Throughout a great deal of my blog postings, you’ll likely read an awful lot of pretty fierce criticism of corporatism, often referred to on this blog as ‘the corporatist interest’ or the ‘Military Industrial Complex’, but obviously not everybody is enlightened as to what corporatism happens to be and so here is an attempt to give a brief explanation. As well as this being a brief explanation of what corporatism happens to be, this is also an explanation as to why it is I campaign hard against corporatism.
Corporatism is basically fascism. To quote Benito Mussolini that man who pioneered fascism: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” With that quote Mussolini clearly explained that fascism in the strictest of definitions is corporatism. But though corporatism is pretty much fascism, the problem with the contemporary political zeitgeist is that fascism has taken on different connotations and therefore it’s preferable to say the system of political governance we live under is corporatism. However, it wouldn’t be melodramatic to say we live in a fascist state.
For those who deny that we live in either a fascist or corporatist state I’d remind them of Mussolini’s quote. Doesn’t the merger of state and corporate power sound awfully familiar to the system of governance that we currently have, particularly in Europe, Japan and of course the US.
We all know that that the corporatist interest gets favours from governments, and if the corporatist interest doesn’t it will bribe or bully until it does. Many of us have woken up to the reality that in many ways government is pretty much just a front for corporate power. Whatever the corporatist interest wants then governments will merely doing their bidding, whether its screwing up the environment or waging war.
Afghanistan, Iraq, the war on terrorism, the rise of fundamentalism, the dumbing down of the mass media, the loss of liberty, all of which in can be attributed to corporatist greed to a lesser or greater degree. This is neither the opinion of a conspiracy nut an anti-capitalist lefty militant.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy nut to work out this stuff out nor do you have to be some anti-capitalist lefty to be a critic of the corporate interest.
Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists have often been accused of either supporting corporatism kind of by default because they vigorously support free market capitalism.
Writing as somebody who could be described as libertarian I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, libertarians support free markets but they support there being a free market unfettered by government, and in the case of anarcho-capitalists without there being government at all!
Libertarians support a free market where everybody has far greater freedom of opportunity to sell their goods and services. If there is a free market unfettered from government intervention, then corporations wouldn’t get protection and favours from government, therefore businesses as in corporations wouldn’t be as monolithic, which would free up the free market for more businesses to offer goods and services, which would benefit the consumer as there would be more competing in the free market then the free market would be more competitive thus benefiting the consumer.
Libertarians do not support the present phoney capitalistic system we have at the moment which is in fact fascistic. Libertarians definitely don’t support the present system where the corporatist interest has the apparatus of government to manipulate the market in their favour, keeping the little man down. This is why libertarians absolutely oppose corporate welfare which government dishes out because it perpetrates the fascistic state and the loss of liberty.
Whereas libertarians staunchly oppose corporate welfare, both the mainstream left and right support some form of corporate welfare, whether it be subsidies, tax breaks, legislative favouritism or diverting justice. Whether Labour or Conservative or Democrat or Republican they support corporate welfare and therefore the fascistic state because they are more or less owned by the corporatist interest. If elected representatives ever did represent the little man, they certainly no longer do; they only represent whoever bribes them the most and therefore owns them the interests of corporate power.
Corporatism is a threat individual liberty and a threat to individual sovereignty, as when there are governmental executives, legislative bodies and judiciaries under the heavy influence of corporate power. The ability for an individual to say no to being controlled and enslaved is seriously under threat from the corporate power and corporate greed; for the corporatist interest doesn’t want you to be an individualist capable of free choice but an obedient automaton. The corporatists want you to be an obedient worker automaton as well as an obedient consumer automaton. The corporatists want to enslave you, and if you don’t see it then you’re already being enslaved.
I see the enslavement coming from the corporatist interest and that’s why I will fight corporatism: because I want to be a free individual able to choose for myself. I fight it because I want a society based on free minds and free markets; because I want a world where humanist endeavour profits and the individualist free spirit flourishes.
Libertarian, atheist, punk rocker, 
Another good word for this is cronyism. Those in power (bureau-rats, politicians) make things easy for their cronies who have money (lobbyists, campaign contributors, big biz). Two other groups suffer immediately – the people who are likely to consume products and services made by those who get the special favors; and the competitors who don’t have quite as much money, or have ethical reasons to refuse to demand special favors.
The cronies, the politicians, and the bureau-rats never suffer. They keep on spending money they didn’t earn, until some sort of collapse (hyperinflation, invasion, etc.). You can see where they think the system is rigged very well, and for the benefit of those who run the state.
Crony politics imposes surplus order. In their 1990 book Powershift Alvin and Heidi Toffler write about the necessary, or desirable order of a shopping mall. People like to be able to wander about without being beaten up. Or go into a store without being forced to buy anything. Or leave their purse in the fitting room for a minute to show a friend the new outfit without having the purse stolen.
