by David D’Amato
BBC News reports that Alcatel-Lucent, a global powerhouse in the
telecommunications industry, “will pay $137m (#88.7m) to settle U.S. charges that it paid bribes to win Latin American and Asian contracts.” The legal strikes were in part based on Securities and
Exchange Commission claims that the company “used consultants who performed little or no legitimate work to funnel more than $8m in bribes to government officials.”
The most remarkable feature of the story is how very unremarkable it is — that a giant corporation would bribe a government is in a very
real way the definition of politics. Another notable aspect of the
story is its identification of structures that funnel money to the
powerful through the creation of titles and jobs that actually do
nothing at all; this is, of course, exactly how the corporatist
economy functions, robbing labour to pour wealth into the tiny tip of
the manager-class pyramid.
Stories like this one ought to appall us, to turn us against our
“public officials,” but we shouldn’t compartmentalize them from the
political process as a general formula. When Big Business lobbies
Congress to raise competitors’ costs enough to foreclose
participation, it’s fashionable to call it “interest group democracy.”
Well, “interest group democracy” is to “bribery” what “national
security” is to “imperialism” or “neocolonialism.” If we’re supposed
to distinguish between the legitimate bribes that happen in politics
every day and the illegitimate bribes that the Justice Department
prosecutes, that distinction is elusive.
Among the things that we, as anarchists, are trying to do is sow the
seeds of a society wherein the means of production are — rather than
exclusively controlled by a small, idle political class — held by
those who, through their labour, should own them.
I deliberately decline to perpetuate the bewildering ambiguity of the
idea that we should want “private ownership of the means of
production” — or “public” for that matter. As Sheldon Richman and
Kevin Carson have pointed out, the purport of either of those
approaches is informed by what “private” and “public” signify within
our political/legal framework. This is not to suggest a top-down
reorganization of society or an argument for dragooning people into
accepting some arbitrarily-imposed order.
The egalitarian aspirations of the anarchist would, of themselves, be
invalidated if they alone were the cynosure of our vision for society,
if we didn’t also consider society’s passage from today’s violent
system of theft to Paul Goodman’s “new order” of “free action.”
“Equality without freedom,” taught Mikhail Bakunin, “is the despotism
of the State. … [T]he most fatal combination that could possibly be
formed, would be to unite socialism to absolutism.” It is the process
itself, the very operation of nonviolence and trade, that will erode
state-capitalism by eliminating privilege.
Libertarians who have rightly fixed themselves on the nonaggression
principle as the nucleus of our social theory ought to ponder the
implications of that principle; they may find it uncomfortable to
learn that today’s corporations have not amassed their power or their domination of resources merely through competition, through “offering something the consumer wants.” The idiosyncratic preference for an economy commanded by oversized companies should not be enough for conscientious libertarians.
We must — at the very least — accept the possibility that the
state’s impediments to voluntary relationships are both the origin of
this capitalism and a handicap to “smallness” and its potential. That
so many libertarians have a predilection for America’s corporate
pecking order economy, and for exporting it around the world, is
perhaps some attestation of the success the state and its deputies
have had in fraudulently stamping their system as “the free market.”
This inclination is part of what Roderick Long calls “right-conflationism,” and its twin on the left “is the error of
treating the evils of existing corporatist capitalism as though they
constituted an objection to a freed market.” In A Vindication of
Natural Society, Edmund Burke identified an inevitable corollary of
the latter species of conflation, which mistakes today’s economy as an unbridled free market; left-conflationists, met with the evils of the
supposed “free market,” turn to the state as — in Burke’s words –
“Protection for the Poor and Weak,” but what could be more, as he
calls it, “ridiculous?”
Voluntary relationships that don’t rely on hierarchies superimposed to profit the powerful are full of untapped potential, of sundry ways to attend to society’s problems. The state, by comparison, was never set up or set in motion to do anything but line the pockets of its
patrician class. To truly discourage bribery and corruption, we need
to work around the state, removing it from the equation and allowing
free people to thrive.
About the writer:
C4SS News Analyst David D’Amato is a market anarchist lawyer currently completing an LL.M. in commercial law at Suffolk University Law School. His aversion to superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.
