Post Critical Theory
Corporatocracy: An Organism Parasitizing Society
Corporatocracy — an ugly growth on the body of society spawned by the unholy alliance of capitalist monopolies and a corrupt ruling class
- This article is a continuation of a series devoted to the issue of Corporatocracy. It is based on my academic research, supplemented by years of personal experience in one of the largest international corporations. I have tried to remain politically neutral but failed to avoid using ideologically charged terms such as exploitation, false consciousness, etc., due to the absence of more suitable alternatives.
Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with those institutions.
Theodore Roosevelt, First Annual Message to Congress, 1901.
Many consider corporations evil by definition, but they are just a specific way of organizing joint activities of people, just like you and me. The true evil is Corporatocracy — an ugly growth on the body of society spawned by the unholy alliance of capitalist monopolies and a corrupt ruling class. It is responsible for transforming the corporate ethos into a means of establishing dominance over public institutions and eroding the values of civil society.
It is only possible to make corporations serve society again by eliminating Corporatocracy as a social class. I am deeply convinced that this must be done in the name of preserving a free democratic society and safeguarding universal human values.
By “elimination,” I do not mean any form of violence, nor do I advocate for it. The task lies in changing the relationships between civil society, big business, and the political system.
Many do not believe this is possible, but Corporatocracy is more vulnerable than it appears. Later, I will talk about its Achilles’ heel, but first, we need to understand how its engine — the modern business corporation — is structured.
1. Circumstantial fraudulence and the discarded moral dilemma
Corporations are incredibly adaptive. They have learned to adjust to the most dramatic changes in their environment. Their ability for sophisticated mimicry makes them highly efficient survival machines and predatory conquerors of unprotected territories.
All organs of the corporate body interact harmoniously with each other, but maintaining this harmony requires human sacrifices. Corporate activity drains the life out of those involved in it. It demands renunciation of everything unrelated to the corporation’s goals.
Accepting such demands is only possible with high employee motivation. To ensure it, corporations effectively exploit the inherent human desire for recognition. They instill hope of generous rewards, which drives employees to devote their time, energy, and talents to the altar of the corporate mission. However, behind all these lofty calls lies the banal pursuit of maximizing human resources to fulfill one-sided corporate interests. Regular employees receive nothing more than their ordinary salary, formal gratitude, and rare and purely symbolic material rewards.
This practice can be aptly called indirect fraud, although it lacks recognizable elements of a crime or even deliberate intent. It is a natural part of the corporate dynamics, shaped by the evolution of the capitalist system.
Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the management of companies does not understand the viciousness of this routine. I do not doubt that, at least for some of them, it causes moral unease. However, they are forced to abide by the unwritten rules of this system if they want to remain within it. In fact, their choice is predetermined: the system has no risks because there are always plenty of contenders for every position, while those who lose their place forfeit numerous privileges.
2. Two castes of the corporate system
It is well known that CEOs and their close associates receive exorbitant compensation. However, this is not due to the paternal generosity of Corporatocracy. It is a condition of the deal, with the Devil lurking behind its respectable facade. The more ways this Devil has of claiming someone’s soul, the greater the financial incentive that justifies this deal.
High-ranking employees of the corporation understand that they are entering a labyrinth from which there is no way out. They know that they are relinquishing their subjectivity and that none of their decisions can be motivated by anything other than selfish corporate interests, no matter how questionable those interests may be from the perspective of societal goals and humanistic values.
Of course, this fundamental aspect of the corporate system must be hidden from outsiders. Thus, the corporation’s leadership forms a closed upper caste whose members adhere to a particular code of corporate morality and whose composition must remain as stable as possible. The interests of this narrow circle are not aligned with the interests of other employees, who are classified as the lower caste of interchangeable elements whose value is purely utilitarian.
3. Сorporate state
It is evident that the lower caste employees should not perceive themselves this way to remain motivated as long as an employer needs them. To keep them in that state, the corporate system employs a trick that resembles the phenomenon of behavior-altering parasitism. In the natural environment, it manifests as the parasite seizing control of the host’s behavior and utilizing its body to propagate its own genes.
In the corporate environment, something similar occurs, except that the threat to the victim is not physical death but the loss of their personality. The task of the corporate mental agent is to install a matrix of “false consciousness” in the human mind, where the universal system of moral coordinates is replaced by the corporate one.
It works because the system is hermetic. It is a kind of state within a state. Although the corporation is forced to obey the external state as a public institution, it successfully instills in its employees the idea of the superiority of its structure over all others.
To achieve that, it uses a mechanism of social control that prescribes corporate citizens a certain behavior and type of thinking. They are meant to be imbued with unconditional loyalty to the company, evangelical faith in its internal narrative, and invariant agreement with its catechism. Critical thinking is possible only concerning technical matters; everything else is prohibited or ignored. Inevitable contradictions between the morality of the corporation and that of fair society are resolved through good old doublethink.
