incompatibility. My ex-colleague and (ex-?) friend at Michigan
State, Paul Strassman would later call me a "renegade" from Chicago economics.
John Toye later referred to me as "the archetypical Western radicalized intellectual,
who at that time [1970s] dominated development thinking was Andre Gunder Frank, the
orthodox Chicago economist who abruptly became a Latin American revolutionary figure
(compare Frank 1958 and 1972)." So much for political climate, conditions,
opportunities, and responses.
1951. I went on to the University of Michigan and studied for a semester with Kenneth
Boulding and Richard Musgrave. I wrote a paper on welfare economics for Boulding, which
proved that it is impossible to separate efficiency in resource allocation from equity in
income distribution. I took the paper, for which Boulding had given me an A+, back to
Chicago to get at least an MA out of them. Since my thesis violated the political economic
gospel of the Chicago school, they first made me cut the heart of the argument out of my
paper; and in their "response" then they gave me a C- for it.
I also became active in the U.S. National Student Association. Though the political
climate of McCarthyism isolated me at the extreme left wing among the delegates, I tried
my hand as "king-maker" for the most liberal of the candidates at the 1951
congress. We lost the election for president to my right-wing room-mate Bill (whose last
name I now don't recall). As president of USNSA, he then put it to work for the CIA, as
was publicly revealed only much later.
1953. My introduction to "development" was through the back door at the
University of Chicago again. I got an assistantship in Bert Hoselitz's Research Center in
Economic Development and Cultural Change. In Bert's absence on leave, the planner and
acting director Harvey Perloff hired me to evaluate the early World Bank reports on
Ceylon, Nicaragua, and Turkey, to which I gave barely passing marks. In response, Perloff
told me to his dismay that I am "the most philosophical person" he had ever met.
1954. The University of Chicago received a sub-contract from George Murdock's Human
Relations Area Files project at Yale University to prepare handbooks on five "Slavic
Peoples;" and I was hired to help prepare the ones on Ukraine and Belorussia. Down
the hall, Fred Eggan ran the "Philippines Project," one of whose members, the
Jesuit Father Frank Lynch, later became "our man in Manila," where at the Ateneo
he promoted U.S. ideological and political interests in the Philippines. Indeed, the final
client and sugar daddy of all these projects was the Psychological Warfare Division of the
U.S. Army. I still remember a visit from a colonel who came to explain the rules of the
game to us and to assure himself that what we produced would serve as a suitable basis for
the Army's own classified additions to our reports. Nonetheless, part of my work was an
anti-cold war friendly interpretation of "The Organization of Economic Activity in
the Soviet Union." Another was empirical research on the Ukraine, which became the
topic of my Ph.D. dissertation. A humorous sidelight was my search for documentation at
the Library of Congress, where I was unable to get some of the material I wanted because
it was checked out by the CIA, which was no doubt duplicating and with more
"political opportunity and response" perhaps improving on my modest efforts. The
opposite side of this coin would become apparent in 1960 (see below).
1957. When I was Assistant Professor of Economics at Michigan State University,
Professor Brandstetter was both head of the campus police and as Chair of the Department
of Police Administration. So he and I had disputes both about parking tickets and
politics. In his latter capacity, he administered and I raised political and moral
objections to the "police training" program that Eisenhower friend and MSU
President Mark Hannah was running for the CIA in Vietnam at the time of Diem (until the
U.S. dumped him!). Several of my friends had taken the opportunity to go to Vietnam on
this program to do "research"; and one of them, Stanley Scheinbaum, some years
later exposed and denounced it in Ramparts.
1958. MIT's Center for International Studies (CENIS) gave me an office for three
months. What an opportunity that was. There I met W.W. Rostow and the others. He had just
written his Process of Development and was working on his celebrated Stages of
Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, not to mention his still clandestine work for the
CIA with CENIS Director Max Millikan, A Proposal. Key to an Effective Foreign Policy.
Although Rostow and Co. dealt with Keynesian type macro economic and even social problems,
they did so to pursue the neo-classical explicitly counter revolutionary and even counter
reformist cold war ends, which were newly in vogue. The quintessential modernization book,
Lerner's Passing of Traditional Society: The Modernization of the Middle East,
appeared at CENIS in 1958 while I was there. At the same time, Everett Hagen wrote his On
the Theory of Social Change and David McClelland his Achieving Society there,
and Ithiel de Sola Pool his right libertarian/authoritarian political works, all of which
translated the "conditions" of naked cold war ideological orthodoxy into
euphemistically saleable social "scientific responses."
