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uh
in december
1985 the cia published secretly
published a research paper on the french
left titled france defection of the
leftist intellectuals this was sanitized
and released through a freedom of
information act request in 2011.
look at that
why were they studying radical theory
and philosophy why were they worried
about it
now if you want an expert opinion on the
left no matter what that means to you
you shouldn't ask a leftist odds are
they're too busy calling another leftist
to sock them on the internet to take
stock of their own political capacity
but the cia is the expert when it comes
to the left they've spent billions of
dollars
researching intimidating smearing
surveilling and murdering
leftist since the second world war
and the books that i introduced on this
channel they were watching the authors
too
sitting in on lectures maybe attending
conferences on late structuralism i
don't know but reagan's cia had its eyes
peeled
now today leftists who read theory or
talk about reading theory like to think
of this as a deviant activity don't let
dad find that radical theory collection
you've stashed under the bed
and once you find the right combinations
of words you like then you can be just
like your favorite radical and it's off
to the marketplace of ideas trying to
sort out the real problems of who's the
most radical
and who's got the hottest takes more
radical
this is like fighting in an alleyway
behind the marketplace of ideas that
pretty much no one else even knows
existed right so just chill
and it turns out long before twitter
invective more radical the cia was
watching the people that we consider to
be our radical theorist even still so
here's what they found and this was in
1985 remember the heyday of our radical
boys here and women actually she was
accused of working for the bulgarian kgb
her code name was sabina and they said
that they dropped her for being too
maoist which
i don't know that's kind of badass
she denies it anyway the cia looked at
the line up here and concluded that
quote they posed no significant
intellectual opposition to u.s policies
damn
disappointed that isn't all though this
new left activism is likely to increase
bickering between the communists and
socialists and within the socialist
party and it will probably increase
voter defection the last 30 years have
proven them absolutely right in france
in some american hegemony has nothing to
worry about from radical ideas and they
don't even need to intervene
because the left
is already owning itself
by infighting
i feel like
[ __ ] i lost it i had a i had a point
there
this is lessons from the cia
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details details so who's brought up in
this report foucault lotafuco also
lacon altuzer
many of whom already dead when this
report was published though their
influence was certainly not
so francis had a
special relationship to its radical
intellectuals for example
50 000 people lined the streets for
sart's funeral
that's real celebrity that's an astral
world
now the cia was curious and what they
were curious about was whether the rock
star popularity of these intellectuals
could convert into french government
policy
this may be news to someone out there
but it's policy not ideas that threaten
american interests and that explicitly
was the connection they were looking for
when they wrote this report
let's rewind a few decades because at
one time the cia was really concerned
about france after the war the communist
party was the largest in the country so
what happened to all that we have le
party coming from say the french
communist party or pcf
and theirs is pretty much the story of
the french left so
immediately after the second world war
the pcf was the largest party in france
and was led by the common turn and while
the party remained loyal to the ussr and
often because it remained loyal to the
ussr they lost seats in every subsequent
election the membership was split
especially over the invasions of hungary
and czechoslovakia then the sino-soviet
split happened which means a bunch of
them became maoists further splitting
the party membership also the centrist
parties allied against them and changed
electoral laws which made it tougher for
them to win seats but still the pcf
remained a viable political force in
france up until the time that this
document was written
but they had been replaced as the
dominant party on the left by the party
socialist that is basically the sock
dems here's how the socialist party did
last election
ish
now as to the intellectuals the kind of
point of this video the philosophers
with names we know they were sort of in
and out of the communist party
the ussr stuff you know it eventually
became too much for them to stomach with
the exception of
louis altuzar you know him as the
ideology guy he tried to get his
students in there some students you may
have heard of derrida rancier
that's gg's teacher
quite an eye for talent and then we get
the big split no coming back from it may
1968. so there was a large general
strike in france spearheaded by students
student unions and union workers
the students the radicals believed they
had the momentum and support required to
overthrow the government real revolution
it was an open question too the
president had already fled the country
however the communist party settled for
wage increases
significant wage increases actually for
the union workers but enabled de gaulle
the president to return to power
now altazer did not support the students
in the may 68 movement he was in the
hospital when it happened but after he
tried to reconcile his critics including
his own students
with the communist party line he called
the students infantile said they were
basically larping an anarchist
libertarian ideology and you know when
he says that word there's some weight
behind it
he said that the workers strike in its
gains were the real center of the events
of may
now this became a big sore spot for the
younger generation of intellectuals
gathari for example said
we were confused about the turn of
events after may 68. we belong to that
political generation whose political
consciousness awoke during the
liberation
in the enthusiasm and naivety and the
conspiracy myths of fascism that came
with it
also the questions left unanswered by
the aborted revolution in may 68
developed in a counterpoint that we
found troubling
we were worried like many others about
the future being prepared for us by
those singing the hymns of a newly made
over fascism
that new fascism basically is the
neoliberal world order the one that the
cia has been working on
and succeeding at since
jfk at least
so the students in radicals felt like
they'd been betrayed they had all the
energy there and the communist party
sold out and denounced the student
protests the revolution had been
betrayed and this was the split of the
radicals who internalized from then on a
distrust of partisans bureaucracy
and so on
for the radical french left after that
the pcf stood for
bureaucracy and deference to the soviet
union though it should be noted even the
pcf broke with moscow for the first time
