Who are "the corporations" ?
Progressive writers all agree that the problems of the world are caused by "capitalism" and "the corporations". What are they talking about and what are the problems? One of the core ideas of this blog is that the "corporations" are dragons - inherently opposed to basic human rights and the welfare of ordinary people -- even the "1%". However, in this blog, we parse the idea a bit more carefully than we usually find in the discussion.
Corporations of all sizes (even my tiny 1-man corporation, "Silicon Wings") have unique DNA that is remarkably different from the DNA of the humans that own them, run them or work for them. It's important to understand this "DNA" to understand how any corporation can so easily become "evil".
When I "incorporated" myself into a tiny corporation, I immediately felt the "pulse" of this new entity. It was not just a "legal fiction". Under law and in fact, I had created a baby entity with a life of its own. Most of these "babies" suffer infant mortality. Those who survive their first year have learned to serve their #1 priority: survival. This "instinct" operates quite independently of the moral virtues of the owners. Corporations who to risk their own existence (such as pissing off their employees, cheating their customers, breaking the laws of the land ...) soon vanish from the scene. This is Darwinian selection: "survivors survive". The lucky corporations do more than survive: they thrive. But as they grow, they do not magically acquire human values. They know exactly as much about human values as a AK-47. This is why it makes no sense to level moral accusations against successful corporations. They are not "evil". They are not "good". They just exist and act vigorously to continue to exist.
Leftist writers tend to willingly disregard the the way a corporation works. They tend to define it in terms of the "owners" and assume that the corporation exists solely for the benefit of the "owners". This is like defining a human being as nothing but neurons, ignoring the rest of the body and what a human needs to be human. A corporation is an ecosystem consisting of the owners, employees, managers, customers, partners,fashion, economic conditions, competition, legal restrictions, available resources and much more. To survive, the corporation must make all these factors "sing and dance" together. As corporations get bigger and more powerful, the "song" gets more intricate and the "dance" becomes correspondingly a performance for experts. It is a dance increasingly performed in secret. For example, if you are big enough and rich enough, you can assimilate a US president president start a war to create business for Halliberton.
In fact, in the first approximation at least, the corporation's exists for the benefit of its customers. This is, in fact, the only really way that corporations are directly subjected to human values. The obvious fact that corporations of all sizes are shaped by their customers, not their owners, is something that is invariably missed by critics of the current "system". To cite just one example, critics of the giant oil companies act as if the evil shareholders will somehow stop pumping green house gasses into the air if only confronted by the moral necessity. The company is not churning out gas to destroy the planet. It is providing a product to its customers. When the customers stop buying the product, the corporation will cease to be. What is more, the customers are regular human beings, who may be persuaded by moral concerns to change their consumption patterns. Although this does not capture the entire truth of the situation, it is useful to think of the oil company as a big machine that customers use to suck oil out of the ground for them. The apparent life of the corporation is an epiphenomenon, a situation where the whole is much more than the sum of its parts and, in fact, cannot be understood by analysis of its parts.
The central premise of this blog is precisely to regard corporations as living, amoral machines. They are not "evil". They are not "good". We create them, we use them. We need to do a better job of controlling them. We can kill them.
The "large" corporation is a special case of the dragon and inherits all of the scary attributes of the dragon. Corporations are not unique. We need to challenge the power of all dragons, not just corporations. For example, labor unions and political parties (progressive or not), are often put forward as the challengers of corporate power. But these are dragons too, prone to crush human rights and assimilate humans just as corporations do. Anyone who has tried to "talk" to a progressive political party with anything but his cheque book will know what I mean. Those who watched with horror as Barack Obama was assimilated into the monster of American power politics will also get the idea.
Many progressive writers conflate the evil power of the corporations with evils of "capitalism". This reflects a profound misunderstanding of both ideas. To my mind, it is important to investigate corporations as "dragons" and take a look at "capitalism" separately. Corporate power is not new. It's a modern form of a system that would be instantly recognized by feudal kings and lords. Most of the damage corporations do is pretty similar to the damage the rich and powerful have been doing for thousands of years. What is different is that the modern "ecosystem" is radically different. If the "clients" of King Henry VIII were unhappy with him, he could simply cut off their heads. Such options are not available to, say, Apple or Microsoft. Writers like Karl Marx (and his modern followers) have not noticed the changes in our relationship with the rich and powerful. It is the "heads" of the corporations that are continually on the chopping block. While we need to avoid the excesses of the French Revolution, perhaps we should be a bit more free with the axe.
Many of the modern problems we have with "the corporations" result from relatively recent specific legal decisions that need to be re-thought and rolled back. For example, it was a mistake to grant corporations "rights" that equal or sometimes exceed those of real persons. The "right" of corporations to massively intervene in the political system is rightly regarded as a deadly threat to any idea of "democracy". These corporate "rights" have been granted to the corporation and can be rescinded. We also need to make sure that the corporation has the "right" to receive capital punishment for crimes against the public, such as old fashioned murder, theft over $1 billion, crimes against humanity and treason.
The litany of charges pressed by the "left" against the corporations (exploitation of workers, destruction of the environment etc.) are the modern equivalent of charges pressed against the nobility in the 18th century. The revolt against the rich and powerful is not over - perhaps it will never be. I do believe that the last three centuries have steadily re-defined power and property. These changes are heading in precisely the opposite direction than the apparently scary triumph that is usually discussed in terms of the "1%" who supposedly own everything and control everything.
Capitalism has been rapidly evolving over the last few centuries and now faces fundamental challenges, especially from information technology (see "The Singularity"). Capitalism and the world of "money" and "ownership" will be transformed out of recognition in the next few decades. Many of the horrors in recent trade agreement can be traced to a last-ditch attempt to preserve the old economic assumptions about ownership into a world where "information" goods can be replicated endlessly - overturning the assumptions underling "money".