One of these CENIS studies was on Indonesia and resulted in Clifford Geertz's Agricultural
Involution. The foreword was written by his CENIS supervisor Ben Higgins, with whom I
have been friends ever since. Three decades later, Ben White would ask with indignation
how Gunder Frank and Ben Higgins could both like Geertz's book, which White among others
lambasted. The other Ben and I both answered in print. Higgins asked "so why all this
Geertz-bashing?" and answered in part "perhaps Geertz was not quite harsh enough
on Dutch colonialism," although for me he had been sufficiently so to demonstrate how
it had generated Indonesia's development of underdevelopment.
Also at CENIS, Walt Whitman Rostow "confided" to me that since the age of 18
he made it his life mission to offer the world a better alternative to Karl Marx. I did
not then understand what that was supposed to mean. After reflecting on the fate of really
existing Marxism and socialism I may now be permitted to wonder why Rostow wanted to
dedicate his life to offering an alternative to them. Moreover, in case that were not
enough, he then proposed to bomb Vietnam back into the stone age. I have often wondered
since then what Rostow's parents would feel about the ideological and political
development of the children they named after Walt Whitman and Eugene Debs. The first
ideologist went on to plan his nuclear development policies in the Kennedy-Johnson White
House basement, and the second super hawk represented the Reagan White House in the
pre-Gorbachev era arms "control" talks. I later wrote "Walt Whitman Rostow:
An Ode to Underdevelopment" and "Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth Through
Escalation to Nuclear Destruction." According to Aidan Foster-Carter, there also was
a "Paradigm Change from Rostow to Gunder Frank." However as we will note below,
it was only a limited change limited to some circles, which was due far more to the
opportunity provided by the political condition of real U.S. war against Vietnam than to
any theory of mine.
1960. The International Institute of Education (IIE) sent me to the Soviet Union to
follow up the work for my Ph.D. Despite -- or as it turned out rather because of -- my
official sponsorship, almost all official doors in Moscow and Kiev were closed to me. Only
later did I learn that someone else and I became the "innocent" subjects of a
tit-for-tat "international incident" between the U.S. and Soviet governments
after the latter had shot down Francis Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane and Khrushchev
therefore abandoned his summit meeting with Eisenhower in Paris. Nonetheless, a seminar at
the Economics Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences discussed the findings of my
Ph.D. thesis, which were among others that collectivization had reduced productivity in
Ukrainian agriculture. "You don't know what you are talking about," I was told
in my first run-in with the political conditions and its ideological orthodoxy on the
other side of the cold war. After the obvious conclusions ceased to be controversial and
Ukraine became independent, in 1993 News from Ukraine in Kiev published an account
of this experience under the title "I was Never Invited Back." In the meantime,
it was also revealed that unbeknownst to me the IIE was a CIA front organization, which
asked many of its fellowship recipients to report back to them in the U.S. on their
findings. If that was what was asked or expected of me, I was too "innocent" to
understand it.
1961. I resigned from Michigan State University with a letter that said that I could
not in good conscience continue to work on "development" there or anywhere in
the United states, because our work was "part of the problem, and none of the
solution." Perhaps I intuited the reasons more than I understood them. The saying
goes that "asking the right question is more than half of getting the right
answer." In that case, I felt that the cold war political climate conditioned us to
asking the wrong questions and guaranteed getting the wrong answer for real development.
That was what I thought all of "development studies" and most of our social
"science" was doing, which made them part of the political problem instead of
the solution.
Many of the reasons for and an understanding of this still remain to be sought out
today. When Mao's foreign minister was asked about the consequences of the French
Revolution, he is said to have replied "it is too early to tell." A fortiori,
much of the political sociology of knowledge of the mutual relations between "the
cold war." "Soviet/Chinese studies," "third world development" in
particular and "social science" in general still requires much analysis and
clarification, to which this BCAS symposium itself can make only a modest contribution. A
recent vivid example of some of the problems involved is the acrimonious debate about and
last minute modifications in the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit of the "Enola
Gay" airplane to commemorate its dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima fifty years
earlier. The debate, several recent books, and their interminable discussion in the press
and on the internet is an indication not only of the continued dispute on "why"
the bomb was dropped (to end the war?, against Asians?, to begin the cold war against the
Soviet Union?) but how much the writing of history and social science themselves have been
and still are handmaidens of cold war conditions and their ideological orthodoxies and
imperatives.
The tie-in between "area" and "development studies" and the cold
war have been particularly closely and intricately "conditioned." Alas, they are
still obscure, even though the former were themselves born and borne by the political
conditions set by U.S. "national" and western "imperialism" interests
on one side and of the "evil empire" on the other. Much of even the testimony
and documentation is only just beginning to be published, e.g. in the present symposium,
the book on The Cold War and the University (Noam Chomsky et al., The New Press,
1996), and for anthropology for instance in Schneider on Schneider (David Schneider, Duke
University Press 1995) in which he testifies to the roles of himself, George Murdock,
Clyde Kluckholm and others with various U.S. government agencies. David Price is only now
making a detailed study "Anthropology in the Cold War." The least of that was
that some work, like ours on the "Slavic Peoples," and by CENIS and Rostow, and
the below cited Charles Wagley and the Department of Defense was specifically commissioned
and financed by U.S. government agencies as part and parcel of their foreign policy. Of
course, the same was all the more the case in the Soviet Union.
