Page 135 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

But at its core this exploitation is thought of as deriving from and expressed
primarily in the large-scale nature of much of the contemporary corporate
economy from which its oppressive and damaging characteristics are
thought to derive. It is this largeness that leads to the vast consumption of
natural resources in the production process. It is the same vastness that
leads to excessive carbon emissions. It is vastness that leads to and is
expressed in global ‘long-distance trade’. It is vastness that leads to the huge
concentration of wealth in a few hands. And it is vastness that leads to the
huge and undemocratic concentrations of corporate power. ‘Globalization is
de-localization’, is the expression used to capture this point. 9
An important theoretical point arises here. In this line of analysis, the
large-scale nature of private and public corporations is not regarded as an
outgrowth of other forces, such as inescapable tendencies to bureaucratic
rationalization as in the well-known line of thinking of Max Weber on
the necessary disenchantment of modernity. Nor for that matter, are the
arguments of the reactionary German phenomenology, concerning the
inevitable emergence of ‘inauthentic Dasein’, following the replacement
of Kultur and Gemeinschaft by ‘bourgeois Gesellschaft’, accepted. Nor is
size seen as a necessary product of the growth of the division of labor and
the market as in the civil society tradition running through Adam Smith,
10
Hegel and Marx. Size is not, so to speak, a dependent variable. It is itself
causative and sui generis. It is willfully chosen as a particular form of
economic organization precisely in order to extract super-profits and to
plunder the wealth of the entire world.
This idea is best captured in the following statement from Cavanagh:

In the eyes of citizens movements, these trends [towards large corporations
and global trade] are not the result of some inexorable historical force
but rather of the intentional actions of a corrupted political system awash
with money. They see the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade
Organization as leading instruments of this assault against the people and
the environment. 11

This rather voluntaristic notion of how and why firms are formed and
grow, bears no relation to any of the theories of firm organization such as
those formulated in the important work of Williamson. Willfulness,
greed and corruption are to be blamed. Given such a naïve conscious-
ness, it then follows that the task is to reduce and eventually to eliminate
bigness. Size is the problem, not the relations of production, forces of
production, technology or economies of scale. If bigness per se is the root
of the evil, then clearly smallness must be the solution. If ‘globalization
is de-localization’, then the alternative must be one of ‘localization’.

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