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Monday 13 August 2012

…small business often serves an ideological purpose. On the right, it’s deployed to resist any political impulses to regulate business or push up wages. That implicitly concedes that smaller firms are nastier to work for, but it’s also a bit devious, since McDonald’s probably would suffer at least as much from a minimum wage increase as Mom’s Burger Shack would. Here, small business becomes a virtuous stand-in for business as a whole, since small business probably has a better public image than the big, no matter how ill-deserved. Even if this is a devious move, it’s not much of a surprise. What I find more surprising, and disturbing, is the tendency of some folks on the left to embrace small business with some passion. This is particularly true in the unfortunately named anti-globalization movement—as if internationalization itself were the problem rather than the way it’s carried out. Their anti-globalism is connected to a desire to “relocalize” economies, and with them to reorient production on a much smaller scale. These aims seem more motivated by nostalgia—and, in many cases, by a nostalgia for something that never existed—than any serious analysis. Doug Henwood

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