Still more consequential, however, was that the entire "development" field
and much of related social "science" was perhaps less visibly but no less widely
and deeply ideologically conditioned and marked by cold war and
"national/imperialist" interests -- and their mutual relations in turn. The
entire "modernization" theory and the Weberian social science as transmitted by
Talcott Parsons on which it was based were reflections of the American "Sinatra
Doctrine" ideology: Do it My Way, what is Good for General Motors is Good for the
Country, and what is Good for the United States is Good for the World, and especially for
those who wish to "develop like we did". I was less and less persuaded by this
"theory" and especially by its application in praxis as when the CIA engineered
the 1953 coup against Mossadeq in Iran and the 1954 military coup against the progressive
social democratic and nationalist governments of Arbenz in Guatemala and. In 1961, I
participated in a spontaneous mass demonstration in the central Republic Square in Zagreb
to protest the murder of Lumumba in the Congo under American and United Nations tutelage,
which was the prelude to the CIA's installation of the former sergeant Mobutu instead. In
these and other cases, the Soviet "cold war threat" was invoked to mask naked
"imperialist interests," which visibly prevented rather than promoted any Third
World "development".
So I decided to go look for better answers in the Third World itself, first in Africa
and then in Latin America, especially in Cuba. On the way and on the strength of my
father's good reputation in East Germany, I was offered a job doing Latin American history
at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. I told them I don't know anything about history,
Marxism, or Latin America; but that I would gladly come back after I had learned something
about each of these on the spot in Latin America. As soon as I did however and in my
second run-in with the other side with the political conditions of cold war ideological
orthodoxy, I was totally rejected by the same "Karl Marx" university as quite
unsuitable!
1962. After travelling through Latin America, I set off to two distant destinations:
Leipzig by way of Cuba. I never got to either, to Leipzig for the above mentioned reason
and to Cuba apparently for the same reason, despite repeated attempts and even a personal
invitation from Che Guevara to come work on some projected research of his. That fell
through when he set off instead for the Congo to help train the guerillas of Laurent
Kabila, who finally managed to fight his way to the presidency and oust Mobutu in 1997.
1964. My 10 page single space letter was addressed
to you and a few others of my friends keeping in mind out personal friendship, our
common concerns, your interest in the social sciences, and your political receptivity....
[about] several personal, political, intellectual and professional implications [of] no
longer distinguish[ing] political from professional aspects and maybe also from personal
relations in my life and work. I have long thought that the liberal positivist creed or
ideology of trying to separate one's politics from one's social science is not only
politically and morally but also scientifically objectionable in that the supposed
political and moral dispassion, far from permitting objectivity, condemns to scientific
failure.
The letter continued with ideas and research proposals about the development of
underdevelopment, etc., some but not all of which subsequently saw the published light of
day.
1965. The United States Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service
denies my application "to return to unrelinquished domicile" in the United
States "for the following reasons":
your attitudes contrary to the best interests of this country as evidenced by your
writings published in the Monthly Review, Vol. 5, (9-1964) and mimeographed letter
dated July 1, 1964, containing ideologies foreign to this country and identifying yourself
as a Marxist and your further identification with the Communist Chinese position of world
revolution and the destruction of the capitalist system.
"Marxism"? That I never knew much about; and I denied that I was either a
Marxist or a non-Marxist, any more than I was a pro- or anti- Newtonian. But in the 1963
Sino-Soviet ideological and "social scientific" debates, the Chinese did seem to
have a better position on Third World development. Moreover, when the First Secretary of
the Soviet Embassy in Mexico came to my house there with premium quality diapers for my
new born son in 1965, I asked him how come his country's relations with Brazil had
increased since the U.S. sponsored military coup in 1964. I have never forgotten his
answer in English rather than Spanish: "Business is Business." Political climate
and conditions may bear on economic "theory" as Myrdal observes, but rather less
so on economic praxis. It did not take long for the Chinese to demonstrate their primary
interests as well, as when they withheld their rice from Cuba and their support from the
Communist Party and Sukharno in Indonesia and from insurgents in the Sudan and Ceylon, not
to mention from the Vietnamese.
