More on the influence of the Powell memo

From the perspective of socialist organizers

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.

Understanding the background, context, and content of the Memo helps us get a sense of the right-wing counteroffensive against domestic people’s movements. Powell eventually entered the Supreme Court and helped usher in a wave of reactionary rulings against the people and for corporate profits. Thus, while the exact impacts of the Memo are hard to ascertain, they eventually made their way into the law books, attacking affirmative action and establishing a theory of corporate speech and “personhood.”