The Ideological Commissar and the Institutionalization of Indoctrination: Insights from the Communist Experience.

• Author: Aligica, Paul Dragos

The social organization of indoctrination and propaganda is a well-known and yet a very little understood phenomenon. It is a commonplace to note that political systems have embedded into their structures distinctive organizational arrangements whose function is to propagate, monitor, enforce, and manage the ideological views that have a central role in both defining and supporting those systems. In most cases, these organizational units operate in the shadow of routine. In fact, that is precisely a mark of liberal democratic regimes: the latent, toned-down nature of these ideological vectors. Yet, in other types of political systems they occupy a pivotal, manifest position. They are intrinsically intertwined with the very fundaments and operations of those systems.

When that happens, one of the main features of these institutional arrangements is that they rarely stand alone. They operate by penetrating and planting their units within other existing organizations. And thus, almost all other institutions and organizations, each having its distinctive social role and position in the system, come to be monitored, censored, and managed on their ideological dimension, from inside, by these political-ideological units and agents. At the same time, these units are coordinated through an overarching (national and sometimes even international) systemic structure.

Thus, the entire institutional configuration of the political and social system is pervaded and altered. Distinctive patterns start to emerge. At that point, we know that we are already dealing with a peculiar form of political system or regime: in it, a set of supreme ideas and values, taking a particular ideological form, has come to occupy such a position that they are considered the ultimate and exclusive drivers and regulators of social life. Those in charge of interpreting and guarding those values and ideas, as well as correctly applying them in practice, gain a dominant social position. And all that has, obviously, major institutional and governance implications.

Probably the easiest to grasp and the best-known illustration of this type of political phenomenon is the institution of the political commissar, operating under various names and forms in communist regimes. The standard definitions describe it as an official of the Communist Party, especially in the Soviet Union or China, responsible for political education and indoctrination and for reinforcing the loyalty of the military to the government. The standard function of the army in any political system is to defend the country from external and internal threats. The function of the commissar was to make sure the army of a country that had turned communist was internalizing the communist worldview, mindset, and interpretation of world events, and that it was loyal in thought and action to the Communist Party's aims. It was the deepest-reaching conduit (in socio-psychological and indoctrination terms) between each army unit and the Communist Party, a party that was the political, ideological, and organizational center of the system and the ultimate standard in the interpretation of the communist vision and ideology. That role required engaging in a continuous monitoring, indoctrination, and guidance process, always following the lines given "from the center."

The political commissar is an excellent illustration not only of the nature of this type of political-ideological practice but also a reminder of the fact that its model could be extended (and indeed was extended in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe) to other social institutions beyond the army. From factories to schools, universities, and hospitals, under communism almost all organizations had at one point or another a special ideological office or agent, by now called an ideological worker--different from those of the Communist Party, the political police, or the informers of the political police. This office was responsible for directing and supervising ideological training--indoctrination--as well as for monitoring and enforcing the official worldview and interpretation of current events in all those institutions. The result in all Soviet or Soviet-inspired regimes was that it became "generally impossible to delimit precisely the field of propaganda. It is only one aspect of a total program of action which ranges from primary education to industrial and agricultural production, and which encompasses all literature, art and leisure. The entire life of the citizen becomes the object of propaganda" (Domenach 1951, 272). We come, thus, to identify the presence of an office (or at least an agent, the ideological worker) that exercises this function in most domains of organized activity in communist regimes. Among them--as one may expect--the institutions of education, especially higher education, were the object of a special attention.

These elementary observations about the political commissar or ideological worker and its functions in communist regimes give a clear indication of the nature and importance of the phenomenon explored in this article, irrespective of the label under which it is known in real life or in the scholarly literature. Indeed, such an accentuated institutionalization of the ideological element and its associated structures and mechanisms is a feature of a large class of regimes and political systems, being a recurring phenomenon in history. And yet, the historical evidence shows that although that function may be present in any political system, there are some systems in which it grows and spreads to become the defining feature of the system (Thompson 1999; Cunningham 2002; Taylor 2013). And when it comes to that, its strongest and most extreme form has manifested in modern times, so far, in communist regimes. That means that, in our attempt to understand the circumstances and implications surrounding the accentuated institutionalization of the ideological element, one of the most fruitful ways to start is to use its communist avatar as an empirical and historical reference point.

This article is a contribution to the study of these institutional phenomena. Let us call it for now the institution of the political or ideological commissar or ideological worker, though as one can easily see, the function and its institutional and organizational embodiments have materialized and continue to materialize in recent history under different shapes and names. The objective of the article is to contribute to a better understanding of these apparently straightforward yet, in fact, complex and little understood institutional processes and their associated practices of indoctrination and social control.

The literature about totalitarian and communist ideology and propaganda (including indoctrination and brainwashing) is rather vast (Gleason, 1997; Lifton, 2012). Yet, at a closer look, the scholarly treatment of the ways the ideological function gets organized and embedded in institutionalized structures reveals massive lacunae. As one becomes more familiar with the topic, it becomes clearer and clearer that the issue is not just about the proverbial "gaps in the literature" that are to be filled. The reality is that, in order to put this research line on a solid footing, one needs to start with very basic, foundational questions: How do we conceptualize and theorize about the social organization of ideology? How should we think methodically--in theoretically and empirically informed ways--about the institutionalization of indoctrination and propaganda? What is the theoretical apparatus best fitted for this task? What are the best ways to document and study the specific domains of institutionalization of indoctrination such as, for instance, the way it gets inserted and implemented in education systems? This article is an attempt to outline several responses to these and similar questions. Its main focus will be on the basic problem of conceptualization: What are the most constructive ways to conceptualize and theorize about the social and political instrumentation of ideology in regimes or systems that assume that a historical mission of salvation or radical transformation is the stringent organizing and legitimizing principle of their very existence?

In the article, I use communism as a historical and empirical reference in order to develop a series of exploratory insights, both regarding the phenomenon itself and regarding the alternative and converging conceptual frameworks to be used in its analysis and interpretation. With this end in view, the article is structured around three modes of conceptualizing the phenomena of interest, each pertaining to a level of analysis: (a) the political system/regime typology perspective, at the macro or systemic level; (b) the functionalist perspective, at the mezzo level; and (c) the organizational perspective, at the micro level. The intellectual cartography and the exploratory investigations advanced in the article have thus to be read as a propaedeutic for better engaging analytically with the problem of indoctrination and its institutionalization. The ultimate objective is to contribute to a broader comparative understanding of the institutionalization of indoctrination and propaganda in a variety of systems, regimes, and circumstances, including but also going beyond the standard case studies (communist, National Socialist, and fascist).

The Political System Typology Perspective: Conceptualizing Ideocracy and Totalitarianism

The system-level view is a primary, general mode of conceptually framing for analytical purposes the phenomenon of the institutionalization of ideology as part of a larger social and institutional whole. The ideological dimension (belief systems, values, and doctrines that define, legitimize, and frame institutional structures) is essential for describing and analyzing any political system or governance regime. Isolating and analytically...