http://dieoff.org/page12.htm
[ See also
the Eight Corporate Rules of the Game... ]
A hundred years ago,
even fifty years ago, it did not seem urgent
that we understand the relationship between business and a healthy
environment, because natural resources seemed unlimited. But on
the verge of a new millenniums we know that we have decimated
ninety-seven percent of the ancient forests in North America;
every
day our farmers and ranchers draw out 20 billion more gallons
of water
from the ground than are replaced by rainfall; the Ogalala Aquifer,
an underwater river beneath the Great Plains larger than any body
of fresh water on earth, will dry up within thirty to forty years
at present
rates of extraction; globally we lose 25 billion tons of fertile
topsoil
every year, the equivalent of all the wheatfields in Australia.
These
critical losses are occurring while the world population is increasing
at the rate of 90 million people per year. Quite simply, our business
practices are destroying life on earth. Given current corporate
practices,
not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will
survive
the global market economy. We know that every natural system on
the planet is disintegrating. The land, water, air and sea have
been
functionally transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories
for waste. There is no polite way to say that business is destroying
the world.
- Paul Hawkin,
THE
ECOLOGY OF COMMERCE
Eleven Inherent Rules of Corporate Behavior
by Jerry Mander
The following list
is an attempt to articulate the obligatory
rules by which corporations operate. Some of the rules overlap,
but taken together they help reveal why corporations behave
as they do and how they have come to dominate their environment
and the human beings within it.
1. The Profit
Imperative: Profit is the ultimate measure of all
corporate decisions. It takes precedence over community well-
being,
worker health, public health, peace, environmental preservation
or
national security. Corporations will even find ways of trading
with
national "enemies" -- Libya, Iran, the former Soviet
Union, Cuba
-- when public policy abhors it. The profit imperative and the
growth imperative are the most fundamental corporate drives;
together they represent the corporation's instinct to "live."
2. The Growth
Imperative: Corporations live or die by whether
they can sustain growth. On this depends relationships to
investors, to the stock market, to banks and to public perception.
The growth imperative also fuels the corporate desire to find
and
develop scarce resources in obscure parts of the world.
This effect is now
clearly visible, as the world's few remaining
pristine places are sacrificed to corporate production. The peoples
who inhabit these resource-rich regions are similarly pressured
to give up their traditional ways and climb on the wheel of
productionconsumption. Corporate planners consciously attempt
to bring "less developed societies into the modern world"
to
create infrastructures for development, as well as new workers
and new consumers. Corporations claim that they do this for
altruistic reasons -- to raise the living standard -- but
corporations have no altruism.
Theoretically, privately
held corporations -- those owned
by individuals or families -- do not have the imperative
to expand. In practice, however, the behavior is the same.
Such privately held giants as Bechtel Corporation have
shown no propensity to moderate growth.
3. Competition
and Aggression: Corporations place every person
in management in fierce competition with each other. Anyone
interested in a corporate career must hone his or her ability
to seize the moment. This applies to gaining an edge over another
company or over a colleague within the company. As an employee,
you are expected to be part of the "team," but you also
must
be ready to climb over your own colleagues.
Corporate ideology holds that competition improves worker
incentive and corporate performances and therefore benefits
society. Our society has accepted this premise utterly.
Unfortunately, however, it also surfaces in personal
relationships. Living by standards of competition and
aggression on the job, human beings have few avenues
to express softer, more personal feelings. (In politics,
non-aggressive behavior is interpreted as weakness.)
4. Amorality:
Not being human, corporations do not have
morals or altruistic goals. So decisions that may be
antithetical to community goals or environmental health
are made without suffering misgivings. In fact, corporate
executives praise "non emotionality" as a basis for
"objective"
decision-making.
Corporations, however,
seek to hide their amorality, and
attempt to act as if they were altruistic. Lately, there
has been a concerted effort by American industry to seem
concerned with environmental cleanups, community arts, or
drug programs. Corporate efforts that seem altruistic are
really public relations ploys or directly self-serving projects.
There has recently been a spurt of corporate advertising about
how corporations work to clean the environment. A company that
installs offshore oil rigs will run ads about how fish are
thriving under the rigs. Logging companies known for their
clearcutting practices will run millions of dollars' worth of
ads about their "tree farms."
