Today, it’s almost taken for granted that activist campaigns and organizing drives, including within the labor movement, have some form of a power research component to help shape strategy and tactics. But this wasn’t always the case. 

In the 1960s, power structure research — which maps who holds power in society, how those entities are connected, and how they use their positions and resources to shape major decisions and policies — was a fairly new thing. Inspired by academics like C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff, and early movement practitioners like Jack Minnis, movement power research gained traction through groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — or SNCC, the grassroots civil rights group that had a vibrant research department led by Minnis; National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex — or NARMIC, which functioned as a research wing of the Vietnam antiwar movement; and the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), which became a major early proponent of power research.

Since then, power research has gradually taken off, becoming a critical arm of a range of movements, campaigns, and union drives.

Over the past 60 years, Mike Locker has been at the center of the rise of movement power research. He was first introduced to power research in the mid-1960s by the late Tom Hayden, an early leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Locker went on to co-found NACLA, and in 1968, he coauthored the famous “Who Rules Columbia?” pamphlet, which remains a cornerstone example of how to map out the power structure of universities.

Into the 1970s and 1980s, Locker deepened his commitment to power research, contributing to studies of the US banks behind South African apartheid and developing comprehensive surveys on the landscape of US corporate power. In the late 1970s, he cofounded the research firm that is today known as Locker Associates. According to one book length study, Locker was a key pioneer of the corporate campaign strategy that is currently used by labor and other campaigns. 

Today, in addition to continuing to oversee Locker Associates, Locker lends his power research skills to Palestine solidarity campaigns and university organizing efforts. Numerous graduate workers, for example, have told LittleSis that Locker was a critical mentor and inspiration in their efforts to map out the power structures of their own universities.

Here, for the first time, Mike Locker has done an extensive interview for wider publication on his long movement career, reflecting on the lessons and legacies of power research since the 1960s. In addition to providing an account of Locker’s personal journey, the interview shows the strong linkages between the origins of movement power research in the 1960s in civil rights, antiwar, anti-imperialist, and student organizing campaigns to its wider popularization today, especially with the labor movement and through corporate campaigns.

The interview has been edited for clarity and readability.

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I. Discovering Power Research in the 1960s

Derek Seidman: What’s the origin story behind your discovery of power research? And who and what were your early influences?

Michael Locker: I had an academic background and a natural inclination toward research. I gravitated toward research as a tool for supporting action for achieving real change. That’s always been the underlying theme of my work.

The opportunity to really pursue this path came when I met Tom Hayden. He was a major inspiration for much of what has happened in my life. I first met Tom around 1962 or 1963, during the early years of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Tom and I talked about a lot of things, and he made a deep impression on me.

At the time, I was planning to go to the University of California, Berkeley, to study political sociology with Seymour Martin Lipset. He wrote the well-known book Political Man, which focused on voting and how to analyze it. I was interested in voting as a form of action and a way to create change. But even then, I had a sense that voting alone wasn’t enough to accomplish the change I wanted to see.

That’s when Tom suggested to me that I try to do some research on things that really affect the world. He said we could work together in Michigan and he encouraged me to come to Ann Arbor. So I switched to graduate school at the University of Michigan and ended up working with him for about two years.

Tom was quite a mentor. He was a student of C. Wright Mills and had closely studied Mills’ work on the power elite. He introduced me to that world. He gave me six books when I first arrived in Ann Arbor and told me to read them before we talked. I read the books, and my understanding of power relations developed from there, all while working with him.

Do you remember what the six books were? 

One was The Empire of High Finance, by Victor Perlo, a classic. Another was Anna Rochester’s Rulers of America. These were written in the 1930s and 1950s. Of course, there was The Power Elite, by Mills. The other three, I don’t remember. 

Those books really instilled in me that you could understand the power structure and that this understanding could help formulate strategies and tactics to help create change. That thrilled me. 

And again, this was going beyond voting. Voting is of course one way to achieve political objectives. But social movements are another way to achieve those objectives. And how do you give social movements the tools to create a strategy and tactics that are effective for creating change? That’s the overarching theme of how I was beginning to approach power research.

That’s also what Mills was talking about. He wanted to understand what was controlling U.S. politics and economics that the American people were not aware of. And he thought that more awareness and consciousness of this would allow people to help develop a strategy and tactics to challenge that power.

It sounds like Mills was a key influence in shaping your discovery and embrace of power research. Were there others who influenced you?

G. William Domhoff comes to mind right away, though a little bit later. He wrote Who Rules America? in 1967, a very important book. Domhoff is more empirical and more academic than Mills, and has less of an overt political agenda, but was very informative on how to understand the power structure.

There was also a very important Soviet economist named Menshikov who wrote an important book called Millionaires and Managers. He was the son of the ambassador to the United States and lived in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. He studied the powerful financial institutions. That was a very important book for understanding where to look when doing power research.

You also discovered how power research could be applied to U.S. foreign policy. Can you talk about that?

Foreign policy was a major inspiration in my embrace of power research. When the U.S. invaded the Dominican Republic in April 1965, I immediately took the tools I was learning from Hayden and from the books I was reading, and I asked myself, ‘How can this intervention be understood in terms of power relations and the power structure of the United States?’ 

