posted 7 June 2008 by Paula | link to this
tags: capital, corporations, profits, wealth
Ran Prieur has an encouraging entry at his blog this week. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ran’s blog, he both lives and writes outside the “consensus trance” and his blog is something of a hub for innovative social thinkers. So I was especially encouraged to see him rethinking the dogma that corporations and profits are automatically evil:
But I have been thinking about corporate evil, mostly because of these two articles: A freelance lifestyle in a corporate workplace is about a radical new workplace environment where workers can do whatever they want as long as they get the job done, and of course they get the job done better than in the old model where they’re degraded and micromanaged. And Comcast Tests a New Bandwidth Black List is about the new trend of punishing people who get too much use out of the internet, even though they don’t seem to be harming people who use it less, or preventing internet providers from profiting. Comcast is only pissing off the geeks here, which is bad business.
Both of these articles refute the idea that corporations = profit = evil. Both Comcast’s decision, and the normal hellish workplace environment, are examples of evil interfering with profit. So if corporations are simply profit machines, where does the evil come from? It comes from humans! Humans who have been abused and controlled themselves can’t stand to see other humans be happy and free, so they perpetuate the crushing workplace environment. And humans whose job is just to make their company profitable become demonically possessed by the spirit of profit, and it’s no longer enough for the company to make a profit overall — it has to make a profit from every individual customer. You see the same thing when credit card companies charge an extra fee to customers who pay off their balance every month. This is not corporate nature — this is human nature using corporate nature as an excuse. And remember that it was humans who designed corporations in the first place to take more than they give with perfect indifference to external costs.
I think capitalism, in its most fundamental sense, is simply just the flow of “capital” through a given system, and “capital” is pretty much anything at all that flows through a system: energy “capital,” information “capital,” social “capital,” human “capital.” The freer the flow, the more the system benefits, and can count this benefit as “wealth” and an increasingly free flow as “wealth creation.” Restricting the flow chokes off wealth creation and impoverishes the system.
Corporations, and the global monetary system, are both systems designed to choke off flow. These are akin to pinching closed a garden hose until a bubble forms and eventually bursts. The person pinching it closed thinks he/she is amassing wealth for him or herself in the form of the bubble, but in fact all the interrelated systems are impoverished by this act. All the elements in the system, including the pinching person, would be much wealthier if the flow were not restricted. This is why open-source projects and companies with politically free cororate cultures are so much more productive, innovative, and (dare I say it?) profitable than traditional corporations.
The whole problem boils down to a matter of tunnel-vision: the person pinching the garden hose can’t see that he or she is part of, and supported by, the wider network of systems impoverished by the lack of water flowing through the garden hose. No one is separate from the natural systems of Earth and the social systems of our species.
I don’t include natural resources among those things that can flow through human economic systems, because ecosystems already exist in the highest state of wealth any system can achieve: everything flows, and nothing is wasted; choke points become the basis for new capital flows. They are our model for wealth creation. For example, a field that has been tilled to extinction can be brought back with a modest investment of compost capital, nutrient-fixing seeds capital, and time; in the same way, an impoverished neighborhood can also be made wealtheir with a modest investment of information capital, wealth-fixing capital (perhaps a community currency), and time. The problem in both instances is that too many people think restricting flows within these systems is what creates wealth, so neither ever has the chance to achieve free capital flows.
And I think the political left is complicit with the political right to make this happen, because while the right obviously wants to harvest everything it can from everywehre and keep the profits to itself, thereby restricting flow, the left shuns capital and capitalism in all its forms and discourages even learning about it, thereby restricting flow. Neither political view can see past the garden hose, or understands that the systems are all interconnected. 