A recent NBC News poll found that 70 percent of Americans believe the country “needs to do more to increase social justice.” Although we’re often told the country is polarized, and the extremist Republican party’s culture war often makes headlines, there’s broad support for a wide range of progressive policies. A large majority of Americans support labor unions, gay marriage, abortion rights, Medicare and Medicaid, lower drug prices, expansion of Social Security, doubling the federal minimum wage, breaking up the nation’s Big Banks, reforming our tax system that favors the rich and want the government to do more to address the climate crisis.
Yet, a study conducted by professors Benjamin Page of Northwestern University and Martin Gilens of Princeton, researching 20 years of data on federal policy decisions, found that wealthy Americans, corporations, and organized interest groups have been much more successful than ordinary Americans at getting their preferred policies passed by Congress.
In his new book, “Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism,” Michael Zweig, emeritus professor of economics at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, makes the case that U.S. progressive social movements have a common interest in challenging the nation’s capitalist framework that often prevents these movements from achieving their popular policy goals. Here, Zweig begins by talking about a 1971 memo written to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, decrying the power of progressive movements and suggesting a strategy to wage an effective corporate counterattack.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: What was going on in the late ’60s and early 1970s is hard for those of us who lived through it to remember it, and it’s certainly hard for people who have come up in the last 20, 30, 40 years to realize what was the climate in this country, the political climate in the late ’60s and early 1970s, where the corporate world and corporate capitalism was very much on the defensive.
U.S. imperialism around the world was the Vietnam War. All of that resulted in a general understanding very broadly in the country that capitalism was the problem. When the Chamber of Commerce went to Lewis Powell Jr., who at the time was a white lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, and said, “Well, what should we do about this?”
And Powell wrote this memorandum, which wasn’t secret, but it wasn’t well known outside of these high-level corporate circles.
What he said was very, very important. What Powell said to the Chamber of Commerce and to the world of business is, “We have to defend not our own industry, not our own businesses. We have to defend the system as a whole. The capitalist system is under attack. It’s not enough just to champion your own industry, no matter how important that is to you. Unless we defend the system as a whole and mobilize our collective resources to do that, these troubles are going to continue and we’re going to continue to be on the defensive.”
In the 1970s, following that memorandum, the corporate world did follow those instructions in that advice. That’s when you get the Heritage Foundation. That’s where you get the Federalist Society developed, which ultimately brought us this very reactionary Supreme Court.
That’s where you get the American Legislative Exchange Council, which develops right-wing legislation for state legislatures to pass and then passes those draft legislations around to all the state legislatures to try to move the agenda to the right, to try to push back on all the gains that the labor movement has made, all the gains that the women’s movement made, that the civil rights movement, Black Liberation movement made, all of that stuff has to be pushed back and undone.
And that process, which began in an organized, systematic way, on a class basis, on a system basis—we’re still living with today and they’re not done. Donald Trump and the others in the Republican party, in the MAGA wing and the Republican party generally these days, what they’re about is taking back every possible progressive gain that social movements have won over the last 60, 80 years.
And if we don’t get together also on a class-wide basis, the working class challenging that capitalist class and the working class with its allies across all these different social movements, we are going to continue to suffer and be on the defensive.
So what my book is trying to do, this book on class, race and gender is trying to understand what is the underlying significance of corporate capitalism for the foundation of these social movements in that it’s capitalism as a system that generates the outrages and the injuries and the divisions that we’re all mobilizing against.
So instead of taking this on issue by issue, instead of taking it on union by union or occupation by occupation or white people or just black people or these ones or those ones, we have to all band together, still taking care of our own issues, but seeing the solidarity that has to develop across all these issues and across all these movements into one anti-corporate, anti-capitalist movement that shakes the country for power.
And that’s what this book is trying to support and get people to understand why that’s true.
For more information about “Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism,” visit PM Press’ page.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Michael Zweig (13:45) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
For the best listening experience and to never miss an episode, subscribe to Between The Lines on your favorite podcast app or platform: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Tunein+ Alexa, Castbox, Overcast, Podfriend,
iHeartRadio, Castro, Pocket Casts, RSS Feed.
Or subscribe to our Between The Lines and Counterpoint Weekly Summary.
