Corporation Nation: How Corporations are Taking Over Our Lives and What We Can Do About It, by Charles Derber. St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Graceful Simplicity: Toward a Philosophy and Politics of Simple Living, by Jerome Segal. Henry Holt and Company, 1999.
It is difficult-indeed, all but impossible-for most progressives to confront their own gnawing sense that many important trends in American life are moving inexorably and inevitably (not simply temporarily) in the wrong direction: inequality has been growing-painfully and progressively; money and media increasingly dominate politics; de facto racial re-segregation is increasing in many urban centers and universities; environmental laws are passed but gains are the exception in many areas, losses the rule. Most of all, voting patterns, the polls, and everyday experience teach that growing numbers of Americans no longer believe democracy works. Too strong? A 1992 Louis Harris poll found:
To be sure, the economy-for the moment-is doing reasonably well for those with money and access to good jobs. But just beneath the surface-and behind the worrisome convictions-lie deep difficulties. Two of the most serious are the decline of organized labor as a political force and the impact of globalization on the economy and the politics of the economy. At its postwar peak, union membership in the United States reached just over 35 percent of the labor force; it is now only 14 percent and even creative and aggressive AFL-CIO leadership has been unable to reverse the trend as old members are lost faster than new ones can be recruited. In 1968 U.S. exports and imports combined added up to only a tenth of the gross domestic product (GDP); since then they have expanded to a quarter.
Organized labor has historically been the institutional keystone of progressive politics in all the advanced industrial nations-the source of money, man- and woman-power, ongoing organizational strength and stability, lobbying power, and, occasionally, the capacity to disrupt. Even before recent declines, the weakness of labor in the United States compared to other nations went a long way towards explaining the comparative weakness of the American welfare state: union membership is 28.9 percent of all workers in the new united Germany, 44.1 percent in Italy, and 91.1 percent in Sweden. The modern decline of labor, taken together with the growing impact of the global economy, goes even further toward explaining downsizing, job insecurity, growing pay differentials (and inequality), destabilized communities, and-most of all-the widespread sense that nothing really significant can be done to alter the big trends.
There are, of course, exceptions, one of the most important being the 1997 and 1998 rejections of "fast-track" authority to facilitate presidential negotiation of even more open trade. In this area it is possible that further backlash pressures will develop in the future (especially when the next recession hits). But for the most part even such recent political victories must be seen as attempts to close the barn door after the trading "horse" has long since escaped into the field of globalized "freedom."
Charles Derber's response to the profound challenge facing progressives is to urge a "new populism" and to rally the troops to action. Our problem, as he defines it in Corporation Nation, is that "Corporations are taking over our lives." The issue for him is: "What we can do about it." On the whole Derber's book is a useful contribution-especially in its compilation of the many things which people who care about political change can do and are already doing. Derber provides solid information on everything from new worker-ownership strategies to "stake-holder" and "national chartering" approaches to corporate governance. He even offers handy lists of things to do and "movements to join" for those ready to sign up. His new populism includes an anti-materialist spiritual concern.
Corporation Nation is an explicit attempt to be anti-corporate without being anti-business, and to advocate social ways to control the large corporation without resorting to traditional forms of "big government." Derber criticizes both Left and Right as he attempts to maintain his balance walking this fine line. However, the truth is many of the proposed reforms imply a much more traditional form of government regulation. For instance, in Derber's ideal world not only will the giant corporation have to be chartered by the federal government, it will be required to have consumer, labor, and community representatives on its board and held to public interest standards on environmental and other issues. At the same time, trying to maintain a pro-business stance and still energize a "positive" anti-corporate populism is not going to be very easy in political or emotional terms-a special problem for a book which self-consciously aims to energize the faithful.
Derber seems aware of other, even greater difficulties. At one point he rather wistfully suggests that there "will be no meaningful limits on the corporation in the United States without the rise of global countervailing powers and the democratization of the global economic system." At another he observes that "the 200 leading corporations of the world are so large and dominant that it is hard to know whether even public chartering or employee ownership will prove able to make them democratic and responsive to the public interest." As a start, Derber urges further government action in the form of a strong anti-trust program. However, he is simply not convincing in explaining what might alter anti-trust legislation's century-long record of largely failed attempts to significantly challenge corporate financial, legal, and political staying-power.
This is not to say that nothing useful can be done or should be attempted. The difficulty in Derber's argument has to do with the central strategic question. To achieve any serious alteration in the big trends, Derber's strategy depends ultimately upon putting together a new populist coalition in a labor-weak continental-scale society, and doing so in a racially divided culture which offers numerous openings for divide-and-conquer right wing strategies: we are back to our common problem.
