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The United what of America?
It has been frequently noted that many corporations exceed nation states in GDP. It has been less frequently noted that some also exceed them in population (employees). But it is odd that the comparison hasn't been taken further. Since so many live in the state of the corporation, let us take the comparison seriously and ask the following question. What kind of states are giant corporations?
In comparing countries, after the easy observations of population size and GDP, it is usual to compare the system of government, the major power groupings and the civic freedoms available to their populations.
The corporation as a nation state has the following properties:
- Suffrage (the right to vote) does not exist except for land holders ("share holders") and even there voting power is in proportion to land ownership.
- All executive power flows from a central committee. Female representation is almost unknown.
- There is no division of powers. There is no forth estate. There are no juries and innocence is not presumed.
- Failure to submit to any order can result in instant exile.
- There is no freedom of speech. There is no right of association. Love is forbidden without state approval.
- The economy is centrally planned.
- There is pervasive surveillance of movement and electronic communication.
- The society is heavily regulated and this regulation is enforced, to the degree many employees are told when, where and how many times a day they can goto the toilet.
- There is almost no transparency and something like the FOIA is unimaginable.
- The state has one party. Opposition groups (unions) are banned, surveilled or marginalized whenever and wherever possible.
These large multinationals, despite having a GDP and population comparable to Belgium, Denmark or New Zealand have nothing like their quality of civic freedoms. Internally they mirror the most pernicious aspects of the 1960s Soviet. This even more striking when the civilising laws of region the company operates in are weak (e.g West Pupua or South Korea). There one can see the behavior of these new states clearly, unobscured by their surroundings.
If small business and non-profits are eliminated from the US, then what's left? Some kind of federation of Communist states.
A United Soviet of America..........................................................................................
Invaders from Mars
"Voting doesn't change anything — the politicians always win." 'Twas not always so, but I'm hearing variations on that theme a lot these days, and not just in the UK.
Why do we feel so politically powerless? Why is the world so obviously going to hell in a handbasket? Why can't anyone fix it?
Here's my (admittedly whimsical) working hypothesis ...
The rot set in back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began recognizing corporations as de facto people. Fast forward past the collapse of the ancien regime, and into modern second-wave colonialism: once the USA grabbed the mantle of global hegemon from the bankrupt British empire in 1945, they naturally exported their corporate model worldwide, as US diplomatic (and military) muscle was used to promote access to markets on behalf of US corporations.
Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)
Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.
Collectively, corporate groups lobby international trade treaty negotiations for operating conditions more conducive to pursuing their three goals. They bully individual lawmakers through overt channels (with the ever-present threat of unfavourable news coverage) and covert channels (political campaign donations). The general agreements on tariffs and trade, and subsequent treaties defining new propertarian realms, once implemented in law, define the macroeconomic climate: national level politicians thus no longer control their domestic economies.
Corporations, not being human, lack patriotic loyalty; with a free trade regime in place they are free to move wherever taxes and wages are low and profits are high. We have seen this recently in Ireland where, despite a brutal austerity budget, corporation tax is not to be raised lest multinationals desert for warmer climes.
For a while the Communist system held this at bay by offering a rival paradigm, however faulty, for how we might live: but with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 — and the adoption of state corporatism by China as an engine for development — large scale opposition to the corporate system withered.
We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don't bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.
In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.
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Hope For a Post-Cynical Europe
The financial has devastated the body and the soul of the European society, so now Europe is a corpse, a zombie. The movement is here to invent a new Europe, emancipated from the dogmas of competition and accumulation. Europe will be reborn thanks to the emergence of the social and erotic body of the general intellect. Thanks to the insurrection of the movement’s sensuous intelligence, Europe is going to be place of solidarity and of beauty.
Excerpted from ‘Un Heimlich’ in Net-time:
“1. The landscape at the end of the year 2010.
The Obama hope has dissolved, and the European crisis has broken out. A new Logic has been installed at the heart of the European life, since the financial crisis of Greece: Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy and Jean-Claude Trichet resolved that European society has to sacrifice its current levels of life, public school system, its civility, in order to pay the debts accumulated by the financial elite. A sort of directorate has taken hold of the Union reasserting the failed dogmas of Neoliberal monetarism: reduction of labor cost, cuts in social spending, school?s privatization, impoverishment of daily life.
Casting the shadow of a long lasting recession on the future of the last generation, Europe is now a blackmail. But if the horizon is darkening, unpredictable events are happening, disquieting and exhilarating at the same time, on the European scene. I see the horsemen of apocalypse and I like that sound.
