The Triumph of Neo-Liberalism Began With the Powell Memo

In August 1971, U.S. capitalism was under withering criticism for its promotion of decadence, its role in fueiling racist imperialism and apartheid colonialism, its money-grubbing ethic and "plastic" values.  This criticism had reached somewhat of a consensus, with the media, campus-based protest, new consumer and environmental laws, all joining in a kind of cultural crescendo against the evils of corporate capitalism.

Into this counter-cultural maelstrom came Lewis F. Powell, Jr., an attorney from Richmond Va. who would later be nominated to the Supreme Court. Powell composed a memo for the US Chamber of Commerce that sought to return the market logic of capitalism back to the driver's seat it once occupied and to reverse what seemed to be a growing public embrace of collectivist ideals and anti-capitalist rhetoric. Powell's memo detailed a series of "avenues of action" that the chamber and the broader business community should take in response to this criticism.


To meet the challenge, Powell urged business leaders to marshal their considerable resources and social capital to more effectively influence institutions of public opinion and as lobbying tools to wield political power more effectively.  Corporations had to reshape the political debate by organizing speakers' bureaus and, most importantly, by creating new think tanks to formulate intellectual and philosophical ideas to shape the debate that ultimately results in policy.


In other words, Powell urged free-market conservatives to engage in what some now deride as the paralysis of analysis.  Powell's memo was enormously influential and is considered by many theorists to be a turning point in American civil discourse.  From 1970 to 2000, there was an increase from fewer than 70 to more than 300 think tanks, with two thirds of the new ones being conservative in orientation, according to Andrew Rich, author of the Think Tanks, Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise." And the others were mostly centrist or vaguely progressive. We see the effect of this in the triumph of neo-liberal, market fundamentalism and in the absence of any compelling alternative.


I contend that much of the progressive movement is paralyzed precisely because of the lack of analysis. There is no compelling ideological alternative to the notion that profit is supreme, to the logic of the marketplace.  Thus, the momentum to privatize America's public institutions grows ever stronger. There might now be vibrant alternative strategies to the private-market, neo-liberalism embraced both by Democrats and Republicans had progressives also followed Powell's advice to be more analytical and tie down some ideological fine points.


Even progressive goals like universal health care, reducing our carbon "footprint" and educational equity are addressed through market solutions like the Affordable Health Care Act, "Cap-n-Trade" carbon policies and the dismal "race to the top" educational model that effectively undercuts the possibility of educational equity.  Even if President Obama had progressive intentions (and it's possible he once may have), our political discourse lacks the vocabulary to plausibly translate those intentions into policy.


So, the next time you hear someone complaining about the "paralysis of analysis," compliment them on their rhyme scheme, or perhaps on their knowledge of Dr. Martin L. King's history (King is reputed to have used this rhyming phrase to goad his staff into action).  But just remind them that we've long been paralyzed by somebody else's analysis.

African-Americans and Cultural Capital

The kidnapping and enslaving of millions of Africans and their progeny was an act of such monumental savagery, the UN declared the TransAtlantic Slave Trade the greatest crime against humanity in recorded history.  The victims of this epic crime were treated as race-specific human chattel for several generations and suffered an unprecedented kind of civilizational trauma. Absolutely severed from their ancestral sources of identity and cultural continuity, enslaved Africans and their progeny were denied the traditions, folkways and habits of mind that inculcate a sense of common accomplishment and significance   We were raced commodities, dehumanized and denied the opportunity to accumulate economic and cultural capital.  The denial of economic capital helps explain our lack of wealth relative to white Americans.  However, the denial of cultural capital may have been the most pernicious deprivation.

Cultural capital is the intangible quality that entrains group behavior patterns and habits of mind in ways that encourage social success. Differing peoples accumulate and bequeath this valuable attribute according to their various histories.  African-Americans often bemoan the fact that varied immigrant groups arrive late into this country and pass us by on their way to the "American Dream."  However, we fail to identify the cultural capital they bring to the table.  In addition to being the most adventurous and entrepreneurial of their source group, most immigrants arrive fortified with values honed from centuries of autonomous social interactions. Their traditions usually are framed by heroic ancestral narratives that bolster their communal esteem and inoculate them against external bigotry.

We were diverted from acquiring this kind of capital because the progeny of enslaved Africans were totally stripped of their ancestral heritage and thus obliged to create an ad hoc culture, primarily designed to accommodate oppression and white supremacist presumptions.  Without a sanctuary that could provide a source of of esteem and validation, the descendants of the enslaved were vulnerable to and undermined by the insidious orthodoxies of white supremacy; for dozens of generations, black folks were socialized for subservience and dependency.  Although, whenever we had just a sliver of autonomy -- Tulsa, Rosewood, Beale Street, Bonneville, and hundreds of unnamed but independent black towns, villages and hamlets -- we quickly accumulated cultural capital and sometimes developed thriving communities despite opposition that was always virulent and often violent.

