Although I believe I understood the core concepts and thesis, I finished “the Corporation” with a feeling of confusion. Primarily, I believe my confusion has much to do with one of the first principles of the film: the idea that a corporation is a person.
Use of the term ‘person’ in describing what a corporation is seems fundamentally, though subtly, misleading. That a corporation is a legal entity, and has the same legal status as a person does, is quite different from saying that a corporation is a person. The State, theoretically, could bestow any subject the same rights as a person, but that State act would not, alone, make the subject a ‘person’, in the way we use the term. Put more directly: just because a corporation has accumulated the same rights as a person, that does not make it a person.
Because of the real difference between being a person and having the rights of a person, the film’s use of the litany of atrocities done by corporations to support the thesis that the corporate person is psychopathic is, I think, somewhat facile. Of course the corporation, if a person, would be a psychopath-its only value is a purely self-interested economic one, and there would be something deeply wrong with a person who was solely motivated by self-interest-but a corporation isn’t a person. I suppose this isn’t really a problem, except I worry that packaging warranted criticism of corporations in a false equivalence gives those who don’t wish to accept the criticism something ancillary to focus on, and justifiably reject. Put more simply: if the point of the film is to bring to the public conversation the idea that corporations are by no means naturally a force for good, surely throwing around a psychoanalytical diagnosis like a petty insult can’t make those who believe in the socially positive power of incorporating more likely to come to the table, especially when the point is so vulnerable to the simple denial of one premise-i.e, that a corporate entity, as a person, is capable of meaningful psychoanalysis.
The point that a corporation, if they were a person, would be a psychopathic person, seems to me like just a circuitous way to get to the more crucial point-namely, that treating or thinking of a corporation as a person, as society does, is really deeply flawed social policy, irrespective of whether there are good reasons to give a corporation the rights of a person. The question at this point, and which the film gets at when discussing both the future, and the malleability of the corporate ‘will’ (also an inappropriately anthropomorphising term, but oh well), is what to do instead. I think the film points to three solutions: the first, exemplified by the successes of protests at the Gap, is where collective action changes the economic calculus that informs the corporate ‘will’. The second, exemplified by the work of the Carpet CEO, would be where we hope that Boards of Directors, by imposing their values, might change the corporate ‘will’ to one that is more socially minded. The third, obliquely referenced in the discussion of cap and trade, would be where the State changes the corporate economic calculus by changing the incentives for the corporation, without imposing any values on the corporation other than its current value, that of owner value.
I don’t know which, of the three, is the best option, but the film does do a good job in showing them all. I suppose if the film succeeds in getting society at large to discuss which, or what mix, of the three solutions can best deal with the social problem posed by corporations, then it is a socially valuable film-even if, as I think, its method of getting everyone into the discussion is less effective than it could be.
I’m interested to hear what people think I am missing something about the pseudo psychoanalysis that makes it superior to a more direct criticism, or if (as is usual) I just missed the point.