Notwithstanding my continuing education in political "science" and
real-political praxis, the Government of Canada later barred me as "a threat to
national security," which its Minister of Immigration claimed in a session of
Parliament and its Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau confirmed in a private letter to me. In
turn, I disingenuously wrote him to ask why he did not want to make common cause with me,
since both of us had been barred from entering the United States because of our alleged
sympathy for China, which he had visited before he became Prime Minister. The only
possible threat to Canadian national security, I suggested, was that the proposed
Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the reasons for my exclusion might find and
reveal that it was the United States that put his government of up to excluding me. He
answered me "how could I even suggest such a thing about sovereign Canada?" but
he disallowed the formation of such a Commission anyway - also on grounds of
"national security"!
1967, On a visit finally to Cuba, but only as a journalist representing the New York
Marxist journal Monthly Review to cover the first (and last) Latin American Solidarity
Congress, I talked with President Dorticos about staying there to work. Instead, my family
and I we were unceremoniously put on a small Cuban plane to Nassau. Arriving from Cuba
without a visa, the Bahamians detained us at the airport until the Governor General
acquiesced to an overnight stay in a hotel, where the police checked on us at 3 AM.
1968. Another trip to Cuba, this time to the International Congress of 500
"Intellectuals" from 67 countries. I helped draft the Appeal of Havana which
said in part "it is the fundamental interest and duty of intellectuals to support the
struggles of national liberation, social emancipation and cultural de-colonization of all
people in Asia, Africa and Latin America and for the struggle against imperialism."
The same theme also dominated the 300th birthday celebration of the University of Lund
in Sweden in 1968, which the Swedish police matched with an equal number of its own men
supported by helicopters to safeguard the peace in a small town from us possible
rabble-rousers. The Yugoslav exile Stefan Dedijer, Amitai Etzioni and I debated about
"Scientific Research and Politics." Part of my intervention was that "I am
sorry to have to say this, but I think that all of North American and nearly all of
Western European social science is one huge Camelot project" (the reference was to
the clandestine U.S. Department of Defense -- DoD -- project to engage Chileans to spy on
themselves). In evidence, let me now quote from the horse's mouth, a document entitled
"Report of the Panel on Defense Social and Behavioral Sciences" issued by the
Defense Science Board, National Academy of Sciences of the U.S., 1967:
The Armed Forces are no longer engaged solely in warfare. Their missions now include
pacification, assistance, "a battle of ideas," etc. All these missions require
an understanding of the urban and rural populations .. in the new "peacefare"
activities or in combat....DoD has been singularly successful; in enlisting the interest
and services of an eminent group of behavioral scientists in most of the areas relevant to
it.... The behavioral science community must be made to accept responsibility for
recruiting DoD research managers [for the following] Priority Ordered Research
Undertakings...
I also quoted the anthropologist Charles Wagley, writing about how political conditions
conditioned Social Science Research on Latin America:
new public interest in Latin America is stimulated by a realization of its importance
to our national interests. The National Defense Education Act supports the study of
Spanish and Portuguese and of Latin American society.... Private foundations supported
research on the study of Latin America.
Of course, the issue was what kind of study and theory of "society" that
"Defense Education," the big foundations, and the universities generally
supported.
The issue came particularly alive among American anthropologists, some of whom, also
including some colleagues, were engaged in "counter-insurgency" in Vietnam,
elsewhere in Indochina and Thailand. The war against Vietnam was necessary, it was alleged
according to the "domino theory," because the possible "fall" of
Vietnam would push over one more country after another into Communism and into the hands
of the Soviets or Chinese, who incidentally already waged a cold war of their own against
each other. So all these "societies" needed "protection," and under
those "conditions" social scientists were engaged to figure out how that might
best be provided by the United States. Some of us instead wanted anthropology to support
rather than to combat the guerrillas in Indochina. Our most prominent and an active
opponent was Margaret Mead, who stood put the full weight of her prestige squarely behind
the establishment.
My first modest contribution was to write Sol Tax and then to a dozen of other
anthropologist friends to urge him as editor of the international journal Current
Anthropology (CA) to open its pages to this issue. The result was the
"Responsibility in Anthropology" debate to which I also contributed and which
opened with Kathleen Gough's article on "Anthropology: Child of Imperialism" as
the article was entitled in Monthly Review - but in CA it was entitled only as "New
Proposals for Anthropologists" ! I also introduced Kathleen to those who were then
only just initiating BCAS, and until her death she remained an active member it its
editorial board. A significant historical footnote is that the nation-wide movement to
protest against the Vietnam War through "teach-ins" started at the University of
Michigan with the active participation of the anthropologist Eric Wolf. Later, Sol Tax
invited me to a special panel at the VI International Congress of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences, which he ran in Chicago in 1973. But after promising him to let me
in, the U.S. government refused entry anyway to me and another would-be participant from
Cuba. My paper pleaded for "Liberation Anthropology" and was entitled
"Anthropology = Ideology, Applied Anthropology = Politics."
