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The Corporate Republic
Corporatism: "The organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising some control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction." -- Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
It's a word, coined in 1890, that's ripe for twenty-first century re-definition. Here's my suggestion:
Corporatism: "A system in which industrial and professional corporations fund and dominate politics, circumvent government and other forms of regulation, expand globally beyond accountability, alter the nature of work, marginalize individuals, and exercise monopolistic control over technology, culture, information and commerce within their jurisdictions."And nearly everything now lies within their jurisdictions.
America is becoming the headquarters of the Corporate Republic, a new kind of political entity that transcends geographic boundaries, and would have sent the original Republic's founders plunging into the Potomac in despair. Corporatism --fueled by the techno-driven global economic boom and the spread of mass-marketing technologies, has become the primary social, cultural and political force in the country, perhaps the world. No single political system is as powerful or pervasive. Increasingly, the big news is about corporatist maneuverings and confrontations.
Everywhere in this new Republic, individualism is on the run. A nation founded on the notion of individual choice, liberty, privacy, and primacy is in danger of being subsumed. All social and political issues -- work, privacy, creativity, individual liberty -- are subordinate to corporatism's sole ideology: economics.
Though America has been the birthplace of modern corporatism, just as it was the primary proving ground for ideas about individual liberty two centuries ago, the Corporate Republic already extends beyond the U.S.
It's a global phenomenon: In the Corporate Republic, Wal-Mart, Bertelsmann, Sony, Disney, Microsoft, AOL Time-Warner and their fellow conglomerates operate internationally, dominating the law, lobbying regulators, setting social policy, acquiring culture itself. Corporatism is the primary contributor to the political system. Corporatism now owns the mainstream media that "cover" the political system, and has acquired most of the companies that control entertainment and popular culture. Corporatist companies like Wal-Mart make small business ownership difficult in many regions, if not impossible. Culture -- from filmmaking and publishing to professional athletics -- becomes Disneyfied, homogenized and sanitized for the widest possible distribution.
To dwell within the Corporate Republic, individuals have to look the other way. The essence of living with corporatism for most people is acceptance and silence -- minding your own business.
The core of individualism, on the other hand, is refusing to mind your own business. This is not, as the essayist John Raulston Saul has written, always a pleasant way of life. "It often consists of being persistently annoying to others," he writes in his l995 book "The Unconscious Civilization," "as well as being stubborn and repetitive." Enlightenment philosopher Friedrick Nicolai also had something relevant to say on this subject: "Criticism is the only helpmate we have which, while disclosing our inadequacies, can at the same time awake us to the desire for greater improvement."
Criticism is different from confrontation. Criticism -- still thriving on the Net, but declining elsewhere -- is the individual's primary weapon, a means to personal affirmation, the most readily available exercise of dignity and legitimacy. But criticism is often linked to culture, and as the latter become corporatized, criticism is on the decline. In the Corporate Republic, comformity and acquiescence are elevated, while criticism and individualism gets punished, marginalized or ignored.
Who hasn't experienced this conflict -- at home, in a classroom, at work? Even in comparatively free communities like this one, non-comformity is bitterly controversial.
One of the hallmarks of the "unconscious civilization" off-line is our failure to grasp how pervasively we have slipped into conformity. Our media embrace "objectivity" -- a marketing ploy invented by publishers in the 1800's to make newspapers less offensive to large blocks of potential consumers. Corporatism is now so ubiquitous we can hardly even see it, even though it affects the food we buy, the restaurants we eat in, the books we can make and read, the movies we can see, the music we can listen to, the software most people buy. The media have turned bland and timid. Though H.L. Mencken brilliantly and savagely spoofed organized religion and politics a half-century ago, it would be nearly impossible to do so now in any public forum outside the Net. Public and political speech itself has become corporatist, aiming not to inspire or provoke but to avoid offense.
The late scholar and writer C.S. Lewis also foresaw this great leveling. In his famous "Screwtape Letters," two devils gleefully correspondent from Hell about the emerging corporatist ethos, "the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social and intellectual."
In fact, in "Screwtape Letters," one of the devils etches out what could be the Corporatist Marketing Manifesto: "Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, "democracy."
Perhaps it's not surprising that individualism and criticism have retreated mostly to the Internet, with its own peculiar traditions of individualism -- its founders were, to varying degrees, ferociously independent academics, scientists, outsiders and oddballs. But the Net -- a medium of individual, networked expression -- is also under siege in the Corporate Republic, which intends to dominate and acquire the network. Lawsuits and conflicts have erupted all along the Internet Edge as corporatism seeks to extend its reach into cyberspace, one of the few places it failed to get an early and decisive foothold.
