BBC News reports that Alcatel-Lucent, a global powerhouse in the telecommunications industry, “will pay $137m (£88.7m) to settle US charges that it paid bribes to win Latin American and Asian contracts.” The legal strikes were in part based on Securities and Exchange Commission claims that the company “used consultants who performed little or no legitimate work to funnel more than $8m in bribes to government officials.”
The most remarkable feature of the story is how very unremarkable it is — that a giant corporation would bribe a government is in a very real way the definition of politics. Another notable aspect of the story is its identification of structures that funnel money to the powerful through the creation of titles and jobs that actually do nothing at all; this is, of course, exactly how the corporatist economy functions, robbing labor to pour wealth into the tiny tip of the manager-class pyramid.
Stories like this one ought to appall us, to turn us against our “public officials,” but we shouldn’t compartmentalize them from the political process as a general formula. When Big Business lobbies Congress to raise competitors’ costs enough to foreclose participation, it’s fashionable to call it “interest group democracy.”
Well, “interest group democracy” is to “bribery” what “national security” is to “imperialism” or “neocolonialism.” If we’re supposed to distinguish between the legitimate bribes that happen in politics every day and the illegitimate bribes that the Justice Department prosecutes, that distinction is elusive.
Among the things that we, as anarchists, are trying to do is sow the seeds of a society wherein the means of production are — rather than exclusively controlled by a small, idle political class — held by those who, through their labor, should own them.
I deliberately decline to perpetuate the bewildering ambiguity of the idea that we should want “private ownership of the means of production” — or “public” for that matter. As Sheldon Richman and Kevin Carson have pointed out, the purport of either of those approaches is informed by what “private” and “public” signify within our political/legal framework. This is not to suggest a top-down reorganization of society or an argument for dragooning people into accepting some arbitrarily-imposed order.
The egalitarian aspirations of the anarchist would, of themselves, be invalidated if they alone were the cynosure of our vision for society, if we didn’t also consider society’s passage from today’s violent system of theft to Paul Goodman’s “new order” of “free action.” “Equality without freedom,” taught Mikhail Bakunin, “is the despotism of the State. … [T]he most fatal combination that could possibly be formed, would be to unite socialism to absolutism.” It is the process itself, the very operation of nonviolence and trade, that will erode state-capitalism by eliminating privilege.
Libertarians who have rightly fixed themselves on the nonaggression principle as the nucleus of our social theory ought to ponder the implications of that principle; they may find it uncomfortable to learn that today’s corporations have not amassed their power or their domination of resources merely through competition, through “offering something the consumer wants.” The idiosyncratic preference for an economy commanded by oversized companies should not be enough for conscientious libertarians.
We must — at the very least — accept the possibility that the state’s impediments to voluntary relationships are both the origin of this capitalism and a handicap to “smallness” and its potential. That so many libertarians have a predilection for America’s corporate pecking order economy, and for exporting it around the world, is perhaps some attestation of the success the state and its deputies have had in fraudulently stamping their system as “the free market.”
This inclination is part of what Roderick Long calls “right-conflationism,” and its twin on the left “is the error of treating the evils of existing corporatist capitalism as though they constituted an objection to a freed market.” In A Vindication of Natural Society, Edmund Burke identified an inevitable corollary of the latter species of conflation, which mistakes today’s economy as an unbridled free market; left-conflationists, met with the evils of the supposed “free market,” turn to the state as — in Burke’s words — “Protection for the Poor and Weak,” but what could be more, as he calls it, “ridiculous?”
Voluntary relationships that don’t rely on hierarchies superimposed to profit the powerful are full of untapped potential, of sundry ways to attend to society’s problems. The state, by comparison, was never set up or set in motion to do anything but line the pockets of its patrician class. To truly discourage bribery and corruption, we need to work around the state, removing it from the equation and allowing free people to thrive.
