Corporate capitalism  

A. Corporate Rules of Behavior

Jerry Mander, a successful advertising executive suggests 11 rules that describe corporate behavior, and which inherently degrade our environment and capitalist societies.  In essence these rules are (after Montague, 1995):

1.  The Profit Imperative:   Profit is the ultimate measure of all corporate decisions. It takes precedence over community well-being, worker health, public health, peace, environmental preservation or national security. The profit imperative and the growth imperative are the most fundamental corporate drives; together they represent the corporation's instinct to "live."

2.  The Growth Imperative:   Corporations live or die by whether they can sustain growth. This fuels the corporate desire to find and develop scarce resources in obscure parts of the world.

3.  Competition and Aggression:   Corporations place every person in management in fierce competition with each other. Anyone interested in a corporate career must hone his or her abilities to seize the moment. Corporate ideology holds that competition improves worker incentive and corporate performances and therefore benefits society.

4.  Amorality:   Not being human, corporations do not have morals or altruistic goals. So decisions that may be antithetical to community goals or environmental health are made without misgivings. Corporations, however, seek to hide their amorality and attempt to act as if they were altruistic. Corporations tend to advertise the very qualities they do not have in order to allay negative public perceptions. When corporations say "we care," it is almost always in response to the widespread perception that they do not care. And they don't. How could they? They don't have feelings or morals.

5.  Hierarchy:   Corporate law requires that corporations be structured into classes of superiors and subordinates within a centralized pyramidal structure. This hierarchical form also characterizes the military, the government and most institutions in our society. The effect on society is to make it seem natural that we have all been placed within a national pecking order. Some jobs are better than others, some lifestyles are better than others, some neighborhoods, some races, some kinds of knowledge. Men over women. Westerners over non-Westerners. Humans over nature. That effective, non-hierarchical modes of organization exist on the planet, and have been successful for millennia, is barely known to most Americans.

6.  Quantification, Linearity, Segmentation:  Corporations require that subjective information be translated into objective form, i.e., numbers. The subjective or spiritual aspects of forests, for example, cannot be translated, and so do not enter into corporate equations. Forests are evaluated only as "board feet." 

7.  Dehumanization:   In the great majority of corporations, employees are viewed as cogs among the wheels, replaceable by others or by machines. Decision making must "not let feelings get in the way." This applies to dealing with the consequences of corporate behavior in the environment or the community.

8.  Exploitation:   All corporate profit is obtained by a simple formula: Profit equals the difference between the amount paid to an employee and the economic value of the employee's output, and/or the difference between the amount paid for raw materials used in production (including costs of processing), and the ultimate sales price of processed raw materials. This arrangement is inherently imbalanced. The owner of the capital always obtains additional benefit. While the worker makes a wage, the capitalist gets the benefit of the worker's labor, plus the surplus profit the worker produces, which is then reinvested to produce yet more surplus.

9.  Ephemerality:   Corporations exist beyond time and space: they are legal creations that only exist on paper. They do not die a natural death; they may outlive their own creators. They have no commitment to locale, employees or neighbors. Having no morality, no commitment to place and no physical nature, a corporation can relocate all of its operations at any sign the owners dislike: demanding employees, high taxes and restrictive environmental laws.

10.  Opposition to Nature:   Though individuals who work for corporations may personally love nature, corporations themselves, and corporate societies, are intrinsically committed to intervening in, altering and transforming nature. For corporations engaged in commodity manufacturing, profit comes from converting raw materials into saleable forms. A piece of nature is taken from where it belongs and processed into a new form. After natural resources are used up in one part of the globe, the corporation moves on to another part. In corporate capitalist societies the process is accelerated because corporations must grow by extracting resources from nature and reprocessing them at an ever-quickening pace. Meanwhile, the consumption end of the cycle is also accelerated --by corporations that have an interest in convincing people that commodities bring satisfaction. Inner satisfaction, self-sufficiency, contentment in nature or a lack of a desire to acquire wealth are subversive to corporate goals.

