Anti-Corporatism
From under a rock perhaps the problems of our world are invisible. In the marketplace of liberal democratic society, we construct ourselves through ideas of what is right and wrong. We counter the insecurity of knowing problems exist with an "answer," or root source of all these problems.
Knowing that problems exist makes us insecure, but finding an answer even if an unactionable one gives us a sense of being more intelligent than the rest. As a result different "answers" proliferate, and one common response is to blame corporations.
Our problems, the logic goes, originate in these large business entities and their soulless pursuit of wealth. Since our society is a marketplace, and the marketplace rewards large wealth centers, corporations are not only inevitable but essential.
 This makes "corporations are evil" an unactionable answer, and forces those who adopt it as a viewpoint to barricade themselves behind downloading Open Source(tm) browsers, buying Fair Trade(tm) coffee, and supporting independent film. None of these have a substantive effect on corporations.
Before we go further down what is then a hopeless quest, we should examine whether corporations are as evil as proposed. What defines a corporation? It is a usually- large company that offers stock in itself on a public market. This is the only actual difference between corporation and small company.
Two factors influence our perception of corporations as evil. The first is their tendency to defer to acknowledged experts in the field of finance, and the second is that their public stock offering makes them democracies beholden to the individual profit-interests of their constituents, or stockholders.
When running a public entity like a corporation, a leader will be blamed for taking any course of action that does not comply rigorously to public perceptions of "correct" practice in finance. For this reason, corporations hire MBAs. Whenever you see a good product become mediocre because fourteen cents were saved in its manufacture, an MBA is responsible.
MBAs are taught the logic of enhancing profit by comparing cost factors and benefit. They are not educated in the business leadership that recognizes spending that fourteen cents establishes a bond of trust with the consumer, and creates brand recognition as one of quality. MBAs look at spreadsheets, cut costs and produce higher year-end revenues.
This leads us to the second negative influence on corporations, which is the stockholders. Stockholders are not a constant. Any person or entity that buys stock becomes a stockholder, and they are acting on the principle of individual self-interest, so their goal is to buy low and sell high.
Whenever a corporation saves fourteen cents, correspondingly raises its profit, and its stock trades furiously, stockholders are taking home personal profit. They are not "part" of the corporation but its short-term investors, so if a fourteen-cent savings kicks the stock up a notch so they can sell it, they are happy.
Stockholders are the voters in a corporation. Corporations hire MBAs to deflect stockholder criticism, because if a stockholder points out that fourteen cents can be saved and profit will rise, the corporation itself comes under criticism. The entire cycle of corporations oddly enough comes back to the individual: stockholders and MBAs wishing to make profit.
There is one more area the individual influences the corporate. Employees do not seek to join the evil empire, but are acting in their own self-interest. Working at a large corporation is a good job with security and excellent benefits. When given the chance, any smart worker is going to opt for that over the vagaries and lower salaries of a small company. Self-interest, again.
When we take all these reasons into account, we see that the corporation is not an evil entity but a convergence of self-interested people taking profit from the process of business. It is this self-interest that filters through the formalities of corporations to create their often-destructive influence.
So when we are inclined to blame corporations for our failings, and stop thinking there, we should instead look to the cause: self-interest replacing the interests of the whole. Until we fix that, corporations or things that act like them will exist.
This problem seems insoluble until we consider that self-interest, while always a part of what we will do, is not necessarily the whole. Our modern society is based upon a philosophy exclusive self-interest, and from this comes the evil. In saner times, this type of thinking was called "decadence" and recognized as a the precursor to a civilization's collapse.
by Brett Stevens
February 12, 2007
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