over the invasion of czechoslovakia but
still as time went on soviet leadership
became an increasingly tough sell with
this split the 68 split of the left and
because the universities got a bunch
more independence as an overture after
68 the intellectual the radical
intellectuals we now read all gathered
up together in the university of paris
eight with foucault as the head of the
philosophy department
where he hired ready for this de lewis
badu rancier balibar leotard negri lacan
irigarei miler zhiz went there everyone
went there now with all this radical
energy in one place that's like half my
channel on one campus
you'd expect
i don't know what would you expect
something
their focus became more like cultural
critique it became reflecting on 68 why
it failed it became what do we do now
with marxism it became foucault and
badew fighting with de luz oh yeah and
the cia ostensibly spying on them all at
one point
a bunch of students smashed holes
through the ceilings looking for police
microphones because they were convinced
paranoidly but correctly that they were
being spied upon they smashed up the
ceilings didn't find anything but they
were there the paranoia was not
misplaced
anyway this is probably more correlation
than causation but in effect with all
these radicals in one place on one
campus putting all this energy into
fighting each other french politics just
drifted rightward from then on till
today this cia report says explicitly
even more effective in undermining
marxism were those intellectuals who set
out as true believers to apply marxist
theory in the social sciences but ended
by rethinking and rejecting the entire
tradition
now that's a little bit overstated but
at least we have these new critiques of
power ideology desire that in a way
took the place of that former emphasis
on collective politics
the cia's take on that is that the bad
taste left by disillusionment with
marxism in the mouths of virtually every
leftist intellectual has translated
directly into a new kind of neutralism
that has contributed to their
immobilization
you see that i don't know how to i don't
know how to understate that neutralism
immobilization and you know
they are the experts
in addition i think
they got to arcane the cia thinks they
got to arcane i mean this is some of the
hardest densest
vocabulary you can read and it's really
difficult if not impossible to relate
power critique ideology critique desire
to public policy and it wasn't always
like that for example a few decades
before sar de beauvoir and rolu ponti
together worked and wrote in this
journal called leiton modern which was
really publicly popular and influential
now here's the cia on the situation in
the 80s miranda that's the the president
miranda's failure to garner needed
support among france's historically
powerful leftist intellectuals reflects
a historic shift and may presage a new
role for the intelligentsia
no longer can his socialist party rely
on the intellectuals to provide a
rationale for its policies and actions
and to sell that rationale to a french
public that has customarily placed great
store in the explanations of its
intellectual elites
so now instead of having the ear of
power the new philosophers compensated
for their own often abstruse prose by
becoming exciting media personalities
defending their points of view in the
long intellectualized
television and radio programs that the
french relish
their influence was primarily negative
however since they had little to offer
in the way of practical suggestions for
a new program
media
instead of policy
ooh
that's a nerve
now what's the effect here's what the
cia correctly predicted as their
conclusion and it's dark this climate of
intellectual opinion will almost
certainly make it very difficult for
anyone to mobilize significant
opposition among intellectual elites to
u.s policies in central america for
example now what was the older
generation doing
you see what i'm getting at here
it is also likely to deny other european
intellectuals notably in scandinavia and
west germany who are hostile to u.s
policies and interests the powerful
leadership they formally received from
the french
so
this report
signifies a shift a real shift and it
ain't a good one in sum the cia is down
with your radical theory they aren't
going to cancel your critical theory or
anarchist youtube channel
because they've done the reading they
were at parasite and they decided
eh
nothing to worry about here
i hate to say it i i do hate to say it
but we are not pissing that off at all
now i'm not a big
lessons guy but there are at least a few
things to note here it wasn't just
capitalism that made the left irrelevant
in this case it was the left
factionalizing fighting each other and
then taking their energy to this tiny
little cloister while leaving any sense
of collective politics back on the
barricades they dove instead into
rivalries abstruse prose and vocabulary
such that only grad students have any
idea of what the hell they're talking
about and then they're just left to
exchange barbs nitpicks back and forth
which builds
nothing but egos
that's what happened in france now let
me rephrase that in the first person we
dive into rivalries in abstruse pro such
that only other grad students have any
idea what the hell we're talking about
and then we're left to exchange nitpicks
and barbs back and forth which builds
nothing but egos
hey
so lessons from the cia the lesson is
this we and the reason we here do not
need to be more radical that's not
something to brag about if you're going
to be
proud of something be proud of being
reconciliatory because that would have
made a difference here
be proud of making complex ideas
into something relevant to public life
and people around you not for elevating
your soapbox one inch higher because you
can poke little holes and someone's
political determinations when you know
you probably want the same world that
they do
i'll leave you with some delis he
thought a lot about 68 and as an event
considered that it hadn't even yet ended
you might see yourself in here i know i
do
the children of may 68 you can run into
them all over the place even if they are
not aware of who they are and each
country produces them in its own way
their situation is not great these are
not young executives they are strangely
indifferent and for that very reason
they are in the right frame of mind
they have stopped being demanding or
narcissistic but they know perfectly
well that there is nothing today that
corresponds to their subjectivity
to their potential of energy
they know that all the current reforms
are rather directed against them
they are determined to mind their own
business as much as they can they keep
it open hang on to something possible
there can only be a creative solution
keep it open and if you don't know what
that means
to me at the bare minimum it means not
being a pedantic [ __ ] on the internet
and i'm i don't know who this is for i
see the debates i see the shots fired
and i think it's worth it to say none of
this is anything new more radical
so
solidarity
this has been
lessons from the cia
[Applause]
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uh i'm turning off my mic now more
radical