Okay, I admit that I’m prone to dark pessimism and apocalyptic thought, but with today’s Supreme Court decision I can’t help but feeling that we’re witnessing the beginning plot points of some dark, dystopian cyber-punk novel coming to life. In effect, the Supreme Court has now granted corporations the freedom to use unlimited money to support and oppose candidates and legislation of their choice. Tell me I’m over-reacting here. With this decision it is now going to become exceedingly difficult for individuals and small activist groups to get any representation whatsoever as they simply do not have the economic means to compete with these forces.
But the situation is worse than this. Many, I’m sure, will grant that Obama has been a tremendous disappointment in this first year of his presidency. On just about every issue he has advocated center-right policies that disproportionately benefit large moneyed interests. Many are feeling as if he was a Trojan horse, but I’m not sure this is entirely the case. The issue seems to be less about Obama the person and whatever ideology he advocates (who knows what that might be at this point), but about certain constitutive structural issues organizing Washington. Reflecting on the failure of Hillary Clinton’s attempts at health care reform during the 90s, this administration and congress, I suspect, have felt as if they’ve had to walk on egg shells and make crap deals with the private sector lest they unleash the dogs of war in the form of ad campaigns that destroy any legislation whatsoever they attempt to pass. This is a good deal of what happened under Clinton’s watch with the notorious anti-healthcare ads.
read on!
If my read is right, this situation is going to become exponentially magnified as a result of this new ruling such that all politicians will constantly have to walk on eggshells lest they earn the wrath of these extremely wealthy interests. Yes, yes, this is nothing new, but it’s going to get much worse. In my view we’re living in a critical time with respect to the environment and energy issues. Changes need to be made now if economic, environmental, and military disaster is to be averted in the not too distant future. This now is going to be exceedingly difficult to accomplish in any sort of meaningful way. Folks will say “but we haven’t lost our freedom of speech, we can still use the internet, we can still organize.” However, keep in mind that the communications corporations have been working diligently to control the internet and internet forms of communication and that with this ruling this task will become all the easier for them. Venues such as this might not be available as means of organization and spaces of countering reigning distortions of facts in the near future. But perhaps I’m just exaggerating, blowing things out of proportion, and it’s not as bad as all this.
Nonetheless, I keep thinking about how the change from feudal economy to capitalist economy took place during the Enlightenment. You had the emergence of a new class that accumulated massive wealth as a result of trade while meanwhile the aristocracy increasingly lost their wealth. As in all cases where groups get a bit of money in their pocket, they wanted a bigger piece of the pie where governance was concerned and the aristocracy and church couldn’t argue as their wealth had become so deflated and they were now relying on this class for their own livelihood. The great democratic revolutions were basically just the dotting of the i’s and the signing of the papers in a process that had already been well under way for a long time.
Are we witnessing something similar today with the corporations? With the rise of the multi-national corporation the nation-state has increasingly become an endangered species as these institutions are fluid and porous, being tied to no particular geography, and therefore becoming sovereign entities in their own right. Because they are tied to no particular geography (being multi-nationals and all), they also are bound by no particular constitution or set of legal constraints. Additionally, should state based officials attempt to heavily regulate these institutions they find that their days are numbered because the corporation can just pick up its ball and move elsewhere, thereby taking away jobs as well and thereby imperiling the re-election of the official. Their only choice is to suck it up and eat the shit-sandwich of the corporation. So increasingly the notion of representative politics disappears or becomes erased altogether. Hell, these institutions (I guess we’re supposed to call them “persons” now as they have free speech) even have their own private armies. Blackwater, for example, is 20,000 strong in Colorado, with its own artillery, helicopters, armored vehicles, and so on. And perhaps one of the most frightening things I’ve ever heard about Blackwater is that they only contribute to one political party, the Republicans. What kind of corporation doesn’t hedge its bets? It’s not unlikely that all these institutions, at some point, will all have their own private armies. I remember clearly visiting my father at his office one day, a highly placed pharmaceutical research institution, and encountering a swath of guards with menacing looking automatic weapons hung from their shoulders. “What’s your business here son?”, a hand resting lightly on the dark, well-oiled device of destruction. Later, when I finally got to my father, he said “you can’t just come here like this, it’s dangerous.”
With the end of constitutional orders, should this occur, what will our new world look like. We won’t, for example, be citizens of anything any longer. Perhaps instead of being citizens tied to a geography we will instead become share holders, members, or workers of corporations that form a new type of politics that we can scarcely imagine or understand within the framework of our current traditions and assumptions and where political conflict becomes some strange conflict among corporate entities attempting to maximize their share of the market and the resources. In some respects this could be a promising future as perhaps it would lead to something like international law and representation, allowing for the founding of a new common where we no longer thought in terms of national interests (“it’s good for ‘Merica, who the hell cares if it screws the rest of the world!”) but instead think in terms of global interests. But somehow I doubt it. Call me cynical. Most fundamentally, however, when such powerful and wealthy groups control the flow of information, what gets heard, are capable of drowning everything else, or, at the very least, are capable of making us believe that all information is already contaminated and false, representing some disguised nefarious interest such that we can trust nothing, are capable of criminalizing forms of organization like unions, and when they control governmental representation, how is it possible to fight back in any meaningful way. I remember that really awful science fiction film with Emilio Estevez and Mic Jagger, Freejack. In this dark future the corporations controlled everything. The people at the feet of the great sky scrapers scurried about with no representation or power whatsoever. Whereas the people in the sky scrapers controlled everything. Is that where we’re heading or do I need to lay off the cyber-punk dystopian novels?
January 22, 2010 at 5:11 am
Go visit Mike Malloy and listen to his comments. There is a political larva here.
January 22, 2010 at 9:13 am
Perhaps I’m being naive, but somehow this particular decision doesn’t bother me much. The only thing it changed is that corporations (and non-profits and unions) can now expressly advocate for or against a candidate in the N days before an election. The things that bug me more, like issue advocacy, were never banned in the first place. Compared to the more pervasive influence on issues and debates, allowing them to now also say “we want you to vote against Joe” seems sort of minor.
January 22, 2010 at 4:47 pm
It’s a crowded ledge.
http://freespeechforpeople.org/
January 22, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Mark, that was my instinctive response, too. Although the whole thing does signal a disturbing trend.
January 22, 2010 at 5:34 pm
“I can’t help but feeling that we’re witnessing the beginning plot points of some dark, dystopian cyber-punk novel coming to life.”
It’s my feeling that wherever we’ve been worried about being taken to for the past fifty or sixty years, we are there; very little that was described by the Grand Masters of Post War Dystopian Sci Fi Pulp (the stories from whom I gobbled as a boy) isn’t now such a common feature of daily life that it’s hard to remember, and point out, off the top of my head:
…from Orwell’s laughably cliché-prophetic CCTV (you’ve heard of the council flats that are under 24-hour interior surveillance, in the UK, as a pilot program?) to Burgess’ post-crash, ultra-violent London (only instead of Nadsat the superpower-colonized yoof speak Nadsat’s Yankee antithesis: hip-hopese) to Huxley’s oppressed-with-decadence citizen-airheads, to oil wars, mineral wars, remote war, endless war, cloning, subcutaneous chip ID, post-literacy, viral plagues, global warming, video game pathologies, the mainstream sports-war-porno complex, wall-sized TV-screens featuring gladiatorial violence, the physical atrophy of the citizen-spectator, genetically-modified ecosystems, hi-tech jihad, water shortages, the rise of Sparta, the global Super State, tasers, lethal robots, cult religions trumping science, robots as sex objects, money as digital credit, psycho-tropically convenience-medicated pre-schoolers, civilian detention camps…
Steven Augustine from thread no. 7 on http://staugustine2.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/the-endless-thread-3-0/#comment-1548
January 22, 2010 at 6:16 pm
In the Jefferson memorial they have an excerpt from a letter “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” The Court conservatives seem have taken this to heart only in that they now allow for a “corporate person” whose power is unlimited, a superman undreamed by DC comics or Nietzsche. But clearly this violates the founders basic notions of equity and a conviction that revolution is the necessary response to tyranny. Therefore, their “innovation” incorporates only that which violates the axioms of freedom and not the recognition that such powers, any more than those of George III, can be compatible with democracy. So I agree with you, unfortunately. Two roads remain. Obama — and I too am deeply disappointed — showed that web funding can perhaps match industrial spending, but this leads to a flood of sound bites, left and right, that cancel complexity and ablate sensibility. Or there is global revolution.
January 22, 2010 at 6:22 pm
IMO the advocation of a public sector as an absolute other of the corporate regime and market place is an idealism no one can really make productive anymore.
What I find more interesting in the context of the philosophies discussed here than the end of Obamas messianism is how Google touches China in a diplomatic incident.
What happens to companies when they overtly become political actors? Do they rule the masses from within their glass-steel towers or does political semantics rather becomes a part of their corporate identity and a momentum in their competition ( what is the impact of Googles removal of its search engine from China on Baidus expansion outside of its home country? ). What if the answer to corporate fascism is not so much more regulation and state fascism but selection which is after all an evolutionary force? What if politics is going to infect economical actors more than they repress us in some sort of cyberpunk conspiracy?
January 22, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Predatory capitalism or another dialectical moment in the movement of the divine? Perhaps, Marx got it right in form, but not in the content of economic determinism; however, when the details dissolve into footnotes, legal fictions were conferred by human beings to have more “reality” (power, rights, money, property, life, resources) than human beings. This contradiction cannot be resolved politically for it is the source.
January 22, 2010 at 8:44 pm
In new zealand there are limits to election campaign spending and limits to donations.
January 23, 2010 at 4:41 am
This is decision is quite disturbing and people should protest it. It seems crazy to me that millions of people protested the start of the Iraq, but it was far too late to do anything about it. This is because corporations had already made the decision to use Iraq for privatization and reconstruction schemes worth billions. If you wait until it becomes a matter of policy, it’s already too late. People on the ‘left,’ or ‘progressives,’ or whatever they want to call themselves, as well as the everyday citizen, have got to get into the habit of protesting corporations and their actions. Just concentrating on government, and corporate government, is no longer enough. We have to attack the problem at its source. We have to attack the corporation.
TOG
January 23, 2010 at 4:38 pm
Jodi Dean has a good post:
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2010/01/all-hail-our-corporate-overloads.html
January 23, 2010 at 6:21 pm
The issue of Peak Oil may have some bearing on the dystopian scenario you outlined. When the primary energetic resource of industrial civilization is gone, the corporate system may no longer serve as a viable system of economic (let alone social and political) organization. But then again, perhaps they’ll find a substitute for petroleum.
January 23, 2010 at 8:06 pm
Since corporations are now “persons,” the obvious question remains: “what is a person?” This is philosophy 101, The Dialogues of Plato, may Socrates forgive the Supreme Court for not defining their terms, thus knowing what they are talking about. Mary Anne Warren gave it shot, but her counterfactual arguments of conscious, would include animals. “Personhood” remains undefined and incoherent. For starters, it is self-evident that a person is a human being. It follows that The Supreme Court believes that coorporations are human beings; if so, the burden is upon them to prove it. So what is a “person?” They need philosophical help.
January 23, 2010 at 8:33 pm
Aaron,
I hope, though my cynicism suggests to me that they’ll drag their feet until the last minute and then the change will be so much that you’ll still get the economic upheaval (though it might right itself in a few years). Interesting observation about the viability of corporations in such a scenario.
January 23, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Just to add, Aaron, I wasn’t linking the economic issues exclusively to peak oil and its consequences. Global warming will have a pretty significant impact on agriculture that will strongly impact economy. It might even have a larger impact.
January 24, 2010 at 12:09 am
Jack, legal and moral personhood is not a biological concept. You are fundamentally confused in your terms. There is an extensive legal and philosophical literature on the concept.
January 24, 2010 at 2:15 am
Craig, I acknowledged this distinction several times. The distinction is clear in my mind, but not in the Supreme Court. You may wish to listed to the justices debate the point:
http://www.fsrn.org/audio/activists-push-abolish-%E2%80%98corporate-personhood%E2%80%99-wake-supreme-court-decision/6100
Also, there is a clear history of the intentional equivication by the court:
http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Corporate_personhood/
“Not a single justice wanted to explain how an amendment about ex-slaves had converted artificial entities into the legal equivalent of natural persons. This opinion without explanation, given before argument had even been heard, became the law of the United States of America. No state or federal legislature passed or even discussed it; no Amendment to the Constitution was deemed necessary; the citizens were simply informed that they had a mistaken view about corporations, if they were informed at all. Future Supreme Courts refused to even consider the question, preferring to build on it, though occasionally future justices unsuccessfully sought to raise the question again.”
January 24, 2010 at 2:28 am
Craig, I think I gave your the wrong site for the debate:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/01/supreme-court-opens-floodgates-on-2010-spending.html
January 24, 2010 at 2:47 am
Craig,
I’m a bit confused as to how you’re inferring that Jack is claiming that “personhood” is a biological concept from his remarks.
January 24, 2010 at 3:26 am
Since corporations are now “persons,” the obvious question remains: “what is a person? […] For starters, it is self-evident that a person is a human being.”
Corporations are “now” persons. They have been “persons” for nearly a thousand years! For better or for worse, the recent SCOTUS decision merely clarifies the obvious: persons are entitled to certain rights; corporations are persons; ergo, they are entitled to certain rights. The concept of personhood is designed to circumvent the identity between “person” and “human being.” Indeed, it is clearly the case that not all “human beings” are “persons” in the relevant sense–a fetus, for instance, or the severely mentally handicapped.
January 24, 2010 at 11:37 am
I highly recommend Jodi Dean’s blog/published work on this issue. She is one of the few political theorists engaging with these issues of information technology and politics in a way that avoids the by now well worn celebrationist/globalisationist/fatalist cliches that tend to dominate these discussions.
I won’t/can’t paraphrase her arguments but they’re worth a look.
See, for example: “Why the net is not a public sphere” and “Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of politics”. See also: http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/
My particular input to this conversation would be to say that the issue of corporations (or governments for that matter) controlling more of the ‘net is a serious issue but one that should not be oversimplified. It is unlikely that any Western organisation is going to make a habit of shutting down blogs just because they don’t like their content – it is not, strictly speaking, therefore an issue of ‘censorship’ as such. This is not the way of capital – there are far more effective means of maintaining the discourses of the powerful and preventing the promulgation of competing/dissenting messages. It is much easier and more efficient to have well oiled, permanently staffed legal, PR and lobbying machines to crush dissidenting thought than to ‘pull the plug’ on anything (wasn’t it ever thus?). The more direct acts of censorship seen in China (the sorts of things which the above post would seem to be fearing) are the result of a very different political culture that has not developed the degrees of subtlety attained in the Euro-Americas. It is simply a more efficient system to allow ‘free speech’ universally but massively disproportionately (equality of quality but not of quantity) because, in this ‘Internet age’, the vast majority of ‘dissent’ simply disappears into the e-ether and that which doesn’t can be isolated and disrupted/destroyed by conventional means – the same means which have been so effective for decades: lobby, slander, sue, rinse, repeat. Hence the significance of the Supreme Court ruling.
In terms of ‘the ledge’ then: I would not concur with the sense of impending doom implied above but nor would I subscribe to the e-utopian naivities that often seem to be the only alternative (at least insofar as the issue of the use of the internet as a medium for dissenting communication is concerned – I don’t have time to go into the rest of it).
I don’t think that this is an apocalyptic moment simply because it is making a terrible situation worse rather than a good situation bad or a middling situation troublesome. It is, then, the latest act in a continuing, monumentally depressing saga not the moment all that is light went dark, nor even the first moment of dusk. These kinds of things are hardly new – the U.S. has been in its biggest businesses’ pockets for decades if not centuries (and it’s not just the U.S. – look at how much influence the British East India Company had over the British government (never mind running the subcontinent itself!)).
So in other words “don’t do it!” but, having said that, the ledge is always an option.
January 24, 2010 at 12:40 pm
Although I agree with your general pessimism regarding the unlimited funding of political candidates and legislation I think your analysis in regards to the state contains a glaring omission. If there is one notion that has been completely blown away by the banking crisis of the last two years it’s that the hegemony of the corporate world has been largely based on fantasy. In the end it was the state using our tax monies that propped up the free market dream of an autonomous corporate world where state intervention was unnecessary.
It seems that you are still believing the neo-liberal rhetoric that the system as a whole was stable but only that something, some excess disturbed the balance. Obama’s recent “declaration of war” against the banking bonus culture seems to feed into this populist desire for stabilisation of fantasy which they hope will allow people to continue dreaming. I’m in agreement with some other commentators, Slavoj Zizek being one who sees this kind of mega state intervention as becoming characteristic of a new trend in capitalism. After the bail outs, with the state practically owning many of the major banks (at least here in the UK) the distinction between state and market is no longer what it was. If there is going to be some dystopian future (and I do generally follow your apocalypticism here) then I think its determining moments will not be on the side of the market in the sense of greater and greater intrusion of free market forces into the political sphere and private lives of citizens, but rather from a gradual disintegration of the distinction between state and market by the necessity of state control and regulation of those forces in order to keep the system running. In effect the model is more like China, an authoritarian state capitalism than the corporate hell of Terminator.
January 24, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Perc,
I agree. I Don’t see governments shutting down specific blogs intentionally. Rather I see something quite different potentially happening. Through legislation bandwith becomes a commodity controlled by various communications corporations and the free space of the net is destroyed as a consequence because it becomes too expensive to maintain small platforms. In the next step, internet users end up purchasing internet packages that are not unlike cable packages that highly limit what sort of material and platforms are available. In other words, we get something like the commodification of information and the standardization that goes with that sort of commodification. The issue is thus not one of direct and concerted censorship, but rather attrition. This legislation is being heatedly debated in the United States right now.
January 24, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Xaven,
I’m a bit perplexed by your remarks here as it seems to be a confirmation of my thesis, not a critique of it. You write:
This is exactly the point with respect to the decline of the nation-state. What you get is a state that is now an arm of the corporate structure rather than an autonomous structure. In other words, because of the dynamics of this globalization it becomes impossible for the state to function separately from these new entities. What you then get is a new form of the political which is something like the “corpolitical”. That aside, I’m agree with the thesis that the neo-liberal idea of free markets has always been a fantasy.
January 25, 2010 at 7:17 am
This has inspired me to try and outline something of the history of the concept of personhood, particularly in relationship to ownership and corporations, with, of course, an eye towards animals.
http://criticalanimal.blogspot.com/2010/01/history-of-concept-of-person.html
April 11, 2010 at 7:33 pm
The bit I like best about Freejack is their constant reference to the threat of a diminished ozone layer and all of the health problems that it caused. Here were are, 1 year after “the future” and the we now know that the ozone crisis of the 1990’s sorted itself out and the ozone layer thickened back up. Should we expect a Freejack 2, where global warming is threatening our survival and then I’ll meet you all back here in another 18 years to talk about what happened ;-)