On Saturday, July 8^th at the bright and early hour of 8 A.M., Colin Gray and I, cramming our faces with cold coffee and Clif bars, carpooled down to Southwest Austin and managed to arrive about eight minutes late to the regional Communication Workers of America office where Kris Raab would be leading us on a journey through the past in order for us to understand how we reached the economic present.

She began the class by dredging our collective memory for a history of progressive movements. We discussed the common social, political, and economic threads that ran through all of these historical moments. This brought us to the inevitable pushback–“The Powell Memo.” In 1971, corporate lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell issued a calling-all-capitalists manifesto in which he outlined the need for a broad coalition of ruling business leaders with the express purpose of ensuring the “survival of what we call the free enterprise system”.

We proceeded to learn about the leveraging of debt, stock buybacks, and exploitation of systemic racism and sexism utilized to strip-mine the increasingly financialized economy of its surplus value and ensure that all profits remain in the hands of the wealthy capitalist class. As a group, we related stories of our own personal alienation from and struggles with this system and discussed strategies by which we can reclaim democratic control of our society.

If you enjoy friendly wagers on the vastness of the wage gap, combating capitalism, and/or socializing with socialists, this class is for you.

There were 19 DSA members plus our instructor who is also a DSA member, and we learned that the function of industrial production is not to make products for a profit but to feed money into finance capital.