Still in 1968 after witnessing the end of its "May 68," the United Nations
International Labour Organisation (ILO) hired me for a Latin American regional research
program based in Chile. On arrival with my UN passport, I was detained at the airport,
taken into town to see the head of the Chilean political police who had a foot high file
about me on his desk, and dispatched back to the airport to be put on the first plane out.
By that time in the evening there was none, and Salvador Allende came to the airport to
bring me into Chile under his responsibility as president of the Senate (that was before
he would become president of the country). He also went three times to the Minister of the
Interior to get me a temporary residence permit and to have the "file" on me
eliminated. Residence was granted, but the file remained. The ILO fired me as politically
unsuitable. We each accused the other of breach of contract, and despite intervention of
the UN Secretary General's office, I lost. In fact, I later learned that the decision was
already printed before the oral argument was even presented at the ILO Tribunal. So much
for how the political climate conditioned justice as well.
1970-73. Allende was president of Chile, and in that political climate it was time to
put dependence theory into practice. My house in Chile became a place of refuge and of
discussion for compañeros from near and far. My sociology student at the University of
Chile, Dagoberto Perez, stayed there after he emerged from jail for a political crime he
did not commit. After his death in a shoot-out with the military regime in 1974, I would
dedicate two books to his memory. I wrote numerous politically inspired or even
commissioned articles for the local press on timely issues of the day, such as the terms
for the nationalization of copper.
Abroad, a couple of international conferences also dealt with social science in the
cold war. My claim to fame in Finland is to have "wrecked" the political part of
the annual international festival in Jivaskala: On a panel with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., I
so severely (or successfully?) criticized his White Paper "justifying" the CIA
organized Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that he simply up and left the conference; the next
day the entire Finnish press was scandalized, and beginning the following year the
festival was limited to cultural events alone. On the other hand at a conference in Cuba
itself, an aide asked Fidel whether Gunder Frank should be brought in to a small private
reception he was hosting. Fidel's answer, as later reported to me by someone who overheard
it, was "Isn't that the conflictive one? OK, bring him in anyway."
After returning to Chile from a conference on "Imperialism, Independence and
Social Transformation" in New Delhi, I found that, Jose Rodriguez Elizondo, a fellow
delegate from the Communist Party of Chile had used its daily newspaper to launch a
serious political and personal attack on me for what I had allegedly said about Chile in
India. He falsely claimed that I had criticized his party and disparaged the political
process in Chile by saying that it had not gone as fast or as far as it could and should.
His newspaper denied me the right of reply to set the record straight. Still in the 1980s
and by then a United Nations official, he wrote a book on the "infantile left"
in Latin America in which he again misrepresented my position and vilified me personally.
1972. At the third UNCTAD congress in Santiago, Chile, delegates of African governments
talked about "development of underdevelopment." I decided that, if this idea had
already become so institutionalized, it was time for me to move on. The VII Congress of
Latin American Sociology was the held in the same building, and my paper was entitled
"Dependence [Theory] is Dead, Long Live Dependence." My argument was that what
was now demanded was the study of and resistance to the world-wide economic crisis of
capital accumulation that I said had begun around 1970. (Actually, it started in 1967 as I
later wrote). I also answered my critics who labelled me variously as functionalist,
dependentista, marxist, neo-marxist, pseudo-marxist, communist, maoist, trotskyist/ite,
petit-bourgeois, principal ideologist of terrorism in Latin America, cats' paw of the CIA
as Rodriguez Elizondo put it, and according to the Italian Communist Ruggiero Romano in a
public lecture in Warsaw, a former guard in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland (when I
was in high school in the USA). A couple of other revealing responses to my work and me
were:
Frank hates social science that does not serve to justify revolution. His comment ...
is bombastic denunciation of almost everyone who does not share his revolutionary rage.
There is no point in responding further to writing so full of anger and ideology (George
Dalton).
[Frank is] a conspicuous theorist of an anarchic left, provocateur, confusionist,
divisionist under pseudo-marxist pretext. To unmask his aspect of provocateur strikes me
as an obligation, and obligation of scientific morality, of intellectual hygiene, of
political prophylaxis (Ruggiero Romano).
Why all this hoopla? Well, one reason was cold war ideological opposition to dependence
theory ranging across the entire political spectrum from right to left and including
especially Moscow and the orthodox Communist parties aligned to it. The ubiquitous Manual(s)
of Political Economy published and disseminated by the Academy of Sciences in Moscow
routinely dismissed dependence theory and denounced me personally in Russian and its
translations by the Foreign Languages Publishing House. That was still another of my
run-ins with the other ideological side of cold war theoretical orthodoxy, particularly
during the political conditions of Brezhnev's detente with Nixon & Kissinger. For
their part, the "Russian Orthodox" Communist parties inveighed against
dependence theory and me in any number of other languages around the world.
