155

p Attempts to provide a “scientific” foundation for these ideas were made after Le Bon’s death.

p Here the milestone was the First World War. According to the British propaganda expert Lindley Fraser, that war "marked the emergence of propaganda from being an art, or craft, to becoming a (rudimentary) science".  [155•***  The reasons are obvious. They lie not only and not so much in the increased prestige enjoyed by science as such, which bourgeois authors are nothing loth to mention, as in the imperialist bourgeoisie’s heightened need for more effective means of spiritually influencing the masses, a need that sprang directly from the conditions under which the general crisis of capitalism began.

p Propaganda problems were given the closest attention in the USA, and it was in that country that the first books were brought out in which the principles of the modern bourgeois approach to propaganda were enunciated (one of these books was Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion published in 1922). But perhaps even more significant is the fact that in the USA whole schools of political theory sprang up which sought to make a serious study of propaganda problems. Among them, for instance, was the school of Professor Harold D. Lasswell, whom bourgeois science regards as one of the leading experts in this field.

p Lasswell did not produce anything particularly original. His contribution consists of a variant of the “elite” theory. But he devoted more attention than his predecessors to the "psychological relationships" between the “elite” and the “masses”, i.e., to problems of public opinion and propaganda.

p Lasswell was one of the first bourgeois scholars to try to provide a scientific basis for these problems not only in internal politics but also in international relations. In 156 an article entitled “Propaganda”, written for The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences long before the Second World War, he stressed that propaganda "assists in making a fiction of the national state and in fabricating new control areas which follow activity areas, intersecting old control areas in ever/ direction. Thus propaganda on an international scale is one important medium for transmitting those pressures which are tending to burst the bonds of the traditional social order."  [156•*  The experience of the Second World War and the expansionist foreign policy aims of US imperialism gave Lasswell grounds for stating bluntly: " Propaganda is an instrument of total policy, together with diplomacy, economic arrangements and armed forces. Political propaganda is the management of mass communications for power purposes. ...the aim is to economise the material cost of world dominance."  [156•** 

p It is significant that a British theorist, Bernard Crick, has described Lasswell as arguing "that there was a world revolutionary situation unique to our age".  [156•*** 

p A number of institutions for the study of propaganda problems was set up in the USA in the period between the two world wars. One of these, founded in 1937, is Columbia University’s Institute for Propaganda Analysis.  [156•**** 

p In the USA the first experiments in the use of psychological science for "commercial propaganda”, in other words, for advertisements, which was to play a considerable role in developing the theory of propaganda methods, were made in the 1930s.

p This work, on a much smaller scale, was conducted also in other imperialist states. A seemingly surprising fact is that although in those years the nazis poured much more money into propaganda (both internal and foreign political) they lagged behind the rulers of the United States.

p First and foremost, a point to be borne in mind is that on 157 account of the political doctrine of German nazism, questions of power, policy and propaganda were shrouded in mysticism, which did not lend itself to a searching social investigation, especially as the word of Hitler or even of Goebbels carried more weight than the recommendations of entire institutes. Though they gave them a mystical twist, these nazi ringleaders by and large formulated the same tenets by which imperialist propaganda has been abiding from the days of Le Bon to our times—emphasis on emotional rather than on rational influences, contempt for the people, the striving to play on base instincts, and so on.

p By giving a considerable impetus to the development of the foreign political propaganda of the leading imperialist powers, chiefly the USA and Britain, the Second World War ushered in a new phase in propaganda research. True, this was brought into prominence at the termination of the war tfhen the corresponding personnel was released from functions directly connected with propaganda within the context of the war effort. Beginning in 1945 there was a substantial animation in the sciences linked with propaganda in the USA and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. A whole army of experts appeared. Abundant literature began to be published—at first devoted to the history of propaganda during the Second World War and to generalisations of its experience, then of a general theoretical and historical character and, lastly, dedicated to the tasks and methods of psychological warfare, i.e., to propaganda in the context of the cold war started by the USA and its allies against the socialist countries.

p Numerous institutions were set up to promote internal and foreign political propaganda. These included private agencies studying public opinion, institutes and departments" at universities studying communism for anti- communist propaganda, centres working out the theory and methods of propaganda (one of them, which subsequently became a major centre of international research, was set up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and divisions at research institutes serving military and foreign policy.

p In short, this signified the formation of a new branch of social science studying and serving the entire range of 158 problems linked with propaganda, a branch that in effect united a number of affiliated social sciences.  [158•* 

p The US Army manual on psychological warfare says that in propaganda an important role is played by sociological, economic and political investigation (notably in connection with the need for studying the audience—its social composition, interests, cultural level, conflicts in society, and so forth).  [158•**  One often hears that ethnography and anthropology are also important to propaganda. The American anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, for instance, spoke in this connection of the importance of studying the different cultures and, as an example, mentioned what he described as Japanese “situational” morale which completely baffled American propaganda during the war.  [158•*** 

p However, psychology unquestionably occupies the central place in the modern bourgeois propaganda theories. This is due not only to the significance of that science in the study of human behaviour but also to some specifics of the imperialist propaganda doctrine.