However, those slivers were rare and usually imperiled by forces threatened by black success. And, more times than not, these successful black communities were sabotaged from without or corroded from within. Now, I'm not making excuses for the seeming inability of African-Americans to prosper as other ethnic groups; I'm just outlining the realities that shaped our historical context.  Unlike Poles, Germans, Lithuanians, Mexicans, Chinese, Indian, or other groups with familial or other explicit connections to the lands of their origins, the childen of enslaved Africans have no such links. And since the primary components of cultural capital are built on these ancestral connections, we were severely handicapped by this forced separation. These are cultural injuries that derive from deep and unique historical wounds. We can deny them or downplay their significance, but we point to them whenever we bemoan the disproportionate criminality in our communities, or our lack of collective enterprise, our tendency to litter, our embrace of anti-intellectualism, etc.   Those cultural injuries are deeply embedded and in some ways have socialized us for self-sabotage.  That may be a bit of an overstatement, but the truth in it helps us understand why we simply can't "self-help" ourselves out of this multi-dimensional box into which we've been placed.  I'm not saying that the struggle for black self-sufficiency and self-determination is not an important fight, just that it's inadequate for the enormous task of repairing those historical wounds.

I argue that preventing African-Americans from accumulating cultural capital may just be slavery's most destructive legacy. And now, obtaining this valuable attribute is a long-term prospect that requires a committed and considerable investment of time and resources.  The comprehensive compensatory programs necessary would easily be justified by reparations protocol already established by the United Nations (especially for the victims of "history's greatest crime"), and by historical parallels with the US's Marshall Plan of assistance to war-torn Europe  - a plan that provided billions (by today's standards) in outright currency transfers to 11 nations devastated by war. No similar regime of compensation (or repair) was provided for the progency of enslaved Africans after generations of flagrant oppression and social exclusion.

There is no getting around the fact that only government can marshal the enormous assets necessary to do the job. There is also no doubt that such an ambitious program would face stiff resistance from an entitlement-weary American public.  However, enlivened public discourse on the issue would offer a golden opportunity to make the case and to properly internationalize the issue.   It will soon become clear that only such a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary effort stands a chance of success of stanching the cycle of decline our commuities are experiencing.  Until we take serious steps to bolster our underlying absence of cultural capital, self-sustaining communities will remain out of our reach. 

Reparations Revisited

Reparations Revisited

I believe that disproportionate levels of interpersonal and criminal violence in the black community are an affect of a historical process that socialized African-Americans for subservience and denied them the acquisition of cultural capital. It's a legacy of racial slavery and Jim Crow apartheid that was noted as a serious problem as long ago as the 1890s in WEB DuBois's pioneering 1899 book, "The Philadelphia Negro."

 This damaging legacy continues to lengthen because it has not been addressed sufficiently. Our strategies for redress were limited by the conventional wisdom of the time and those strategies have failed to make much change. If we are to make real progress, we must challenge those conventions. I recently came across a 1984 piece I wrote about the funeral of Benjamin Wilson, a coveted high school athlete murdered during a personal altercation, and it struck me how many of the words spoken then, echoed words spoken at the recent funeral of Heaven Sutton, the 7-year-old killed by a stray bullet.


This sickening regularity should help us keep in mind that our problems are structural, multi-dimensional and directly related to policies designed to enforce and encode the racial hierarchy of white supremacy. And, in my view, they can only be redressed by a massive investment of resources, akin to the Marshall Plan the US enacted to bring Europe back from two-and-a-half years of war. The notion of reparations provides a historical justification and conceptual framework for this investment, which would be a comprehensive compensatory scheme focusing on education, housing, jobs training, business development, etc.  And while this notion may seem like an unrealistic pipe dream, the absolute necessity for such a massive investment is not negated by its current political implausibility.


It is a truism of social development that structural problems require structural solutions. For example, the nation of Israel was created largely as compensation for Nazi persecution/extermination of Jewish people. The persecution was specific and so is the remedy, which still remunerates Israel with billions in reparations from people in Germany who had nothing to do with Nazis -- but their specific targeting of Jewish people justifies this specific, multi-generational obligation.


There was perhaps no global crime more savagely destructive or group-specific than the 300+ years of the TransAtlantic trafficking of kidnapped human beings and their race-based enslavement among people convinced of their inferiority. Not only was this commerce of human cargo inherently inhumane, it also obliterated enslaved Africans' ancestral connections and left them totally vulnerable to the degradations of white supremacy. We've been socialized in this hostile environment for nearly 20 generations!!! It's no wonder our lack of self-regard is so deeply rooted. Quite frankly, it's damn near a miracle that we've made it this far.


