Big business and the liberal left

After reading through this article by the Capital Research Center about corporate contributions to left wing causes (hat tip: Inverted World's Ian Jobling) it stuck me just how far the liberal left has become part of the furniture of the mainstream corporate establishment.

Not only does the liberal left dominate the public sector and many aspects of the legal system, but it also has a strong influence over the private sector through its impact on corporate public relations.

Back In the 1920s, the liberal left was a genuinely cash-strapped outsider movement, shunned by mainstream business and media and totally dependent on the energy and idealism of its supporters to gets its message across. In those days, it did genuinely focus on improving the life of the working class, and it's supporters led grime and decidedly unglamorous lives, as chronicled by the American inter-war writer John Dos Passos in his USA trilogy.

By contrast, today's left liberal activist is probably more at home sailing around the high seas chasing after Japanese whalers, or siting around a board room talking to corporate CEOs about their affirmative action programmes or donations to the WWF. In this modern kind of left-wing politics the gnarly idealistic activist of yesteryear, has been replaced by the extroverted affirmative active lawyer, as Engels and Marx make way for Jesse Jackson and Michael Moore.

One of the reasons why the left has been so successful in being accepted into mainstream politics has been it's decision to abandon its commitment to economic equality and instead promote social and environmental causes. Whereas Economic Marxism directly challenges corporate power, through union and government intervention, cultural Marxism and environmentalism do not pose such a direct threat to business and can be used by corporations as marketing tools to develop new products and attack competitors.

The Cultural Marxists established a strong following in the 1950s through French and American universities, while the modern environmental movement seemed to take off in the early 1960s following, among other things, the backlash against the over-liberal use of DDT and the hydro dam boom.

A number of recent books like Bobos in Paradise have done an excellent job of highlighting the commercialization of the 1960s counter culture and its absorption into middle class life, but perhaps there hasn't been enough investigation into how much big business has bought into social and environmental causes to clear the playing field of smaller competitors.

According to the Capital Research Center article on corporate donations, for example, two giant timber companies, International Paper and the Weyerhaeuser Foundation, actually donated funding to anti-logging causes:

"...the foundations of the timber giants International Paper and Weyerhaeuser fund many groups that support the endangered species act, which has imposed drastic restrictions on the use of forests claimed to be the habitat of alleged endangered species..."

It is likely that International Paper and Weyerhaeuser are annoyed by laws restricting their use of forests. But they have the legal talent to fight these policies in a court or broker special deals with government regulators. Restrictive forest use policies hurt small businesses far more because they cannot pay what it takes to fight a government regulatory onslaught abetted by environmental advocacy groups."

It's likely there are other types of big business strategies which are partly related to keeping small business in check. For example, why is it that big companies in most western countries aren't more opposed to GST and VAT, even though it places such a big administrative burden on the business sector as a whole? Could it be that big business can deal with all the administrative hassles of indirect taxes better than small business, and perhaps welcomes the opportunity to knock over smaller businesses that are no longer able to compete?

One thing's for sure, whatever big business's tactics in supporting or appeasing the liberal left, there aren't many old school socialists and populists still around to keep an eye on it.