The Legacy of U.s. Corporatism
by Modern day U.S. corporatism has its roots in the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, but its modern renditions can be found in in the first third of the last century, especially with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini. Over the years corporations have transformed themselves, where their power has been merged with the State and now they dominate all aspects of life.
We have to be careful when talking about “the government”. To think of it as elected representatives doing the electorate’s will is simply juvenile. A more sophisticated description separates the “nameless bureaucracy” from the upper echelons of government – policymakers; the bureaucracy is eternal and the rest transient. It is the bureaucracy that really is “the government” deals with people directly. The bureaucracy, however, is merely carrying out policy; in fact, for the most part, it is under the executive branch, not the legislative or Supreme Court. Still. we need to identify the policy makers, and here is where we talk about who the government really is. First, we need a quick review of how we got to where we are.
Two competing strains of thinking permeate the U.S. Political scene – the contract state and economic anarchy. One can dispose of the anarchists relatively simply; they are against socialization, claiming that “rugged individualism” is the backbone of society and that authority is to be mistrusted. That such a system works, so they say, is based upon the human being acting in her or his own rational self interest; an “invisible hand is the regulator, each person knowing what the limits of actions are.
The idea of a contract state emanates from Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the Leviathan and Rousseau (1712—1778), The Social Contract . Hobbes argued that people wanted to emerge from the state of nature, where there was a war of all against all, and to do so, they had to give up their freedom to a sovereign to gain liberty, or freedoms constrained by the sovereign. Rousseau formalized further the contract state, saying that people need to subjugate the individual will to to the general will, thus strengthening liberty for everyone, analogous to the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The contract state school is further subdivided into those favoring a social democracy and those arguing for a more authoritarian sovereign. However, over the years that sovereign has changed character, as political economy, based upon the free market of the 1700s and early 1800s transformed into exchanges being increasingly dominated by corporations. Now, we are beginning to be enmeshed in a finger pointing about who has been responsible for “big government”.
Ultrareactionaries will complain about Woodrow Wilson being a fascist, and there is a germ of truth here, but the pronouncement is a bit premature. Benito Mussolini was faced with approximately the same problems as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson – the power of the corporations. “Free enterprise” had been pretty much dead by 1890, and even the Sherman Act failed to curb excesses. The same can be said for the Clayton Act, as well. Both were temporary setbacks, as the relationship among corporations, as well as corporations vis-a-vis government was morphing. Labor was getting out of hand, as well, both in the U.S. and Italy. Capitalism, itself had failed, and it would take an institution larger than the corporations collectively to save private ownership of the means of production.
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