| It is the argument of this book that the contemporary Progressive movement in the United States, designed to replace the Liberalism whose demise was the object and accomplishment of the Reagan Revolution, is the product of a series of strategic experiments and decisions by activists in organized labor, in the environmental and human rights movements, and elsewhere on the Left, guided by an antipathy to the business community and by an understanding of the forces that had contributed to the resurgence of the American Right in the 1970s and 1980s.
This is not an argument about competing ideologies per se but about the strategies and tactics by which one set of ideologues—on the Left—has chosen to contend with its competitors to the Center and Right. It is composed of five elements:
- a guiding empirical theory of social, political, and economic organization;
- selection of nomenclature around which, and construction of an enemy against which, to rebuild a political movement;
- development of an institutional counterstructure;
- development and adaptation of a strategy of attack; and
- the waging of a social netwar against the identified enemy—the corporation as a political and economic institution.
It is this final element that gives the book—and the phenomenon around which it is built—its distinctive title: Biz-War.
It is, in a sense, a rather odd book for me to write, for it is a book about ideologues, and I do not regard myself as an ideological person—postmodern deconstructionists to the contrary notwithstanding. It matters not whether the ideology in question is grounded in the Left, in the Right, or in a piece of pecan pie. I have always been fascinated less by the colorful philosophical banners around which true believers rally than by the strategies and tactics employed by their leaders to attract and mobilize them.
Yet in another sense, this book is a natural. It grows directly out of my last one, The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation, in which I examined the use of multidimensional attacks on corporations by organized labor to pressure them into meeting demands that ranged from unionization of the workforce to specific contract concessions. Labor was forced to develop this attack strategy because it was losing market share, influence, and legitimacy, and because the tried and true methods of the past—NLRB-administered elections and strikes—no longer met its needs. As a movement, labor was in a death spiral and was desperate to escape it. Corporate campaigns, which have at their center a framing of the corporation as a social outlaw, together with a collection of other recruitment and mobilization strategies, offered perhaps the only salvation. So it came to pass that unions adopted the corporate campaign as a primary mode of operation and in the process began a decades-long assault on the reputations of individual companies and on the standing of the corporation itself.
This book examines the history, theory, objectives, strategy, and tactics of the Progressive Left in the context of its attack on the corporation as a social—the Left would say anti-social—institution. It is intended to illuminate the dynamics of movement building (and of corporate bashing) but not to render a judgment on the merits of one or the other point of view. The book is based on a wide variety of sources and methods, among them an extensive review of media coverage of the organizations and campaigns discussed here, news releases, publications and other materials produced by the activists, interviews and conversations with knowledgeable individuals, correspondence, Internet postings, case law summaries, publicly available tax and regulatory filings, documents, and other materials. |
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