For those of us of a certain vintage who were on the “left” when it basically meant an instinctive sympathy for the underdog and a belief in “fair play for all men,” the current alliance between our old bete noire of Big Capital and the contemporary left never ceases to bemuse.
Nowhere is that better exemplified than in the massive corporate funding of left NGOs pushing a liberal agenda on issues such as abortion, migration, and transgenderism. It has been highlighted once again by the campaign to have major US companies boycott Texas following the Supreme Court upholding of the passing of more restrictive abortion legislation by the state legislature.
This is part of an overall campaign to target Texas-based companies including Exxon, American Air, Dell as well as encouraging people to stop visiting the state or playing Texas sports teams. One of the online promoters of this initiative are the Occupy Democrats whose origins are in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011.
While they have supported the perennial favoured left candidate Bernie Sanders in primaries, like virtually the entire American left they have swung behind the establishment candidates Hilary and Biden once their man was defeated.
The companies concerned, organised under the Orwellian title of Don’t Ban Equality, are not exactly among “50 of the biggest companies in Texas.” Nor are they mostly Texas-based with some of the bigger ones being headquartered in California. Others are small businesses whose niche areas are among Woke consumers. Some of the businesses do not even have people working for them in Texas.
It is also significant that major companies such as Microsoft and Starbucks have not signed up to this initiative, perhaps mindful of the rather embarrassing experience of Coke who engaged in similar virtue signalling over Georgia’s voter identification legislation, initiatives that it seemed some of the big tech companies were initially inclined to follow. Coke quickly backed down following a robust response from conservative consumers and now ironically face a backlash from leftists annoyed over their jabbering.
Then again, a recent opinion poll indicates that the Texas pro-life law is by no means as unpopular as the mass media, including our own, would have you imagine. Even the wokest of the Woke corporations will not jeopardise their bottom line if they believe they might lose out financially.
Apart from whether such a boycott might or might not have an impact on the economy of Texas (and it would seem that it will not really) the whole issue of whether big business ought to regard itself as a potential factor in overturning the democratic legally valid decision of a state is surely “problematic.”
And especially that the so-called left ought to be part of encouraging this, although the American left have mostly crossed that Rubicon in becoming almost entirely dependent on corporate funding. Our own are ensconced among the NGO sector, and survive on a combination of state funding and similar bankrolling from a range of foundations established by billionaire liberals.
Again, for older former lefties such as myself, those of us who were familiar with some of the myths of the American left will cast our minds back to when American companies such as United Fruit were regarded as having been the bad guys in Guatemala and other Latin American countries. Ironically, United Fruit later became Chiquita which was discovered to have paid money to the Colombian FARC, former chums of one of our own Woke entities.
Indeed, casting my mind back to the time of the Colombian venture and the heightened interest of the Clintons in their Irish friends, I was struck by the dissonance between the American Democrat liberals who arrived into Sinn Féin around that time and the traditional republican left. They, and several of them were given jobs with Sinn Féin, had very little understanding or even sympathy with old fashioned socialist stuff.
The left to them was about identity politics, and pushing Sinn Féin to abandon its opposition to abortion. They were the first ones to speak about race and gender being “social constructs,” although ironically class was of absolutely no interest to them – other than that white male workers were presumed to be mostly backward reactionary types most likely to oppose all the makey up rights that obsess American bourgeois liberals. But that is for another day.
The support of luuvies like Ben and Jerry’s for attempts to bully southern American states on abortion restrictions contrasts rather embarrassingly one would think, if you were a leftie, with the fact that Ben and Jerry’s had to be browbeaten into signing an agreement to pay Vermont minimum wage to migrant workers in 2010. Then again, very few of those who work for Big Tech are allowed to join trade unions.
Perhaps the companies are right when they claim that most of their techie staff – as opposed to the grunts who perform more menial tasks – are content with their lot. Google and Facebook do, after all, pay well at the professional end and allow their white collar employees to indulge in all sorts of virtue signalling that has the imprimatur of their bosses. Indeed, groups of tech workers have occasionally demanded even greater censorship of the non Woke by Twitter for example.
All of which goes to illustrate perhaps the changed world in which all of this is taking place. That the majority of the activist left obviously regards what happens at the point of production as trivial in comparison to pronouns, and that they share the dogmatic attachment of the billionaire corporate liberals to abortion is part of all of that strange new world.