It is a fair rule of
thumb that corporations tend to advertise
the very qualities they do not have in order to allay negative
public perceptions. When corporations say "we care,"
it is almost
always in response to the widespread perception that they do not
have feelings or morals.
If the benefits do
not accrue, the altruistic pose is dropped.
When Exxon realized that its cleanup of the Alaskan shores was
not easing the public rage about the oil spill, it simply dropped
all pretense of altruism and ceased working.
5. Hierarchy:
Corporate laws require that corporations be structured
into classes of superiors and subordinated within a centralized
pyramidal structure: chairman, directors, Chief Executive officer,
vice presidents, division managers, and so on. The efficiency
of
this hierarchical form (which also characterizes the military,
the government and most institutions in our society) is rarely
questioned.
The effect on society
from all organizations adopting hierarchical
form is to make it seem natural that we have all been placed within
a national pecking order. Some jobs are better than others, some
lifestyles are better than others, some neighborhoods, some races,
some kinds of knowledge.
Men over women. Westerners
over non Westerners. Humans over nature.
That effective, non-hierarchical modes of organization exist on
the planet, and have been successful for millennia, is barely
known by most Americans.
6. Quantification,
Linearity and Segmentation: Corporations
require that subjective information be translated into objective
form, i.e., numbers. The subjective or spiritual aspects of
forests, for example, cannot be translated, and so do not enter
corporate equations. Forests are evaluated only as "board
feet."
When corporations are
asked to clean up their smokestack emissions,
they lobby to relax the new standards in order to contain costs.
The result is that a predictable number of people are expected
to become sick and die.
The operative corporate standard is not "as safe as humanly
possible," but rather, "as safe as possible commensurate
with
maintaining acceptable profit."
7. Dehumanization:
In the great majority of corporations,
employees are viewed as ciphers, as cogs in the wheel,
replaceable by others or by machines.
As for management employees,
not subject to quite the same
indignities, they nonetheless must practice a style of decision
making that "does not let feelings get in the way."
This applies
as much to firing employees as it does to dealing with the
consequences of corporate behavior in the environment or
the community.
8. Exploitation:
All corporate profit is obtained by a
simple formula: Profit equals the difference between the
amount paid to an employee and the economic value of the
employee's output, and/or the difference between the amount
paid for raw materials used in production (including costs
of processing), and the ultimate sales price of the processed
raw materials. Karl Marx was right: a worker is not compensated
for full value of his or her labor; neither is the raw-material
supplier.
The owners of capital
skim off part of the value as profit.
Profit is based on underpayment. Capitalists argue that this
is a fair deal, since both workers and the people who mine or
farm the resources (usually in Third World environments)
get paid. But this arrangement is inherently imbalanced.
The owner of the capital -- the corporation or the bank
-- always obtains additional benefit. While the worker makes
a wage, the owner of capital gets the benefit of the worker's
labor, plus the surplus profit the worker produces, which is
then reinvested to produce yet more surplus.
9. Ephemerality:
Corporations exist beyond time and space:
they are legal creations that only exist on paper. They do
not die a natural death; they outlive their own creators.
They have no commitment to locale, employees or neighbors.
Having no morality, no commitment to place and no physical
nature (a factory, while being a physical entity, is not
the corporation), a corporation can relocate all of
its operations at the first sign of inconvenience
-- demanding employees, high taxes and restrictive
environmental laws. The traditional ideal of community
engagement is antithetical to corporate behavior.
10. Opposition
to Nature: Though individuals who work
for corporations may personally love nature, corporations
themselves, and corporate societies, are intrinsically
committed to intervening in, altering and transforming
nature. For corporations engaged in commodity manufacturing,
profit comes from transmogrifying raw materials into saleable
forms. Metals from the ground are converted into cars.
Trees are converted into boards, houses, furniture and
paper products. Oil is converted into energy. In all such
energy, a piece of nature is taken from where it belongs
and processed into a new form. All manufacturing depends
upon intervention and reorganization of nature. After
natural resources are used up in one part of the globe,
the corporation moves on to another part.
This transformation
of nature occurs in all societies where
manufacturing takes place. But in capitalist, corporate
societies, the process is accelerated because capitalist
societies and corporations must grow by extracting resources
from nature and reprocessing them at an ever-quickening pace.