But, just as Jews, various indigenous peoples of former exploiter nations, Dalits ("untouchables") in India, Roma ("Gypsies") in the Czech Republic and other parts of Eastern Europe, have been awarded reparations for their history of victimization and persecution, I believe no one is more deserving than the African-American progeny of enslaved Africans.


And I believe this society increasingly will understand that the U.S. suffers from wounds of slavery that have been largely unattended and that a domestic Marshall Plan may do the job. Those wounds are a part of a lingering legacy that cripples the nation's potential and even threatens its survival. The American people increasingly will see the folly of perpetuating a system that mindlessly reproduces the forces of its own demise and grow to understand the need to heal slavery's festering wounds. They will begin to realize that the well-being of the entire American project is dependent on redressing this crippling legacy.

Essay in Black Vernacular Intellectual Newsletter on Salim Muwakkil

 The following is a slightly-edited- for-accuracy essay that was  published on the Website: Black Vernacular Intellectuals 

Salim Muwakkil–Full Essay May 10, 2012 -- Award-winning journalist Salim Muwakkil is one of the most recognized contemporary African-American writers, representing his intellectual abilities in a way that places him within the confines of Farred’s definition of the vernacular intellectual. Over the course of his life, Mr. Muwakkil has transitioned his views in a way that lends credence to the label of vernacularity, one that has enabled him to both represent and critique the African-American experience from within and outside racial constructs. His experiences—from his military service, to his time in the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam—have helped shape his modern worldview in a way which allows for him to serve as an effective critic and chronologist of minority issues within the United States. 

Born Alonzo James Cannady in 1947, Mr. Muwakkil was the oldest of four children. Upon his high school graduation, Mr. Muwakkil volunteered for the Air Force, where he served in the USAF Security Service and later as an administration specialist. “I got radicalized while in the service, during the 60’s,” Mr. Muwakkil said in an interview for Studs Terkel’s ambitious book Race. “It was in the Vietnam era. I had been in Germany, but during my four months in Thailand, I found out that what we were doing wasn’t kosher. . . I didn’t see any action there, but when I got back to the States, I was shot. It was at a Georgia motel, near the Robbins Air Base. This was in ’68. I was speaking a kind of racial jargon. The clerk said I threatened him, so he shot me in the abdomen with a .38. I was hospitalized for quite a while. He was exonerated” (Terkel, 166). This experience was one of the turning points in Mr. Muwakkil’s life, as he joined the Black Panther Party soon after leaving the hospital. 

But something was missing from what Mr. Muwakkil wanted from the Black Panther Party, which was too concerned with catharsis and seemed to lack that intangible quality that could propel its members to reach for a higher sense of purpose. It was at this time that Mr. Muwakkil became a member of the Nation of Islam; while at one time it seemed to him to represent “something sinister, alien,” it provided a stable and uplifting quality for its members: “They possessed the qualities that the Panthers didn’t. They were serious, changing their life-styles, their behavior patterns. We had been socialized in this culture to be self-destructive. I saw the Nation of Islam as counteracting this impulse” (Terkel, 166). While pursuing his B.A. in political science at Rutgers University following his return from service, Mr. Muwakkil began working for the Newark Bureau of the Associated Press, the first black journalist in the history of the bureau.

At this time a fledgling member of the Nation of Islam, he began to do side-work with Muhammad Speaks, the weekly newspaper of the NOI: “Notwithstanding several pages dutifully exalting Muhammad as God’s messenger, whose presence unlocked the key to black liberation and eternal salvation, Muhammad Speaks provided coverage of local and national civil rights struggles, black militancy and corresponding white resistance, and African and Third World liberation movements, explaining how all these elements figured into the international politics of the Cold War era” (Joseph, 25). After his graduation, Mr. Muwakkil began to work for Muhammad Speaks full-time, moving his family to Chicago where he first served as the copy editor and then soon the managing editor of the newspaper. In 1975 he officially changed his name, dropping Alonzo Cannady, and becoming formally known as Salim Muwakkil: “One of the reasons I changed my name is because, while in the service, I was stationed not far from Macon. My maternal family was there, so I made quite a few visits. They told me lots of stories. One was about an ancestor called Guinea Sultan. He came as a slave and was part of my family’s history. It was the only connection I could find between myself and my land of origin. So I feel a soft spot at least for Islam” (Terkel, 170). 

