Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 47

                                          NO PLACE FOR PEOPLE 


    We see a pattern repeated at all levels of society and in every corner of the world. In the name of increasing efficiency hundreds of millions of people are being discarded by a global economy that has no need for them. In Mexico, small farmers are displaced to make way for mechanized agriculture.  In India, they are forced off their lands by massive new dams needed to produce electricity so that factory workers can be replaced by more efficient machines. On Wall Street, the human traders who key decisions into computer terminals to execute trades in global money markets are replaced by more efficient computer programs. Small-town merchants are driven out by superstores run by mega-retailers, who in turn are threatened by dot-com retailers. Voice-recognition devices replace operators. Multimedia education replaces teachers. Corporate downsizing is eliminating redundant workers and middle managers. Corporate mergers and consolidations eliminate middle, even top managers. There is no end in sight.

              FIRST THE MUSCLE,  NOW THE BRAIN 

   We are crossing the threshold into the second industrial revolution . The first industrial revolution exploited a newfound human mastery of energy to give machines enormous muscle power and greatly reduced the demand for physical human labor. Machines, however, could not calculate, reason, discriminate visual patterns, or recognize and interpret human speech. Thus, every machine required a human operator to provide it with a brain and a human intermediary to serve as its eyes and ears. The greater the number of machines, the greater the number of people to tend them. The more sophisticated the machines, the greater the skills their operators required and the higher the wages skilled operators could command. The second industrial revolution is exploiting major advances in information technology that use computers and electronic sensors to give machines eyes, ears, and brains to see and hear, interpret, and act on their own. 
   Economists with secure, tenured positions at leading universities assure us that we have no need to worry. The increases in productivity will spur economic growth, and growth will mean more jobs, they tell us, just as happened in the first industrial revolution. They fail to note that when the British textile industry was mechanized during the first industrial revolution, Britain shifted much of the unemployment to India. It placed prohibitive tariffs on textiles imported from India to Britain, while British colonial administrators in India virtually eliminated the tariff on British textiles imported to India and levied taxes on Indian cloth produced domestically for domestic sale and on household spinning wheels. The colonies also absorbed many migrants who were surplus to the European economy. Exported to the colonies, they commandeered the best lands to grow export crops, such as cotton, to feed the mother-country industries. 
   The second industrial revolution, based on a process of colonization defined more by class than by geography, is forcing ever more of the world's population into the ranks of the colonized. 

   Efficiency is about producing a greater output with less input. When we increase productive output per hour of human labor, we speak of increasing productivity. In the simplified examples of the sort favored by economic texts, it seems quite a good thing.
   A farmer who buys a small tractor can cultivate more acres to provide more food and income for her family or devote fewer hours to toiling in the fields. Either way the farmer gains, no one loses, and the society is enriched in a variety of ways. 
   Unfortunately, the real world isn't like such simplified textbook examples. Note that in our example, the manager, the owner, and the laborer are one and the same person --- she makes the decision, bears the costs, and decides whether the productivity gain will go toward increasing production or reducing work time. In the real world, the decision is likely to be made by an agribusiness corporation based solely on profitability. A few favored workers will be required to increase their output ; the remainder will lose their jobs, with few alternative prospects. 
   It seems that the only beneficiaries of productivity increases in a nonunionized, labor-surplus world are the owners of capital. Yet, as management analyst William Dugger suggests, we may be on the way to displacing them as well : 

     Some fascinating possibilities present themselves. Corporations have already begun to buy up their own stock, holding it in their treasury. Taken to the logical conclusion, when 100 percent of the stock is treasury stock the corporation will own itself. It will have dispensed entirely with shareholders from the species Homo sapiens. To whom or to what would it then be responsible ? Take these speculations about organized irresponsibility a bit further. . . Could a corporation entirely dispense with not only human ownership but also human workers and managers ? . . . What would it be then? . . . It would exist physically as a network of machines that buy, process, and sell commodities, monitored by a network of computers. Its purpose would be to grow ever larger through acquiring more machines and to become ever more powerful through acquiring more computers to monitor the new machines. It would be responsible to no one but itself in its very purest, completely unconcerned with anything save profit and power. 

Perhaps one day, if allowed sufficient freedom to follow its own unrestrained tendencies, a global corporation will achieve the ultimate in productive efficiency, an entity made up solely of computers and machines busily engaged in the replication of money. We might call it the perfectly efficient corporation. Although this is surely not what anyone intends, we are acting as though this is the world we seek to create.