Jerome Segal confronts the pain of late twentieth-century America from a different perspective entirely. His Graceful Simplicity starts with Aristotle and the fundamental philosophical question of how to define "the good life." Like many "simple living" books which urge a voluntary individual downsizing of consumption, work, and the pressures of everyday life, Segal suggests we would all be better off if we somehow got off the treadmill and opted out of the rat race. The "graceful" part of the "simplicity" he urges includes a rediscovery of the beauty of beauty itself. Segal-a professional philosopher who writes in down-to-earth terms-offers a vision of the "good life" understood as a psychologically and spiritually thoughtful handling of time and the affirmation of "beauty, peacefulness, appreciation and generosity."
Unlike most simple living advocates, Segal takes up the nasty "reality" problem of whether there is any way for ordinary Americans-defined as a married couple with children and median 1997 family income of $54,000-to participate in "the good life." This is his greatest contribution: Is simple living simply for the affluent who can decide to opt out? Or is it for the marginal who can retreat to the land and grow their own food? Segal dissects everyday budgets to clarify precisely what the average family must of necessity spend for housing, education (and/or child care), health, food, clothing, and transportation. Although something can be done by less-than-affluent Americans to reduce wasteful consumption (keep your old car a bit longer), Segal concludes that simple living cannot-repeat, cannot-be achieved by most Americans without changes at a macro-political level.
The central elements of any serious strategy to make simple living possible for the vast majority are (1) a politics of redistribution and (2) a collective national decision to translate productivity gains into a general reduction of the work-week in the new century-rather than ever-increasing wages and salaries to keep up with the Joneses who themselves are trying to keep up with someone else. Segal concentrates on the second strategy; he suggests that time gained through productivity improvements should be allocated in the form of three-day weekends taken every other week, and he proposes a goal of husband and wife each working a twenty-five hour week. He sees the current earned-income credit-which adds to the pay of low wage-earners without adding to hours of work-as a step in this direction. Another requirement of a serious strategy for simple living-suggested but not spelled out by Segal's analysis of housing and transportation costs-is the redesign and rebuilding of communities so as to reduce the expense of both.
Although Segal is clear that collective-hence, political-action is required to achieve the goal of simple living, he is even less clear about the viability of a specific strategy than Derber. And although his discussion of the median-income family is extremely illuminating, he substantially neglects the even more challenging problem of the bottom one-third. A related omission in this very thoughtful book is any serious discussion of problems presented by race.
I am generally a prudent optimist in politics. Yet cool realism suggests that on our current trajectory the negative trends we currently see will continue and progressives are likely to be able to achieve only modest gains at the margins of these trends. Moreover, the decay building up at the bottom of the system at some point could easily explode into violence, and with violence will almost certainly come repression. On the other hand, it is also true that the long-term fundamental transformation of societies is as common as grass in world history. And it is highly unlikely that any political-economic system, including our own, will remain as it is forever.
The place to look for clues to ways out of the box in which progressive politics finds itself is almost certainly in the deep grass-roots of unpublicized local activity. Scholars probing the sources of the civil rights explosion of the early 1960s know that the real foundation stones were laid-and some of the most difficult and dangerous work undertaken-in countless little-noticed local efforts in the South during the 1940s and 1950s. Historians of the French, American, Chinese, and, indeed, every major revolution know that what might be called "pre-history" in large part is history.
At one point Derber comments, almost as an aside, on some quietly evolving contemporary efforts which could conceivably play a "pre-historical" role in a longer process of change. His discussion is very short, but what he clearly has in mind is the little-studied but rather impressive build-up over the last few decades of a new kind of "community-based" economics including: local cooperatives, neighborhood development corporations, worker-owned firms, small municipal enterprises, local neighborhood land trusts, and a broad range of "hybrid" non-profit community-building organizations engaged in practical for-profit business on behalf of local public goals. Neither quite capitalist nor quite socialist in nature, most are characterized by some form of "democratization of capital"-i.e., institutional arrangements which give ownership to (small) public or quasi-public groups. A forthcoming survey by Ted Howard of the National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives suggests that (depending on the definitions one chooses) the numbers of these groups already run into the tens of thousands.
Derber observes that people concerned with such efforts "envision a proliferation of community-based (and sometimes worker-owned or community-owned) small manufacturers, credit unions, banks, retail stores, farms, and other small-scale businesses...." The goal, though very long term, is not simply a reform of the corporate world: "Unlike the other populist strategies described thus far, this populism seeks an end run around the corporation. Rather than change the corporation from within, the cooperativist would build workable alternatives...." For Derber, such
a broadening of the cooperativist vision to the national level has great appeal, since it offers not only a concrete alternative to the corporation but a vision of a better way to live. By highlighting the value of local participation, it speaks to the deep desire of many Americans to see values of community, self-development, and democracy prioritized over a life based on consumerism and competition.
