Being the Sovereign People

Being the Sovereign People

Goodman Contest: C. J. Quinn

The following is a runner-up in the Paul Goodman Essay Contest.

WE ARE at an unprecedented moment in public life, in which nearly all facets of our civil society are, if not wholly and cripplingly dependent on private corporations, at least prey to their influence. In the economy, our entire productive capacity is defined by the corporate form. In political circles, it is only disguised by the haltingly choreographed ballet of our “government,” a group of bought-and-paid-for operatives for the business interests that finance political campaigns and decide policy. In our academic institutions, research grants and endowments are directly or indirectly provided by corporations through direct business deals or donations from foundations. The same is true in the arts, where there is precious little public money to be found. And these are only our institutions. Each and every one of us depends on corporations to get through our days. They provide our food, our paychecks, our information, our credit, our clothing, our leisure. We rely on corporations for our very lives.

As early as the 1940s, social critics were tracing the outlines of the emerging society run by the corporations, for the corporations. One of these critics, Paul Goodman, not only outlined the problem of corporate control, but proposed practical solutions to it. His trenchant and holistic approach to the problem of corporate social tyranny struck a chord with the youth movements of the 1960s. Since then, his influence on public discourse has faded, but the problems he identified have only grown.

Why should we care about corporations? After all, we human beings have needs for survival and desires beyond those that make life more enjoyable. If corporations provide for our needs and desires, what’s the harm?

THE PROBLEM with this perspective—that corporations are simply a means for providing goods and services demanded by society—is that it makes a tacit assumption that corporations are the most preferable or at least an acceptable system for providing for our needs and desires. It ignores the character of our most influential social institutions by not taking into account their intrinsic power relations and by giving short shrift to the negative social, political, and ecological effects of their business practices (“externalities” in corporate Newspeak).

Labor exploitation, wars, ecological disaster, massive social inequality, violation of human rights, neocolonial dependence–all can be traced back to corporations and the governments that act on their behalf. In fact, it would not be overstating the case to say that most of our current problems are due to the private power represented by corporations, and to the corporate form of organization and decision-making.

Most human beings are not monsters. We generally share a sense of moral responsibility and a motivation to help one another or at least a disinclination to directly harm our fellows. Given a gun and the choice to shoot a stranger for a pile of money or instead to leave her alone and go without, I would like to think that most of us would walk away and ensure that the person who presented the choice would not be able to offer it to anyone else! Indeed, we would consider anyone who would choose to shoot to be a dangerous psychopath and a menace to society. Like Goodman, I maintain that this attitude is a fundamental aspect of our nature. We are social beings and are therefore repulsed by grossly antisocial behavior, such as murder and violence. Furthermore, we feel responsible for our actions and are plagued by guilt when we do anything, even something minor, that we or our neighbors believe is wrong.

One of the functions of the corporation–indeed, a function absolutely vital to its immense profit-making potential–is demoralization of human beings and the concomitant elimination of responsibility, social and legal. Other forms of ownership, e.g., sole proprietorship or partnership, concentrate responsibility for wrongdoing on the owner(s), making crimes and violations an immense liability to those who would commit them in the interest of profit. Human owners can be jailed or levied with crippling fines, prospects that serve as a strong disincentive to malfeasance and monstrousness (of course, students of history will realize that even this is a far from perfect system, since state power has often intervened on behalf of moneyed interests in conflicts with the oppressed, but it is nonetheless a system; the corporate model represents the near total absence of such an accountability mechanism). In the corporate model, responsibility falls on “the corporation,” a disembodied group of investors whose operations are controlled by a narrow cadre that is guaranteed the legal status of an immortal person. Of course, it’s rather difficult to throw a disembodied legal “person” in a jail cell, leaving fines as the only viable option within our legal system to punish corporations. However, the massive assets of your average corporation make such fines a laughable penalty. In addition, because it is the corporation itself that is legally at fault, the corporate directors often face no legal penalties for the criminal policies they pursue. This allows them to weigh the costs and benefits of criminal activity against the windfall profits that will result.