All these grotesqueries of the corporate state get normalized by total propaganda, in which both those who receive this as a job reward and voluntary activists are involved.
4. Surveillance and whistleblowing
But propaganda doesn’t solve all problems, so it is complemented by ubiquitous surveillance. Any employee’s message can be intercepted and examined. With the advent of advanced AI, this is achieved more effectively than ever.
Surveillance becomes total and indiscriminate. Whistleblowing is accepted and sometimes encouraged (of course, it is covered by one of the corporate euphemisms, “reporting
But that’s not all. Immediate termination can follow if an employee sets their status to “Open for Work” on their LinkedIn profile with the option to hide this information from their employer activated. Is this a coincidence or a violation of the platform’s obligations?
The answer could have been found in the source code of LinkedIn if the company truly wanted to demonstrate its social responsibility. However, it seems that for them, like most other monopolies, responsibility is more of a lip service than actual practice. And since a private company is free from public scrutiny over its business processes, catching it red-handed is hardly possible.
The times when trade unions protected workers from such arbitrariness are gone. With the onset of the neoliberal era, corporate capitalism effectively neutralized the trade union movement, and now it is in deep decline. One of the consequences is the constant weeding out of “unreliable” employees within the corporation and their replacement with loyal ones; those who are not willing to trade stability for uncertainty are eventually forced to comply.
What happens next? As individuals become more of a “corporate citizen,” they gets increasingly alienated from society of humans and turn into a kind of corporation’s appendages. The norms and values of the former substitute those of the latter in their consciousness. Concepts such as “truth,” “justice,” and “equality” are reduced to meaningless speech/text fillers to avoid conflict with their authentic meanings and systemic goal-setting. Otherwise, this conflict would be inevitable, as the logic of competitive struggle encourages ignoring all these values in favor of corporate profit.
5. Deliberate time-privation
It is essential to understand that the corporation’s competitors are not only other enterprises but the entire external world. The realm of meanings of that world is much broader and richer than the realm of meaning the corporate model can propose to the hired individual. By having time to understand that world, a person can find an alternative to the worldview imposed by the corporate model.
So, the less time available for this discovery, the easier it is for corporations to convert individuals into their resources. Therefore, corporations must take away as much of that time as possible. Ideally, the time outside of work should be perceived by individuals as a void between periods of serving the corporate state.
And the corporate system methodically works on this task day after day. Since the legal workday is limited to 7–9 hours (this norm, it should be noted, has hardly decreased in Western countries over a century, while labor productivity has increased many times over), corporations have taken a detour to accomplish this task. They seek to deprive employees of their personal mental space, overloading them with information to such an extent that their minds cannot unload until the next workday (as some employees put it, they seek to overwhelm them with corporate spam — all these silly success stories, pointless meetings, and endless KPI measurements).
Of course, this impact varies from individual to individual, but overall this tactic works effectively, as evidenced by the depressing statistics of corporate employee burnout.
In all of this, there is nothing new. That is the same inherent pattern of monopolistic capitalism, its categorical imperative of utilizing human beings as tools.
Of course, its manifestation is not as vivid now as it was in the 19th century when the Capitalist would take children from the barracks where they slept to the factory or mine, like a toolbox, and then deliver them back to the barracks after the end of the workday, thus limiting the space of their lives. But the fundamental pattern remains unchanged; only how it is carried out and disguised has shifted.
As before, exploitative capitalism steals from people their well-being and, ultimately, their most important asset — time for life.
6. Defenders of Corporatocracy
Thus, nowadays a corporation represents a quasi-totalitarian system that uses much more subtle and sophisticated means of subordinating human reason to its goals than crude violence. The system does not need crude violence, especially when those who claim to be committed to the ideals of freedom help it maintain the current status quo but do not recognize the need to create conditions for realizing that freedom.
I’m referring to intellectuals who defend capitalism against “socialism.” Essentially what they mean is a political system that restricts free entrepreneurship. However, neither what they protect nor what they protect it from is what they proclaim.
They are not defending capitalism. At least not the idealistic capitalism of the American Dream era, where everyone could aspire to a decent life by starting their own business. That capitalism ceased to exist several decades ago; neoliberalism destroyed it.
These people are defending Corporatocracy. It has deprived the vast majority of citizens of the chance to own capital. It has virtually monopolized all business opportunities, leaving nothing around but scorched earth, unfit for dignified human existence.
The grim irony lies in the fact that subjugating public interests to the interests of Corporatocracy is a direct consequence of a policy purportedly designed to protect freedom.
