The Future of the Corporation

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Already we stand on the precipice of a post-nation state future. Globalisation of private corporate interests has successfully unshackled the international market from the controls of individual governments and so has positioned the legal entity of the Corporation above the law. In the twenty-first century the transnational corporation has become a law unto itself, governed only by the imperative to increase the value of its shares for its wealthy private stakeholders. So successful has been this corporatist revolution against the bourgeois state that is has now arrogated to itself the right to sue the state when the actions of the latter undermine the corporation’s interests – a move which has cemented the subjugation of democracy to the whims of global corporations.

Above we have used the word Revolution, because a revolution is precisely what we have witnessed. It is no longer in the realms of conspiracy theory that the Corporation has become the new order of the world, but conspiracy fact. Years of secretive negotiations, across the developed world, between corporately sponsored governments and the corporations themselves have borne fruit in the creation of globalised treaties granting effective domination of the world’s economy to unelected and legally unaccountable super-boards-of-management. Now these new Lords of the Philistines play the tune to which elected governments must dance, regardless of the thoughts and better interests of the people who have elected them. Democracy has lost its teeth.

We the people, the newly dehorned electorate workers of the world, must think carefully about this new direction of global social evolution. Until recently we have each been, within the social contract, an asset of the state in which we have had a meaningful vote. Today the very governments we elect have become the clients of a new superstructure of suzerains over which no one has control save for the profit principal. Our multinational corporate overlords, with an overwhelming share of the world’s wealth, can now buy and sell the resources and assets of any nation – and this includes us for we too are state assets.

One does not need a crystal ball to see that this trajectory is leading to somewhere very dark. Whether it is the economy, the environment, or human rights, individual states and international bodies of states the likes of the United Nations have been rendered powerless in a post-nation state reality. Of course there is the chance that we are worrying over nothing. Corporations may discover that what’s best for people and the environment is best for business, but we have seen precious little evidence of this in the past. Our most likely path into the future is one of a dystopian hell where human and workers’ rights exist only on the statute books of pacified nations, and where the wonders of nature are broken down in ledger books to crude cash value.

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