Myxomycophyta

 There's a really hefty portion of the progressive community that view large corporations as the root, if not of all evil, then of the biggest chunk in Hell's pie chart. 

There's small doubt that that's true quantitatively. Exploitation of workers, environmental rape, coverups, fraud that damages lives, and outright theft--happens all the time. As someone whose grandfather died in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, I have scant inclination to minimize these things. 

But is it legitimate to take the next step--that corporations in and of themselves are evil? Or the step after that, that property is theft, and owners and capitalists are a class to be overthrown, and a communist society the only just society. THe Right has mirrored those steps that 1) everything the unrestrained free market system is good, and 2) amoral social Darwinism is the best way to advance the Race. Both positions are fueled by the repugnance of their mirror images. Anger and hatred thus abound. It's pretty ugly.

Now there doesn't seem to be any cosmic necessity that an organization put together to make money should be, or become, evil. A company can be run by a tyrant and operate on fear; it can be run by a gonif and run on fraud and theft--none of that has to happen.

Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism, especially at the time, was perceptive: owners will always try to get work for as little money as possible, and will support conditions to make labor as cheap as possible. It's a nasty engine for a race to the bottom, especially when anti-democratic forces make the push back nearly impossible for the other side of the negotiation.

Of course, the owner wants to sell the product for as much as he possibly can--which poses an interesting double feedback situation when the market for the product is the same as the labor pool. The same poverty that lowers your costs also limits your sales. So it's not so simple, and by no means an inevitable war.

And certainly, as long as a company is an extension of the owner, corporations can be as varied as human beings. 

But there, I think, we come to it. I always thought that there were two philosophical propositions underpinning the modern corporate world that were simply absurd in conjunction: 1) that corporations are legally persons, and 3) that the only purpose of a corporation is to create value for the shareholders. What kind of person do we then have in our polity that would have so little complexity in their makeup that they come across as a bunch of low-grade morons? What kind of society puts those morons in charge?Why should a corporate person be excused from the complex and multilateral relationships that all other persons live with?

And then contemplating that, it hit me: corporations are a low form of life.

Putting that pair of glasses on, things make a little more sense. Present a corporation with a resource or an asset or a pile of money, it will extend a pseudopod toward it. Try to limit its income, or block its access to food or light, and it will squeal. Wound it and it will fall apart and other corporations will eat the remains. Present it with a rainforest and it will try to eat it: it will consume a resource as fast as it possibly can, and begin to whine uncomprehendingly when the resource is depleted. Try to raise the minimum wage, institute safety standards, call it to task on its damage to the environment, it will squeal. And thrash about, and try to sting.

This is not true of companies that are the extension of a human personality, whether owner or CEO: Walt Disney, say, Tom Watson, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Bud Frankel. As these men's intelligencce went, so went the company. But the thing that becomes increasingly obvious to me is that the modern big corporation, as it grows, sheds intelligence and discernment as it grows, until what you get resembles nothing so much as a big slime mold.

There are many things that help this along: Wilson's law, that communication is possible only between equals, that minimizes information flow in a hierarchical organization; insane CEO compensation and detachment from the consequences of their actions; CW and CYA--and the principle of shareholder value alone. There are a hundred ways where conventionnal corporate practice prevents the formation of a central nervous system, through bad communication and lack of corporate will. Complex and intelligent strategies that mean deferred reward  and long term strategy, of deferring immediate profit for long-term viability--At every point the pressure is to abandon those behaviors in favor of feeding, crawling, whining and squealing.

If there's one phrase that, in my lessmoral mooments, I think I could turn into the keystone of a Management best-seller and a subsequent round of richly-psid talks, it's this: A committee is incapable of holding an idea. It will drop it at the first opportunity. Forget it, or eviscerate it. If you need to work with ideas, you need to use a higher form of life, viz. human beings. It's possible to corporation to act like something with a notochord, but you have to both be aware of the devo forces at work inside the big slug and the will and power to counteract them.

And that means acting like a citizen instead of mycelium, respecting human rights and the environment, and working towards a sustainable future instead of the next pool of oil. The myxomycophytous corporation will make stupid decisions, greedy decisions, completely unimaginative decision, and squeal and bleat whenever its pseudopods don't find nutrients. This unfortunately translates into exploitation, brutality, lies and fraud, and the occasional mass murder. 

It's nothing that a nervous system can't cure, however. A corporation can act as intelligently as any other group of human beings, and making money is no goal that requires scum-sucking evil. The rest of society can, in fact, compel corporations to act intelligently--and in a world with an ever-increasing technology gradient, critical environmental issues, and all the woes that flesh is heir to, that's ultimately a good idea.

If there's one thing truly wretched, though, it's a bunch of people who, in blind reaction against what they see as fanatic communism, wide-eyedly defend and praise stupid behavior, low level predation, mindless cruelty, and joyously echo the whines and squeals of these big motile slime monsters, as if it were Schopenhauer.

Maybe someday we'll begin to realize that acting intelligently is a good idea. Sooner rather than later would be nice.