11.  Homogenization:   American rhetoric claims that commodity society delivers greater choice and diversity than other societies. "Choice" in this context means product choice in the marketplace: many brands to choose from and diverse features on otherwise identical products. Actually, corporations have a stake in all of us living our lives in a similar manner, achieving our pleasures from things that we buy in a world where each family lives isolated in a single family home and has the same machines as every other family on the block. Native societies --which celebrate a non-material relationship to life, the planet and the spirit --are regarded as backward, inferior and unenlightened. We are told that they envy the choices we have. They represent a threat to the homogenization of worldwide markets and culture.

To a high degree these 11 rules are inherent in corporate structure. Though corporations exist in a society that claims to operate by moral principles, they are structurally amoral. It is inevitable that they will dehumanize people who work for them and the overall society as well. They are disloyal to workers, including their own managers. Corporations can be disloyal to the communities they have been part of for many years. Corporations do not care about nations; they live beyond boundaries. They are intrinsically committed to destroying nature. And they have an inexorable, unabatable, voracious need to grow and to expand. In dominating other cultures, in digging up the Earth, corporations blindly follow the codes that have been built into them as if they were genes.

We must abandon the idea that corporations can reform themselves. To ask corporate executives to behave in a morally defensible manner is absurd. Corporations, and the people within them, are following a system of logic that leads inexorably toward dominant behaviors. To ask corporations to behave otherwise is like asking an army to adopt pacifism.

Free market madness

B. How Corporations are Different from Real People

According to Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman: ^REF 

Corporations are fundamentally different than you and me.

That's a simple truth that Big Business leaders desperately hope the public will not perceive.

It helps companies immeasurably that the law in the United States and in many other countries confers upon them the same rights as human beings.

In the United States, this personhood treatment, established most importantly in a throwaway line in an 1886 Supreme Court decision, protects the corporate right to advertise (including the tobacco companies' right to market their deadly wares), corporations' ability to contribute monetarily to political campaigns, and interferes with regulators' facility inspection rights (via corporate rights against unreasonable search and seizure).

But even more important than the legal protections gained by faux personhood status are the political, social and cultural benefits.

Companies aggressively portray themselves as part of the community (every community), a friendly neighbor. If they succeed in that effort at self-characterization, they know what follows: a dramatically diminished likelihood of external constraints on their operations. If a corporation is part of the community, then it is entitled to the same freedoms available to others, and the same presumption of non-interference that society appropriately affords real people.

Here are 10 differences between corporations and real people:

1. Corporations have perpetual life.

2. Corporations can be in two or more places at the same time.

3. Corporations cannot be jailed.

4. Corporations have no conscience or sense of shame.

5. Corporations have no sense of altruism, nor willingness to adjust their behavior to protect future generations.

6. Corporations pursue a single-minded goal, profit, and are typically legally prohibited from seeking other ends.

7. There are no limits, natural or otherwise, to corporations' potential size.

8. Because of their political power, they are able to define or at very least substantially affect, the civil and criminal regulations that define the boundaries of permissible behavior. Virtually no individual criminal has such abilities.

9. Corporations can combine with each other, into bigger and more powerful entities.

10. Corporations can divide themselves, shedding subsidiaries or affiliates that are controversial, have brought them negative publicity or pose liability threats.

These unique attributes give corporations extraordinary power, and makes the challenge of checking their power all the more difficult. The institutions are much more powerful than individuals, which makes all the more frightening their single-minded profit maximizing efforts

Money is a form of sppech

  Optional online resources

Corporations: Different Than You and Me, Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Common Dream News Center, 24 January 2001

Corporations Behave As If They Are More Human Than We Are, George Monbiot, Guardian of London, 5 October 2000 (posted at Common Dreams News Center)

USA, Kalle Lasn, AdBusters #28, Winter 2000 -- brief history of the corporation in the USA

  Corporate Rules of the Game, by Jerry Mander, 1999 -- Eight rules by which all corporations operate...  [800 words]

  Bad Company: How to Civilize the Corporation, Jonathan Rowe, Dollars & Sense, July/August 1998

  Democracy and Megacorporations May Be Mutually Exclusive, Robert B. Reich, Corporate Watch, May 1998

  Know Thine Enemy; A Brief History of Corporations, Joel Bleifuss, In These Times, February 1998 (posted at Third World Traveler)

  Corporate Rule, Jay Hanson

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Thomas Detwyler maintains this page (tdetwyle@uwsp.edu)
Last updated 28 January 2001

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