Liberation Audio2 Kesä 2023

The “Powell Memo” and the Supreme Court: A counteroffensive against the many

By the early 1970s, the global revolutionary tide of socialist and national liberation struggles was at its apex, and the tide was washing over the U.S., with expanding and increasingly militant social movements and political organizations. The beginning of “neoliberalism” was a domestic aspect of the coming global counterrevolution, which devastated the world for decades. This article tells the story of how the right wing of the capitalist class came to drive a new set of reactionary Supreme Court rulings, government policies, and ideological battles against democracy and the basic democratic rights our class won and that the right wing soon started rolling back. A key figure in this anti-democratic turn was Lewis F. Powell Jr., a tobacco company executive turned Supreme Court Justice. In the transition between the two roles, he wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” In hindsight, the private memorandum Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971—known as the “Powell Memo”—in many ways represents the inaugural moment in this counteroffensive. Titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the Memo clearly expressed the sharpness of the class struggle at that time and encapsulated the capitalist class’ fear that they were losing the battles of ideas and the world. It undoubtedly laid the groundwork for some key components of U.S. imperialism’s new offensive against the global revolutionary upsurge that characterized the immediate post-World War II environment, an offensive that is still with us today. Read the full article here:

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Jaksot(364)

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A popular coal-miner’s riddle from the 1930s summarizes one of capitalism’s most visible and absurd contradictions. After a daughter asks her father why their home is so cold, he tells her they don’t ...

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Thomas Sankara: Assessing the 3rd year of a revolutionary process

The eighth installment in Liberation School’s series of previously untranslated works by Thomas Sankara is published on the day Sankara was born in 1949. We would like to thank Bruno Jaffré and the ed...

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The class struggle in every commodity: Use value and exchange value

Every year, Pew Research publishes a study on the U.S. population’s political priorities. Their 2024 report shows that, like the previous years, “no single issue stands out after the economy,” with al...

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Hearing or reading about the “contradictions of capitalism” in an article or at a rally might be intimidating, like a foreign language or a term only a certain group can understand. While the contradi...

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Liu Liangmo: China’s anti-imperialist, anti-racist, Christian revolutionary (pt. 2)

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