The other and real world hot war reason for attention was that despite so much
resistance and opposition from all sides, dependence theory and praxis has made
significant inroads, first in Latin America, then in the United States and Europe, and
finally elsewhere in the Third World. Why? Simple! The one word answer was
"Vietnam". Here is still another illustration, this one on the "other"
side, of how cold war conditions and opportunities and development studies responses were
inexorably interlinked. In Latin America of course, the Cuban Revolution and other closer
to home political economic policy issues made dependencia theory and policy appealing to
some and anathema to others, still including the Communists, who I - and for a brief time
Fidel Castro as well - criticized for their "national bourgeois" theory and
praxis disguised with red labels. Elsewhere in the world, it was primarily the Vietnam War
and the world-wide opposition to the same that generated the political climate for the
sudden appeal for "dependence theory," particularly in the United States and
after May 1968 in Western Europe. For dependence seemed to offer an alternative response
to the orthodox received wisdom of "modernizers" like Rostow who wanted to bomb
Vietnam back into the stone age and others who argued that "we have to destroy it to
save it".
After the mid-1970s, the end of the War in Vietnam and the military coups in Latin
America again changed the underlying political climate and the resulting conditions pulled
the rug of popular support out from under dependence theory and praxis. But the same also
happened to modernization theory, which ever the "realist" Henry Kissinger
pronounced dead in 1979 at the hands of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Elsewhere, the
world economic crisis would bring military coups and martial law to the fore along with
the opportunities now for the world-wide appeal of Milton Friedman's monetarism,
Reaganomics and Thacherism, as I argued under such titles as "The Crisis of Ideology
and the Ideology of Crisis." I then devoted 20 years full time to the study of that
economic crisis and its political and policy repercussions world wide, on the cold war
included as I will note below.
1973, September 11, the military coup. My ex-professor of economic "theory"
Milton Friedman's monetarism was carried to Chile by himself, Arnold Harberger and the
Chicago Boys (this was Chile's version of the earlier Berkeley Mafia in Indonesia). The
new policies were imposed by General Pinochet as equilibrium on the point of a bayonet.
That was the subtitle of my Economic Genocide in Chile. It started as two open
letters to my former professors at Chicago, Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. My
letters also recalled the arrival of the first Chilean students under Harberger's
direction at Chicago while I tried and failed to write a dissertation under his direction
in the mid 1950s. I recalled that in the name of the efficiency of resource allocation and
never mind income distribution, the Chicago line already argued when I was there in the
mid 1950s that Chile should abandon its relatively equitable social welfare and medic-
care system as a luxury it could not afford. Meeting Al Harberger again in Chile itself in
1964, we argued about public subsidies for urban bus fares. He argued that this
misallocates resources inefficiently and I that it helped a bit to redress some of the
inequalities and inequities in the distribution of income that were due to inefficiencies
in the allocation of other resource, whose marginal cost did not equal their marginal
revenue or price either.
In his militarized Chile, General Pinochet gave the Chicago Boys free reign over
economic policy. Therefore it was only natural for Friedman and Harberger to come down and
to recommend their shock treatment therapy. "Free to Chose" Friedman argued that
the magic of the market (efficiency?) comes first and freedom (equity?) later. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, not for peace, thank God. However, Harvard refused
to accept Harberger for his part in the whole sordid story. Harberger later told a Chilean
who was interviewing him for a Ph.D. dissertation on the "Chicago Boys" that
nothing had hurt him more than that as one of his "boys" I had
"turned" on him. The World Bank still gives Chile the first pride of place for
its model, never mind that it has cost the assassination of literally countless personal
friends, some still rather recently.
1973-78. As still a citizen Germany and because I had a one semester visiting
professorship at the University of Berlin, I went there after the coup in Chile. Yet in
five years of trying I was never able to get a university job there, despite being
short-listed several times. Once the state Minister of Culture and Education, who has to
approve all professorial appointments, simply eliminated the position for which I was in
first place on the list. The political conditions were that instead he offered to open two
previously closed positions for the university if only it would propose politically
sufficiently "balanced" candidates. The last time I reached the top of the short
list, the same minister told a university president who wanted to hire me that "this
Frank will never get a job here." That is when I left Germany again in 1978 and moved
to England and then to Holland. During these years, I then applied for at least 80
different advertised university teaching positions in the United States. I was interviewed
for three, but got none.
Like Bruce Cumings, I now proceed to post cold war matters, but not quite as fast.
