Seattle Postscript

Corporatism isn't capitalism. It isn't old American can-do business savvy either. Since the late 80's, when de-regulation, marketing and technology fused to create a new kind of company, we're confronted with a virulent, greedy new kind of force that's pushing the individual to the margins. And responsible for the filing of patent injunctions all over the Net, from toys to one-click software. This is just one of the things the protesters in Seattle -- left and right -- were trying to point out. Get ready for the brawl of the 21st century.

As the protests in Seattle suggested, corporatism has become an enormous political issue, perhaps the biggest.

Corporatism stifles and subjugates individuals. It alters political systems. It changes the nature of work. It distorts and influences research, applying it increasingly towards the rankest commercialism. It pushes individuals and individual expression farther to the margins.

Increasingly, corporatism has become linked with technology, which provides the tools and means to expand and dominate, and the economic motive for doing so. And increasingly, technology will become one of the battlegrounds between corporatism and individualism. If you're suddenly wondering why the talk of the Web is lawsuits -- Etoys.com seeking an injunction against etoy.com; Amazon.com seeking a one-click patent injunction against bn.com -- the answer is pure corporatism. One of corporatism's elemental credos is that no principle -- freedom, creativity, vigorous competition -- takes precedence over money and dominance.

Corporatism, money and lawyers are a toxic mix.

Individuals (even smaller companies) don't stand a chance against modern corporatism. Everywhere, they are losing ground.

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Corporatism isn't synonymous with capitalism, Big Business, or familiar notions of the corporation. This is different.

"The acceptance of corporatism," wrote John Raulston Saul in "The Unconscious Civilization", "causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. Corporatism is an ideology which claims rationality as its central quality. The overall effects on the individual are passivity and conformity in those areas which matter and non-conformism in those which don't."

Saul might well have been covering the protests in Seattle, the central concern that brought many of the demonstrators there.

Following the federal government's business de-regulation of the 1980's, the nature of the modern corporation changed. Companies were no longer run by idiosyncratic dreamers and visionaries like Walt Disney, J.P. Morgan, William Paley of CBS, Lee Iaccoca of Chrysler, IBM's Thomas Watson, or even Henry Ford.

These entrepeneurs, in every field from publishing to banking to computing, were hardly a pious or noble breed.

Often greedy and tyrannical, they nevertheless had the sheer power to shape their companies and set goals beyond profit.

They could, if they chose, create workplaces that fostered loyalty, security and nurtured creativity. They had the freedom to take political, ethical or moral positions. Some even did.

But todays corporations operate in the absence of any substantial oversight or regulation or scrutiny, and in an increasingly Darwinian marketplace that demands maximum profits and chews up competitors, especially smaller ones.

In the 1980's, corporations had begun to re-structure themselves in order to compete in global markets. They adopted, as sociologist Richard Sennett has written, flexible management structures and corporate and competitive strategies that emphasized mobility and change, and de-emphasized worker loyalty, security and the well-being of local communities.

These corporations stopped taking responsibility for their workers, or for the cities in towns in which they functioned, focusing increasingly only on their marketing missions and whatever it took to get them accomplished.

They used new surveying, focus group and mass-marketing technologies as well as computing to refine their sales procedures and product lines and services, and to identify and capture enormous chunks of markets.

The idea that any sort of governmental or other entity should control, regulate, oversee or curb them - or hold them to any standard regarding workers or responsibilities to a larger civic good -- has vanished.

Control of these companies has gone from individuals with idiosyncratic missions to amorphous boards of directors, stockholders, analysts and executives.

Corporatism permits only two goals: growth and profit. All other ethics and notions are subordinate, sometimes even considered malfeasance.

Recently, technology has become not only the means through which these kinds of corporations expanded, but an unimaginably profitable commodity in and of itself.

Prior to corporatism, individuals had more freedom and opportunity. There was room for small businesses. "Can-do-capitalism" that has been such a tradition in the United States occupied one economic niche, smaller businesses and entrepeneurs another.

People could live lives apart from these companies and the products they sell. Increasingly, this is no longer true.

Hardly any individual citizen who doesn't wish to live like the Unabomber can avoid corporatism. It's no longer a choice, but an increasingly pervasive and intrusive entanglement. It's simply not possible to work, shop, communicate, work or function without dealing with corporatism in one form or another.

And hardly anyone who does deal with these companies believes these institutions care about them or their needs, or are sincerely interested in their complaints and frustrations, the massive commercialized hype to the contrary. America has the best economy in the world, and some of the crummiest jobs.

Of the hundreds of e-mails I got after a series of columns about the Seattle protests, it was striking how many touched on these themes of bigness, the helplessness of the individual, and life in a world where commerce and technology have no moral context whatsoever.

"I wasn't 100 per cent sure why I went to Seattle," e-mailed a student from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. "Then, when I got there, I understand instantly why all of us had come. We all feel like we're up against the same suffocating, powerful, immoral, almost inhuman force, no matter what our issues were."

And they were.

There is nothing inherently wrong or menacing about the idea of the corporation or of capitalism -- especially when compared to alternative systems like communism -- the latter having brought about staggering individual initiative, wealth and prosperity.

Corporations have employed many millions of people, underwritten research and scientific development, provided security, shelter and even education for workers and their families all over the world. Business is central to the unprecedented prosperity, employment and influence of the United States.

Corporatism is something different, something new. It goes far beyond the usual concept of Big Business.

Corporatism brings a whole set of values to competitiveness, relationships with workers, and morality. Corporatism is the corporation unchecked, the corporation becoming a political force as or more powerful than the government in place to oversee it.

Individuals and individualism have taken a battering at the hands of this brand of corporatism, especially in the past two decades. Tens of thousands of retail businesses have shut shutdown because of the spread of Wal-Mart,a company whose ambition is to set up shot every 30 miles across America. Many millions of Americans have been down-sized, laid-off, re-engineeered, human sacrifices to the new corporatism. Dead-end jobs with no prospects, benefits or security have become a staple of the American workplace. Almost everyone is a free-lance worker.

Communities have lost factories, business, sports teams. Writers, painters, other creative entrepeneurs are driven from creative market by cultural corporations only interested in huge numbers. Media has been almost totally corporatized, no longer able to fulfull traditional roles - like watching corporatiions.

Family farmers have been knocked out by corporate agricultural farmers, or rooming house owners shut down by hotel chains.

Or consider Microsoft: now even the federal courts seem to recognize that smaller techno-entrepeneurs, competition, and creativity itself have suffered because of its power and reach. And the new round of patent lawsuits injects the law right between innovation, freedom and the Net. Individuals, smaller entrepeneurs and companies will operate at a disadvantage, looking over their shoulders not at creative competitors but process servers.

In this and other ways, corporatism spreads conformity. It has crept into politics and educational institutions. Politicians mass-market, afraid to outspoken or take stands that will bring down their polls, and schools have embraced uniformity as a common ideology, enforcing codes of dress,speech and behavior that encourage students not to be model or creative citizens, but mostly, to be like other students.

Corporatism embraces the idea that legislators are primarily elected to represent their interests, resulting in intensifying political market research and instant polling, along with enormous growth in the lobbying industry.

It also seeks to gain political, cultural, and in recent years, technological influence. Corporations now contribute the overwhelming majority of money to national political campaigns, and it's become almost commonplace for retired or defeated politicians to become lobbyists; it follows that individual's interests - in preserving a marketplace that allows them to work (farmers up against agricultural combines, music retailers smothered by Wal-Mart, independent filmakers against studios, smaller software entrepeneurs fighting Microsoft), say, or a political system that represents them - will take a pounding.

Corporations understood from the first that in order to gain influence and control debate, they needed to acquire information outlets. Only a handful of the prestigious media outlets that occasionally monitored authority still remain independent; the rest have been acquired by corporations like Viacom, GE and Westinghouse.

Those companies, driven by mass-marketing ethics and research, seek to dominate the information markets the way they dominate everything else - by tailoring products to reach the broadest possible audience. The result is that outspoken opinion, investigative reporting - many of the traditional ways the press functions as a check on authority - have nearly vanished.

Compare the diverse opinions expressed on the Net with those to be read on most op-ed pages in America. The difference would be signficant if anyone under 50 were still reading op-ed pages in America.

The Net is hardly Utopia, but perhaps one reason it's experienced such rapid growth in so short a time is that it gives individuals the ability, at least for now, to create their own own environments, to speak freely, and to preserve their dwindling individuality. The open source movement is a perfect example of a media/social/technolgical-movement that's booming, even mainstreaming, online (it's no accident that many of the Seattle protesters used free software to connect), but has no equivalent offline.

Our knee-jerk political system tends to reduce all issues to left versus right, but this issue is bigger and much more complex. Corporatism has no ideology now but to grow and prosper at all costs, and in any context. No other mission is possible, and increasingly in the Digital Age, technology is the pathway as well as the result. In a corporatist society like ours, other considerations - workers? security, idealistic impulses, stirring visions - get lost in the details of marketing, data-gathering, bureaucratic manipulation.

Leftists clinging to Marxist rhetoric may denounce corporations as fascistic - old ideas struggling to confront new realities - but corporations aren't ideological enough to be fascistic. They are profoundly anti-democratic, but mostly as a by-product of their devotion to profit. Run by marketeers, they simply acquire markets, moving from one to the next like some unstoppable glacier, grinding everything in their paths.

It doesn't take Machiavelli to grasp that in order for corporatism to prosper and grow, it has to confront the Net's culture and potential in the same way it confronted the other one - by lobbying the government for regulation, by entering technologically -driven markets with a flood of new products, by offering services and enticements no one can compete with, by ruthlessly blocking, acquiring or shutting down potential competition - all the things Microsoft has been trying to do.

The notion of organizing against corporatism has been rocketing around the Net for several years, now. New media technology has transmitted information about overseas working conditions, environmental issues, the impact of free trade agreements, efforts to tax or regulte Net commerce and a range of other concerns that have nothing in common but this: they involve corporatism.

Corporatism de-humanizes everyone, from the pharmacist who has to close down when Rite-Aid moves in to the kid working in a fast-food franchise to the consumer on hold for hours, awaiting tech support that never comes.

All this at the hands of enormous companies that aren't held accountable for the products they make, the working conditions they creat, and which and needn't fear anybody's oversight, regulation or intervention. Having amassed enormous amounts of power and money, they appear to have little regard for their impact on individuals and communities, or on the direction and ethos of technology itself.

Somehow in recent months, out of sight of government and journalism, there arose via the anarchic pathways of the Net, a diffuse anger, frustration and disenchantment with the endemic bigness that seeks to control technology and consume one American institution after another.

The Internet has connected thousands of people with different political points of view and brought them to Seattle, where some exploded in frustration. This was a preview. Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have seen it coming for years.

But in its modern incarnation, corporatism is heading for a direct political confronation with the people constructing the Internet and World Wide Web, disporportionately represented at the WTO protests.

Perhaps the real political campaign of the Millenium won't unfold on the irrelevant streets of New Hampshire, where politicians and co-dependent journalists gather every four years to bolster their own sense of importance. Maybe it began on the streets of Seattle.