I uncovered the importance of the sugar industry, which was a mainstay of the Dominican economy. Several officials in the Lyndon Johnson administration who were running U.S. policy toward the Dominican Republic were from the sugar industry, especially the U.S. special envoy and mediator Ellsworth Bunker. 

Bunker was the head of the second-largest sugar company in the United States, the National Sugar Refining Company, which had enormous interests in the Dominican Republic’s sugar industry. He was actually a very famous ambassador who later went on to play a leading role in the Vietnam War as well. I also uncovered several other key policy players with direct ties to the U.S sugar industry that shaped and implemented the U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic. In my opinion, this played a major role in their actions.  

You said that it really excited you when you discovered power research in the mid-1960s. Can you say a little bit more about what was so exciting for you about this?

I was a sociologist, and I also studied history. I had some engineering training, too, at Brooklyn Technical High School. My interest in power research was really about trying to figure out how to use my skills in those areas to develop ideas and methods to help the movement build strategy and tactics.

I think the overarching theme for me has always been trying to find a way to create meaningful social change that leads to better living conditions and a better world. And I’ve always wanted to know what makes things tick. How do they run? Why? I’ve always had a strong inclination to really understand how things work — not just describing them, but analyzing them, taking them apart, and understanding the various dynamics. 

II. NACLA and Power Research

Let’s move on to NACLA. How did that get started?

Foreign policy was such an important component of the 1960s. What the U.S. was doing overseas — and this is still true today — really mattered. The Vietnam War and, to some extent, the invasion of the Dominican Republic, sparked a lot of outrage. There were many campus protests and teach-ins.

The civil rights movement also played a huge role. The thing that actually got me excited to look at the Dominican Republic was from a SNCC newsletter. Jack Minnis, the head of the SNCC Research Department, put out a mimeographed newsletter, which he sent to the SDS people in Michigan. One of the newsletter’s had a paragraph about sugar and the Dominican Republic. That’s where I got my lead on the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. 

Minnis actually picked up on the sugar industry as what was driving the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. Cuba, the largest supplier of sugar to the U.S. was cut off after the Cuban revolution. We needed sugar. The Dominican Republic was a replacement for Cuba. And Minnis found some key people in the Johnson administration that helped trigger my whole power research project. 

I took that research, and — actually, the story is interesting. 

Please, tell the story!

There was a guy who was involved in the Dominican Republic intervention named Fred Goff. Fred and I were two of the three founders of NACLA. This happened because I wrote a paper on the Dominican intervention and the sugar industry. A friend of mine went to a peace conference in Cleveland and took the paper with him. 

Fred Goff, who had just gotten back from the Dominican Republic, was at the conference. He had played a nefarious role in the Dominican Republic, setting up a “Free Election Committee” — an outfit chaired by Norman Thomas, the famous U.S. socialist leader — to rubber stamp the U.S. invasion.

Fred read my paper and thought it was very significant. This is why research is so important, by the way. Fred hadn’t understood the power structure of the U.S. and how it was related to the invasion of the Dominican Republic. That’s what I described in the paper that I wrote. 

Fred immediately came to Ann Arbor, and we met. He walked into the living room of a friend of ours. Fred was as straight as an arrow, wearing a tie and dress shirt. I thought right away, ‘he’s CIA.’ I asked him one question: ‘who is Sacha Volman?’, who I suspected was a top CIA agent in the Dominican Republic. Fred laughed. Sacha Volman was his contact person when he first arrived there in the Dominican Republic and played a major role in the Free Election Committee. 

We immediately hit it off. And I said to Fred, ‘Look, the American people know nothing about what’s going on in Latin America and how the United States is dominating the region. We have to educate them enough so that they’ll take action and push the U.S. away from its dominating role.’ And he said, ‘I’m with you, Mike.’ 

So that led to the founding of NACLA, literally!

Can you talk more about the role of power research in the early years of NACLA?

It was really central. The analysis of the Dominican Republic invasion that we developed was eye opening. All of us were quite active around the Vietnam War. People wanted an analysis of what was going on! Why were things happening? Why was the U.S. doing what it was doing? 

It wasn’t just about anticommunism or trickery or morality. It wasn’t by chance. There was rhyme and reason to it all, and power structure research gave you a way of understanding why the U.S. government did what it did.

Fred said we should do this kind of research for the rest of Latin America. We have to understand how the United States is involved in Brazil and Chile and Peru and Mexico, and how the corporate power structure has generated the interventions and modes of domination that existed between the U.S. and those countries. So we founded NACLA with the aim of uncovering the power relations that directed and ruled U.S. policy toward Latin America. 

We also wanted to create an independent institutional structure outside of academia that could sustain this type of work by employing fulltime workers.  

What role did NACLA play in popularizing power research in the 1960s and 1970s?

We were constantly trying to give people tools they needed to do research and take action. That was the intention. For example, one of our members, Mike Klare, did a detailed analysis on chemical and biological warfare research at universities. We revealed the exact locations where this kind of horrible work was going on, showing that it was happening at major university campuses where liberal ideology was deeply entrenched. Most people didn’t know that this was happening and the outrage drove students and professors to take strong, direct action.

The research gave people a focus. It gave them a target, a place to direct their opposition work and to protest and demonstrate. We ended up doing a whole series on the military-industrial complex and university contracting work. Again, this helped people understand that the war machine existed on their campus and in their community, and that it was within their ability – and........

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