1982-1989. By way of an "area studies" proposal, I several times proposed the
development of the Russian Far East with Chinese labor and Japanese capital, which would
benefit from Siberian resources. The "economic" appeal seemed obvious, but
various bi- and tri-lateral political obstacles have stood in the way. So my proposal also
came complete with a dozen suggestions how to resolve in seemingly distant Indochina and
Cambodia, and closer to home on the Sino-Soviet border. Perhaps the most ticklish issue
has been the four Kuril Islands or Northern Territories, which the Soviet Union received
as war booty for joining the allies for a few days against Japan at the end of World War
II. Russia still uses them in part to base its Pacific submarine fleet. (I then suggested
they could go to Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam instead, though by now Subic Bay in the
Philippines may be a better bet.) My modest proposal was to return the islands to Japan,
but with the restriction that they be and remain de-militarized. Since then, the South
Koreans have offered to build golf courses there.
My first public trial balloon launch was at the final plenary of the 1981/82 annual
"Socialism in the World" Conference in a Yugoslavian luxury hotel near
Dubrovnik, which has since surely been bombed to smithereens. The Japanese present said
nothing; the medium high level Chinese delegation showed interest, and the head of the
Soviet delegation asked for my proposal in writing so he could take it back to Moscow.
When in 1983 I raised the matter publicly in at the Institute of World Economics and
Politics in Beijing, for its director Pu Shan the proposal went down like a lead balloon.
But the next time I brought it back with a few refinements, the same man who used to
accompany Chou En-lai around the world now showed a live interest in my
"proposal" in 1986. In Japan I then learned that one of its big life insurance
companies had a similar project to invest its then abundant capital. Since then, a
Russian-Japanese settlement of the island issue has been announced as finally being in the
offing, a bit late. In the meantime, South Korean private and public capital have already
staked out major positions in the Russian Far East (and now also in parts of ex-Soviet
Central Asia), while up to one million Chinese settlers have already crossed over into the
Russian Far East. South of the border are many more million Chinese and some Koreans in
the North who may find no better options when their peninsula reunites.
Closer to home at the 1983 hundredth anniversary commemoration of the death of Karl
Marx in his home town of Trier and in the presence of political dignitaries from left to
right, including the governing Christian Democrats, the orchestra played Wagner at the
opening ceremony. Another official invitee sitting next to me, the Israeli Marxist Shlomo
Avineri, remarked that composer was a rather inappropriate choice to commemorate Marx. I
answered that Wagner was appropriate enough for them and hence also us in his birthplace
to honor not Karl's Marxism, but his Germanity.
Another invitee at the same event, the Polish economist Barbara Liberda, subsequently
invited me to lecture at her Faculty of Economics in Warsaw. As she walked me to the
lecture hall, she said that in principle I am free to say anything I want. However to
protect her reputation among her colleagues from too much guilt by association with me,
she asked me at all costs not to let the word Marx/ism pass my lips.
Then after 30 years, I was finally "invited back," if not to Kiev at least to
Moscow. My host this time was not of the Academy of Sciences, but the rival Institute of
Social Sciences of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They had a veritable marble
palace of assembly halls, class and other meeting rooms, and two attached high rise hotel
buildings to house visiting scholars and students from the world over. My hosts, some of
whom I already knew from the annual "Socialism in the World" conferences in
Yugoslavia, were now at home in Moscow. In and out of their oak paneled seminar room in
Moscow, they kept bringing up the same burning question: "What do you think of
Civilization?" What in the world could a worms-eye person like me answer to such a
lofty question: Nothing. Not until the umpteenth time around did it dawn on me what they
were really after and meant: Civilization = Western Civilization = THE WEST. What they now
wanted in the worst way was contact with and invitations to the West, which is why I was
now back there in the first place. Alas from inside their Communist Party ghetto, they
were unable to see or imagine how isolated their invitees were on the other side of the
cold war.
1990-1997. A Mexican newspaper headline claimed that "Gunder Frank Predicted the
Fall of the Soviet Union." That is an exaggeration, but a friend from Hungary told
others and me at the 1997 meetings of the International Studies Association that I was the
only person who had correctly analyzed the political economic process and its outcome in
his country and Eastern Europe. However that may be, Vendilka Kublakova (1994) observed in
her "Requiem for the Soviet Union" and for Soviet studies that at least I did
better than the consensus among Western cold war Sovietologists, including many who became
media personalities whose tunnel vision made them see only what they and their cold war
conditioned public wanted. More often than not she observes, events including finally the
sudden demise of their very subject matter itself arrived unforseen out of the blue and
was inexplicable within their Sovietology paradigm. Since then it "has become an easy
target for ridicule; collections of misguided predictions made by leading Sovietologist
now are considered amusing reading" (ibid. 29).
