Political Consciousness in the USA is a Soviet anatomy of the American mind — an attempt to map, type by type, the whole spectrum of how Americans think about power, and to explain how that thinking is produced, held together and, at its upper reaches, managed. It is the work of the USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of US and Canadian Studies, the Moscow institute that Georgi Arbatov built into the Soviet Union's most sophisticated window on the United States; Arbatov's own name stands in the index, and his The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations (Progress, 1973) is cited in the opening pages. The book carries two general editors, Yu. A. Zamoshkin and E. Ya. Batalov, and five authors who divide the chapters between them: Batalov takes the Introduction, the methodological first chapter, the long chapter on the American left and the Conclusion; B. V. Mikhaylov the liberals, A. Yu. Melvil the conservatives, S. M. Plekhanov the right radicals, and Zamoshkin the closing chapter on the socio-psychological machinery behind the whole. These are not apparatus functionaries filling a template. They are professional Americanists — Melville would go on to a long career as one of post-Soviet Russia's leading academic political scientists — and it shows on every page.
Date the text, not the spine. The English edition is Progress Publishers' of 1984, and here the imprint is close to honest: the manuscript closed around 1982–83. Its horizon is the arrival of the Reagan administration "at the threshold of the 1980s," the 1980 election in which "some neoconservatives supported Republican Ronald Reagan, not Democrat Jimmy Carter," and "the state of affairs in the '70s and early '80s." It does not reach the crisis year of 1983 — the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Euromissile deployments, the destruction of KAL 007, the Able Archer scare — and one should not read those absences as findings, since the book's subject is the interior of American ideology and not the arms race. But its mood is the mood of the second Cold War all the same: the Conclusion frames its own moment as one of "attempts to turn the country rightward, to inhibit the process of detente," a book written in Moscow at the coldest point of the decade about the ideological weather in the country across the ocean.
What was it for? Not, this time, the sympathetic Western reader the series has learned to stop assuming by default. This is a scholarly monograph in the ISKAN manner, aimed at Soviet specialists and cadre who needed a reliable, fine-grained account of how the adversary's population actually thought — and, in the Marxist frame the book never abandons, of how that thinking is engineered. The aim, Batalov writes in the Introduction, is to "critically analyze the spectrum of non-Marxist forms of political consciousness," treating it "as an integral dynamic system whose elements have complex interconnections." The result is genuinely ambitious: a taxonomy running from liberal-technocratic and liberal-reformist consciousness through the traditionalist, libertarian and neoconservative right, out to the radical-propertarian Birchists and radical racists, and across to the radical-democratic, rebellious and romantic currents of the New Left. Whatever else this book is, it is a serious piece of intellectual cartography.
The institution behind it is worth pausing on, because it sets the irony that governs everything below. The Institute of US and Canadian Studies was the Soviet establishment's premier producer of expertise on the enemy, and its director, Georgi Arbatov, was simultaneously a Central Committee member and one of the architects of the Soviet Union's own foreign-policy propaganda. The book the authors cite of his in their opening pages — The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations — is a study of, in its own subtitle, "the imperialist doctrine, methods and organization of foreign political propaganda." An institute that theorised how the adversary manages minds was itself a working organ of the Soviet state's management of minds; the men who mapped the American manufacture of consent worked inside the Soviet one. None of this is hidden in the text — it simply cannot be seen from where the text stands, and that blind spot is the most interesting thing about the book.
The organising thesis is orthodox and stated without embarrassment: political consciousness in a class society is not a free market of ideas but a structured field shaped, in the last analysis, by the relations of production and, at its commanding heights, by the class that owns them. The American peculiarity the authors keep returning to is the dominant class's unusual success at manufacturing consent. What distinguishes the United States, they argue, is "the ability of the dominant class, making use of the peculiar historical development of the USA," to create in social consciousness a "zone of common interest" broader than any in France or Italy — a "zone" whose concrete emblem is the "American dream" that "influences the consciousness of all classes." The mechanism by which this happened in the nineteenth century is named precisely: "Conditioned by market fetishism, mass consciousness assimilated the idea that exploitation, inequality and injustice" between social groups "were impossible under the laws of equivalent exchange, provided the exchange itself was carried out according to market rules." This is false consciousness in the strict sense — a real social relation misrecognised as a natural law — and the book's account of how laissez-faire ideology, once a progressive weapon against feudal regulation, hardened into "a smoke-screen of 'great principles'" masking "the actual power of the economic magnates" is one of the better short Marxist histories of American liberalism in English.
