It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Producerism, sometimes referred to as "producer radicalism," is a right-wing populist ideology promoting economic nationalism which holds that the productive forces of society—the ordinary worker, the small businessman, and the entrepreneur—are being held back by parasitical elements at both the top and bottom of the social structure.
Producerism sees society's strength being "drained from both ends"—from the top by the machinations of globalized financial capital and the large, politically connected corporations that together conspire to restrict free enterprise, avoid taxes and destroy the fortunes of the honest businessman, and from the bottom by members of the underclass and illegal immigrants whose reliance on welfare and government benefits drains the strength of the nation. Consequently, nativist rhetoric is central to modern producerism (Kazin, Berlet & Lyons). Illegal immigrants are viewed as a threat to the prosperity of the middle class, a drain on social services, and as a vanguard of globalization that threatens to destroy national identities and sovereignty. Some advocates of producerism go further, taking a similar position on legal immigration.
In the United States, producerists are distrustful of both major political parties. The Republican Party is rejected for its support of corrupt Big Business and the Democratic Party for its advocacy of the unproductive lazy waiting for their entitlement handouts (Kazin, Stock, Berlet & Lyons).
Producerists tend to support skilled-craft trade unions, as organizations of "ordinary men" creating goods beneficial to society, but oppose left-wing, revolutionary unions or those that claim to speak for the lower ranks of society in general. National, industrial corporations, that is, those that produce tangible goods in domestic facilities, are viewed favorably, while international, globalized companies that engage in outsourcing, "sending jobs abroad" or those that earn their profits from the abstract financial world are treated with hostility in producerist circles. This disposition is sometimes referred to as "business nationalism." High tariffs and protectionist policies are regarded as not only beneficial to workers, but essential to the long-term survival of the domestic economy to counter the predatory practices of currency manipulation and illegal trade practices.
The domestic innovators and patriotic industrialists such as Henry Ford, Lee Iacocca and Sam Walton are the heroes in this view of the business world, while the cost-cutting CEOs and unaccountable financiers are the villains.
Historically, the producerist attitudes towards corporation adopted to the changing concerns of the middle class. In William Jennings Bryan's time, the big corporations like railroads and mining interests were strongly disliked because they were an economic threat to the producerist-minded small businessmen. Today, by contrast, the middle class tends to be corporate employees and so views corporations more favorably. Nationalist concerns about the decay of the national productive infrastructure due to outsourcing is also a fairly recent phenomenon in America, driven primarily by competition from China and India.
Originally posted by Misoir
Why is this a right-wing ideology? This doesn't appear so 'right-wing' to me.