There’s nothing wrong, when a notable person dies, with a public conversation in which their worth is weighed and for some commentators, comes up wanting.
When you know that the newly deceased was profoundly important in the lives of many people who account nothing of what that person did as wrong or flawed, it is wise to go slow and be careful if your own accounting is different. Out of a general ethic of respect and care for others, but also out of a pragmatic understanding of politics and solidarity if all the people with a different view are people you otherwise think of as allies and friends or at least as people that you must make common cause with.
Politics sharpens these debates about the dead. If you see yourself as broadly on the left, as progressive, as radical, even as liberal, in any national or international politics, there’s something else to think about, especially if you are an intellectual. Any part of a famous individual’s life should be approached with a disciplined understanding of a series of questions: how much did that person’s life positively affect the struggle for equality, justice and freedom through inspiration, through organization, through ideas and arguments, through institution-building? How enduring is that legacy, how much is it a foundation for work into the future? Where there is a part of that life that went in another direction, how much of that was highly agentive, highly conscious, and unmistakeably consequential either to individuals who knew that person or at some larger scale? How typical are those flaws?
Those questions don’t resolve these postmortem debates. Left and liberal thinkers who are heavily in debt to the deceased will often find that the weight of their contributions vastly outweighs the deficits of their existence. People who have been wounded either directly by the dead person or wounded by the kinds of things they did will, properly, never be able to see past that legacy.
But working the problem with the intellectual and political tools at our command should at least mean we don’t get stuck on tendentious evasions and manipulations, but instead really think it out. That is all the more important in the age of the troll farm and the bot, in which it has become trivially easy to manipulate public culture and create divisions and distractions where none should exist. These are the moments where, if you believe yourself to be political, to be working for social transformation, to be seeking solidarity, you have got to assume the responsibility all of that implies.
Yes, I’m thinking about the life and legacy of Gloria Steinem. What I am asking is, are you?
It’s fine if she is, to you, history, and so you don’t immediately feel connection, or appreciation, or indebtedness for any of her accomplishments as a feminist, or a sense of recognition for the life she lived. It’s fine if to you, she was not nearly as important as more intellectual feminists of her generation, as more unconventional or radical activists around gender and sexuality, if you think she was elevated beyond her stature by a public culture more appreciative of her conventional heterosexual affect. There are a lot of fine responses to Steinem’s life that might lightly grudge or softly diminish her accomplishments, though there are many that I think get closer to the reality that generously appreciate and love what she did, when she did it, how she did it. I think anyone left or liberal who believes in social change, in some form of liberation, who wants to defend the opening up of post-war societies, pretty much has to see Steinem as a highly laudable and important force for good, but it’s fine to create a bit of space for layering and contextualizing that appreciation. I think that’s actually a sign of an important life, of a significant person, that their complexities beg to be remembered and explored.
However.
If your first response to hearing of her death was to say (or endorse others saying) that Steinem’s major legacy was to distract from proper class analysis, just bench yourself now and save everyone else the effort required to ignore you. That’s a sub-basement below the most vulgar of vulgar Marxist thinking. Whatever might be valid in that thought, it either belongs as a point in a much vaster and more subtle critique of postwar American liberal-left thinking and activism or as a complex appreciation of a tension that surrounds all activism, all left ideology. People who imagine struggle as a thorough process of burning away the full sociality and humanity of our time and place are cultists, not activists.
If your first response to hearing of her death is to recall that she once worked for the CIA and at a later date refused to straightforwardly regret that involvement, I have to say that you really need to know more about the CIA and other Cold War intelligence agencies. Particularly if you imagine yourself a leftist. To wit:
The CIA (and MI5/MI6 and for that matter the KGB) devoted considerable effort to underwrite the work of intellectuals, artists, writers, journalists in a wide variety of ways, sometimes through proxy organizations and businesses. The work they underwrote was often liberal or leftist in its content, and the people being supported did not always know where the money was coming from. Sometimes they did know and they decided that having money was better than not having money. You might well ask, “Why do that if the content was not actually propaganda for the United States and its governmental ideologies?” One reason was precisely so that the CIA could, at any time of its choosing, create exactly the kind of stupid left-wing firing squad divisiveness that follows on accusations of ties to the CIA. Or so that at a later date it could blackmail public figures with liberal-left commitments by threatening to do so.
I should particularly not have to tell older leftists from developing countries to slow their roll about accusing someone like Steinem of being dirty for having once worked for the CIA or a European intelligence agency or gotten money under the table at some point, because, wow, there were and are a lot of people in their own networks who did the same, and a lot of them have not (yet) been exposed. That much is pretty clear if you read declassified archival materials from the early Cold War.