I am, of course, talking about neoliberalism. Its intellectual father, Friedrich Hayek, believed that capitalism is the most efficient economic system and the guarantor of civil society. He understood that uncontrolled capitalism could lead to the merging of monopolies and state bureaucracy and undermine the system of liberal democracy. He wrote extensively about this menace and how to prevent it, advocating that the government should limit its role to ensuring conditions for fair competition and refrain from interfering in business affairs.
The topic of how right Hayek was about the role of the government is too complex for such a short article (I strongly recommend interested readers to turn to the history of the epic debate between F. Hayek and J.M. Keynes). I argue that today’s civil society and capitalism relationship differs from how Hayek saw it. What we see is precisely Corporatocracy, not a society of equal opportunities.
The evidence for this is ubiquitous. We can mention:
- The privileges enjoyed by corporations to earn superprofits while the well-being of ordinary citizens stagnates.
- Lobbying by monopolies allows them to avoid genuine accountability for the consequences of their anti-social actions.
- The actual burden of financial crises is being shifted onto the shoulders of ordinary people instead of punishing the real culprits, namely the financial elites.
Lastly, how else can one explain that the social status of a corporate wage worker has come so close to the realities of serfdom, against which Hayek vehemently rebelled? Advocates of corporate capitalism argue that this worker has a choice, but it is not a choice between their own life and working for a corporation. This “choice” is limited by corporations that buy people’s lives at a throwaway price.
7. Corporatocracy and the Scarecrow of Socialism
Defenders of Corporatocracy justify all this outrage by the need to prevent “socialism.” However, by socialism, they mean its particular variant, which is nothing but state capitalism.
That was the political regime of the USSR, its satellites in the Warsaw Pact, and other allied countries. There was indeed no public ownership of the means of production in these countries. All property belonged to the political elite.
But essentially, it was a certain form of Corporatocracy. I know that reality better than others because my youth was spent in a country with that system. But now, living in a Western country, I see that its system increasingly resembles that scary ghost of the past that we thought we had rid ourselves of after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It may sound shocking, but it is not difficult to explain. The essence of Corporatocracy is the same everywhere and at all times. Corporatocracy is not about an economic system but about the subjugation of civil society to oligarchical power. It arises whenever democracy gets declined.
Socialist Corporatocracy exploits citizens by relying on state violence, and Capitalist Corporatocracy exploits wage workers by relying on the threat of extreme ostracism and the support of a corrupt ruling class. The difference between them lies only in this, so, tell what you prefer. Indeed, the second case is less severe than the first, not because Capitalistic Corporatocrats are inherently more humane than their Socialistic counterparts, but due to the persistent struggle of progressive society, which has gradually compelled capitalism to recognize the significance of human dignity.
But this struggle will never end. Corporate capitalism will forever strive to squeeze as much as possible from people, leaving them with only a minimum subsistence, which is its immanent objective. Ultimately, it aspires to turn every individual into a non-reflective being, into a dumb animal whose mind is forever enslaved by the tyranny of mindless consumerism.
8. Conclusion
What I have written above may seem like an exaggeration to those who have never worked in a contemporary corporation. Also, it may confuse those who are inside but cannot or do not want to acknowledge the pathological nature of corporate reality. However, those who prefer to keep their eyes and ears open will understand what I am talking about because they feel the suffocating constraints of such an environment.
What’s even worse is that this state of affairs is not unique to any specific corporation — it’s pervasive. The same arrangements can be found in all corporations, while outside of them, there is scarcely anything left that they haven’t claimed as their own.
I believe that the tragic death of George Floyd ignited the United States also because his last words and the circumstances in which they were uttered accurately reflected the feelings of millions of people. As a social system becomes unjust and indifferent to the pressing problems of individuals and their communities, each breath becomes increasingly difficult. Yes, not everyone works in corporations, but corporations rule the world and therefore wield power over flesh-and-blood human beings until a particular force can overturn this abhorrent, pathological dominance.
Yet no pathology is eternal, even if deeply rooted in the social structure. Eventually, people become tired of perceiving injustice and exploitation as the norm, which creates the conditions for change.
These changes are overdue and necessary if we want to be confident of fair access to the goods produced by society, equal opportunities, social security, and the right to control our life at our discretion.
Corporatocracy is the key obstacle to a free, just, and prosperous civil society.
I will reiterate here what I said at the beginning of the article:
Corporatocracy should be eliminated as a social class to make corporations serve society again. That must be done in the name of preserving a free democratic society and safeguarding universal human values.
The widespread awareness of this necessity is a critically important step towards liberating us, the citizens of the free world, from the dictate of this inhumane parasitic structure.
The good news is that we can see the light of hope. As I mentioned earlier, Corporatocracy has an Achilles’ heel, which I will discuss in one of the upcoming articles.
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