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The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea,
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. Modern Library, 2003, 227
pages.
No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, by
Naomi Klein. Picador USA, 2002, 502 pages.
Poke 'Em in the Eye? by Christopher Chantrill
If you surf to the website of Adbusters, a magazine devoted to the "unbranding"
of America, you can download the "Brands and Bands," a U.S. flag in which the
stars have been replaced by the logos of 30 multinational corporations. The
corporations have taken over America. Get it?
| | Christopher
Chantrill is a writer living in Seattle. He is writing "The Road to the
Middle Class." |
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Of course, the Adbusters are right. Corporations — limited-liability
companies — are immensely powerful, and they certainly outshine the 50
states that adorn the Stars and Stripes. But the question is: what are we going
to do about it? Two recent studies of the modern corporation approach, in
different ways, this question.
In their entertaining The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary
Idea John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two journalists from the London
Economist, remind us that the corporation has not always bestridden the world
like a colossus. In the early 19th century, the limited-liability company was
considered obsolete. "'They are behind the times,' thundered one governor of
Pennsylvania." Yet by 1862, when the British Parliament passed the landmark Joint
Stock Companies Act that allowed limited-liability companies to be formed without
special license from Parliament, limited liability was all the rage from Berlin
to Washington, D.C. In 1893, Gilbert and Sullivan produced their "Utopia Limited"
in which a promoter travels to the South Seas and turns the inhabitants and the
government into limited-liability companies. The Companies Act is celebrated in
song:
All hail, astonishing Fact
All hail, Invention new
The Joint Stock
Companies Act
The Act of Sixty-Two.
"The Company" begins with a quick prehistory of the corporation, introducing
the crude trading arrangements of the ancient Sumerians, the societates of
Rome, the trading partnerships of Venice, and the immediate ancestors of the
modern corporation, the "chartered companies" of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The meat of the book is contained in "A Long and Painful Birth," a chapter
that describes the century of political and corporate maneuverings that
culminated in the Act of Sixty-Two and the global emancipation of the
limited-liability company. The chartered company of 1750 "represented a combined
effort by governments and merchants to grab the riches of the new worlds opened
up by" the age of exploration. As government-licensed monopolies, they were
political creations and were owned by the great and the good. But their owners
held shares that could be bought and sold on the open market, and they were
protected by limited liability. "Colonization was so risky that the only way to
raise large sums of money from investors was to protect them." Then in the early
18th century the governments of France and England thought that they would
restructure their war debts using the chartered concept. The result was the first
great modern bubble: the John Law fiasco in Paris and the South Sea Bubble in
London. In England, the South Sea Bubble sired the South Sea Bubble Act, a
punitive law that required each limited-liability company to secure a charter
from Parliament. It took a century before legislators would again look at the
bright side of limited-liability companies. When Parliament found itself
approving dozens of corporate charters a year during the railway mania, it was
time for a change. |
| The corporation has not
always bestridden the world like a colossus. In the early 19th century, the
limited-liability company was considered obsolete.
|
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After its painful birth, the corporation quickly became Peck's Bad Boy.
Neighbors never tire of gossiping about the latest corporate escapade, and "The
Company" does not shrink from passing on all the shocking details. But it also
tells of the achievements, "producing society-changing products, like the Model T
or Microsoft Word" and also changing the pace of daily life and "the way that
people behave."
To some people, the gentle seduction of society-changing products felt more
like a forcible rape that put an end to the romance of ancient idyllic relations
and made cold cash the sole nexus for social interaction. Instead of a world of
corporations, they wanted a world community. Thus was born the great secular
religion of socialism, a movement to purge the world of the evil corporation.
Part political movement and part religious crusade, its message proved
irresistible to millions, and for a century it grew like wildfire. Then it
collapsed in a ruin of mass graves and unspeakable oppression.
Comes now revivalist Naomi Klein to awaken a new generation to the enthusiasm
of left-wing activism. Dutiful daughter of the welfare state and of hippie
parents who went to Canada in the 1960s to dodge the draft and provide for their
children the "benefits of Canada's humane social services, public health-care
system and solid subsidies to the arts," she attempts to create in "No
Logo®" (yes, a registered trademark) a manifesto for a new generation of
"activists." She is shocked by the megabrands, the brand bombers, and the
category killers of the modern consumer society. For in the blaring public space
of the brands there is No Space for artists and creativity, in the ravenous
appetite of the Wal-Marts and Starbucks there is No Choice for consumers, in the
new world of temporary jobs and contract workers there are No Jobs for workers.
Fortunately a new movement of left-wing activism has arisen to oppose and harass
the new predators, and to raise high the chalice of No Logo.