The tumultuous years following the assassination of Malcolm X by members of the Nation of Islam, as well as the death of its leader Elijah Muhammad, disillusioned Mr. Muwakkil from the organization. While still close with Louis Farrakhan, who at the time was involved in a bitter power struggle with Elijah’s son Wallace to assume control of the NOI, Mr. Muwakkil grew tired of the infighting and soon cut his ties with the organization: “As a reporter in Newark during the early 1970’s, I covered some of the ritualistic murders still reverberating from Malcolm’s 1965 assassination. My reflections on the ease with which disciples can commit even the most heinous acts, as long as it’s in the name of their particular deity, began reviving my skepticism of temporal figures seeking religious devotion. That, coupled with my realization of the similarities between the NOI’s devotional “fatherland” nationalism and the mystical nationalism of Nazi ideology, helped speed my exit from the nation and its various offshoots” (Alexander, 209).

 The post-NOI years saw Mr. Muwakkil further pursuing his commitment to journalistic writing. Still keeping his Nation of Islam name, Mr. Muwakkil first worked as a writer and editor for the U.S. Department of Housing and Development in Chicago, doing some freelance writing on the side. Articles with his byline appeared in newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago. This passion for investigative journalism propelled Mr. Muwakkil to once again become a full-time public writer, taking up the post of Senior Editor with In These Times in 1984 and serving in that position ever since (within that period he also worked as a columnist for both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune).  He also serves as the host of “The Salim Muwakkil” show on WVON, Chicago’s historic black radio station and a means of furthering the conversation about modern racial issues in America. It is no surprise that Mr. Muwakkil found his way to In These Times—a progressive publication that uses cultural critiques and political investigations as core elements of its focus—as the focus on maintaining an understanding of race in America drives Mr. Muwakkil’s journalism. His experiences have given him the credibility to cover issues that are intangibly related to his life, and Mr. Muwakkil frequently focuses on issues in his hometown of Chicago as a way of exploring a microcosm of race relations in the country. 

He recently began a series of in-depth articles for In These Times that focus on “The Other Chicago,” allowing him to bring to light the experiences of the black community that are often left unexplored or misunderstood by mainstream society. By bringing the issues of the black Chicago community to light, Mr. Muwakkil is using his national prominence and experiences to make society see what it could not see, understand what it could not understand, and explore the culturally unexplored: “Out of sight of mainstream media, divergent class interests have largely prevented any unified political attempt to wrest power from the city’s entrenched ethnic freedoms. Though tensions exist in black neighborhoods, the contrast between the poor West Side and the better-off South Side have become a crude geographical surrogate for black Chicago’s stark class divisions” (Muwakkil, “Black Chicago Divided”). On other issues, Mr. Muwakkil has often used his position to bring the focus back to race when mainstream society blindly surges forward without any consideration.

 The election of President Barack Obama was a historic time for African-Americans, but Mr. Muwakkil was one of the critics who cautioned against the urge to label America a “post-racial” society and one that loses touch with understanding issues of race: “…[critics, including Salim Muwakkil in his article “The Squandering of Obama”] drew attention to the ways that Obama’s victory adds momentum to the rightward slide into racial silence, shrinking public space for race talk, cauterizing the racial present from the past, eviscerating old agendas and solidarities, and fanning an uncritical exuberance that sedates social action towards antiracist accountability” (Mukherjee, 221). Mr. Muwakkil is able to represent the idealized version of a vernacular intellectual because of his aptitude for never fully accepting one perspective as doctrine, instead using them to formulate his own outlook, his own personal intellectual doctrine. 

From the Black Panther Party to the Nation of Islam to his respected journalistic career, Mr. Muwakkil has shown a propensity for embracing the vernacular: “Vernacularity represents the moment of a significant, palimpsestic transformation. Vernacularity signals the discursive turning away from the accepted, dominant intellectual modality and vocabulary and the adoption of a new positioning and idiomatic language” (Farred, 11). His experiences enabled him to serve as an effective critic of racial issues, allowing him to rise up in national prominence and become one of the leading contemporary voices on minority relations. This ability to rise up from the masses and achieve national recognition in a way that lends credence to his intellectual insight falls well in line with Farred’s definition of vernacular intellectualism: “Vernacular intellectuals are, as the process of bringing them to public prominence demonstrates, a complex representation of the voices from below or the margins speaking at once to, within, and against the hegemonic order” (Farred, 10).

 Works Cited Alexander, Amy., ed. The Farrakhan Factor. New York: Grove Press, 1998. Farred, Grant. What’s My Name: Black Vernacular Intellectuals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Joseph, Peniel E. Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006. Mukherjee, Roopali.”Racial Politics (in the United States)” Social Text 27.3 (2009): 219-222. Muwakkil, Salim. “The Squandering of Obama.” In These Times 26 July 2007. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3268/the_squandering_of_obama/ Muwakkil, Salim. “Black Chicago Divided” In These Times 20 July 2011. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/11604/black_chicago_divided/ Terkel, Studs. Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American