Can we take this text at face value? Is what is being said as radical as it sounds-and as utopian? This is a revolutionary goal-even if by peaceful evolution. The projected "system" of co-operative institutions would be quite hospitable to Segal's long-term vision. The target, indeed, is the very nature of capitalism-and the long-term goal is to replace the corporation with a "concrete alternative," not attempt somehow to reform or regulate it. Derber seems to grasp this point-and rightly adds that ultimately "to succeed the community-based alternatives have to be linked with a broader positive populist movement that offers a vision of how to transform the biggest corporations, the national and global market, and the government itself, in the service of all communities." But then he backs off, making it quite clear that the only 'linking" of so radical a reconstructive strategy he thinks viable is with his own more limited reform-the-corporation agenda.
Derber's position is reasonable: it has been a long time since we allowed ourselves to think seriously about transcendent goals, and the odds against a fundamental transformation are very long indeed. On the other hand, the logic of Derber's own argument-and of many scholarly studies of corporate power-point beyond minor reform. The self-evident problem is that large corporations form a system not only of economic but of political power. They generate inequalities of income and wealth which in turn further re-enforce inequalities of political power. They must of necessity sustain a sell-consume-grow dynamic in an era which cries out for ecological limits. They have an inherent capacity to thwart and marginalize many proposed reforms. In his prize winning study, Politics and Markets, Yale professor and former president of the American Political Science Association Charles Lindblom bluntly concludes: "The large private corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed, it does not fit."
But what might conceivably replace the corporation-even over the very long haul? Quietly-but persistently-various writers both here and abroad have begun to explore models of larger-scale economic activity which move beyond the corporation as we know it. For instance, the late Louis Kelso, a Cambridge Nobel Laureate; the late James Meade; and the radical American economist John Roemer have all put forward carefully worked-out proposals for quasi-public corporate structures which pass on profits to all citizens as a matter of right. (For those who like precedents, the proposed models might be thought of as enlarged versions of the Alaska Permanent Fund-which as a matter of right currently provides each citizen of that state with about $1,000 a year from profits earned by publicly invested oil revenues.) Other scholars are revisiting the very early vision of the Tennessee Valley Authority-a regional public enterprise structured along grass-roots participatory principles. In another area entirely, many have noted that approaches to Social Security reform which include stock market investment point ultimately towards some form of public management on behalf, minimally, of unsophisticated poor and low-income Americans-and this in turn (as conservatives rightly fear) is likely to lead to greater public control of capital investment.
Significant opportunities for structural change are also likely to emerge as the economy itself changes. Within a decade traditional manufacturing is expected to employ no more than 12 percent of the labor force-and it will continue to decline as the century progresses. As it does, most big factories will disappear-to be replaced by enterprises quite different in kind, size, and structure. New technologies which permit great decentralization are also likely to make new institutional forms both more feasible and more accessible to democratic control. Again, as the century progresses the economy-which currently generates roughly $120,000 for every four people-will reach levels permitting the equivalent of $240,000, to be taken in money or time, for every family of four. (This is almost certainly a conservative estimate: some projections of twentieth-century trends suggest the amount could be almost twice this on average for families of four by the end of the century.)
What I find most significant is the dynamic process at work: it is precisely because the traditional strategies are not working that people keep struggling to build alternatives at the local level. And it is because the old ideas do not satisfy that writers and thinkers keep struggling to break new intellectual ground. If the larger political-economic stalemate continues, this laying down of the theoretical and real-world groundwork for "something different" may turn out to be the critical function of this phase of our development. To me, books like Derber's and Segal's appear not so much to be offering "answers" as to be suggesting "vectors" which point towards something different, something which might one day become viable as we move deeper into the new century. As a next stage of ideas and proposals builds upon the current crop, others in turn will follow upon these. Similarly, the process of each experiment building upon past experiments over time-with each suggesting principles for larger scale application-is much more important than the specific features of any one effort at any particular moment in time. Moreover, such proposals raise expectations which clarify what can-and what cannot-be done without further change.
It may be that all of this will come to naught. On the other hand, if one views our strange and difficult present both as current history and as evolving "pre-history," strategies akin to what the Chinese used to call a "walk on two legs" approach become interesting: the thing to do, of course, is to move forward with whatever conventional reforms are possible-even though their limits within the current system are well understood. At another level-simultaneously-it is also important to open a far-ranging debate about the historical realities we face and the logical requirements of a fundamental solution involving different institutional patterns-even if over the very long haul. Just possibly, doing what can be done today but not ducking what must be discussed and developed for tomorrow might allow us to establish a serious foundation for the transformation the new century is all but certain one day to require.
Gar Alperovitz, author of The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and (with Jeff Faux) Rebuilding America, is president of the National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives.