Previously in Politics & Prose: Joe Sixpack's Revenge (May 17, 2000) If the authors of two new books are right, it's time for Republicans to give class warfare a chance. Christopher Caldwell explains. Governing Globalism (May 3, 2000) Jack Beatty on the protests in Washington, Runaway World, and globalization's good and bad sides. The Uses of Sprawl (April 6, 2000) Christopher Caldwell on Suburban Nation, New Urbanism, and how Democrats can reap the benefits of the sprawl they helped to create. Be Afraid (April 6, 2000) If the digital revolution produces the dystopian nightmare envisioned in the April issue of Wired, humanity's only hope may be the end of capitalism as we know it. Try selling that in an election year, Jack Beatty writes. Tagging After Teddy (March 22, 2000) Christopher Caldwell on why Teddy Roosevelt -- "an egomaniacal weirdo" -- is an unlikely hero to both Republicans and Democrats. Bush vs. Gore (March 8, 2000) Scenes from the first presidential debate of the 2000 election campaign. By Jack Beatty. More Politics & Prose in Atlantic Unbound. Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. |
Has democracy at last caught up with the corporation? by Jack Beatty June 15, 2000 Humanity is becoming ever more profoundly dependent on the corporation, not only for the means of production (that has been true since the Industrial Revolution), but also for the technology of communication, the ganglia of social connection. A letter through the post connects one to government. A message conveyed by e-mail connects one to a corporation. The gain in convenience comes at a price in autonomy, perhaps not payable for decades and then only imperceptibly. In America's commercial civilization, Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, the power of government might prove a lesser threat to liberty than the excesses of freedom. The "cookies" planted by Internet companies to spy on our purchases as we click from site to site are just that kind of excess. If this subversion of individual liberty by economic freedom tokens the future, then the American political imagination, so long fixated on government's threat to private life, must change with the times. Madison's system of checks and balances protects us from government, but in the "privatized" society of power without accountability toward which we seem to be heading, what will protect us from the corporation? Government intervention to restore a balance of power between the corporation and society is rarely the model for today, when nation-states whose authority stops at their borders have neither the power nor even the jurisdiction to check globalizing corporations. Moreover, should its journey from Rotarian lubricity to real-world trend continue unimpeded, "privatization" will weaken governments' hold on the levers of countervailing power within their borders and jurisdictions (a point well made by Benjamin Barber, a Rutgers political theorist, in an as yet unpublished paper). Will it take Henry Adams's nightmare -- some form of world government -- to create transnational countervailing power? History is a poor guide to the unprecedented. * * * The difficulty of establishing international standards for the corporation in the absence of international authority was the crux of the debate over granting normal trading status to China, recently concluded in the House and about to begin in the Senate. The debate has raised a fundamental question: Why, through the China deal and the WTO do we export only part of our economic system? The right to collective bargaining is part of our system. Prohibitions on child and slave labor are part of our system. Regulations of the hours and conditions of work -- these are not exogenous filigree, but part of our system. American capitalism has evolved to include them. Yet we export the kind of "wild capitalism" we have not seen in this country for a hundred years, leaving CEOs free to project their laissez-faire fantasies onto the blank page of the global economy. You're to blame for this. Your pension fund drives corporate behavior. Corporations seek to break the carapace of domestic regulation and so earn greater returns for you by opening plants in the union-free, low-wage, hard-governed developing world. The promise of the twenty-first century is
to move from ownership -- already nearly 50 percent of us
own stock -- to control. More and more the system is
truly becoming "ours." The democratization of
investment is fast bringing us to the point where we can
begin to take responsibility for capitalism, which for
the past two hundred years has been happening to
humankind like fate. Countervailing power, that is to
say, may arise not through political intervention from
outside the economic system, as it did in the New Deal,
for example, but from within the economic system itself,
through the democratization of ownership. |
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| This was not utopianism.
This was very nearly practical politics. Fearing
Republican caricature -- "Imagine the folks who run
the Post Office running Wall Street" -- the Gore
campaign has said nothing about Clinton's plan. But the
issue will come up again should the corporate grip on our
investor-driven politics -- its results measured in jobs
lost to free trade and downsizing, in health and pension
benefits cut back, and in wages lagging increases in
productivity -- grow intolerable. Pension funds, whether
private or public, are a latent force for world-historic
change. What do you think? Discuss this article
in the Politics
& Society conference of Post & Riposte. Jack
Beatty is a senior editor at The Atlantic
Monthly and the author of The World According to Peter Drucker
(1997) and The Rascal King: The Life and Times
of James Michael Curley (1992). All material copyright ©
2000 by The
Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights
reserved. |
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