The Corporation by Joel Bakan

Author:Joel Bakan [Bakan, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

Reckoning

Over the course of the twentieth century the world stumbled, haltingly and unevenly, toward greater democracy and humanity. New nations embraced democratic ideals, and governments in extant democracies expanded their domain over society and the economy. Social programs and economic regulations, such as Roosevelt’s New-Deal and later initiatives in the United States, were created as part of a broad midcentury movement by Western governments to protect their citizens from neglect by the market and from exploitation by corporations. Beginning in the latter part of the century, however, governments began to retreat. Under pressure from corporate lobbies and economic globalization, they embraced policies informed by neoliberalism. Deregulation freed corporations from legal constraints, and privatization empowered them to govern areas of society from which they had previously been excluded. By the end of the century, the corporation had become the world’s dominant institution.

Yet history humbles dominant institutions. Great empires, the church, the monarchy, the Communist parties of Eastern Europe were all overthrown, diminished, or absorbed into new orders. It is unlikely that the corporation will be the first dominant institution to defy history. It has failed to solve, and indeed has worsened, some of the world’s most pressing problems: poverty, war, environmental destruction, ill health. And growing numbers of people—activists, Main Street Americans, the globe’s poor and disenfranchised, and even business leaders—believe that rationalized greed and mandated selfishness must give way to more human values. Though the collapse of corporate capitalism is not imminent, people are increasingly uneasy with the system. The hard question is, What do we do now about, and with, the corporation?

On November 25, 1997, I watched through my office window as thousands of students spilled out of their classrooms and dormitories and marched across the University of British Columbia campus to confront a wall of police. The students were protesting against the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, a meeting of world leaders, among them Bill Clinton and Indonesia’s since-disgraced Suharto, who had gathered to advance the free trade agenda of economic globalization. I ventured outside—Constitution in one hand, library card in the other (it identified me as a law professor at the university)—to try to protect the students’ civil rights from overzealous police. My efforts were futile, which came as no surprise.

The real surprise was that the protest had happened at all. Most students in mid-1990s North America were building investment portfolios, not social movements, I had thought. Yet here they were, thousands of them, braving pepper spray and police batons to fight for ideals. Even more unusual, the students were protesting against corporations—against their destruction of the environment, exploitation of workers, and abuses of human rights, For the first time since the Great Depression and after years in the shadows of other issues—civil rights, the Vietnam War, race and gender politics—the corporation was back in the spotlight of political dissent. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, protesters continued to dog the architects of economic globalization wherever they met. Soon after the 1997 APEC protest in

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