FOR EVERYBODY who’s gotten more than a bit annoyed at all the assorted excesses attributable, rightly or wrongly, to Global Business’s machinations (you know, the layoffs, downsizings, job exports, slave-labor and near-slave-labor imports, consolidations, deregulations, price gougings, political corruption, pollution, global warming, species depletions, suburban sprawl, SUVs, stock-market roller coasters, anti-democratic “free trade” agreements, national economies ruined by IMF/World Bank austerity demands, awful Hollywood movies, dot-com boors gobbling up all the best places to live, dumb fashion magazines, brand logos in classrooms, etc. etc. etc.)–take heart.
Local author David C. Korten has a message for you: It doesn’t have to be this way.
Korten, who wrote When Corporations Rule the World back in ’96, returned last year with a follow-up, The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism.
He and his wife are among the leaders of the Positive Futures Network, which does various new-agey think-tanky kinds of stuff and publishes a journal, Yes!, which once infamously put ex-Seattle Mayor Norm Rice (that corporate-Democrat, developer-suckup) on the cover of an issue about making urban areas more “sustainable.”
Anyhoo, Korten has a few ideas about how to stem corporate power. Like many of his generation used to propose in the ’70s, a lot of his prescriptions involve proposed governmental fiats (end corporate tax breaks, increase capital-gains taxes, kill WTO, retract corporations’ extra-personal legal rights, etc. etc.
These applications of sticks and/or deprivals of carrots, Korten thinks, could sufficiently weaken the big-money stranglehold on the political and economic lives of the world just enough to allow his kind of good guys to come in–environmentalists, neo-community activists, transit planners, small and employee-owned enterprises, grassroots organizers.
The result, if all goes the way he hopes, would be something very close to the ’70s novel Ecotopia or the early-’90s TV show Northern Exposure–the kind of utopian world where the values of 50-ish baby boomers would rule.
A world of villages, of arts and crafts, of sufficiency, of collective yet oh-so-rational decision-making, where everything and everyone would be laid back and mellow.
A world where there would be two and only two ways of doing everything–Korten’s way and the bad way. (As he puts it, the “path of life” vs. the “siren song of greed.”)
A world filled with such buzzwords as “voluntary simplicity,” “holistic health,” “biocommunities,” “living consciously,” “latent human potential,” and “inner awakenings.”
In short, the kind of world I’d be bored to tears in. The kind of insular, pastoral, prosaic world Emma Bovary and the son in Playboy of the Western World tried like hell to escape from.
What’s more, Korten (and the social researchers he chooses to quote from) has this annoying habit of
Despite those caveats, and Korten’s propensities toward reducing social and historic complexities to oversimplified binary choices (principally a choice between a life-affirming world and a money-grubbing one), he has some good points.
Some of these good points involve the championing of certain local activist operations, including Sustainable Seattle and the Monorail Initiative.
And he’s at least subtle enough to note a distinction between “capitalism” (as currently practiced by the globalists) and “markets” (small business, human-scale exchanges, family farms, etc.).
And as for his monocultural post-corporate future, it doesn’t have to be that way.
For one thing, a great deal about DIY cultural production, community organizing, and anti-conglomerate thinking has been developed over the past quarter-century by the punk, hiphop, and dance-music subcultures, and also by gays and lesbians, fetishists, Linux programmers, sci-fi fans, immigrants and their not-totally-assimilated descendents, religious subsects, and many, many others of the assorted cliques and sub-nations that have emerged and/or flourished (abetted by new corporate priorities away from forging one mass audience and toward identifying (or creating) ever-more-specific demographic marketing targets.
Corporate power, here or in the world as a whole, could very well collapse from its own imbalance. (And I hope it doesn’t take a massive stock crash to do so.)
When it does (quite possibly in our quasi-immediate futures), we won’t need one universal socioeconomic premise of a neo-village monoculture, to replace today’s universal premise of everything revolving around big money. I predict we’ll be able to muddle through just fine with different groupings of folks all pursuing their own different priorities in life.
The trick will be reaching out across these cultures to solve common needs.
There’ll be something about that, sort of, tomorrow in this space.
TOMORROW: We finally watch Survivor.
ELSEWHERE:
