The need for the 1960s counterrevolution

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For the flowchart depicted above, you can realise I have taken up the United States of America as an example. After World War II, the rise of Marxism, primarily in the Soviet Union and the Carribean, alarmed the USA enough to ponder on some of the possibilities of quelling this new threat to the capitalist ideology.It is perceived as a threat in the first place because of the measures taken to comfortably outlast the phase. If the USA had not behaved in such and such a manner in response to the Communist stimulus, the world might not have been made aware of the problems being faced in the American administrative circles. After World War II, the nuclear race began with massive spawning and hoarding of nuclear weapons; with a seemingly juvenile tit-for-tat behaviour observed in the policies of both nations, the nuclear stockpiles became larger and larger, until finally culminating with their impotence that was brought on by the formation of the United Nations. However, in this period, capitalism did not scare Marxism as much as the other way round. The freedom even then prevalent amongst the elite intelligentsia in the West became the primary threat to the success of a new weapon, that of ideological control. What the government wanted was a gradual phasing out of any skepticism directed at the state’s (obviously highly questionable) foreign policies. To this end, the US government employed the reach of the mass media in order to twist the truth. During the Cold War period, and especially in the 1960s, Marxism and socialism were no longer permissible even as topics of discussion in universities. The other sector of business, which also the government wanted to dominate over by controlling investment decisions, was but easily taken care of by appropriate budget reallocations. Subsequently, there arose a group of orthodox reporters, journalists and editors who, to take up an important and defining example, excused the state’s aggression towards the Soviets by, instead, condemning the insurgence of the reds and playing down the US’s behaviour to a simple defense. The ‘THOUGHT CONTROL’ box at the bottom of the flowchart is the concept behind this take. With succesful thought control came succesful ideological, by which I mean the state’s overwhelming ability to unostentatiously define what it’s subjects thought and concluded. This ‘propaganda manufacturing’ continues even to this day, and could be seen with great contrast during the Bush, Jr. regime.

There was, however, a brief and welcome respite in the 1960s with the emergence and collapse of the student movement. Books on Marxism continued to be published in that period, and when students who read these books came together, they demanded the reopening of discussions on the subject. Although it was inevitable that this feeble front would soon fall (owing to insufficient support and widespread opposition), it’s effect on the populace as such was visible with the rise of the revisionists,who demanded that everyone, including people like themselves as well as the orthodox, face the facts of the world in the face. These revisionists, who included reporters like Gar Alperovitz, did indeed face heavy criticism in the beginning, but when coupled with the demands of the student movement, some discussion circles began to take them seriously. What aided them greatly was that the subject of the ideological orthodoxy, in terms of exempting the United States from sharing the blame for the mindless stockpiling and slandering, vaporised in mere weeks: analysts discovered that what they had speaking about for days was, in fact, based upon baseless assumptions that the state had driven them to consider them in the first place.