Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives by Elizabeth S. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Newest Industrial State

The world we live in is neither capitalist nor socialist but corporate. This world conforms to none of the theories of economics or politics that are commonly used to justify corporate action or government policy. The corporate economy combines the hierarchical bureaucracy of extreme communism with the ideological force of extreme free enterprise to create a culture which now rules the planet. John Kenneth Galbraith predicted a half century ago in his The New Industrial State what we now experience in daily life. No one paid much attention. Not enough people had yet felt the pain. More do now; perhaps enough will be moved by Elizabeth Anderson’s analysis.

Accountability for this de facto government is vague. Yet the corporation establishes the regime in which we live. Most of the daily lives of most people in most regions of the world are spent in the service of the corporation and are subject to its particular form of carrot and stick brutality. The illusion that such subjugation is voluntary is part of the corporation’s governmental power. A small minority of corporate employees may be able to move advantageously from one corporate employer to another. But the vast majority are simply stuck with the corporate regime as ‘the way things are.’

Outside of employment, the corporation dominates our existence far more thoroughly than any elected government. Corporate legislative lobbying is the tip of an iceberg of highly technical international standards and agreements that determine what will be done where and to what level of personal and ecological safety. We might object to corporate funding of political campaigns but it is the hidden non-legislative commitments made by government acquiescence to ‘corporate expertise’ that creates the real clout for corporate control over markets from food to high-tech components.

Elizabeth Anderson is a political philosopher and one of the few social critics who has recognized the modern economy, society, and government for what it is: life totally controlled by the singular institution of the corporation. She reminds us that it was not always so. Neither Marx nor Adam Smith knew anything about the corporation. Its institutional growth was promoted as a means to eliminate monopoly and its attendant inequities. According to liberal theory, the corporation is a mere way station to perfect markets. Yet it is in fact an intentional suspension of market forces that has ‘internalized’ decision-making permanently within itself.

The issues of globalization, immigration, trade pacts, ecological destruction, and the nature of liberal democracy itself, are all subsidiary to the issue of the corporation. Yet the corporation controls the discussion, not just in annual jamborees like Davos, but through the literally thousands of meetings, fora, and working groups that constitute normal corporate life. What Anderson offers in these lectures and her responses to their critics is away to begin talking about this form of private corporate government and how to bring it to heel.

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