Though Cowards Flinch

The Powell memo was written by Lewis F. Powell to Eugene Sydnor, Director of the US Chamber of Commerce, in 1971. Powell was a member of the board of eleven corporations and was shortly to be nominated by President Richard Nixon to the US Supreme Court. I only came across this memo care of David Harvey, though it is fairly universally acknowledged to be key evidence in understanding the sea-change in politics during the 1970s between ‘embedded liberalism’ and a more aggressive ‘neo-liberalism’.

There are many interesting things one can garner from the memo. Anyone who has read anything by the American Right over the past three decades will recognize instantly the persecution complex which Powell exhibits on behalf of business, apparently the ‘forgotten man’ of American politics. Some of the evidence adduced in support of such assertions is demonstrably false, such as when Powell talks about politicians tripping over themselves to approve any measure protective of the environment.

What I suspect Powell had in mind at the time was the competition to seem environmentally friendly in 1970, e.g. through Senator Muskie’s amendments to the 1963 Clean Air Act, or President Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, an era which peaked with Ralph Nader’s run for the Presidency. It’s easy to forget that it took powerful popular movements, that borrowed from the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War campaigns, to pressure politicians into passing the laws required to protect clean air and water. Oooh how radical.

Powell laments:

“One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction. The campuses from which much of the criticism emanates are supported by (i) tax funds generated largely from American business, and (ii) contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business.”

This ignores that high levels of taxation to fund social spending and high levels of government intervention were the results of intense class struggle. The battles were fought for forty years on the shop floor and involved American troops and police shooting workers. They were fought out through election cycles, involved millions in poverty and the mass mobilisation of American business and labour for war, where the working class battalions died wholesale and the ruling class battalions fought with Roosevelt for the right to profit from death.

Much more central to our current political situation, however, were Powell’s recommendations for challenging the status quo outlined above.

“The ultimate responsibility for intellectual integrity on the campus must remain on the administrations and faculties of our colleges and universities. But organizations such as the Chamber can assist and activate constructive change in many ways, including the following:
“Staff of scholars…Staff of Speakers…Speaker’s Bureau…Evaluation of Textbooks…Equal Time on the Campus…Balancing of Faculties…Graduate Schools of Business…Secondary Education.”

Powell goes further still to discuss the pro-business use and abuse of television, radio, scholarly journals, books, advertisements, political parties, the courts, ‘stockholder power’ and an ideological narrative about the threat of state intervention to individual freedom.

The last is particularly interesting. With George W. Bush, we saw the defence of ‘freedom’ scale new heights of disingenuity and Newspeak. The narrative of protecting individual freedom only stands up to scrutiny if one forgets that the State didn’t certain regulatory actions in a vacuum, with the goal of constraining ‘freedom’; it was practically bullied into those actions by the very people whose freedom Powell claims is at stake – whether as a result of urban riots, protracted strikes, massive demonstrations or a general flouting of authority on campuses.

All of this is with the intent that, in Powell’s own words;

“Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”

Personally I think it’s time that ‘labour’ and ‘other self-interest groups’ re-learned this particular lesson and began pushing back. On the basis of capitalism, ordinary people – rather than those in charge of business – operate at a disadvantage, because business controls such a large and concentrated slice of wealth, that can be put to particular uses. Such as creating a well-financed and interlocking network of academic departments, think-tanks, forums and professional political lobbyists, to recruit and put to use all those of a certain ideological bent.

This is why our political activism must take a different angle. We will never be able to ape the political methods of our betters, their Westminster lobbyists and group love-in conferences. Instead we can dominate the shop floor, and through that our immediate managers. We can control our communities, and through that our elected representatives. Yet all of these things require funds and organisation, something many left campaigns, like the People’s Charter, are starved of (deliberately, one might suspect), despite being backed by the TUC.

With those funds and that network – which, truthfully, should be easier in so many ways, thanks to information technology – we can link together until it is the economy and the nation we control.

Or as Lewis Powell put it:

“Strength lies in organisation, in careful long range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organisations.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.