If the corporation was a person, would that person be a psychopath?
Elizabeth Jeenx
To the anti-globalisers, the corporation is a devilish instrument of
environmental destruction, class oppression and imperial conquest. But
is it also pathologically insane? That is the provocative conclusion
of an award-winning documentary film, called "The Corporation", coming
soon to a cinema near you. People on both sides of the globalisation
debate should pay attention. Unlike much of the soggy thinking peddled
by too many anti-globalisers, "The Corporation" is a surprisingly
rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important
institution.
It begins with a potted history of the company's legal form in
America, noting the key 19th-century legal innovation that led to
treating companies as persons under law. By bestowing on them the
rights and protections that people enjoy, this legal innovation gave
the company the freedom to flourish. So if the corporation is a
person, ask the film's three Canadian co-creators, Mark Achbar, Joel
Bakan and Jennifer Abbott, what sort of person is it?
The answer, elicited over two-and-a-half hours of interviews with
left-wing intellectuals, right-wing captains of industry, economists,
psychologists and philosophers, is that the corporation is a
psychopath. Like all psychopaths, the firm is singularly
self-interested: its purpose is to create wealth for its shareholders.
And, like all psychopaths, the firm is irresponsible, because it puts
others at risk to satisfy its profit-maximising goal, harming
employees and customers, and damaging the environment. The corporation
manipulates everything. It is grandiose, always insisting that it is
the best, or number one. It has no empathy, refuses to accept
responsibility for its actions and feels no remorse. It relates to
others only superficially, via make-believe versions of itself
manufactured by public-relations consultants and marketing men. In
short, if the metaphor of the firm as person is a valid one, then the
corporation is clinically insane.
There is a tendency among anti-globalisers to demonise captains of
industry. But according to "The Corporation", the problem with
companies does not lie with the people who run them. Sir Mark
Moody-Stuart, a former boss of Shell, comes across in the film as a
sympathetic and human character. At one point, he and his wife greet
protesters camped on the front lawn of their English cottage with
offers of a cup of tea and apologies for the lack of soya milk for the
vegans among them. The film gives Sam Gibara, boss of Goodyear, time
to air his opinions, which are given a reasonably neutral edit. Ray
Anderson, boss of Interface (which claims, with psychopathic
grandiosity, to be the world's largest commercial carpetmaker) is
given the hero treatment. Having experienced an "epiphany" about the
destructive and unsustainable nature of modern capitalism, Mr Anderson
has donned the preacher's cloth to spread the religion of
environmental sustainability among his peers.
The main message of the film is that, through their psychopathic
pursuit of profit, firms make good people do bad things. Lucy Hughes
of Initiative Media, an advertising consultancy, is shown musing about
the ethics of designing marketing strategies that exploit the tendency
of children to nag parents to buy things, before comforting herself
with the thought that she is merely performing her proper role in
society. Mark Barry, a "competitive intelligence professional",
disguises himself as a headhunter to extract information for his
corporate clients from rivals, while telling the camera that he would
never behave so deceitfully in his private life. Human values and
morality survive the onslaught of corporate pathology only via a
carefully cultivated schizophrenia: the tobacco boss goes home, hugs
his kids and feels a little less bad about spreading cancer.
Company executives and foot soldiers alike will identify instantly
with this analysis, because it is accurate. But it is also incomplete.
Although the moviemakers claim ownership of the company-as-psychopath
idea, it predates them by a century, and rightfully belongs, in its
full form, to Max Weber, the German sociologist. For Weber, the key
form of social organisation defining the modern age was bureaucracy.
Bureaucracies have flourished because their efficient and rational
division and application of labour is powerful. But a cost attends
this power.
As cogs in a larger, purposeful machine, people become alienated from
the traditional morals that guide human relationships as they pursue
the goal of the collective organisation. There is, in Weber's famous
phrase, a "parcelling-out of the soul".
For Weber, the greater potential tyranny lay not with the economic
bureaucracies of capitalism, but the state bureaucracies of socialism.
The psychopathic national socialism of Nazi Germany, communism of
Stalinist Soviet rule and fascism of imperial Japan (whose oppressive
bureaucratic machinery has survived well into the modern era) surely
bear Weber out. Infinitely more powerful than firms and far less
accountable for its actions, the modern state has the capacity to
behave even in evolved western democracies as a more dangerous
psychopath than any corporation can ever hope to become: witness the
environmental destruction wreaked by Japan's construction ministry.
The makers of "The Corporation" counter that the state was not the
subject of their film. Fair point. But they have done more than
produce a thought-provoking account of the firm. Their film also
invites its audience to weigh up the benefits of privatisation versus
public ownership. It dwells on the familiar problem of the corporate
corruption of politics and regulatory agencies that weakens public
oversight of privately owned firms charged with delivering public
goods. But that is only half the story. The film has nothing to say
about the immense damage that can also flow from state ownership.
Instead, there is a misty-eyed alignment of the state with the public
interest. Run that one past the people of, say, North Korea.
Copyright © 2004 The Economist
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