American Corporatism

Mark Rickling rickling at softhome.net
Sat Oct 13 08:20:14 PDT 2001


From: "Chip Berlet" <cberlet at igc.org>


> Your quite right that there were similarities, and even after WWII there
were US
> corporate interests that argued for the creation of a corporatist society
in the
> US. Sort of a structured version of "what's good for General Motors is
good for
> the USA." There were articles and books talking about the concept of an
> Industrial Republic along corporatist lines.

It's true that there were some business interests, such as Henry Kaiser, who supported corporatism, yet they were a tiny, uninfluential minority by the end of WWII. It was the CIO, in the form of Philip Murray's Industrial Councils Plan and Walter Reuther's ideas to rationalize wartime production, who wanted to embrace and extend the kind of tripartite (business, labor, and the state) planning found during the war. Employers, on the other hand, engaged in an offensive in the immediate post-war period to reassert their control over production and free themselves from state and labor interference. "What's good for General Motors" was a slogan recited by the enemies of corporatism.

Since you seem to love citing authority <grin>, here are two for your library card: see Nelson Lichtenstein, "From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era," in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., _The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980_, and Howell Harris, _The Right to Manage_.

mark



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