Or think about Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. In that world, the development of human cloning and other reproductive technologies has enabled humanity to control its numbers, reducing resource demands. It is also a world in which the manipulation of subconsciousness has made people hold caste-appropriate ideas, thereby guaranteeing industrial and social peace, and also adopt extreme consumerist culture, which ensures high levels of demand – thus indeed solving ‘the problem of depression prevention’, to use the phrase from Robert Lucas quoted earlier. This world is arguably a modern neuro-economist’s paradise, as described in the book The Happiness Industry by William Davies, but, once again, this is not a world that most people would want to live in.
Another similar – though less controlled – world is described in Andrew Niccol’s movie Gattaca, in which developments in genetics and reproductive technologies have put humanity on the cusp of weeding out genetically imperfect individuals. It is a world in which talent (or at least potential talent) is almost perfectly matched with people’s jobs, but it is a horrible world, in which genetically imperfect people are not even allowed to try for better things.
In other words, Brave New World and Gattaca are saying that being imperfect, being not totally predictable and having free will (including the will to try what science says is impossible, as in the case of Vincent Freeman, the leading character in Gattaca, played by Ethan Hawke) are key features of our humanity. They are saying that we don’t want a ‘perfect’ world brought about by scientific progress, if it denies our humanity.
Now, an interesting extension of the idea that SF is a way to imagine another economic world is to say that history is a ‘dystopian science fiction without even memories of advanced technologies’.
In the past, largely because we had different (and mostly less productive) technologies, economic institutions were different from what we have today. I have already discussed the case of child labour. Child labour was so widespread and so problematic in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth in Europe and North America because of the particular technologies that were being used. Poor children had always worked, but most of them tended the family goat, ran errands, picked pockets, or whatever, but they did not do adults’ work. The machine-based technologies that emerged from the eighteenth century meant that adult males’ muscle power was no longer necessary for a lot of jobs, so they made it possible to hire children more widely. At the same time, these technologies were not sufficiently productive that societies could not afford to take every child out of work, as the richer countries do today.
Because technologies and institutions were different, individuals were different. Individuals may have free will, but what they are, what they want and even what they can imagine are deeply shaped by the technologies and the institutions that they live under. This is why many countries regarded today as being hard-working and organised – the Germans, the Japanese, and the South Koreans – were denounced as having lazy, dishonest and irrational people when they were poor.3
Of course, I am not advocating a strictly materialist view, in which technologies define institutions and institutions define individuals. The causality is much more complex. Individuals may be formed by technologies and institutions but they also change and newly create technologies and institutions. Institutions influence how technologies are used and changed; for example, Marxist commentators have argued that capitalists have often chosen certain technologies because they give them the greatest control over their workers rather than because they are the most efficient.4 Technologies may set ultimate boundaries to the institutions that you can have, but there is a lot of room for diversity, depending on how individuals exercise their agencies in designing institutions and depending on the shape of existing institutions. And so on.
If you understand history in this way, you can very easily see that the economic realities that we believe to be the outcomes of some ‘scientific, natural laws’ are really the results of technological changes, institutional changes, political decisions and the influence exercised by individual agencies. Used in this way, historical research becomes similar to writing and analysing SFs, except that the alternative realities are not as much imagined as in SFs. Please note here that I have just said ‘not as much imagined’ rather than ‘not imagined’, as the recording and the deciphering of history involve important elements of imagination – about the perceptions and the motivation of the actors, unwritten social rules that later historians can only infer and imagine, and so on.
Finally, the British novelist L. P. Hartley famously said in his novel The Go-Between that ‘the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. If you say that one of the utilities of studying history is to allow us to imagine other realities, you can say the same about studying foreign countries, or doing comparative studies. When that foreign country is a country with very different technologies (and thus very different institutions, very different individuals, etc.), the comparison almost becomes a historical study from the viewpoint of the technologically more advanced country. Or conversely, when seen from the viewpoint of the technologically less advanced country, the comparative study becomes an analysis of SF. Or, if you see it from the point of view of the researcher conducting the comparative study, it is like travelling in a time machine – the ultimate SF fantasy.
To sum up, in trying to understand the economy and reform it for the better, we can be immensely helped by SF, the study of history and comparative studies. SF, history and comparative studies all allow us to see that the existing economic and social order is not a ‘natural’ one: that it can be changed; that it has been changed; and, most importantly, that it has been changed in the way it has only because some people have dared to imagine a different world, and fought for it.
1R. Lucas (2003) Macroeconomic Priorities, American Economic Review 93(1): 1–14.