More than any other greeting, e-mail to me often begins with the phrase: "I don't always agree with you, but..." It's well-meant, but always strikes me as curious because it's so unwittingly revealing of a society raised on corporatist pablum as a subsitute for dialogue and discussion. Why should people always agree with me, or I with them? Isn't that the very point of a columnist and critic: to provoke discussion, disagreement and thought? If people always agreed with me, what possible purpose would I serve? What point would there be in reading my columns at at all?
But given what passes for public discussion on CNN, MSNBC and newspaper op-ed pages, the greeting is hardly surprising. Outspoken opinion has become shocking (even on Slashdot, hundreds of people actually filter it out), though the founders of the American Republic (not the corporate one) meant it to be one of the cornerstone opportunities of citizens in a democracy.
Just this week, there was what once would have been an unthinkable display of corporatistism suffocating the flow of information, as the ABC television network vanished from the cable systems of Time Warner in eleven different cities after the giant conglomerate failed to reach an agreement with ABC's owners, the Walt Disney company. The spectacle of these two corporate media behemoths at one another's throats, each accusing the other of being "monopolists" -- Time Warner was, in effect, punishing its own customers -- was amazing enough, but the idea that one company could yank programming of an entire network away from millions of Americans -- including those in New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Philadelphia -- over a contract dispute was a landmark display of the consequences of corporatizing media.
One California station manager said the blackout was a "frightening foreshadowing of the implications of the Time Warner-AOL merger." He's right. No company has ever controlled as much synergistic content as the alliance between American Online and Time Warner. But how could he have missed this story until now? There have been frightening examples of corporatism's impact on speech, culture and media for years. Hardly anyone has been paying much attention, but the blacking out of "Who Wants To Be A Millioinnaire?" in different parts of the country finally triggered congressional calls for an inquiry into the AOL/Time-Warner merger.
Online, individuals cling to the myth that they can escape the Corporate Republic, though the synergy and momentum of contemporary politics, culture and commerce suggests otherwise. Just last week, C-Net published a special report on "The AOL-ization" of America, suggesting that the monstrous new company is already homogenizing the Net to a degree Microsoft never dreamed of. "
The truth is that corporatism is so entrenched in the United States and spreading so rapidly throughout the rest of the world that it's hard to envision defeating it, or even holding it at bay for very long.
Individuals have for decades felt powerless in civic affairs and now, it appears, they really are. The image of individuals on hold or lost in corporate phone systems has become a universal, almost poignant experience in 21st century America, a staple of life in a corporatist world. These entities have become masterful liars: they continuously market themselves as responsive and eager to listen while becoming steadily more arrogant and unaccountable.
Except through the act of voting -- which citizens increasingly see as pointless and meaningless, since they have such restricted options to choose between -- or through voluntary personal and recreational activities, citizen participation in civic affairs, the bedrock of American democracy, has been virtually eliminated.
Corporatism has as aggressively moved into the civic system as it has the marketplace. It funds the national political process, having corrupted the campaign finance system even as very idea of regulation of corporate growth has vanished as a civic idea. Corporatism has polluted public policy from gun control to health care to Internet copyright laws.
In recent weeks, the Pinkerton Corporation's entry into the school safety business via its noxious WAVE America.com website--which encourges schoolkids to turn in classmates they perceive as potentially dangerous -- has brought into focus corporatisms' powerful new reality.Civic issues, even the safety and emotional welfare of children, are now being managed for profit.
At a time where government provides mostly an enthusiastic competition to see which party and candidate can do the least, be the most divisive, and propose the fewest fresh ideas and programs, corporatism has moved to fill the void. Corporatists run prisons, schools, hospitals, and contribute a growing amount to dependent universities and research institutions. It no longer even seems odd for publishing and media to be in the hands of a half-dozen international conglomerates, from theme park operators to light-bulb manufacturers,or for the world's largest private security firm to take over school safety for profit.
This is, the natural, inevitable evolution of an era in which government has abandoned its historic obligations to police the power of business; in which technology and marketing permit companies to grow beyond anything previously possible; in which markets race insanely out of control; and in which globalism has put many companies beyond regulatory oversight or moral restraint.