My analysis, on the other hand, situated the Soviet Union, but also China and other
"socialist" countries, within the world economy and subject to its imperatives,
which conditioned and shaped their policies just like anybody else's. Thus already in 1972
and again in 1976 under the title "Long Live Transideological Enterprise! The
Socialist Countries in the Capitalist International Division of Labor" I argued that
there is only ONE world economic system and that the "socialist" countries were
rapidly being "re"-integrated into it. In still another conflict with the
orthodoxies of the cold war on both sides, I found and denounced the cold war more and
more as a snare and a delusion. I lectured and wrote how American interest groups were
using and in every recession escalating the cold war to promote their own economic
interests not only in the Third World but in the increasing competition that the deepening
world economic crisis generated with Western Europe and Japan.
Part of this analysis was my 1983 book The European Challenge, which argued
that, all ideological differences notwithstanding, East and West Europe could and would be
again be united, but with the East dependent on the West. Extending the same argument at
the beginning of the last recession in early 1989 and still before the Berlin wall came
down, I argued for eastward expansion of the European Union by 1992.
On "this" side of the cold war, my European Challenge book was also
published in Spain by its Socialist Party at the initiative of two friends (one a
prominent ex-Communist). They then (mis?)used my argument in support of their own that
Spain should join NATO, which many Spaniards and most socialists opposed. The Socialist
Party government then did bring Spain into NATO with some restrictions similar to those of
France. Outrage in Spain was heightened when its Socialist Minister of Defense was then
appointed to head NATO and now to negotiate its expansion eastward, which was confirmed at
the July 1997 NATO summit in Madrid.
In 1990, I raised alarms about the coming economic, political and social crisis in
Eastern Europe and especially in Yugoslavia as a result of bad political economic policy
management in response to this now fifth and deepest recession in this now already quarter
century long world economic crisis. In the final irony on the "other" side of
the cold war, my article was published by the international Communist parties' house organ
Problems of Peace and Socialism in Prague in 1990 in its issue Number 381. The
editor later told me that he was able to disregard earlier objections to publishing
anything of mine by various Communist Parties, since he knew that under the new political
and economic conditions this issue would be the magazine's last before it went out of
business. The English, French and Spanish language editions used my original title
"The East European Revolution of 1989," but the Russian language edition of the
same called it "The Events of 1989"!
My theses about the "socialist" East and its relations with the
"capitalist" West and the "Third World" South were all derived from my
analysis of the one and only world system, its structural inequality and the unevenness of
its cyclical development. The argument was and is summarized in 1992-1994 titles like
"Soviet and East European 'Socialism': A World Economic Analysis of What Went
Wrong."
My recent pursuit of this global theme backward over five thousand years of history in
a world economy in which Asia remained dominant and Europe quite marginal until 1800 has
far- reaching implications for the social science theory of "The Rise of the
West." Europe did not pull itself up by its bootstraps; and there is nothing unique
about its alleged development and spread of "capitalism." Instead the ingrained
Eurocentrism which was "conditioned" by Western colonialism and imperialism in
everybody from Marx and Weber to Braudel and Wallerstein, made them get the place and role
of The West in the world all wrong. All this "theory" and the post-cold war
"area" studies that pit "The West" versus "The Rest" like
Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington but also those on the "left" are thus
blinded from seeing that Asia is now only Re-gaining the dominant place in the world that
it already had before a brief Western interval. Now as Myrdal's Asian Drama
observed "changing political conditions and opportunities [demand] major recasting of
economic thought." So the title and message of my 1998 book is ReORIENT!
Yet many on the "right" and "left" still dispute endlessly about
economic "systems" and political "democracy." The right-wingers claim,
against all the evidence, that letting "the magic of the market" "get the
prices right" promotes democracy and promises to alleviate, not to mention eliminate,
inequality and poverty. In the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe production and
income has been reduced by half or more, and in Russia life expectancy has precipitously
declined. In the world as a whole, poverty continues to increase. My progressive
"left" (over?) friends still maintain, also against all the evidence, that it is
possible and even probable to eliminate and avoid all this through "another
system". None of the above, for there is only one world "system" to
struggle in as a bit of global historical perspective and any and all experience shows.
Even the Bible noted already that in it "to those who have shall be given, and from
those who have not shall be taken" what little they have, both locally and a fortiori
globally.
So my whole world view leaves me again to fall between the cracks of the BCAS
debates between Cummings and Johnson or Heginbotham, not to mention Huntington, and under
present conditions to disappear into politically irrelevant oblivion. Indeed, my global
theory and praxis to "ReOrient" and to promote "unity in diversity" is
likely to have no appeal whatsoever for the many who in the present political climate now
rush instead to promote all manner of separatisms from post-modern ethnic identity to real
ethnic cleansing.
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