Which leads to another point: older leftists from all over the world should by now know that people in movements who accuse other people of having ties to the CIA, MI5 or other agencies have frequently turned out to be the spies or to have been manipulated directly by spies within the party or movement. Anybody who has studied Cold War-era intelligence agencies knows that’s a problem that the agencies themselves had internally, that the people charged with rooting out moles either were moles themselves or did so much damage in looking for them that they might as well have been agents of a foreign government. That’s a real thing, it’s not just in spy novels. I should not have to tell leftists from Africa, Latin America, Europe, or South Asia this point, because it’s been driven home again and again. If you are involved in any kind of left or liberal political movement now, and if you were then, you should just take for granted that there are many people in your organization who are reporting on what you are doing, even now in an unprecedented era of signals-based surveillance. And one way to spot them is that they frequently hint or suggest that particular other individuals are the spies. (Yes, there’s a paradox in this point, ok.)
There is an important division in the history of the CIA and similar agencies between two activities: intelligence-gathering and covert action. A fair amount of what people on the left legitimately hate about the CIA comes centrally from covert action—that’s the coups and the assassinations and the giant piles of money for corrupt autocrats. Intelligence-gathering wasn’t a morally innocent activity but it’s not what predominates when the crimes and failures of the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies are compiled. When people who were not employees of the agencies were employed by agencies as writers or artists or culture-makers, and so on, they were almost universally dealing only with the intelligence-gathering side of the organization. You can say, “But you can’t compartmentalize guilt! The stain applies everywhere!” Sure, but by that reasoning, anybody who ever worked for or with the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House, the U.S. Congress, USAID, and so on, is stained, and I don’t mean that abstractly. Lots of the work that the federal government subsidized was directly or indirectly weaponized in the Cold War. Every Title VI-subsidized area studies program in a US university, most notably. If I’m going to hold people accountable, I prefer to hold people accountable for direct involvement in specifically deadly or destructive operations where they had full knowledge of what they were doing and what came of it.
That this kind of superficial purity-seeking politics keeps resurging within a very post-Cold War global left is to me a sign that the left never really reckoned with the existence of intellectually and personally sincere and rooted anti-communism within radical, progressive and liberal networks. E.g., folks continue to get away with seeing anti-communism, more specifically anti-Comintern politics and thought, as the work of reactionary infiltrators, as existing only because the CIA or other agencies underwrote it, and therefore as having no intellectual integrity or social rooting in its own right that urgently begs to be understood by leftists of any kind. So in nationalist movements where anti-communists saw Marxism as another modality of colonialism, in civil rights movements where communism was seen as another tool of white control, in many parties and organizations where left factions like the Spartacist League were despised for their anti-democratic tactics, in contexts where left-leaning thinkers preferred a humanistic approach to understanding social relations and found formal ‘scientific’ leftism and the sprawling infrastructure of left ideology a tedious distraction, and so on, all of those misgivings and critiques and aversions get pushed aside as a priori misguided and more importantly as bought and paid for. So no one ever has to ask with any real empirical curiosity, “Why might that person on that occasion have sent a letter to MI5 about a colleague?” or “Why might that person have volunteered information to a CIA handler in an embassy while visiting a foreign city?”
I’ve mentioned the point already, but it bears repeating: regardless of who is encouraging troll farming, botting, or just conventional attention-getting social media activity, whether it’s an actual “dirtbag left”, or for-the-lulz alt-right people, or something far more organized, it’s just a new twist in an old game that should delegitimize anybody who stokes it up, whether or not there’s any kind of validity down at the roots of their sealioning.
If, as you look back—or as you look ahead and wonder what politics we might yet build that could hold solidarity in better ways and to better ends—you find what the CIA did morally loathsome whether it was gathering information or sponsoring coups, if you think any intellectual or artist should have read the fine print and known what they were getting involved with, remember what it is that you are actually loathing. If you are hating the coups and the assassinations, you are not just mourning people who died or were tortured, but instead the futures that were possible—democracies, systems, transformations. But even more you are mourning the way that Cold War intelligence agencies, and their downstream mutational descendants, poisoned the lifeblood of democratic civil societies everywhere by spreading mistrust, by subsidizing disinformation, by twisting and compromising important conversations that needed to happen, and still need to happen.
If that is what you loathe, then don’t make it worse. And blame who did it, not to whom it was done. If there’s ever been a place to think more about structure and less about agency, this is one of those junctures.
Image credit: "Gloria Steinem 1977 ©Lynn Gilbert" by Lynn Gilbert is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.