What is corporatism?

    In the midst of a great time of debating over on the blog Rachel Maddow is Not a Leftist, one issue that came up is the ever present definition war over words like "capitalism" and "corporatism." I think the notion of corporatism does need to be fleshed out more, and I think this can also help with the larger question of whether "left"and "right" can truly unite against "corporations."

What corporatism isn't

    Years ago, I started thinking about why people thought of corporations as evil, and I did a thought experiment:

    Let's say I went into business for myself. I earned $200,000 this year, paid myself $50,000, paid $100,000 total to two contractors ($50k average), and another $50,000 went to overhead. Very few people would find anything wrong with this picture.

    But several banner years later, we achieve 1000x growth to $200 million in income! I pay $10 million to myself, $140 million to ~2,000 employees ($70k average), and $50 million in overhead. On a percentage basis I am paying myself 1/5 what I did before (5% vs. 25%), but somehow, I am now the greedy capitalist, because instead of two employees I'm employing more like 2,000.

    This accusation made no sense to me. I couldn't see how simply making more is the issue, unless we really are looking at the politics of envy.

What corporatism really is

    After some more reading on the topic, working on my own business, and musing on the left-leaning rich like Nancy Pelosi or Warren Buffet, I came to realize that the money itself was not the issue. Instead, it was how the money was being used.

    From my own small business, I learned quickly that the only way to grow to a large size is to have a business model that is predictable, and scalable. This can only happen in a sufficiently uniform market that allows you to sell a similar product over and over. How could you sell bacon, for example, if every farm feeds pigs a different diet, making your product taste slightly different from farm to farm? How could you sell a car if towns arrange their layout and transportation in very different ways, sometimes in ways where autos are rarely if ever needed?

    Now we go back to our rich leftists. What if, with a sufficiently large amount of money, one could influence societies to become uniform, such that you had standardized people, working standardized jobs, purchasing standardized goods? Your profits would not only be predictable, but in the words of Donald Trump, yuuuuge! And if you put all of the labor into a union such that all workers were bound to whatever deal you made with the leadership, and if you could bind all cities to one national policy, there would be no variance or unexpected problems anywhere. You "pay the toll" to the respective leaders in this business-union-government triad, and the gate opens to a perfectly uniform market.

    This, I believe, is the true heart of corporatism. There are other "isms" that related to it, but the general idea is the binding of all individuals and communities to a small number of corporate bodies, be they big unions, bug business, big government, or big non-profits, such that those bound lose any meaningful will of their own. The end goal, of course, would be globalism, as this would create corporate bodies that include nearly everyone, operating according to one set of rules in a predictable global market.

    This binding takes place by first encouraging conformity in education (Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction covers this in some detail), but also by encouraging artificial conflicts that force people into groups for safety. Which group you are in doesn't matter, so long as you understand that to be one of "us," you must conform to a large number of pre-determined truths. Over time, these groups are ideally either eliminated or merged when similar enough, until finally we get to just one group of standardized humans, participating in a standardized market. These people would have no culture, no gender, no history, and no future. Just a permanent "now" of work and consumption.

Can we break free from corporatism?

    This brings us now to our current falsified left-right paradigm. While pundits are encouraged to act in an inflammatory manner, any real differences are not discussed, and any real similarities are also avoided.

    The truth is, right and left have different views on authority, but one thing we should see from our understanding of corporatism is that the "right" does not respect illegitimate authority, and anyone trying to undermine communities to create "standard humans" does not carry legitimacy from any historical or religious standard, and not from most philosophical standards either. For the left, the idea that a few people are manipulating the world into a conformity, destroying all cultures, in order to extract predictable profits should be an anathema.

    For this reason, one area where people on either "side" can come together is the concept of localism, where people have more freedom to determine their own standards for living, and for determining the kind of community and culture they wish to live in. This would also create some necessary unpredictability that puts a natural governor on the size of organizations.

    Another area for potential collaboration is the open source movement, which one can see as a sort of parallel institution to academia. Here, there is an intersection of a few corporate bodies, namely academia, business, and government, who want to control innovation such that it only happens predictably inside of a few institutions. Open source is an end run around this process, and allows open and unpredictable innovation in any direction people wish to contribute.

I am looking forward to this ongoing discussion, and hope this contribution helps the various members of Minds work together toward a freer society that meets the needs of people and communities in the ways that they choose.