Essay:corporations weaken the state

The corporation business, a rather modern creature that has caused so much controversy within the last half-millennium (from the Dutch East India Company to Standard Oil to Microsoft), is now seen as an anti-nationalist force that spans across countries and continents to fulfill goals of profit and enrichment. Corporations do not exist to bring glory or maintain allegiance to the hegemony of a particular culture, religion or government, but to blindly fulfill the desires of the masses for manifold monetary and financial gains. It is the corporation's own leaders who will rail against the influence of a particular state that is either not thoroughly conducive to the corporation's bidding or is taking too much of a "nanny" oversight of corporate leaders' behaviors. Nation-states such as the PR of China take note of this, and thus have crafted a policy ("Socialism with Chinese characteristics") that allows for immense and more pliable enrichment and resources (including labor) for both corporations and other countries for as long as both entities look the other way from Chinese civil rights issues (which are, ultimately, "internal affairs" from whence non-Chinese individuals must "butt out") and act according to a gag order which both:

• restricts freedoms from being exercised inside China using corporately-produced-or-maintained goods (the World Wide Web, for example)
• lambasts and psychologically belligerates against others outside of China for exercising such freedoms regarding foreign opinion over China using corporately-owned-or-maintained produce.

But ultimately as a force of influence, multinational corporations transcend boundaries, while conglomerated corporations (those which participate in a diverse set of trades and activities) assume a respectable chunk of a region's financial and psychological dependence through brand trust and visibility. Cooperative corporations are constituted to provide mutually-distributed benefits to the owners, be it in the form of lower prices, the reception of profits from ownership or transparency in decision making and corporate behavior. But all such corporations are created for profit and monetary gain.

Reform

But even if corporations benefit from a client state's dictatorship and violation of human rights, corporations could also benefit from liberal democratic governments in client-states if they adopted a liberal workplace-ownership democracy within the corporation. Reassessments and reforms of corporate behavior and policy would benefit the public customer base in the long run, and the best basic platform for such reform is the mutualization, or cooperativization, of the corporation. This is the place whereby individuals can live and work in greater freedom and privilege than in the status quo of the semi-feudal illiberal institution of both congolmerates and multinationals, just as liberal democratic governments tend to be the more tolerant of intellectual diversity than semi-feudal dictatorships and tyrannies.