I find it very difficult to imagine a world where people cannot come together with a common purpose to form something like a corporation - usually to provide some kind of service. I can also imagine that such "corporations" may some day operate without consideration to what we would today call "money". To my mind, the issue is access to resources not ownership. The question is: how do we organize society to provide access to needed resources?
In the course of meeting our needs, how to we ensure that the "dragons" we create remain serve rather than assimilate their masters? To my mind, the real danger is that we continue to invest the bulk of our resources and the best of our technology in our dragons. They become more and more powerful and more difficult to control. Some are already completely out of control. We cannot hope to control them if we don't understand their basic nature -- a nature that is an emergent phenomenon, "alive" but totally unlike the life of the humans that create them.
Corporations of all sizes (even my tiny 1-man corporation, "Silicon Wings") have unique DNA that is remarkably different from the DNA of the humans that own them, run them or work for them. It's important to understand this "DNA" to understand how any corporation can so easily become "evil".
Leftist writers tend to willingly disregard the the way a corporation works. They tend to define it in terms of the "owners" and assume that the corporation exists solely for the benefit of the "owners". This is like defining a human being as nothing but neurons, ignoring the rest of the body and what a human needs to be human. A corporation is an ecosystem consisting of the owners, employees, managers, customers, partners,fashion, economic conditions, competition, legal restrictions, available resources and much more. To survive, the corporation must make all these factors "sing and dance" together. As corporations get bigger and more powerful, the "song" gets more intricate and the "dance" becomes correspondingly a performance for experts. It is a dance increasingly performed in secret. For example, if you are big enough and rich enough, you can assimilate a US president president start a war to create business for Halliberton.
In fact, in the first approximation at least, the corporation's exists for the benefit of its customers. This is, in fact, the only really way that corporations are directly subjected to human values. The obvious fact that corporations of all sizes are shaped by their customers, not their owners, is something that is invariably missed by critics of the current "system". To cite just one example, critics of the giant oil companies act as if the evil shareholders will somehow stop pumping green house gasses into the air if only confronted by the moral necessity. The company is not churning out gas to destroy the planet. It is providing a product to its customers. When the customers stop buying the product, the corporation will cease to be. What is more, the customers are regular human beings, who may be persuaded by moral concerns to change their consumption patterns. Although this does not capture the entire truth of the situation, it is useful to think of the oil company as a big machine that customers use to suck oil out of the ground for them. The apparent life of the corporation is an epiphenomenon, a situation where the whole is much more than the sum of its parts and, in fact, cannot be understood by analysis of its parts.
The central premise of this blog is precisely to regard corporations as living, amoral machines. They are not "evil". They are not "good". We create them, we use them. We need to do a better job of controlling them. We can kill them.
Many progressive writers conflate the evil power of the corporations with evils of "capitalism". This reflects a profound misunderstanding of both ideas. To my mind, it is important to investigate corporations as "dragons" and take a look at "capitalism" separately. Corporate power is not new. It's a modern form of a system that would be instantly recognized by feudal kings and lords. Most of the damage corporations do is pretty similar to the damage the rich and powerful have been doing for thousands of years. What is different is that the modern "ecosystem" is radically different. If the "clients" of King Henry VIII were unhappy with him, he could simply cut off their heads. Such options are not available to, say, Apple or Microsoft. Writers like Karl Marx (and his modern followers) have not noticed the changes in our relationship with the rich and powerful. It is the "heads" of the corporations that are continually on the chopping block. While we need to avoid the excesses of the French Revolution, perhaps we should be a bit more free with the axe.
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| Overthrow of one corrupt system often results in more problems than it solves ... |
Many of the modern problems we have with "the corporations" result from relatively recent specific legal decisions that need to be re-thought and rolled back. For example, it was a mistake to grant corporations "rights" that equal or sometimes exceed those of real persons. The "right" of corporations to massively intervene in the political system is rightly regarded as a deadly threat to any idea of "democracy". These corporate "rights" have been granted to the corporation and can be rescinded. We also need to make sure that the corporation has the "right" to receive capital punishment for crimes against the public, such as old fashioned murder, theft over $1 billion, crimes against humanity and treason.
The litany of charges pressed by the "left" against the corporations (exploitation of workers, destruction of the environment etc.) are the modern equivalent of charges pressed against the nobility in the 18th century. The revolt against the rich and powerful is not over - perhaps it will never be. I do believe that the last three centuries have steadily re-defined power and property. These changes are heading in precisely the opposite direction than the apparently scary triumph that is usually discussed in terms of the "1%" who supposedly own everything and control everything.
Capitalism has been rapidly evolving over the last few centuries and now faces fundamental challenges, especially from information technology (see "The Singularity"). Capitalism and the world of "money" and "ownership" will be transformed out of recognition in the next few decades. Many of the horrors in recent trade agreement can be traced to a last-ditch attempt to preserve the old economic assumptions about ownership into a world where "information" goods can be replicated endlessly - overturning the assumptions underling "money".
I find it very difficult to imagine a world where people cannot come together with a common purpose to form something like a corporation - usually to provide some kind of service. I can also imagine that such "corporations" may some day operate without consideration to what we would today call "money". To my mind, the issue is access to resources not ownership. The question is: how do we organize society to provide access to needed resources?
In the course of meeting our needs, how to we ensure that the "dragons" we create remain serve rather than assimilate their masters? To my mind, the real danger is that we continue to invest the bulk of our resources and the best of our technology in our dragons. They become more and more powerful and more difficult to control. Some are already completely out of control. We cannot hope to control them if we don't understand their basic nature -- a nature that is an emergent phenomenon, "alive" but totally unlike the life of the humans that create them.
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