Gabriel Kolko

Gabriel Kolko (born August 17, 1932) is an American historian and author.

Kolko was born in Paterson, New Jersey, attended Kent State University (B.A. 1954) and the University of Wisconsin (M.S. 1955), married Joyce Manning in 1955, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1962. Following graduation he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at SUNY-Buffalo. In 1970 he joined the York University History Department in Toronto and is now an emeritus professor of history there.^{[citation needed]}

Kolko's research interests include American political history, the Progressive Era, and foreign policy in the 20th century. He has been called "an incisive critic of the Progressive Era and its relationship to the American empire."

Kolko was considered a leading historian of the early New Left, joining William Appleman Williams and James Weinstein in advancing the corporate liberalism idea whereby the old Progressive historiography of the "interests" versus the "people" was reinterpreted as a collaboration of interests aiming towards stabilizing competition [Novick, 439]. According to Grob and Billias, "Kolko believed that large-scale units turned to government regulation precisely because of their inefficiency" and that the "Progressive movement - far from being antibusiness - was actually a movement that defined the general welfare in terms of the well-being of business" [Grob and Billias, 38]. Kolko, in particular, broke new ground with his critical history of the Progressive Era. He suggested that free enterprise and competition were vibrant and expanding during the first two decades of the 20th century; meanwhile, corporations reacted to the free market by turning to government to protect their inherent inefficiency from the discipline of market conditions. In other words, "the corporate elite—the House of Morgan, for example—turned to government intervention when it realized in the waning 19th century that competition was too unruly to guarantee market share." This behavior is known as corporatism, but Kolko dubbed it "political capitalism." Kolko's thesis "that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government-business coalition" is one that is echoed by many observers today [Grob and Billias, 39]. Former Harvard professor Paul H. Weaver uncovered the same inefficient and bureaucratic behavior from corporations during his stint at Ford Motor Corporation (see Weaver's The Suicidal Corporation [1988]). As one profile put it:

“

For Gabriel Kolko, the enemy has always been what sociologist Max Weber called “political capitalism”—that is, “the accumulation of private capital and fortunes via booty connected with politics.” In Kolko’s eyes, “America’s capacity and readiness to intervene virtually anywhere” pose a grave danger both to the U.S. and the world. Kolko has made it his mission to study the historical roots of how this propensity for intervention came to be. He was also one of the first historians to take on the regulatory state in a serious way. Kolko’s landmark work, The Triumph of Conservatism, is an attempt to link the Progressive Era policies of Theodore Roosevelt to the national-security state left behind in the wake of his cousin Franklin’s presidency. Kolko’s indictment of what he calls “conservatism” is not aimed at the Southern Agrarianism of Richard Weaver or the Old Right individualism of Albert Jay Nock. In fact, Kolko’s thesis—that big government and big business consistently colluded to regulate small American artisans and farmers out of existence—has much in common with libertarian and traditionalist critiques of the corporatist state. The “national progressivism” that Kolko attacks was, in his own words, “the defense of business against the democratic ferment that was nascent in the states.” Coming of age in the ’50s and ’60s, Kolko saw firsthand the destruction of the “permanent things” as the result of the merging of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. A sense of place and rootedness lingers just beneath the surface of his work

”

Kolko is also an important contributor to the historiography of the Vietnam War. In The Roots of American Foreign Policy (1969), Kolko contended that the American failure to 'win' the war demonstrated the inapplicability of the US policy of containment. Later, in The Anatomy of a War (1985), Kolko became, along with writers such as George Kahin, a leading writer of the postrevisionist, or synthesis, school, which suggested, among other things, that the revisionist school was wrong in speculating that the United States could have won the war.^{[citation needed]}

Kolko's wife Joyce has been a collaborator in his writings, e.g. on The Politics of War and The Limits of Power.

Political Views

While describing himself as a Leftist and anti-capitalist (and considered by some a "quasi-Marxist"), Kolko is withering in his criticism of the undemocratic, authoritarian strands of Socialism espoused by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. Having condemned Lenin's famous dismissal of democratic workers' control—what Lenin called an "infantile disorder"—Kolko writes, in his Politics of War, an amusing dismissal of the shallow, power-hungry duo of Stalin and Mao:

What Mao called theory, with the intense vanity which made him manipulate the [Chinese Communist] party into passing encomiums to him, was nothing more than tactics, tactics designed to lead a national revolution of a reformist character. What is less important than the superficiality of the thought is its intent - designed to make a coalition and victory politically possible. Mao was a great strategist and tactician in the acquisition of power, but in fact below even Stalin as a thinker. His ideology was derived, intellectually crude, and strictly relegated to this desire and passion to use the dynamics of China in chaos to attain power. He never rose to even Stalin's sterile level of generality and abstraction, or above homilies that took more from Sun Yat-sen than Lenin. He always knew what was right for the moment, and in this regard he was a genius... [Mao]'s obsession with being confirmed as the Great Sage made him dogmatic about a theoretical line so nebulous and pragmatic that it was always successful as a tactical armory.

Kolko is a regular contributor to the political newsletter CounterPunch.

References

• Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

• Grob, Gerald N and Billias, George Athan. Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives, vol 2 "Since 1877". New York: The Free Press, 1987.

• US Government 'White Paper' (February 1965)

• Kahin, George, Intervention: How America Become Involved in Vietnam, New York, 1986.

• Divine, Robert, "Historiography: Vietnam Reconsidered" in Walter Capps (ed), The Vietnam Reader, New York, 1990.

Bibliography

• Kolko, G. (1955), Distribution of income in the United States New York; Student League for Industrial Democracy, (SLID research tracts #5)
• Kolko, G. (1962), "Wealth and power in America: An analysis of social class and income distribution",
• Kolko, G. (1965), Railroads and Regulation: 1877-1916
• Kolko, G. (1968; 1990 edition with new afterword), The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, ASIN B0007EOISO
• Kolko, G. (1971), Crimes of war: A Legal, Political-Documentary, and Psychological Inquiry into the Responsibility of Leaders, Citizens, and Soldiers for Criminal Acts in Wars, with Falk, Richard A and Robert Jay Lifton, (eds), New York: Random House.
• Kolko, G. (1963), The Triumph of Conservatism, The Free Press, ISBN 0-02-916650-0
• Kolko, G. (1965), Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916, Greenwood Publishing Company, ISBN 0-8371-8885-7; This was based on his Ph.D. dissertation.
• Kolko, G. (1969), The Roots of American Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Power and Purpose, Boston.
• Kolko, G. and Kolko, J. (1972), The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy 1945-1954, Harper & Row, ISBN 0-06-012447-4
• Kolko, G. (1976), Main Currents in Modern American History, Harper & Row, ISBN 0-06-012451-2
• Kolko, G. (1985), Anatomy of a War; Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience, The New Press, ISBN 1-56584-218-9
• Kolko, G. (1994), Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society since 1914, The New Press, ISBN 1-56584-191-3
• Kolko, G. (2002), Another Century of War?, The New Press, ISBN 1-56584-758-X
• Kolko, G. (2006), The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World, Lynne Rienner Publishers (March 30, 2006), ISBN 1-58826-439-4
• Kolko, G. (2006), After Socialism: Reconstructing Critical Social Thought, Routledge; 1 edition (October 28, 2006), ISBN 0-415-39591-7
• Kolko, G. (2009), World in Crisis: the End of the American Century, Pluto Press; 1 edition (March 17, 2009), ISBN 0745328652

External links

• Podcast with Kolko
• Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist: [1]