What is American Corporatism?

[housewolf]

This article is a couple of years old and from a conservative perspective but I found it quite interesting and thought it might stimulate some thought and discussion here.


What is American Corporatism?
By Robert Locke
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 13, 2002

We are probably heading into some economic heavy weather which will spur needed debate on what's right and wrong with our economy. This will require our being clear about what kind of economy we really have. I have mentioned before that we increasingly live not in a capitalist society but in a corporatist one, and I would like to flesh out this notion.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3054

[eg101]

1. Locke is an interesting writer! n/t

[imenja]

2. It is unfortunate that so few Americans bother to learn history

The author's use of the term corporatism is incorrect. Corporatism refers to a political system in which various interest groups (labor, farmers, industrialists, the military, etc...) are organized into the structure of the state through institutions (like official labor unions) that give to those groups certain gains and privileges in exchange for support for the government and their refraining from more radical activities. Key examples of corporatist states include Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, Argentina under Juan Peron, the post-Estado Novo government of Getulio Vargas (Brazil), and Mexico's PRI. One of the principal functions of the corporatist state was to incorporate labor unions into it's structures, granting workers certain benefits, and thereby avoid direct challenges to the capitalist system. Leaders of these states, like Juan Peron, juggled the interests of various groups and found themselves assailed as communists by industrialists while simultaneously challenged by socialist and anarchist labor unions.

Wikipedia notes: "Historically, corporatism or corporativism (Italian corporativismo) is a political system in which legislative power is given to corporations that represent economic, industrial, and professional groups. Unlike pluralism, in which many groups must compete for control of the state, in corporatism, certain unelected bodies take a critical role in the decision-making process. This original meaning was not connected with the specific notion of a business corporation, being a rather more general reference to any incorporated body. The word "corporatism" is derived from the Latin word for body, corpus. . . . This use of the term "corporation" is not exactly equivalent to the restricted modern sense of the word. . . . Corporate in this context is intended to convey the meaning of a "body," as in corpus. Its purpose is to reflect more medieval European concepts of a whole society in which the various parts each play a part in the life of the society, just as the various parts of the body play specific parts in the life of a body." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism )

In Locke's analysis, "corporatism" refers to domination by business interests and what we now refer to as corporate welfare. If his analysis had been limited to current day America, I could excuse the term. He, however, wanders into history. In discussing the historical development of the state's involvement in promoting business interests and assuaging the most brutal elements of capitalism, he mistakenly refers to that as "corporatism," a political phenomena of the same period. The 1930s and 1940s witnessed the emergence of corporatist states (Fascists in Europe and Latin American Populism) of a very different nature from what Locke describes. His is a system in which the state promotes business interests above all else. Corporatism, as historians and political theorists use the term, is a system in which the state incorporates various interests into the body of government itself.

I do not dispute the overall argument that the American state is actively engaged in promoting business interests and assuaging some of capitalism's most savage excesses, but the author's terminology--especially when discussing history--is unfortunate.