2. Wikileaks has shown the infinite potency of collective networked intelligence.
The event orchestrated by Assange is the unleashing of the general intellect’s creative force. We already knew that diplomats are paid to lie, and the military are paid for killing civilians. The lesson of Wikileaks is not so much in the contents of the disclosures, but in the activation of solidarity, complicity and independent collaboration between cognitarians: programmers, hardware technicians, journalists working together and sharing the same goal: destabilize totalitarian power. From this lesson a new generation of rebels will find the way towards autonomy, and self-organization of the general intellect.
3. Rebellion is spreading in the cities of Europe, from London to Rome to Athens, but street riots is not the only language of this movement.
What is at stake in the mass riots of December? Rebels know very well they are not staging a military fight against police and the State. They don?t care that much about police and State. They are looking for recomposition of the social body and re-activation of the erotic body of the general intellect.
During the last ten years precarization isolation and competition in the labor market have caused dissociation of the networked collective intelligence from the social body of the cognitariat. Simultaneously the acceleration of the Infosphere (intensification of the rhythm of cognitive exploitation) has stressed the social Psychosphere, provoking loneliness, panic, depression, dis-empathy. In the street riots cognitarians are looking for empathic rhythm. Bodily sensibility and desire want to flow again. The first generation that learned more words from a machine than from the mother is going to the streets to recompose their body.
4. General intellect is looking for a body
The student’s struggles are not a sudden outburst, but the beginning of a long lasting process that will mark the next decade, a European insurrection of sort. Insurrection means raising up, and also full deployment of the potencies of the actor. The actor entering the historical scene is the General intellect in subjectivation. The full deployment of the potencies of the General intellect falls beyond the sphere of Capitalism, and implies the re-activation of sensibility. Sensibility, the ability to understand what cannot be verbalized, has been jeopardized in the process of precarization and fractalization of time. In order to re-activate sensibility, art and therapy and political action have to gather. “
...............................................................................................................Utopia
Utopia — a fictional country with a perfect socio-political and legal system — is, of course, fiction. It's a polemical tool that is best used as a lens for examining our ideas about how we would like to live. A road map showing how to get there from here is optional; nor does utopian speculation generally provide a guide to the vexatious question of relations between utopia and the outside realm of the imperfect (should such a thing still have the bad grace to exist).
As a vehicle for fiction, utopias are piss-poor: they don't lend themselves to dramatic tension because they're perfect, and they're also annoyingly persistent — it's not utopia if it comes and goes in a couple of decades. (Indeed, what makes the SF of Iain Banks so interesting is that he does have a utopia, in the shape of the Culture — which, unfortunately, only works due to it being, well, science fiction.)
Anyway: it seems to me that the post-cold war neoliberal dominated political consensus (which is a consensus of the Right, insofar as the flagship of the Left hit an iceberg and started to sink in 1917, finally hitting the sea floor in 1989) is intrinsically inimical to the consideration of utopian ideals. Burkean conservativism tends to be skeptical of change, always asking first, "will it make things worse?" This isn't a bad question to ask in and of itself, but we're immured a period of change unprecedented in human history (it kicked off around the 1650s; its end is not yet in sight) and basing your policies on what you can see in your rear-view mirror leaves you open to driving over unforseen pot-holes. To a conservative, the first priority is not to lose track of what's good about the past, lest the future be worse. But this viewpoint brings with it a cognitive bias towards the simplistic outlook that innovation is always bad.
Which is why I think we badly need more utopian speculation. The consensus future we read about in the media and that we're driving towards is a roiling, turbulent fogbank beset by half-glimpsed demons: climate change, resource depletion, peak oil, mass extinction, collapse of the oceanic food chain, overpopulation, terrorism, foreigners who want to come here and steal our women jobs. It's not a nice place to be; if the past is another country, the consensus view of the future currently looks like a favela with raw sewage running in the streets. Conservativism — standing on the brake pedal — is a natural reaction to this vision; but it's a maladaptive one, because it makes it harder to respond effectively to new and unprecedented problems. We can't stop, we can only go forward; so it is up to us to choose a direction.
Having said that, we should be able to create a new golden age of utopian visions. A global civilization appears to be emerging for the first time. It's unstable, unevenly distributed, and blindly fumbling its way forward. But we have unprecedented tools for sharing information; slowly developing theories of behavioural economics, cognitive bias, and communications that move beyond the crudely simplistic (and wrong) 19th century models of perfectly rational market actors: even models of development that seem to be generating sporadic progress in those countries that were hammered down and ruthlessly exploited as colonial assets by the ancien regime and its inheritors.
We need — quite urgently, I think — plausible visions of where we might be fifty or a hundred or a thousand years hence: a hot, densely populated, predominantly urban planetary culture that nevertheless manages to feed everybody, house everybody, and give everybody room to pursue their own happiness without destroying our resource base.
Because historically, when a civilization collapsed, it collapsed in isolation: but if our newly global civilization collapses, what then ...?
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