Citations to this article:
- David D'Amato, Bribery, Thy Name is Government, Quebecois Libre, 01/15/11
- David D'Amato, Bribery, Thy Name is Government, Deming, New Mexico Headlight, 01/03/11
- David D'Amato, Bribery, Thy Name is Government, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age, 12/31/10
- David D'Amato, Bribery, Thy Name is Government, The Canadian, 12/30/10
- David D'Amato, Bribery, Thy Name is Government, London, Ontario Free Press, 12/30/10
Excellent post David. Especially that last paragraph. A question though: You seem to be saying that corporate bigness, in and of itself is problematic. Do I read you right on this? It's hard to imagine that, absent state coercion, no corporation would ever get large and dominant in it's market.
@Paul Mollon
"It's hard to imagine that, absent state coercion, no corporation would ever get large and dominant in it's market."
I think that is the crucial point! As Ludwig von Mises pointed out in Human Action monopoles and big business
linked to the state can only develop and grow in a world controlled by states/governments.
Kind regards
Dr. Werner Ende 30. Dezember 2010
werner.ende@stay-free.de http://www.stay-free.org
I would say the opposite. Absent the state, it would be much more difficult for a business to grow that large as they would have a bugger of a time keeping good people from leaving to work for themselves. Absent subsidies like the interstate highway system, the expense of operating a business over a territory of thousands of square miles would be prohibitive. There is a lot of good research in this area, Kevin Carson's "Organization Theory" is an enlightening treatise on the subject of firm size and efficiency in a freed market. http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-…
You are leaving out, maybe deliberately dismissing, voluntary structures that use hierarchies towards other ends. Yet from monasteries to football teams, and even in the degrees of freemasonry, those have had a useful place and worked well. In fact, the whole idea of hierarchy goes back to the same thing that inspired monasteries, the temple structure of ancient Egypt. I personally believe that hierarchy of this sort would be needed by whatever militia or similar a functioning anarchy might have to develop to head off outside threats.
That is not an accurate summary of the origins of every single state, just of the practice of mature ones. Even though they all appear to degenerate into that, quite a few weren’t set up like that in the beginning. If you think about it, that’s an even stronger position, one that people can’t argue against by suggesting “well then, let’s try setting up a state with different foundations” – whatever they set up would wash out and that summary would start operating instead.
Paul Mollon wrote:-
The issue is that corporations can’t come into being (certainly not with limited liability), or persist without falling apart when their controllers divvy them up, unless there is a state framework or else special circumstances give them an internal coherence and dynamic, the way monasteries have an internal coherence and dynamic. That’s a separate issue from whether big business as such could come about, at any rate under special conditions; it can, e.g. Andy Carnegie’s massive steel business was built as a partnership – but it couldn’t have outlasted him and his partners very long if he hadn’t gone corporate and sold out in the form of US Steel, a corporation (of course, his special conditions included US protectionism, demand from state-fostered railways, etc., etc.).
I have discussed this elsewhere in more detail; google for it on the Mises blog or on Kevin Carson’s blog.
Paul — Thanks a lot for your comment and for the kind words! I don't think that bigness is per se problematic, but I think, as Todd does, that as a practical matter corporations in a genuinely voluntary, free market would be restricted in size as a matter of course. We're going to have to wait and see what kinds of institutions free associations in a stateless society yield, but my guess is that such institutions won't look a whole lot like today's multinationals.
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Mr. Lawrence – Regarding voluntary structures that *do* use hierarchies, of course they exist and function effectively in some instances. Indeed, I have bosses just in my capacity as a writer for C4SS. My comment about voluntary relationships that don’t rely on hierarchies was not to suggest otherwise, though I see that it could’ve been taken that way. The way I tried to phrase it was to leave open the possibility of hierarchies that might exist for reasons other than to profit the powerful.
As for the reasons that particular examples of the state were established, it isn’t so clear to me that there has ever been a state that has, as a matter of fact, done anything but line the pockets of elites. Now, I suppose you’re right that we might debate the *motivations* behind the establishment of discrete governments, but – whatever they are – the outcomes produced by states seem to me to offer the best evidence about them.
My recent post Speed Bumps on the Information Superhighway
It's terrible how you paid $8M to government officials, now pay $137M to government officials.