But this stands in contrast to the surplus order of the police state, where doors are kicked in at 3 a.m., passports revoked, children seized from their screaming parents, parents seized from their screaming children.
Surplus order shows up in the market all the time. It isn’t a very free market because the money is where the bullying begins. If you make something like e-gold or Liberty Dollar you get arrested and your wealth is confiscated. If you use a lot of cash, they seize it and say you were laundering money. So the Feral Reserveless System gets to issue the only money you are allowed to use, except for favored banks with Visa and MasterCard. If you try to get involved in that industry, say by opening a bank and lending out 9 dollars for every dollar on deposit, you will be arrested for banking without a license.
It is a long, sad, boring (for the most part), anti-intellectual tradition of crony politics. Violent when anyone refuses to get the picture.
The only ~real~ way out of this mess is to:
[1] Outlaw corporations
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[2] Outlaw banks. Rather, have credit unions only where the depositors are part owners.
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[3] At most, allow Limited Liability Companies, but no person in a company may have ~any~ significant interest (more than 20%) in any OTHER LLC or company anywhere else in or out of the country, nor may any external entity have ~any~ interest in internal companies.
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[4] The stock market should be restructured such that no investor may sell stock in any interest without ALL OTHER stock holders being assessed of the matter, and any sale of stock by a holder must result in EQUAL distribution to ALL OTHER stock holders at that time. This would prevent the rape of minor holders which happens all the time with very large investors who first inflate stock by buying huge quantities, and then sell their stock when it reaches peak thus devaluing the stock leaving minor holders with near worthless stock as a result.
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[5] No municipality to be allowed incorporation or bond issuance.
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[6] No citizen to be forced to participate in municipal activities.
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[7] All municipalities to charge user fees only.
Or, we could just get rid of the state.
Getting rid of the state is certainly =the= thought. However, the reality of it all is just this: Far too many people aren’t willing to ‘go it alone’ without someone to look up to and lean on for assistance.
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Add to that the willingness of those same people to employ force against anyone they happen to not like or bear a grudge against.
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Getting rid of the state would mean that most kids would have to be able to fend for themselves by the age of 12, and be completely independent by the age 15. Can ~you~ see that happening now?
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Independence isn’t taught anymore, neither by parents nor by any place of learning. Rather, what they ~do~ instruct is that the state is ‘everything’ without which you cannot survive, and you are but the merest fraction of that.
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Both of us desire to throw off the shackles of tyranny, but the inertia makes that all but an impossible task —if not actually so— in the present sense, for the reason I spoke of above.
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The problem begins in the home. With 18 or so years of inculcation and indoctrination.
What those of you who are not anti-capitalists always miss is that the state was created by capitalists. The state is the servant of capitalism, not its master. The emergent bourgeoisie of monarchies created the state to restrict and ultimately destroy the power of the monarchs, while also preventing absolute control by the people.
You can’t have capitalism without the state, because capitalists will simply recreate it. Why have your own police force when you can get the people to pay for one that serves your wishes? Why base your contracts on the honesty of either party when you can create laws protecting them and prisons to stick people who break them into?
Your vaunted “free market” will simply recreate hierachies and ultimately the state unless it is stripped of the capitalist focus on profit and opposes exploitation of people. Mutualism recognises this, but “anarcho”-capitalism and right-wing libertarianism doesn’t.
The comment was:
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You can’t have capitalism without the state, because capitalists will simply recreate it.
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And the dope you’ve been smoking is called … what?
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Before there was ~any~ state, there was capitalism right here in what is now the ‘USA.’
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The American Indians had their own brand of capitalism all without any kind of ’state.’
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Explain that one, Dildo.
Wow, there was me thinking this might be an opportunity to have a serious discussion. No, it appears not. Dildo? Come on, what age are you, 12?
If you’re going to make an asinine comment, then you must be expecting of a duly appropriate reply.
Asinine? This from an idiot who thinks the egalitarian tribal (and sometimes pseduo-feudal) systems of the natives of the part of the world now known as the Americas was capitalist. If you’re that ignorant about what capitalism is, really, there’s no point. Capitalism is an economic system that came after mercantalism, it’s not just markets and economic transactions. Read a little about mutualism and find out the difference – Proudhon and Tucker were anti-capitalists.
Look here, sweet cheeks, from the American Heritage English Dictionary:
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cap·i·tal·ism
n.
An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
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See there, sweet cheeks?
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PRIVATELY OWNED.
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“Development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.”
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Got that?
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FREE MARKET.
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That’s what the AMERICAN INDIANS had: A FREE MARKET.
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Don’t like that? TOUGH!
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Maybe you should move to ~europe~ …?