Historian John Lukacs has suggested that you can tell a lot about a writer by
the moment he has chosen as year zero, the moment at which history begins. For
Micklethwait and Wooldridge, year zero is not 1850, 1800, or 1750, the years
chosen by most historians of modern commerce, but 3000 B.C. They develop a
narrative to paint in the empty centuries of industrial prehistory and set the
scene for what might be called the Axial Age of the corporation, from about 1750
to 1850.
| Klein's lament reminds
us that the last two decades of the 20th century have not been happy times for
the Left. |
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But for Naomi Klein, year zero seems to be 1980. Before then, North America
was a paradise of good jobs for good wages, responsible corporations, strong
unions, and comprehensive public services. But since 1980, things have gone
straight downhill. Huge budget deficits, ruthless privatization, and school
budget cuts have shredded the public services that once protected us, and the
megabrands and big box stores have gutted once-flourishing Main Street stores and
businesses, particularly independent bookstores and coffeehouses. Never mind that
a generation ago, the Left was railing at the man in the gray flannel suit and
the stultifying conformity of his big company loyalty, and that two generations
ago the Left was railing at the hypocrisy and vacuity of Main Street boosterism.
All is forgiven: just keep out the megabrands and the category killers.
Klein's lament reminds us that the last two decades of the 20th century have
not been happy times for the Left. The great compromise that the Left had imposed
upon the middle class and had thought would last forever unexpectedly fell apart.
Suddenly progressive tax rates were slashed, public services were privatized, and
once-great industries downsized and moved offshore. In the aftermath, if you want
to shop you go to Wal-Mart; if you want a cup of coffee you go to Starbucks. It
is all too bad and a profound disappointment to the messianic hopes of the
1960s.
As Micklethwait and Wooldridge make clear in "The Company," the process
started well before the evil 1980s. Branding started in the late 19th century
when the new railroads made it possible to attempt nationwide distribution of
goods. And Sears, the prototype of Wal-Mart, went into business in the 1880s to
undercut the mom-and-pop general stores of 19th century rural America. But to
push Klein's year zero back a century would dilute the scandal of 1990s
globalization, and make it into just another episode of routine, capitalistic,
creative destruction.
Still, Naomi Klein has a point. The seismic shift in the workplace has broken
up the old working culture of good jobs for good wages that the Left supported
for a century. In the aftermath of that earthquake, liberal arts graduates find
themselves working as coffee counter-jerks, and Filipino teenage girls leave the
stoop labor of the farm only to end up in urban sweatshops assembling garments
like New York City immigrants a century ago. Something must be done. But
what?
To fight the evil corporations, Klein recommends a "raiding" strategy of
guerrilla war: adbusting, culture jamming, brand bombing, and blooding the odd
corporation to provoke a media feeding frenzy. Significantly, this strategy for
opposing the corporations is not the Marxian persisting strategy of invasion and
conquest but a raiding strategy of hit and run. It is a sign of the strength of
capitalism that it seems now, like China, too big to invade.
| We never learn from
Klein that what the workers really want in a Nike factory in Vietnam is for Nike
to expand the plant so that they can get jobs for their relatives.
|
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Klein's favorite target for anti-corporate activism is the evil Nike,
worldwide purveyor of athletic equipment. Nike epitomizes everything that lefties
hate about the new economy. First of all, Nike's swoosh is the quintessential
"Ÿberbrand," and lefties hate all brands (except their own hammer and sickle,
raised fist, and the socialist rose). Nike also markets its products in the inner
cities, and that is bad because the single mothers of inner city kids can't
afford Nikes. And Nike has pioneered the idea of outsourcing manufacturing. It
designs, brands, and markets athletic equipment, but often doesn't manufacture
it. This annoys lefties because they want to be able to force corporations to
create "good jobs for good wages" for their workers, and it isn't fair if the
workers that assemble Nike's athletic shoes in Third World sweatshops aren't
actually Nike employees.
"No Logo" avoids the epic sweep of "The Company." It carefully avoids placing
the modern economy within a broad social and historical context. Its purpose is
not history but to instruct the reader in the catechism of left-wing protest.
Klein leads her readers on a tightly controlled tour of Corporate Exploitation
Theme Park. She stops the bus at the Cavite Export Processing Zone in the
Philippines, and we all recoil at the squalid sweatshops and applaud the plucky
union leaders and the frightened teenaged girls they are trying to organize. She
stops the bus in the inner city and we shake our heads over a young black kid
whining at his mother to buy some Nikes and cheer the adbuster high above our
heads who is altering the message on a billboard. She stops the bus at a corner
Starbucks, and we frown when she tells us that Starbucks snatched the lease away
from a long-established mom-and-pop coffee house. She stops the bus at a Reclaim
the Streets event and we chuckle at the colorful rebels partying the night away.
But readers are never allowed to admire the view from an overlook or to wander
around unsupervised. So we never learn from tour guide Klein, as we do from Johan
Norberg in London's Spectator, that what the workers really want in a Nike
factory in Vietnam is for Nike to expand the plant so that they can get jobs for
their relatives. What they really appreciate is not the wages, but the escape
from working outdoors on the farm. Is that why New York City's streets seemed to
be paved with gold a century ago? Because it offered indoor work?
The birth and rise of the corporation remains an epic and frightening
experience. It is as if a great bear suddenly appeared in town. What should we
do? Should we kill it? Should we cage it? Or should we keep a wary eye upon it
and see what happens? A century ago, the Left said: kill it! Half a century ago,
it said: cage it! Now Naomi Klein says: poke it in the eye!
How about we step back and marvel at it, warts and all, as Micklethwait and
Wooldridge do, while keeping a two-by-four handy, just in case we need to get its
attention?
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