AS OF NOW, the corporations are almost entirely unaccountable to the great mass of stake-holders whom their “externalities” affect, (read: the public) and, where they are accountable, slap-on-the-wrist enforcement is woefully inadequate to force them to act in the public interest. Corporations are accountable, however, to their shareholders, a proviso that is backed by law. If corporations do not follow this cardinal rule, rather more serious penalties can result than those that arise from matters of public interest, as happened in the recent hubbub over Goldman Sachs’s betting against the interests of its own shareholders. The U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a massive civil suit against Goldman, not for being a prime cause of the global financial meltdown, but for defrauding its wealthy investors. The fact that corporations are required by law to serve their shareholders’ interests above all else means that they are in effect required to be destructive amoral agents in the pursuit of profit alone.

Goodman referred to corporations as “feudal domains,” and political economist Robert Brady describes their internal power relations as follows:

All policies emanate from the control above. In the union of this power to determine policy and the execution thereof, all authority necessarily proceeds from top to bottom and all responsibility from bottom to top. This is, of course, the inverse of “democratic” control; it follows the structural conditions of dictatorial power.

Thus, although the United States is ostensibly a democracy, the corporations that dominate our society make no such pretensions. Heads of corporations are often not elected by shareholders but appointed by those already running the organization, removing another layer of accountability. When it comes to influencing corporations, the only leverage left to us is deciding what product to consume.

The influence of corporations on our lives speaks to a broader trend of centralization of decision-making power. Goodman was characteristically prescient when, in his 1951 preface to Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, he described our society’s “drift into fascism”: “One is astounded at the general slavishness….in the corporations the junior executives talk about the Rat Race, yet kowtow to rank.” Indeed, the extension of corporate tyranny into politics and our social relations is not recognized as creeping fascism because it is not the brutally imposed fascism from above of Hitler or Mussolini, but rather an insidious fascism from around—the extension of private tyranny into public life, passed off as the natural status quo of the modern world.

What, then, can we propose as a solution to this tyrannical strain that pervades public life? It must be practical, and at the same time utopian, for, as Emma Goldman noted, although an idea is considered not to be utopian if it can be “carried out under the existing conditions…it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.” That is to say, we must be able to easily put it into practice, but it must be different, perhaps radically different, from the status quo so as to ensure that it is indeed a worthwhile break with the now.

My practical proposal is one that Goodman often championed himself: decentralization. The problems that arise from corporate influence are problems of the centralization that shuts out public influence by concentrating power with a handful of unaccountable decision makers. A practical solution should produce a state of affairs in which all those affected by major decisions of social planning, production, and so on, have a substantive role in making such decisions for themselves.

One major element of our society that is ripe for improvement is our food system.

Corporate agriculture and “food manufacturing,” enabled by federal subsidies, have radically altered our eating habits, our bodies, and the way we think about food. Over half of all crops harvested in the United States each year are corn and soy, largely because of the massive federal subsidies thrown their way. Most of this agricultural product is not used to feed humans directly, but instead is fed to genetically engineered livestock that convert it at a massive loss of energy and nutritive value into meat. Americans now eat 150 times more chicken than they did eighty years ago, not to mention the massive uptick in our consumption of high fructose corn syrup, a clever use for all our surplus corn. These and other changes in the American diet have resulted in a veritable epidemic of food-related disorders such as diabetes and obesity, all because it is more profitable for corporations to produce the foods that cause them. As with all U.S. policies, though, we are not the only ones who lose out. The surplus agricultural products engendered by massive U.S. subsidies are dumped on developing countries, making farming pointless for local farmers and ensuring third world dependency.

Many communities have already seen the light on this issue thanks to its introduction into the public discourse, and there is a renaissance of community gardening. A decentralized food system would involve local agricultural programs in which the produce not used by the family that grows it would be distributed through a cooperative neighborhood farmers’ market for neighbors to enjoy.

Another major opportunity for decentralization is in the media. If the only ideas and news that the citizenry receive are the carefully tailored messages of the corporate media that unfailingly tilt toward corporate power and away from people power, they begin to believe them. Semi-monopolistic corporate control of the media is the single main reason for the assimilation into our mainstream cultural psyche of the myth of centralization as the best or the only way of doing things. Once upon a time, the wage slaves of huge businesses knew where the battle lines were drawn. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America saw the operation of a robust, working-class press that made clear to its millions of readers that the boss was the enemy and that struggle was vital to gain fundamental rights for workers. Noam Chomsky tells us that “[a]s recently as the 1950s, 800 labor newspapers were still reaching 20-30 million people, seeking—in their words—to combat the corporate offensive to ‘sell the American people on the virtues of big business.'” Today, the media in general have consolidated to an astonishing degree through corporate buy- and crowd-outs of local media. Writing in the Fall 1964 Dissent, Goodman lamented that “fewer than 60 towns have competing newspapers (in 1900 there were 600). These are served by, now, only 3 international news services. With the best will in the world, these few persons cannot know what is all the real news.” Since then, further corporate consolidation paired with the advent of Internet news have led some to proclaim not unjustified eulogies for American journalism.

A DECENTRALIZED media would mean a shift to more community and citizen journalism. Groups of interested and journalistically inclined citizens in particular neighborhoods could gather together and discuss what local issues ought to be covered for the week, (or the day, depending on the size and engagement of the citizen staff) and each person could volunteer for a story or two. The staff might also include national and international editors who monitor other neighborhood media and if necessary the wire services to produce a digest of national and international stories approved by the rest of the staff. The publication could be printed and available online, and the content might be posted to an Internet hub of citizen journalism, accessible by anyone, somewhat along the lines of the very successful Indymedia model of activist journalism. In order to ensure that citizen journalists could afford the time and effort involved in worthwhile journalism, a low fee might be charged for the print publication, and both the print and online versions could accept advertisements if necessary from other community cooperatives, organizations, etc.

These are a few direct actions we can take to push back against the powerful current of tyranny that promises only to grow in the coming years. There are of course many others that I have not mentioned, and ways to improve proposals already made as circumstances show what does and doesn’t work for our goals and visions. People across the United States and the world are already reasserting their community power by developing parallel institutions that serve people better than corporate or state apparatuses.

This is not to say that we should avoid centralization at all costs. “There are many functions that are central by their natures,” Goodman reminds us. Indeed, while the amoral and destructive corporation remains the dominant force in society, it may be necessary to further centralize some functions in the slightly more accountable apparatus of the state. Our criterion should not be whether a function is adequately decentralized, but rather whether it serves human needs and does a good job of it. Health care is a telling example. For decades, health care has been provided (or not) by a number of corporations to those who could afford to pay for it (and under the recent health care legislation, this will remain largely the case). By centralizing this function in a single-payer health care system in which the government guarantees free care to all regardless of their ability to pay, we could guarantee that millions more people would receive quality health care and that the quality of care for some who are already covered would improve drastically. Such a system would also be more democratic, as U.S. public opinion polls show majority support for free health care for all.

In addition to the direct techniques already discussed, we can and should take indirect action to resist tyrannical regimes both public and private. We can use what political power we still have to force our governments to work for our interests, as they already claim to do. Often, Americans on the Left ignore the relative freedom we enjoy and don’t take advantage of the opportunities for substantive civic engagement that do exist. With enough popular pressure, we can make the pawns of the corporations enact policies that benefit people over profit. Many progressive policies that we now take for granted only came through hard-fought struggles by people against power (for example, the abolition of slavery, the eight hour work day, the New Deal, and many others).

PAUL GOODMAN was many things: a critic, a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, a dreamer. The element of his life’s work that I find most inspiring is his poetry. I think it is only appropriate to end with some of his most moving words about the power of ordinary people to make society anew along their own lines:

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Cameron J. Quinn is a student and activist from Los Angeles. He is currently reading for a BA in Philosophy and French at the University of Oxford.