Volkswagen - Cars for Nazis!

I've just been watching film The Corporation. Maybe I will edit this with more & more coherent stuff tomorrow (or later today really) but I wanted to get some thoughts down while they're still fresh.

Corporations are organisations that have a status as legal persons. They can own, buy and sell property, they can sue for libel, and so-on. Originally they were set up for specific purposes (like to build a railroad, or finance railroad construction or something), and wound up when these were fulfilled (or if they were not adequately). Along the years, corporations - being and being headed by rich and powerful people - have managed to stop themselves being held to specific purposes and to turn their legal obligations into just one: to make money for their shareholders.

So we have these legal persons who cannot die of old age, be imprisoned and so-on, and who to survive must make profits by any means that are effective. This is the logic built into the organisation.

What the film conveyed well is something which I advocate strongly which is that it's the systemic logic that drives things. The people in corporations at any level are not necessarily bad people. Yes, certain people are more suited to certain jobs - if a big part of your job is making massive redundancies it's not good to care too much about your workers - but they're people. They are constrained and shaped by the system as much as anyone else. They read literature targeted at them which tells them what they are doing is good. Their information, their social position shows a limited view. They tell thmeselves 'it's only a job', 'I can't change the system'. And the way they think and feel is shaped by the situation they're in and what they have to do. From time to time you see cognitive dissonance coming through as something challenges their role, though the best candidates for the jobs are skilled at ignoring or avoiding this. They change their, and their corporations', behaviour in a positive way - but only within the boundaries that they see. When, ever so occasionally, someone breaks from this worldview, it's an epiphany.
"Fellow plunderers," as Roy Anderson, CEO of the world's largest carpet maker, addresses assembled corporate heads.

We're all put in this capitalist system that dissociates - alienates, to use the classic marxist term - us from everything else. Production is distanced from consumption. Production processes are cut up, specialised, globalised, so people working on the same things are disassociated from one another. We are cut off from any cyclical, reciprocal relationship with the world and one another. As Vandana Shiva describes it, agriculture goes from a circle - seeds to plants to seeds, plants to fertiliser to earth to plants, with some food coming out of the cycle - to a linear one - seed and fertiliser are bought in, food comes out (obviously that's all very simplified). We are sliced up into stages on the production line, target markets, class fractions.

It also brought out, or at least hinted at how if you naturalise something it becomes immutable, unarguable. Corporations, markets and so-on have been constructed in particular ways over many centuries. There's nothing in Adam Smith about shareholder value. But forget about this history, make these things Laws of economics, make the corporation a natural form of organisation, and they become unarguable.
Also, shift things from one domain to another and control and attitudes change. Something in the political sphere - a public company, for example - people think they can control, they can make collective, moral decisions about. Move that to the economic sphere and suddenly market forces will determine everything perfectly, people will register preferences with their money individually, democratic control is an invasion.
And it's so very wrong to think of capitalist consumption as some sort of democratic substitute. There's massive inequality, there's the control of information by corporations, a lack of legal measures for accountability, transparency and so-on, the inbuilt fragmentation of the society that I've described, the whole logic of the individualist, consumerist, greed-driven system. It is possible to try and be an ethical consumer and producer, to make good choices, but so much is stacked against you. It can only be part of any solution.

There are a few things I would have liked to see more about - though the film was pretty long as it was. More on the relationship of government and corporations (both public and private) would have been good. Also I was disappointed there was nothing about the social relationships within corporations. With corporations essentially set up as hierarchical tyrannies how does this affect the people involved, both in and out of work. If you go to town or village meetings once a week and vote in elections, but you spend eight hours a day in a situation where you are a social inferior to your boss, are you really living in a democratic society? Again, we see that these are not cast-iron laws, some corporations are better than others, the model itself varies considerably (eg. legal rights for unions, employee consultation (part of EU law), German corporate councils bringing together workers (not unions) and employers). Also, this is an issue which cuts across both public and private corporations. If they mimic the conventional corporate structure, public corporations repeat the problems - though they may also be a source of inspiration by presenting established alternatives. And it's an issue that cuts across economic systems - if a 'socialist' country has the same organisational structure as a 'capitalist' one, how different are they?
I suppose that would have taken the documentary in a bit of a different direction and maybe turned it to much into a sociology lecture, but it was something I was hoping to see.

Some other random things:
The 'water war' in Cochamba, Bolivia, is pretty well known, but I didn't know how far the privatisation extended. It was literally all the water in the city, including rainwater. Very valid links were drawn with Ghandi's march to collect salt from the sea, taxed by the British.
The fact Fanta was invented so that Coke could continue selling in Nazi Germany. I heard about this before (from mark I believe), but had forgotten it.

I really want some new (non-ambient) electronic music but I'm not sure what. Suggestions welcome.
I also have an urge to buy a copy of Vandana Shiva's The Violence of the Green Revolution for myself. I never thought agricultural economics was such an interesting subject.