2See H.-J. Chang (2002) Breaking the Mould: An Institutionalist Political Economy Alternative to the Neo-Liberal Theory of the Market and the State, Cambridge Journal of Economics 26(5): 539–59. For a shorter and more user-friendly exposition, see H.-J. Chang (2010) Thing 1: There Is No Such Thing as a Free Market, in 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism: 1–10. London: Penguin Books.
3See H.-J. Chang (2007) Lazy Japanese and Thieving Germans, in Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Security: 182–202. London: Random House.
4S. Marglin (1974) What Do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production: Part I, Review of Radical Political Economy, 6(2): 60–112, is the best-known example.
2
Future Incorporated?
Laura Horn
In a vastly overpopulated near-future world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge transnational corporations.
The Space Merchants (1953)
When corporations have all the power, the only way to get it back is from the inside.
Incorporated (2016)
The future is dominated by mega-corporations, determining every facet of production, consumption and social interaction. As the ubiquitous theme of the corporate dystopia in popular science fiction has it, resistance against the corporation and its evil managers can come only from subversive actors, constituting the last bastion of individuality and agency. This representation of the corporation has been a recurrent theme in visions of future societies, including notable examples such as classic novels from the 1950s (e.g. Mack Reynold’s Mercenary from Tomorrow, or Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants), works of science fiction from the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. the Umbrella corporation in Resident Evil, Tyrell in Blade Runner, Weland-Yutani in Alien and Delos in Westworld – the original, and now the reimagined TV show) to recent corporate dystopias in, for example, Mr. Robot, Continuum and Incorporated. While this portrayal of the role of corporations might at first seem to question corpora
te power with its focus on corporate crimes and acts of resistance, I argue that it actually reinforces a discourse that prevents imagining alternatives to the corporation. This chapter explores the social scientific and economic fiction of the corporation as the most efficient, or indeed only way of organising production, and how it has become a persistent myth that permeates into most visions of future developments.
Drawing on a range of popular representations of the corporation in future societies, the chapter investigates how the corporate form is being obscured and reified through a portrayal that focuses almost exclusively on (evil) management and corporate agency, rather than questioning and highlighting the social power relations that form the very fabric of the corporation. Resisting corporate power, in this narrative, is almost inevitably an individualistic, punctual act, even when it results in ‘bringing down’ the corporation in one way or another. There are no visions of what comes ‘after the corporation’ – that is, alternative visions of organising collectively owned, or at least worker-directed, production. Since either the state is seen as weak or collective agency is ruled out outright, these narratives in effect cement the logic of no alternative to corporate power. This is what the second part of the chapter then seeks to question, by mobilising utopias (both ‘real’ and actual) of worker co-operatives, worker self-directed enterprises and other ways of reorganising the future of production and property. These alternatives, in combination with prefigurative politics, can contribute to envisaging a future that does not necessarily have to be incorporated.
The Social Fiction of the Corporation
Corporate power is a key dimension of contemporary capitalism. Out of the 100 wealthiest economic entities in the global economy, 69 are now corporations; only 31 are countries, and this trend is increasing.1 The power of transnational business is such that governments tend to portray corporate interests as synonymous with broader societal interests. The very idea of the corporation has become common sense in the contemporary perception of how production and consumption should and could be organised; it is difficult even to imagine alternatives. And yet, at the end of the day the corporation is nothing more than an enduring social fiction, an entity entirely constituted upon legal structures that has taken on layers of meaning much beyond the initial social innovation of separating investment and liability. As Adam Haley puts it, the corporation might indeed be ‘political economy’s most science-fictional trope’.2
The corporate form comes in a whole range of legal formats, but most commonly it is the specific form of the limited liability corporation with widely dispersed share ownership and one-tier (i.e. single) board structure as the focus for discussions of corporate power. ‘Limited liability’ here means that the shareholders are not personally liable for claims against, or the debt of, the corporation. ‘Widely dispersed’ refers to the fact that there is not one (or several) actor(s) owning a number of shares that would entitle them to have a controlling say in corporate decision-making, such as at the annual general meeting. Instead, the assumption is that shareholders will coalesce on certain positions vis-à-vis the management’s strategies, and either sanction them, or else sell their shares. Managers, here, are in a delicate relationship in which their strategies are supposed to sustain the corporation as such, but fundamentally also act on behalf of the shareholders’ interest (which is assumed to be profit maximisation, also known as ‘shareholder value’). The corporation, then, does not have ‘owners’ as such; as an entity, it is an actor in its own right. Workers or employees do not feature in this dominant image of the corporation. Neither does the state, other than as regulator and enabler for a business environment; a corollary of corporate power is the many ways in which corporations and governments interact in the dismantling of corporate oversight. The significant expansion of corporate rights over the last decades is a concomitant development to this; the impersonal ‘legal fiction’ has now acquired far-reaching corporate personhood, and an international investor–state dispute settlement system arbitrates the rights of corporations when states implement inconvenient policies that might limit corporate profits. Transnational corporations, with their global value chains, vast logistics and distribution networks and complex marketing strategies, are one of the key driving forces of the global economy, manifesting the imperative to ‘nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’ that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had already highlighted in 1848. It has become almost impossible not to interact with corporations in one way or another in contemporary capitalism, even just at the basic level of everyday processes of consumption. This renders the acute feeling of powerlessness in the face of corporate power all the more pressing. It is here that representations of the corporation have come to serve ‘as symbols for larger economic concerns often too vast or complex to comprehend’.3 With corporations seemingly all-encompassing, and the state at best at arm’s length, or at worst ‘captured’ by corporate interests, the possibilities for social change, for contestation and resistance of corporate power are often seen as limited even by activists. This perception has permeated into the representation of the corporation in fiction;4 it is particularly works of science fiction that the next section focuses on.
