"The essence of freedom is not being a corporate drone".
Corporatism is the desire to see large Corporations become the principle economic and social force in the world. History will record that the 21st century ushered in the great battle between Corporatism and Freedom. We are not witnessing the battle between the "Liberal" elite and the People, we are witnessing a battle between the "Corporate Elite" and the People.
If you work for a large Corporation you are expected to absorb the corporate "values", "vision" and "culture". Most corporate employees accept the message without question and many commit themselves to the company or government department etc. Even "casual" clothing, such as everyone wearing jeans and tee-shirts, can become a Corporate tool to enhance commitment. If you browse through the "Human Resources" literature you will find an enormous amount of academic work on motivating people to be part of the Corporate model.
Large Western corporations are in many ways like small communist states and this is no coincidence, Karl Marx was so impressed by the new corporate world of the nineteenth century that he believed the State should be a single corporation (See Das Kapital) and this became the essence of communism. By the twentieth century power in the world was divided between countries that had Marxist state corporations and the Capitalist West. In the capitalist West there were many large corporations in each State as well as many smaller enterprises which provided much of the creative impetus in Western economies and societies.
Politicians in Marxist countries controlled the State corporation which controlled everyone. They used clumsy, prototype versions of the indoctrination techniques that are applied by modern large corporations but despite this were able to achieve dedication amongst their employees for 70 years.
At the same time as Marxism was on the rise the Western corporations became powerful but politicians in the West were not always controlled by them. The advantage of the independent Western corporation is that it can fail and be swept away without bloodshed. The UK has been extremely fortunate to have resisted the growth of public and private sector corporations so that even today they are only 40% of the workforce. Unfortunately, despite the fact that 60% of workers are not employed by large corporations or government, the corporate media portrays the UK in corporatist terms.
The Marxist Corporation failed to provide creativity and innovation and Marxism was rejected globally in the late twentieth century because it was an economic failure as well as socially repressive. However, as Marx had discovered, the real seat of power in a society lies with large corporations and the path to ultimate power lies in uniting them. It is this desire to unite corporations that is Corporatism.
What you will read below should shock you because you will realize that we are complacently slipping into a world controlled by corporations and are moving towards Chinese Capitalism with scarcely a murmur of public dissent.
The mechanism of corporate power goes well beyond the control of employees and wealth. Just look around, from the phone in your pocket to the loan on your house corporate power is all around you. Corporations are much of the economic and social environment but fortunately not all of it.
Actions by Corporations against individuals and political movements only become really dangerous when a single corporation has a monopoly of power or the corporations begin to act together. There were strong warnings about Western corporations acting together in the late twentieth century but the corporations had already amassed the media power to dismiss the various warnings about the European Movement's Bilderberg Group, Davos etc. as conspiracy theories. (They mounted a brilliant disinformation campaign that smeared any criticism of secret meetings between the most powerful people in the world as "tin hatted bollocks"). It is amazing how, only a decade after the Bankers stole hundreds of billions of pounds from the public with scarcely a prosecution mounted, so many people still believe the corporate media story that Corporations lack power, never conspire together and could not possibly do them any harm.
Apart from having the wealth of Croesus, how do large corporations exercise control over individuals in society at large? During the twentieth century both the communist national corporations and the Western commercial corporations developed a method of blacklisting and shadow banning to deal with opposition. In the UK the scandal of the blacklisting of 3200 construction workers exposed what was happening. Blacklisting undoubtedly continues in the UK because it is only illegal to blacklist Trade Unionists ( See (2) and NHS Blacklisting). In Marxist countries the State Corporations “shadow banned” those who were found to be undesirable. This involved the State Corporation subtly denying employment prospects for those who were slightly offensive to corporate values. The victims would have no idea that the state was doing this to them. This allowed the state to relegate those who were most problematical to the lowest paid jobs to remove their influence (See for instance Borneman,1999). Shadow banning was the most used method of control in the totalitarian Eastern Bloc. It works brilliantly, especially on journalists and media employees, and scarcely seems to be a "crime". You haven't even noticed it (clue: "shadow" banning and "black"-listing mean they are kept quiet).
Blacklisting and Shadow Banning are only effective if they are well organised between corporations or implemented by a corporation that has virtually monopoly powers. Shadow banning is spectacularly successful in the media where journalists and comedians depend on patronage.
In the twenty first century Western corporate power has grown immensely. The largest multinational corporations have formed powerful collaborative groups (Note 1) and, perhaps more importantly, the Internet has fallen under the control of a handful of corporations. Twitter, owned by a group of billionaires, uses Shadow Banning liberally, much to the applause of the corporate media who extol its virtues as a way of fighting terrorism and racism. Facebook also shadow bans its users as does Reddit. Even non-commercial enterprises use Shadow Banning, the most egregious example is University Humanities Faculties which have implemented a global ban on certain ideas and types of person that the ordinary man in the street might believe are centrist and harmless.
It should be remembered that the anti-terrorist justification for suppression of individuals and free speech has been used by every corporate state.
Most Western CEOs and board members are not evil people, although 20% are psychopaths, so why should we be afraid? The danger has arisen because the principle measure of moral good in the twenty first century is material well-being. It is very easy for a corporate CEO to equate the prosperity of corporations with global material well-being and hence believe that they are the ultimate moral source in society. To be head of Facebook AND believe that you hold the keys to global moral well-being puts a CEO in a terrible position. It is as if the Divine Right of Kings has returned to haunt us.
How do you motivate staff in a giant corporation? You teach them
corporate values. The biggest implied value is that the prosperity of
the corporation is a good thing, that it is morally good and saves the world. The corporate media
reinforce this message so that the whole population understands that
corporatism is a good thing. Anybody who attempts to portray such a good
thing as a threat is obviously a conspiracy theorist.
What has been missed in the desire of corporations to see themselves as good is that material well-being is not the only good and may not be the most important good (What of Freedom or Love?) and love of money becomes an evil once we have enough. What has also been missed is that democracies are based on the idea that the economy works for the People, the people do not exist to work for the economy. Corporations treat humanity as Human Resources for the benefit of corporations. The rallying cry of corporatists is "unity" whereas decent people believe in respect for each other.
The collision between freedom and corporatism is most evident in China. The Chinese have moved from operating a Marxist national corporation to a multi-corporate State. This new economic and social environment might be called “Chinese Capitalism”. This change has brought prosperity to the Chinese and must be a blessed relief for them after the Maoist years. Unfortunately the Chinese are not free and there is little prospect for their freedom. This means that if they complain about a polluting power station they are at risk from shadow banning and blacklisting, if they adopt a religion that displeases the state the same will happen. If they intimate that their new President for Life, Xi Jinping, must be a psychopath they may not be heard from again.
But Chinese corporations are only doing what Western corporations have started to do.
The Western corporate media have already taken the first steps down the road to removing freedom. The principal weapon used by the media is the suppression of news. This blacklisting and shadow banning of opponents and their views is the standard mode of operation of corporations.
Suppression of news was especially evident in the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK where “predictions” of what might happen after Brexit were given vast priority compared with what is actually happening now. The journalists involved knew that research had shown that the "predictions" of economists on such matters were worse than useless but covered them as if they were the entire campaign so that information about the UK-EU relationship could be suppressed. This led to a large proportion of the population feeling that they had been ill informed but not quite knowing how. The suppression of any real information about the EU was so effective that at least half of those who now feel cheated by the Brexit vote still believe that unanimity is required on most EU matters (ie:vetoes are widely possible) or that the UK-EU Trading position is highly beneficial to the UK. These are usually intelligent people who have simply been deprived of the truth by the media. The Journalists and comedians in the broadcast media take the corporate view because they are exceptionally careerist in a highly competitive atmosphere and their utter fear of shadow banning means they take on board the views of those who govern their careers with little question.
It is organised activity from multinational corporations such as Airbus, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BMW, Ryan Air
etc. etc. that has been exerting the pressure for the UK to remain in the EU
and Single Market. Not only do Multinational Corporations, those that reap the benefits of international trade, require the removal of borders to further their businesses but it is essential for Internet Retail Corporations to remove local and national opposition if they are to displace sales away from local businesses.
The growing influence of Corporations in the West is pointing our society along a path that terminates in Chinese Capitalism. Unfortunately the Trade Unions also believe in corporatism, being largely inspired by Marxism. The academic elite, from teachers to dons, are reared on public sector corporatism and tend to train their pupils and students to believe in it.
What is the answer? All of us must remember that there is more to life than material well-being, there is also freedom, love and much else besides that depends on freedom. Numerous corporations in a state are good for prosperity but allowing them to combine, especially allowing them to combine in International Groups like Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and Davos or the US Council on Foreign Relations is a terrible error. The involvement of corporate bosses in the public debate of political issues should be discouraged except where these narrowly impact on their business. In the UK the changes made to the BBC such as the implementation of the BBC Charter being put in the hands of Ofcom, a business organisation, and the damage done by the appointment as head of the BBC of one of the key players in the Luxembourg Corporate Tax Avoidance Scandal, Rona Fairhead, must be undone.
Most important of all, governments must realise that Small and Medium Sized enterprises (SMEs) are the core of a vibrant economy. These do not pose any threat to the political order and provide the diversity that makes the economy robust. SMEs provide 60% of all employment in the UK (compare with 17% public sector corporate most of rest - 23% - large commercial corporate). The primary aim of government economic policy must be to ensure the health of SMEs, the large corporations can take care of themselves. The SMEs are the heart of the free People. The emphasis of UK economic policy on attracting Foreign Investment by large foreign corporations rather than caring for SMEs is at the heart of the current UK Balance of Payments Crisis.
Not only are SMEs the core of the economy, they are also the soul of a free society because they contain many of the "masterless" men and women. The essence of freedom is not being a corporate drone.
The lobbying and otherwise corrupting of government by large corporations should be controlled. Certainly foreign companies like Goldman Sachs and Airbus should not have such enormous influence on government policy when the rest of the economy is more important by far than their concerns.
If we fail to recognise and tackle corporatism the future is bleak. The Chinese have already developed AI controlled systems that have access to all key data on their citizens from credit card transactions to car movements to ensure that the population behaves. Their approach is proving hugely successful and nearly all protest has been snuffed out. Such an approach, when linked to shadow banning, can be used to simply smother any attempt at freedom at birth.
Should the Corporatists win the current battle there is a huge danger that the world will enter a dark age in which it becomes "obvious" to everyone that material prosperity is the only moral good. The corporate media will drill this message into the population and all dissent will be suppressed for being obviously ignorant "popularism". As the Chinese have shown, the availability of automated surveillance methods means that once corporatism has captured the allegiance of more than half the people it will be able to rapidly gain control. Eventually there will be global government on the Chinese model.
I do not believe that the UK will lose the battle. Many young British people have been indoctrinated by corporatists but there is still a deep instinct amongst the British for freedom and there is still time for those who have been indoctrinated to recover.
See also: Globalization, Global Trade and Internationalism - Who Benefits? and Corporate funding of StrongerIn in the EU Referendum
Footnote:
It is interesting that the Trade Unions experienced their greatest power when they were allowed to combine so that general strikes could be threatened to apply pressure to individual corporations. Many countries have now passed laws to prevent this exercise of union power. They have not passed laws to prevent the abuse of corporate power, whether it be plotted in trade organisations, confederations of employers or the European Movement's Bilderberg Group.
Those who wish to homogenise the globe into a utopia for corporations have managed to identify culture with race. Some countries have right wing cultures and some have left wing cultures so political opinion can be attacked as racism where it argues against another political culture. Talking about "Chinese Capitalism" is then dangerously close to racism. The use of racism in this way in modern politics was pioneered by Corporate PR companies such as Bell-Pottinger who realised that it gave their corporate clients a way of influencing national politics without even mentioning the client or truly discussing any issue. PR firms advised on the EU Referendum and were successful in making Remain identify Leave as racists, Bell-Pottinger took the same approach in South Africa and when they were caught out everyone realised that this divisive method of political campaigning was evil. Any issue can be racist - for instance homogenising the world is racist because it abolishes racial difference or simply saying the Welsh are mucking up their NHS is racist. Any group can be the racist or victim but it is always the well funded corporate group that "wins" by claiming the moral high ground and dividing the People into opposing groups that hate.
Note 1
At the beginning of the 20th century Western corporations were largely isolated, competed with each other and did not have a common agenda except profit.
After the Second World War the largest corporations were invited to become members of transnational groups such as the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum (DAVOS) and, in the USA, the Council on Foreign Relations. By the end of the twentieth century these groups had developed a common narrative in the corporate world about the desirability of corporate activity. This narrative is as follows: Global Trade is always good and should not be hindered, Globalisation is a universal good. Production, labour and capital should be able to move freely around the globe. What is good for large corporations is, by definition, good for people because corporations are the generators of wealth and material wealth is the measure of “good”.
The Multinationals provide most of the input to, staff for and support for the IMF and WTO and lobby most other International Organisations. Few other lobbyists exist - when did you last go to a WTO meeting to lobby it?
The "International Order" is the level of government used by the Multinationals.
Note 2
Blacklisting of Trade Unionists is illegal according to the Employment Relations Act 1999. In the West it is organisations like “The Consulting Association” that linked together most UK construction companies so they could blacklist workers.
Marxist analysis of corporations:
On the final state of a Capitalist Society: “In a given society the limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.” Das Kapital V1,25,441
Marx proposed that the solution to corporate dominance was to make the entire state into a corporation run by the people. Of course we now know that such a state always ends up run by psychopaths (as do many large corporations).
”(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers. (vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.” (Communist Manifesto 1848)
Marx on Globalisation
“By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.” The Communist Manifesto
John Borneman,1999. CAN PUBLIC APOLOGIES CONTRIBUTE TO PEACE? AN ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION Anthropology of East Europe Review Vol. 17.No. 1 1999.
He describes the Shadow Banning employed by communist East Germany: “It [The Commission] determined, nonetheless, that her dismissal and punishment corresponded to a general pattern typical of the Stasi in the 1960s and 1970s. That pattern was to blacklist people who voiced political opinions without taking actual formal legal action against them and without systematically documenting the measures taken. Thereafter such people usually suffered downward mobility in their careers. “
24/08/18
Corporatism is the desire to see large Corporations become the principle economic and social force in the world. History will record that the 21st century ushered in the great battle between Corporatism and Freedom. We are not witnessing the battle between the "Liberal" elite and the People, we are witnessing a battle between the "Corporate Elite" and the People.
If you work for a large Corporation you are expected to absorb the corporate "values", "vision" and "culture". Most corporate employees accept the message without question and many commit themselves to the company or government department etc. Even "casual" clothing, such as everyone wearing jeans and tee-shirts, can become a Corporate tool to enhance commitment. If you browse through the "Human Resources" literature you will find an enormous amount of academic work on motivating people to be part of the Corporate model.
Large Western corporations are in many ways like small communist states and this is no coincidence, Karl Marx was so impressed by the new corporate world of the nineteenth century that he believed the State should be a single corporation (See Das Kapital) and this became the essence of communism. By the twentieth century power in the world was divided between countries that had Marxist state corporations and the Capitalist West. In the capitalist West there were many large corporations in each State as well as many smaller enterprises which provided much of the creative impetus in Western economies and societies.
Politicians in Marxist countries controlled the State corporation which controlled everyone. They used clumsy, prototype versions of the indoctrination techniques that are applied by modern large corporations but despite this were able to achieve dedication amongst their employees for 70 years.
At the same time as Marxism was on the rise the Western corporations became powerful but politicians in the West were not always controlled by them. The advantage of the independent Western corporation is that it can fail and be swept away without bloodshed. The UK has been extremely fortunate to have resisted the growth of public and private sector corporations so that even today they are only 40% of the workforce. Unfortunately, despite the fact that 60% of workers are not employed by large corporations or government, the corporate media portrays the UK in corporatist terms.
The Marxist Corporation failed to provide creativity and innovation and Marxism was rejected globally in the late twentieth century because it was an economic failure as well as socially repressive. However, as Marx had discovered, the real seat of power in a society lies with large corporations and the path to ultimate power lies in uniting them. It is this desire to unite corporations that is Corporatism.
What you will read below should shock you because you will realize that we are complacently slipping into a world controlled by corporations and are moving towards Chinese Capitalism with scarcely a murmur of public dissent.
 |
| (Blair gets £2m a year from JP Morgan) |
Actions by Corporations against individuals and political movements only become really dangerous when a single corporation has a monopoly of power or the corporations begin to act together. There were strong warnings about Western corporations acting together in the late twentieth century but the corporations had already amassed the media power to dismiss the various warnings about the European Movement's Bilderberg Group, Davos etc. as conspiracy theories. (They mounted a brilliant disinformation campaign that smeared any criticism of secret meetings between the most powerful people in the world as "tin hatted bollocks"). It is amazing how, only a decade after the Bankers stole hundreds of billions of pounds from the public with scarcely a prosecution mounted, so many people still believe the corporate media story that Corporations lack power, never conspire together and could not possibly do them any harm.
Apart from having the wealth of Croesus, how do large corporations exercise control over individuals in society at large? During the twentieth century both the communist national corporations and the Western commercial corporations developed a method of blacklisting and shadow banning to deal with opposition. In the UK the scandal of the blacklisting of 3200 construction workers exposed what was happening. Blacklisting undoubtedly continues in the UK because it is only illegal to blacklist Trade Unionists ( See (2) and NHS Blacklisting). In Marxist countries the State Corporations “shadow banned” those who were found to be undesirable. This involved the State Corporation subtly denying employment prospects for those who were slightly offensive to corporate values. The victims would have no idea that the state was doing this to them. This allowed the state to relegate those who were most problematical to the lowest paid jobs to remove their influence (See for instance Borneman,1999). Shadow banning was the most used method of control in the totalitarian Eastern Bloc. It works brilliantly, especially on journalists and media employees, and scarcely seems to be a "crime". You haven't even noticed it (clue: "shadow" banning and "black"-listing mean they are kept quiet).
Blacklisting and Shadow Banning are only effective if they are well organised between corporations or implemented by a corporation that has virtually monopoly powers. Shadow banning is spectacularly successful in the media where journalists and comedians depend on patronage.
In the twenty first century Western corporate power has grown immensely. The largest multinational corporations have formed powerful collaborative groups (Note 1) and, perhaps more importantly, the Internet has fallen under the control of a handful of corporations. Twitter, owned by a group of billionaires, uses Shadow Banning liberally, much to the applause of the corporate media who extol its virtues as a way of fighting terrorism and racism. Facebook also shadow bans its users as does Reddit. Even non-commercial enterprises use Shadow Banning, the most egregious example is University Humanities Faculties which have implemented a global ban on certain ideas and types of person that the ordinary man in the street might believe are centrist and harmless.
It should be remembered that the anti-terrorist justification for suppression of individuals and free speech has been used by every corporate state.
Most Western CEOs and board members are not evil people, although 20% are psychopaths, so why should we be afraid? The danger has arisen because the principle measure of moral good in the twenty first century is material well-being. It is very easy for a corporate CEO to equate the prosperity of corporations with global material well-being and hence believe that they are the ultimate moral source in society. To be head of Facebook AND believe that you hold the keys to global moral well-being puts a CEO in a terrible position. It is as if the Divine Right of Kings has returned to haunt us.
 |
| Facebook Boss in T Shirt |
What has been missed in the desire of corporations to see themselves as good is that material well-being is not the only good and may not be the most important good (What of Freedom or Love?) and love of money becomes an evil once we have enough. What has also been missed is that democracies are based on the idea that the economy works for the People, the people do not exist to work for the economy. Corporations treat humanity as Human Resources for the benefit of corporations. The rallying cry of corporatists is "unity" whereas decent people believe in respect for each other.
The collision between freedom and corporatism is most evident in China. The Chinese have moved from operating a Marxist national corporation to a multi-corporate State. This new economic and social environment might be called “Chinese Capitalism”. This change has brought prosperity to the Chinese and must be a blessed relief for them after the Maoist years. Unfortunately the Chinese are not free and there is little prospect for their freedom. This means that if they complain about a polluting power station they are at risk from shadow banning and blacklisting, if they adopt a religion that displeases the state the same will happen. If they intimate that their new President for Life, Xi Jinping, must be a psychopath they may not be heard from again.
But Chinese corporations are only doing what Western corporations have started to do.
The Western corporate media have already taken the first steps down the road to removing freedom. The principal weapon used by the media is the suppression of news. This blacklisting and shadow banning of opponents and their views is the standard mode of operation of corporations.
Suppression of news was especially evident in the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK where “predictions” of what might happen after Brexit were given vast priority compared with what is actually happening now. The journalists involved knew that research had shown that the "predictions" of economists on such matters were worse than useless but covered them as if they were the entire campaign so that information about the UK-EU relationship could be suppressed. This led to a large proportion of the population feeling that they had been ill informed but not quite knowing how. The suppression of any real information about the EU was so effective that at least half of those who now feel cheated by the Brexit vote still believe that unanimity is required on most EU matters (ie:vetoes are widely possible) or that the UK-EU Trading position is highly beneficial to the UK. These are usually intelligent people who have simply been deprived of the truth by the media. The Journalists and comedians in the broadcast media take the corporate view because they are exceptionally careerist in a highly competitive atmosphere and their utter fear of shadow banning means they take on board the views of those who govern their careers with little question.
 |
| Senior BBC journalist displaying loyalty for the WEF (DAVOS) |
The growing influence of Corporations in the West is pointing our society along a path that terminates in Chinese Capitalism. Unfortunately the Trade Unions also believe in corporatism, being largely inspired by Marxism. The academic elite, from teachers to dons, are reared on public sector corporatism and tend to train their pupils and students to believe in it.
What is the answer? All of us must remember that there is more to life than material well-being, there is also freedom, love and much else besides that depends on freedom. Numerous corporations in a state are good for prosperity but allowing them to combine, especially allowing them to combine in International Groups like Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and Davos or the US Council on Foreign Relations is a terrible error. The involvement of corporate bosses in the public debate of political issues should be discouraged except where these narrowly impact on their business. In the UK the changes made to the BBC such as the implementation of the BBC Charter being put in the hands of Ofcom, a business organisation, and the damage done by the appointment as head of the BBC of one of the key players in the Luxembourg Corporate Tax Avoidance Scandal, Rona Fairhead, must be undone.
Most important of all, governments must realise that Small and Medium Sized enterprises (SMEs) are the core of a vibrant economy. These do not pose any threat to the political order and provide the diversity that makes the economy robust. SMEs provide 60% of all employment in the UK (compare with 17% public sector corporate most of rest - 23% - large commercial corporate). The primary aim of government economic policy must be to ensure the health of SMEs, the large corporations can take care of themselves. The SMEs are the heart of the free People. The emphasis of UK economic policy on attracting Foreign Investment by large foreign corporations rather than caring for SMEs is at the heart of the current UK Balance of Payments Crisis.
Not only are SMEs the core of the economy, they are also the soul of a free society because they contain many of the "masterless" men and women. The essence of freedom is not being a corporate drone.
The lobbying and otherwise corrupting of government by large corporations should be controlled. Certainly foreign companies like Goldman Sachs and Airbus should not have such enormous influence on government policy when the rest of the economy is more important by far than their concerns.
If we fail to recognise and tackle corporatism the future is bleak. The Chinese have already developed AI controlled systems that have access to all key data on their citizens from credit card transactions to car movements to ensure that the population behaves. Their approach is proving hugely successful and nearly all protest has been snuffed out. Such an approach, when linked to shadow banning, can be used to simply smother any attempt at freedom at birth.
Should the Corporatists win the current battle there is a huge danger that the world will enter a dark age in which it becomes "obvious" to everyone that material prosperity is the only moral good. The corporate media will drill this message into the population and all dissent will be suppressed for being obviously ignorant "popularism". As the Chinese have shown, the availability of automated surveillance methods means that once corporatism has captured the allegiance of more than half the people it will be able to rapidly gain control. Eventually there will be global government on the Chinese model.
I do not believe that the UK will lose the battle. Many young British people have been indoctrinated by corporatists but there is still a deep instinct amongst the British for freedom and there is still time for those who have been indoctrinated to recover.
See also: Globalization, Global Trade and Internationalism - Who Benefits? and Corporate funding of StrongerIn in the EU Referendum
Footnote:
It is interesting that the Trade Unions experienced their greatest power when they were allowed to combine so that general strikes could be threatened to apply pressure to individual corporations. Many countries have now passed laws to prevent this exercise of union power. They have not passed laws to prevent the abuse of corporate power, whether it be plotted in trade organisations, confederations of employers or the European Movement's Bilderberg Group.
Those who wish to homogenise the globe into a utopia for corporations have managed to identify culture with race. Some countries have right wing cultures and some have left wing cultures so political opinion can be attacked as racism where it argues against another political culture. Talking about "Chinese Capitalism" is then dangerously close to racism. The use of racism in this way in modern politics was pioneered by Corporate PR companies such as Bell-Pottinger who realised that it gave their corporate clients a way of influencing national politics without even mentioning the client or truly discussing any issue. PR firms advised on the EU Referendum and were successful in making Remain identify Leave as racists, Bell-Pottinger took the same approach in South Africa and when they were caught out everyone realised that this divisive method of political campaigning was evil. Any issue can be racist - for instance homogenising the world is racist because it abolishes racial difference or simply saying the Welsh are mucking up their NHS is racist. Any group can be the racist or victim but it is always the well funded corporate group that "wins" by claiming the moral high ground and dividing the People into opposing groups that hate.
Note 1
At the beginning of the 20th century Western corporations were largely isolated, competed with each other and did not have a common agenda except profit.
After the Second World War the largest corporations were invited to become members of transnational groups such as the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum (DAVOS) and, in the USA, the Council on Foreign Relations. By the end of the twentieth century these groups had developed a common narrative in the corporate world about the desirability of corporate activity. This narrative is as follows: Global Trade is always good and should not be hindered, Globalisation is a universal good. Production, labour and capital should be able to move freely around the globe. What is good for large corporations is, by definition, good for people because corporations are the generators of wealth and material wealth is the measure of “good”.
The Multinationals provide most of the input to, staff for and support for the IMF and WTO and lobby most other International Organisations. Few other lobbyists exist - when did you last go to a WTO meeting to lobby it?
Note 2
Blacklisting of Trade Unionists is illegal according to the Employment Relations Act 1999. In the West it is organisations like “The Consulting Association” that linked together most UK construction companies so they could blacklist workers.
Marxist analysis of corporations:
On the final state of a Capitalist Society: “In a given society the limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.” Das Kapital V1,25,441
Marx proposed that the solution to corporate dominance was to make the entire state into a corporation run by the people. Of course we now know that such a state always ends up run by psychopaths (as do many large corporations).
”(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers. (vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.” (Communist Manifesto 1848)
Marx on Globalisation
“By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.” The Communist Manifesto
John Borneman,1999. CAN PUBLIC APOLOGIES CONTRIBUTE TO PEACE? AN ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION Anthropology of East Europe Review Vol. 17.No. 1 1999.
He describes the Shadow Banning employed by communist East Germany: “It [The Commission] determined, nonetheless, that her dismissal and punishment corresponded to a general pattern typical of the Stasi in the 1960s and 1970s. That pattern was to blacklist people who voiced political opinions without taking actual formal legal action against them and without systematically documenting the measures taken. Thereafter such people usually suffered downward mobility in their careers. “
24/08/18
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