And when the book turns from ideology-in-general to the deliberate management of opinion, it can be very sharp indeed. Its single most penetrating stroke falls on the neoconservatives, then newly ascendant "among the ruling elite." Batalov's colleagues catch in Kristol and his circle exactly the trait a defender of elite rule most wants to hide: "Neoconservatism is unable to hide the fact that it regards the masses as an object of purposeful manipulation." Its whole posture, they write, is spoiled for mass appeal by an "elitist-manipulative orientation" — a governing stratum that "feel[s] that a partition exists between them and the rest of the populace, which are merely objects of their ventures." That is a real and durable observation about the technocratic managerialism of the American right, and it was made before the word "spin" had entered the language. The Conclusion generalises it into a verdict on the whole constitutional machine that few American radicals would dispute: "the US political mechanism is so shaped as to enable the well organized and wealthy minority to hold down or even paralyze the policy that is supported by the majority." A reader who has followed the fate of majority preferences on health care or gun regulation in the decades since will not find that sentence dated.
The book is at its most useful, in fact, precisely where it draws on the American critical tradition rather than around it. Its typology of the New Left is built out of close, quoted engagement with the very writers the American radical canon rests on — Herbert Marcuse's "one-dimensional" man and the "Great Refusal," Theodore Roszak on technocracy, Charles Reich's Greening of America, and, standing behind the whole enterprise, the sociology of C. Wright Mills, whose name recurs in the index. When the authors write that the rebel radical sees "the permanent 'quiet' suppression of the individual and the cultivation of the 'one-dimensional' conformist by the state jointly with the corporations through the consumer mechanism," they are reporting the American New Left accurately and sympathetically, in its own terms. The chapters on the far right are better still, because there the Marxist lens and the evidence point the same way: the long anatomy of the John Birch Society's conspiracy theory, of Robert Welch and Gary Allen and the "invisible government" literature, of the radical-racist descent from the Klan through Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium, is documented from the primary sources and remains a serviceable guide to the American paranoid style. Where this book does research, believe it.
And here the series' recurring irony arrives in its sharpest form yet. This is a forensic study of managed political consciousness — of censorship of the real by "great principles," of a "zone of common interest" manufactured to blur class lines, of an elite that treats the masses "as an object of purposeful manipulation," of political machinery "so shaped" that an organised minority can override the majority. It was produced, in 1984, by the ideological apparatus of the state that ran the most comprehensive machinery of consciousness-management in human history: a single-candidate ballot, a censorship office (Glavlit) that vetted every printed word, a monopoly of the press and the airwaves, and an agitation-and-propaganda department that reached from the Politburo down to the factory wall-newspaper. Every instrument the book forges to expose Madison Avenue and the neoconservative "partition" between the managers and the managed fits the hand that made it. The category "elitist-manipulative orientation" describes the nomenklatura with a precision its authors could not, on pain of their careers, apply at home. The verdict that a "well organized and wealthy minority" can "paralyze the policy that is supported by the majority" is a fair description of a one-party state in which no policy was ever put to the majority at all.
The book even hands us the mirror and looks away from it. In the chapter on the far right, S. M. Plekhanov describes with contempt the internal life of American right-radical movements: their "bureaucratic centralism," their "strict ideological orthodoxy," the "sects as organizations of leaders, functionaries and activist cadres" in which "the activity of the masses is precisely regulated and directed from above" and "inner-party democracy is strictly proscribed." He means it as an indictment of Birchite authoritarianism. Every clause of it is a clinical description of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under which he was writing. The one form of political consciousness the book never puts on the dissecting table — never treats as a structured, socially produced, potentially self-deceiving object — is the Marxist-Leninist one from which it writes. That vantage is exempted by construction. The typology is candid enough to admit the gap: it concedes that its own scheme "overlooks, for instance, the socialist tradition in American political ideology." What it cannot say is that the socialism it means is the American New Left it has just anatomised, and that the socialism it speaks from — the official doctrine of the Soviet party — is the one consciousness in the book that is permitted to be simply true.
This is not a private discovery of the present series. The Fourth International's founder built the whole method the book uses, and then did the thing the book refuses: he turned it around. In Their Morals and Ours (1938) Trotsky set out the doctrine of engineered consciousness in three sentences that the ISKAN authors could have taken as their epigraph — "The ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it into considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality." And then the decisive addition, the one this book cannot make: "Such a regime could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needs the cement of morality." A ruling class rules by manufactured consent because terror alone is too expensive — that is the theory of ideology the Moscow authors apply to America. Trotsky applied it, in the same breath, to the Soviet bureaucracy, "a symmetrical complement in its own genre to fascism," a new privileged stratum that "is forced to resort to mendacity and frame-up in the struggle against the representatives of the revolution."