American democracy was based on notions of personal and economic individualism, the very kind of autonomy corporatism is snuffing out. At the beginning of the 21st Century, the core ideology of civilization, it seems, has become economics. If business is good, we are a happy and contented nation. If it isn't, we aren't.
In recent years, the technologically-empowered individuals on the Net have begun challenging the corporatists in the most direct way -- creating the free software and open source movements, creating alternatives to monopolies like Microsoft, challenging industry's efforts to curb the flow of free music and movies.
This new movements are being bitterly resisted -- witness the recording industry's bitter fight over music-downloading on the Internet. These escalating conflicts evoke a "court opinion" written by the writer Robert Heinlein in "Life Line," one of his earliest published stories:
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Heilein's ruling was eloquent, but fictional. Corporations do have that right, and are exercising it with a vengeance. Tensions between individuals and corporatism can -- and should -- only worsen.
But it will be a complex and unprecedented king of struggle. Without some radical change, individualism is likely to be outgunned by corporatism armies. Individuals resist leaders, spokespeople, and common agendas. By their very nature, they are uncomfortable with the sort of power acquired and deployed by the entities that push them relentlessly to the margins of life.
Online, the trade-off couldn't be more naked or significant. We have all of this personalized and highly individualistic and expressive technology. We can speak more freely than anybody in the world, but who, exactly, is listening?
Next: An ideology of individualism.
America is becoming the headquarters of the Corporate Republic, a new kind of political entity that transcends geographic boundaries, and would have sent the original Republic's founders plunging into the Potomac in despair.
Why is it that America has proven to be the ideal breeding ground for the current corporation-driven global economy that has gotten so out of hand? If you look at all of the major issues that come up on /. about 95% of them are birthed in the US. How did the nation which prides itself on its God-given rights to freedom come to end up in such a state?
I think the "American Dream" has a lot to answer for. The dream of gaining wealth and possessions through the mechanisms of capitalism is one of the core national beliefs of Americans, and it pervades every part of their culture. Beneath its hope-filled surface, it subliminally encourages people to put themselves ahead of others, to work against them to better oneself, and to treat every opportunity in life as a means of making more money for yourself.
Undoubtedly this has done a lot of good for America's economy and growth, since the US boasts one of the largest economies in the world. But it has bought about the start of mega-corporations, massive bodies devoted to the gaining of wealth without any kind of conscience. They are the ultimate expression of the American Dream, and are intimitely tied in with the violence of that dream.
Personally I think that the whole notion of the American Dream is one that needs to be abandoned. It has resulted in a society driven by violence towards acquisition and greed, in which the violence of its spirit is mirrored in its gun-obsessed, violent culture and media, and in its interventionalist foreign policy.
Noam Chomsky Political Texts Online: Noam Chomsky's a professor of linguistics at MIT, and has been writing about the effects of capitalism on democracy for over 20 years.
The Left Business Observer: A hard look at the messages of capitalism's cheerleaders, from an analytical economist's point of view. Plenty of charts and graphs.
Stay Free! Magazine: A zine focusing on commercialism and consumer culture. Slashdot readers will probably enjoy the mean iMac ad parody on the front page.
Francis Hwang
Do domain names matter?
You seem to ignore certain things such as why corporations have the power they do. AOL and Time-Warner didn't just pop out of nowhere with billions of dollars. They became the powerhouses they are because *individuals* wanted the services they had to offer and gave them money for it. If the vast majority of Americans were unhappy with these corporations for a vast period of time there power would dwindle. You complain about how companies such as Wal-Mart can overpower small-business ownership as if it is a terrible thing. You know what? Individuals are making money from that Wal-Mart. Just because some ma and pa store can't succeed doesn't mean that the system is unfair. Just because large corporations such as Wal-Mart are successful doesn't mean they don't also have the right to compete in the market and be as successful as possible.
Also, I must say this is am extraordinarily poorly written article. It has *very* little substance, mostly only opinion backed up by nothing. Come on, I was taught in my high school writing classes to back up my writing with more evidence than was put into this article published by a "professional writer".
Everywhere in this new Republic, individualism is on the run. A nation founded on the notion of individual choice, liberty, privacy, and primacy is in danger of being subsumed. All social and political issues -- work, privacy, creativity, individual liberty -- are subordinate to corporatism's sole ideology: economics.
Care to explain why I can't be creative because Time-Warner can blackout "Who wants to be a Millionaire"? I mean really, this piece is full of buzz-words that have little meaning without specific interpretation/proof.