Interestingly, what was called right wing in the 70s is called left wing in the 00s. In the past, the critique was targeted at the too-big-state. Today, we are talking about corporate power.
Now that the world is run by big companies and businesspeople for instance in Finland are more interested in what happens in Nokia than the national parliament, corporate social reponsibility is a relevant political issue.
Few days ago Mike Moore announced that Disney banned the distribution of his latest film. Of course, Mike exaggerates the facts and his film will be distributed (by some other company) anyway. However, his announcement makes excellent guerilla marketing. The announcement went through to almost all possible media worldwide. It makes you ask if corporate ownership concentrates, how can we guarantee freee speech and other basic freedoms the democratic civil society was once built on?
Some weeks ago EFFI published something related in Finland. We wanted to ask what is Nokia’s social reponsibility if it pushes corporate ownership from factories and material assets to ideas and abstract things such as computer programs and information processing on the Internet. Our little newsletter went through to all possible media in Finland. The message was Nokia’s influence to social policy – if their policy decisions that follow global US based multinationals are pushed through, then what is the role our little democratic parliament?
This is not leftism. Sure, there are old 70s-style extreme-freaks around and one may call them globalization activists, green anarchists, post-communists or whatever. But if you talking about free-choice, pro-market people, in the ‘Hayekian’ sense of the word, we are not at the left. We are neither conservatives nor socialists. We are the liberal front.