p Lately bourgeois social thought has been attaching increasing importance to psychology precisely because of the possibilities it holds out in controlling the public mind. The well-known English philosopher Bertrand Russell believes that "before very long psychology, and especially mass psychology, will be recognised as the most important of all sciences from the standpoint of human welfare, and that whether civilisation can long survive now depends on psychology".  [158•****  The West German expert on propaganda (particularly military propaganda) Major I. G. Leschinsky describes scientific psychology’s penetration of social life 159 as follows: "Following scientific psychology’s emergence at the close of the 19th century, the method of exercising a purposeful influence on people was taken from its arsenal.... Today we find that psychological discoveries are systematically used in medicine, education, the economy, journalism and, last but not least, politics."  [159•* 

p Western theoreticians are of the opinion that propaganda cannot be effective today without psychology. On this score Paul Linebarger writes: "It (propaganda) can become true psychological warfare, scientific in spirit and developed as a teachable skill, only by having its premises clearly stated, its mission defined, its instruments put in systematic readiness, and its operations subject to at least partial check, only by the use of techniques borrowed from science."  [159•** 

p When bourgeois propagandists speak of enlisting the services of science for propaganda, the use of techniques borrowed from science and so forth they have in mind not only and not so much the elucidation of propaganda’s place in politics or the elaboration of its ideological content as its purely applied functions—the framing of its methods, forms and techniques.

p This is motivated, above all, by objective factors: where the task of propaganda is to indoctrinate millions of people with different social backgrounds and education levels and containing different age groups, the methods for such indoctrination indeed become one of the chief problems of propagandists. There is yet another reason, particularly in the USA, that is, a strong influence exerted on political propaganda by the premises and approach evolved by business, which has long ago come to appreciate the necessity of moulding the public mind in the course of day-to-day business and commercial activity.

p This applied function is very much pronounced in the researches, which, since the war, the United States monopolies have been sponsoring on a growing scale in order to use scientific data to improve advertising, the selection of personnel, the organisation of production, and so on. 160 Take, for example, "motivational research" that has become widespread since the close of the 1940s and the early 1950s. Some of the institutions set up for this purpose in the USA have become quite well known, for instance, the Institute of Motivational Research, the Colour Research Institute of America and the Institute for Social Research. Huge sums of money are paid to these institutes and individual experts for their recommendations on sales organisation. Their services are sought by General Motors, General Foods, Goodyear Tire and Rubber and many other leading monopolies. It is estimated that as early as 1956 annual expenditures on this research amounted to 12 million dollars.  [160•* 

p Speaking of advertising methods, the British sociologist Vance Packard cites facts to show that the research in this area is conducted along the same lines as in political propaganda. From advertising "depth research" moved on to the selection of personnel, production organisation, the “reconstruction” of relations in production, methods of disorganising the working class and so on.  [160•**  This brought into being branches of research such as "social engineering" and "social relations”. An indication of the scale of this research is that 40,000 experts are engaged in the study of "social relations" and that a hundred leading companies are spending more than 50 million dollars a year on this research.  [160•*** 

p The growth of all the branches directly serving the interests of big capital has whetted the appetites of their organisers. One of them, Edward G. Pendray, is quoted as having declared: "To public-relations men must go the most important social engineering role of them all—the gradual reorganisation of human society, piece by piece and structure by structure."  [160•****  Lately the experts in “motivation”, "social relations" and so on have been insisting, in particular, on the reorganisation of foreign political propaganda in 161 accordance with their recommendations, which envisage making this propaganda more aggressive, a further intensification of anti-communism, and so on.

p Already today the recommendations of research institutions (both political and commercial) are being widely applied in propaganda. Since the election campaigns of 1952-56 the bourgeois parties in the USA have been making extensive use of psychology and other sciences serving propaganda in order to step up the efficacy of their election fights.

p The first experiments of this kind are described by Aldous Huxley on the evidence of the publisher of a leading American commercial newspaper: "...all the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilised and set to work. Carefully selected samples of the electorate are given ’ interviews in depth’. These interviews in depth reveal the unconscious fears and wishes most prevalent in a given society at the time of an election. Phrases and images aimed at allaying or, if necessary, enhancing these fears, at satisfying these wishes (at least symbolically), are then chosen by the experts, tried out on readers and audiences, changed or improved in the light of the information thus obtained. After which the political campaign is ready for the mass communicators. All that is now needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look ’sincere’. Under the new dispensation, political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really matter."  [161•* 

p At the 1960 presidential elections John F. Kennedy’s "brains trust" did not remain content with evolving the methods of running the campaign by conventional means—the drawing up of memos, speeches and so on. They were the first in the history of US elections to use computers. The results of an opinion poll involving 100,000 Americans carefully divided into groups were fed into these machines, whose task was to compute the “parameters” of the average American elector, try to foretell his behaviour at the 162 elections and determine the best propaganda methods of influencing public opinion.  [162•* 

Similar techniques in propaganda, and particularly in foreign policy, worked out. on the basis of recipes produced by psychology and other sciences, are directly serving the class interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie.