Corporatism. . . .

To some basic degree I have always understood the corporatist mentality. After all, one only has to read Fredrick Engles' The Condition of the Working-Class to know to what inhuman lengths capitalists will go to make profits. Children working in coal-mines for 16 hours a day, women chained to weaving looms, it is all there. And people today who think that capitalists wouldn't do the same thing today if they could are naive. After all, they do, in fact, do many of the same things in the Third World today. And corporatism is even worse than traditional capitalism because it removes people further from the point of exploitation so they can be more easily indifferent to the immoral acts of the drive for profit.

So in theory it is pretty simple: capitalists will exploit people to the point of death to make money and if they feel some pangs of ethics they will either construct an elaborate ideological justification for what they are doing or they will remove the factories to far off countries where they don't have to think about the degree of exploitation.

What has always amazed me is not that capitalists do this sort of thing, what I find curious is that they have been able to sell a corporate agenda to so many average people against whose interest this ideology so obviously acts. They have done this through a rather complex combination of lying and misrepresentation. They have trained an army of technocrats who, at every turn, tell us the most outrageous lies about globalization, taxation, unions, the actions of large corporate bodies, and roll that labour plays in the creation of wealth.

A century and a half ago republicans and leftist naively thought that universal suffrage would solve many of the problematic and exploitative aspects of capitalism because they thought that people would elect representatives who would act in their interests. The problem is, however, that over time, the rich and powerful trained their economists and technocrats to essentially convince people that they HAVE to choose certain kinds of economic policies and that a more cooperative society is simply impossible. As a result, much like war, many of the most exploited have been cheerleaders in their own exploitation.

But it is all a lie. A very large, elaborately constructed lie. All the wealth of a nation, of the world, comes from the labours of people who make things and grow things, not from people who push papers around. And if all those people decide to create a cooperative society in which 90% of the wealth isn't in the hands of 10% of the population, then that is precisely what they can do. We are many, they are few.