He had already shown, two years earlier, what that looked like in practice. The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is the standing answer in this series to any Soviet account of Soviet society, and its chapters on the press and the 1936 Constitution read as the negative of the book in your hands. Where Political Consciousness in the USA exposes how the American ruling class conceals real relations behind "great principles," Trotsky wrote of his own state that "everywhere and all the time — in the press, in speeches, in statistics, in the novels of its litterateurs, in the verses of its poets, and, finally, in the text of the new constitution — it painstakingly conceals the real relations both in town and country with abstractions from the socialist dictionary. That is why the official ideology is all so lifeless, talentless and false" (ch. 9). Where the ISKAN authors deplore the American right's regulation of "the activity of the masses… from above," Trotsky described the Stalinist press as a "continuation of the fierce advance-censorship whose chains are held by the Secretariat of a Central Committee whom nobody has elected" (ch. 10). And where the book charts the manufacture of American consent, Trotsky had already named its Soviet form exactly — the discussion of the "most democratic constitution in the world" that "reduced itself to sending resolutions of gratitude to Stalin," the guarantee of assembly that meant only "the obligation of certain groups of the population to appear at meetings summoned by the authorities for the adoption of resolutions prepared in advance" (ch. 10). That is the manufacture of consent as a state monopoly, and it was in print, in the tradition this introduction is written from, half a century before ISKAN turned the same searchlight on the country across the ocean and declined to swing it home.
There is a quieter falsification worth naming, because it is done by the shape of the categories rather than by any single claim. The book's most striking editorial decision is how it disposes of the American left. It grants coherent, historically serious "traditions" to liberalism and to conservatism, but when it reaches the radicals it dissolves them into a series of psychological types — the "radical-rebellious," the "radical-romantic," the "radical-propertarian" — organised around temperament, disappointment and the "artificiality of the wants imposed on people," rather than around any political programme the authors are prepared to take at face value. The New Left is read, sympathetically but decisively, as a mood: a revolt of the déclassé intellectual against technocracy, forever pinning its hopes on "outsiders" and never on the working class it "declares 'integrated in the system.'" This is not nothing — much of it is acute — but it is also a way of denying American socialism the standing of a politics. The book concedes the manoeuvre almost openly, admitting that its typology "overlooks, for instance, the socialist tradition in American political ideology, which is more than a century old." The organised socialist and communist currents of American history — Debs, the old Socialist Party, the very tradition this introduction is written from — are absent not because the authors are ignorant of them but because the only socialism their frame can fully credit is the one headquartered in Moscow. Every other radicalism is a symptom; theirs alone is a science.
None of this makes the book worthless — the opposite. Because it is real scholarship, its findings about the United States mostly stand on their own feet, independent of the state that commissioned them, and several of them the American radical tradition would sign without alteration. The account of laissez-faire ideology congealing from a progressive weapon into a mask for monopoly; the diagnosis of the neoconservatives' contempt for the very public they claim to speak for; the observation that the constitutional machine is built to blunt majorities; the sober, sourced portrait of the John Birch Society and the neo-Nazi fringe — these are contributions, and a reader wanting to understand how the American right talked to itself at the dawn of the Reagan years will learn from them. The book's engagement with Mills, Marcuse, Reich, Roszak, Domhoff, Kolko and the rest is a genuine encounter with the sharpest American self-criticism, not a caricature of it. On the test this series applies hardest — does the author quote the people he judges, in the original, or only characterise them? — Political Consciousness in the USA passes with room to spare. Its footnotes are dense with The Public Interest, Commentary, Newsweek and the Birchite press, read closely and cited by page.
The trouble was never the instrument. It was, as the sibling volumes in this series keep finding, the fixed direction of the searchlight. ISKAN's Americanists — the same school, and in Batalov's case the same author, who elsewhere in this catalogue dissect the American two-party system, American political science and the "philosophy of revolt" with equal skill — built a superb tool for seeing how a ruling class shapes a nation's mind. They were forbidden, absolutely, from turning it on the ruling class that employed them. Read Political Consciousness in the USA for what it sees, which is a great deal; and read it, as its authors could not, all the way round.