The Social Science Fiction of the Corporation
Following Fredric Jameson’s magisterial understanding of science fiction as ‘archaeology of the future’,5 the following discussion takes as point of departure that any work of science fiction is linked to the social, economic and political context in which it was written; beyond even the immediate intents of the author. The corporation in its ‘evil’, dystopian representation here constitutes a trope, a recurring image that embodies both the material and the discursive constitution and perception of corporations in historically specific periods of capitalism. The template for the ‘evil corporation’ varies according to genre and time period, of course, but generally involves corporations superseding government functions, running public and private services, directly or indirectly (i.e. digitally) enforcing control over civilian populations and even intervening in foreign policies and international relations in their own interests. Even its visual representation has universal features, such as an architectural aesthetic of sheer brutalism, or, later on, ‘brooding’ glass-pane modernism.6 Part of this generic narrative is that, against the structural dystopian context of the corporation, there are individual villainous actors, most commonly senior management, who embody the utilitaristic, profit-maximising or even criminal character of corporate power, posited against heroic individual protagonists fighting both the managers and the system. Or, to quote the creator of the Roxxon Corporation in the Marvel Universe, ‘it was the people that ran the corporation. They were the embodiment of evil [and] became the prototype for everybody’s free-floating anxiety.’7 Resisting or even fighting corporate power takes on the quality of subversive, counter-hegemonic struggle against the seemingly inevitable, all-encompassing corporate entity. It also takes place against a background whereby the state, and other forms of collective representation and agency, are dysfunctional or captured. As Haley argues, this dystopian narrative has actually acquired a totaling quality in contemporary representations, in which ‘the corporation itself has gradually become a primary object of dystopian fear’, much more so than the other fundamental dystopian canvas of the authoritarian state.8
Critical literary analysis can here offer us an important contribution to understanding how and why these corporate dystopias have become so pervasive. Ralph Clare highlights the importance of analysing what this means for the very way we think about and imagine the future.9 In discussion of the recent corporate dystopia TV series Continuum, Haley points out that ‘narratives of inevitability buttress corporate futurity’. Time travel has become the only way around the inevitability of corporate hegemony: ‘[W]hat better signal of hegemony than the marking of resistance as necessarily science-fictional?’ In his critical reading of ‘science fiction as a denaturalization mac
hine’, futurity becomes ‘irreducibly corporate’. With no social space for radical imaginaries, the structural closure of the future precludes transformative political thought, let alone social action.10
This is where political economy can, and should, come in, with its analytical understanding that ‘economic science fictions’ are always already prefigurative. Questioning the overdetermination of social processes – or, as Jameson puts it, ‘what is finally not ultimately unthinkable about historical conjunctures’11 – offers a terrain in which alternatives to the corporation can be discussed, both within science fiction as well as in the realm of ‘real utopias’. In the following, drawing particularly on the work of Kim Stanley Robinson and others, I show that there are in fact alternative imaginaries in science fiction, far from reproducing or accepting the inevitability of the corporate dystopia. To anchor this within contemporary political economy, a discussion of worker co-operatives then offers a sketch of some of the core issues with regard to the future of alternatives to corporate power.
Beyond Corporations
In contemporary fictional presentations of the corporation, the economic alternatives to the corporate multiverse are limited to hustling, criminality or small-scale subsistence. The system is seemingly so all-encompassing, so holistic, that there is no alternative form of organising and producing, not even in the interstices, the cracks. Even if alternatives are alluded to they appear unfeasible, remote and abstract, such as the co-operatives mentioned in passing in Incorporated, which are ‘out there’ but no actual option for the protagonist. To bring down the evil corporation might be the main plot line, but there is no conception of what comes next, no alternative narrative for a different way of organising. This is very much consistent with the incisive frame put forward by Mark Fisher, writing about capitalist realism as ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living.’12
Economic Science Fictions Page 5