Meanwhile, the consumption end of the cycle is also accelerated
by corporations that have an interest in convincing people that
commodities bring material satisfaction. Inner satisfaction,
self-sufficiency, contentment in nature or a lack of a desire
to acquire wealth are subversive to corporate goals.
Banks finance the conversion
of nature; insurance companies
help reduce the financial risks involved. Of course, on a
finite planet, the process cannot continue indefinitely.
11. Homogenization:
American rhetoric claims that commodity
society delivers greater choice and diversity than other
societies. "Choice" in this context means product choice
in the marketplace: many brands to choose from and diverse
features on otherwise identical products. Actually, corporations
have a stake in all of us living our lives in a similar manner,
achieving our pleasures from things that we buy in a world
where each family lives isolated in a single family home and
has the same machines as every other family on the block.
Recently, the "singles" phenomenon has proved even more
productive than the nuclear family, since each person
duplicates the consumption patterns of every other person.
Lifestyles and economic
systems that emphasize sharing
commodities and work, that do not encourage commodity
accumulation or that celebrate non-material values, are not
good for business. People living collectively, sharing such
hard goods as washing machines, cars and appliances
(or worse, getting along without them) are outrageous
to corporate commodity society.
Native societies
-- which celebrate an utterly non-material
relationship to life, the planet and the spirit -- are regarded
as backward, inferior and unenlightened. We are told that they
envy the choices we have. To the degree these societies continue
to exist, they represent a threat to the homogenization of
worldwide markets and culture. Corporate society works hard
to retrain such people in attitudes and values appropriate
to corporate goals.
In the undeveloped
parts of the world, where corporations
are just arriving, the ideological retraining process is just
getting under way. Satellite communications technology, which
brings Western television and advertising, is combined with
a technical infrastructure to speed up the pace of development.
Most of this activity is funded by the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, as well as agencies such as
US Agency for International Development, the Inter-American
Bank and the Asian-American Bank, all of which serve
multinational corporate enterprise.
The ultimate goal of
corporate multinationals was expressed
in a revealing quote by the president of Nabisco Corporation
"One world of homogeneous consumption... [I am] looking
forward to the day when Arabs and Americans, Latinos and
Scandinavians, will be munching Ritz crackers as
enthusiastically as they already drink Coke or brush
their teeth with Colgate."
In the book, Trilateralism,
editor Holly Sklar wrote:
"Corporations not only advertise products, they promote
lifestyles rooted in consumption, patterned largely after
the United States.... [They] look forward to a post-national
age in which [Western] social, economic and political values
are transformed into universal values... a world economy
in which all national economies beat to the rhythm or
transnational corporate capitalism.... The Western way
is the good way; national culture is inferior."
Form Is Content
Corporations are inherently
bold, aggressive and competitive.
Though they exist in a society that claims to operate by moral
principles, they are structurally amoral. It is inevitable that
they will dehumanize people who work for them and dehumanize
the overall society as well. They are disloyal to workers,
including their own managers. Corporations can be disloyal
to the communities they may have been part of for many years.
Corporations do not care about nations; they live beyond
boundaries. They are intrinsically committed to destroying
nature. And they have an inexorable, unabatable, voracious
need to grow and to expand. In dominating other cultures,
in digging up the Earth, corporations blindly follow the
codes that have been built into them as if they were genes.
We must abandon the
idea that corporations can reform
themselves. To ask corporate executives to behave in a
morally defensible manner is absurd. Corporations, and
the people within them, are following a system of logic
that leads inexorably toward dominant behaviors. To ask
corporations to behave otherwise is like asking an army
to adopt pacifism.
Corporation: n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual
profit without individual responsibility.
- Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914.
Excerpted from: IN
THE ABSENCE OF THE SACRED:
The Failure of Technology and the Survival of
the Indian Nations, Sierra Club Books,
730 Polk St.. San Francisco, CA 94109.
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from the Winter 1995,
EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL which is published
quarterly by Earth Island Institute, 300 Broadway # 28,
San Francisco, CA 94133 Phone: 415-788-3666; FAX: 415-788-7324;
earthisland@igc.apc.org
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