Thanks. My mistake. Will go ferret out the books you suggested. I fell victim to my own complaint. That it is easy to mix up corporatism and corporate rule. Sigh...
-Chip "needs to read more" Berlet
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Rickling" <rickling at softhome.net> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Saturday, October 13, 2001 11:20 AM Subject: American Corporatism
> 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
>
>
>
>