The Ford Foundation And The Co-option of Dissent

[Magda Hassan]

The Ford Foundation And The Co-option of Dissent

by Michael Barker




(Swans - January 25, 2010) While most progressive writers have failed to document the power of liberal philanthropy to co-opt the processes of social change, Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Random House, 2007), provides a rare counter example. This historical anomaly -- for her and other radical writers -- revolves around her description of the support that liberal foundations provided for training the intellectual elites that seized the reins of power in both Chile and Indonesia in the 1960s and 1970s. In Chile, she observes how this elitist co-optive project was the brainchild of Albion Patterson, who was director of the local US International Cooperation Administration (which became the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID) and Theodore Schultz, the chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. With tuition and expenses paid for by US taxpayers and US foundations, Klein notes how between 1957 and 1970 some one hundred Chilean students pursued advanced degrees at the University of Chicago in an environment "where the professors [like Milton Friedman] agitated for the near-complete dismantling of government with single-minded focus." In 1965 this neoliberal project "was expanded to include students from across Latin America," courtesy of a grant from the Ford Foundation, which "led to the creation of the Center for Latin American Economic Studies at the University of Chicago." Yet despite the best efforts of the Chicago school's "intellectual imperialism," there "was, however, a problem: it wasn't working." (1)

By Chile's historic 1970 elections, the country had moved so far left that all three major political parties were in favour of nationalizing the country's largest source of revenue: the copper mines then controlled by U.S. mining giants. The Chile Project, in other words, was an expensive bust. As ideological warriors waging a peaceful battle of ideas with their left-wing foes, the Chicago Boys had failed in their mission. (p.73)

Here, contrary to other more historically informed analyses, (2) Klein suggests that what subsequently "rescue[d] the Chicago Boys from obscurity" was the rise to power of a Republican administration in the United States, marked by the 1969 election of Richard Nixon. However, as other critical writers have long observed, the US government was already well committed to destabilizing leftist politicians, as shortly "after Chile's closely contested 1958 election in which [Salvador] Allende's (Marxist) party came close to winning, the CIA decided to ensure that this increasingly popular leader was kept out of government." By focusing on Nixon as the saviour of the Chicago Boys, the bipartisan nature of the imperial offensive on Chile is masked: after all, during this period the Ford Foundation was already working hand-in-hand with the CIA. (This of course is well known to Klein, who writes how: "In the 1950s, the Ford Foundation often served as a front organization for the CIA, allowing the agency to channel funds to anti-Marxist academics and artists who did not know where the money was coming from, a process extensively documented in The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders." p.147)
Writing in 1966, James Petras had argued that the Democrats working within Lyndon Johnson's administration were acting to contain "Latin American radicalism -- just like it is doing with the home grown version -- by combining a seductive ability to co-opt indigenous leaders into the establishment with a coercive repression whenever that becomes necessary." (3) He continued:

In reality U.S. policy -- including the Alliance for Progress -- was primarily a plan to stabilize a region in which the U.S. exercised hegemony. Alliance operations were not geared toward structural changes but toward neutralizing or integrating the politically important but socially amorphous "middle class" (professionals, businessmen, public and private employees) into society as a counterweight to lower class pressure for more basic reforms. U.S. policy orientated itself toward "accommodating" this middle class through financing housing construction (for employees), providing credits (for commercial people), and research and foundation grants (for professionals). (pp.49-50)

Grants from liberal foundations were ably utilized to not only promote the Chicago Boys' neoliberal economics, but to simultaneously co-opt progressive and revolutionary elements. In this regard it is important to note that James Petras, whose 1963 Masters thesis was titled "The Chilean Political Process: The Emergence of Working Class Politics," acknowledges.....read the rest of the article here at Swan's Commentary