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Commentary by Dave Belden.
Written spring 2000.
I hate you! I need you! Paradoxes of the Left and the Corporations:
#1. The Left Needs the Corporations
The Left and the Corporations hate each other, right? Think Seattle over a year ago. Failing to find actual windows belonging to the World Trade Organization, anarchists smashed the windows of Starbucks, the Gap and other big companies. The responsible, mainstream left condemned the anarchists, but shared the basic sense that it's Us against Them. Us folks against the Corporations.
All through the 20th century progressives fought the corporations, and we folks actually had many victories. Anti-trust, trade unions, social security, welfare, Medicare, Clean Air Act, OSHA, civil rights, gay rights, women's rights. We did partly succeed in bringing big money under control at a national level. Now we have to do it all over again on a global level.
But here's the paradox: it was the corporations and indeed capitalism itself that made these people's victories of the last century possible. What? Am I saying that civil rights, social security, feminism and gay rights could never have happened without the modern economy? That's exactly what I'm saying. Women were oppressed for thousands of years. How come they largely turned that around just in our mother's lifetimes? People always dreaded poverty in old age: now the old have a modest income. How come in just the last generation gays have been able to live lives out of the closet and soon will be able to marry and be just ordinary folks? How come slavery, an institution almost as old as the oppression of women, has been outlawed in just the last 200 years? Which countries did these victories happen in - the rich ones or the poor ones?
A few key words explain these victories for the oppressed. Words like cities, wages, education.
Until there were lots of women living together in cities, working together in factories, drawing their own wages, and getting educated, you could never have a successful feminist movement. In a purely farm economy, a woman who leaves her husband leaves her farm and her whole livelihood; she's destitute; so he has her under his thumb. Having everyone live on farms owned by men is hell for women's rights. But drawing her own wage enables a woman to live without a man, or with a man but more equally. Getting her own education gets her independence of thought. Finding a lot of women around her in the same boat gives her a chance to organize a movement. And that only happens with factories, towns, cities.
Same with African American farm workers. It was only when the migration of 20 million Americans from the farms to the cities happened in the 1940s and 50s that you had the conditions for civil rights: the conditions were - African Americans living together and working together in cities, getting wages, getting educated, getting independent, getting organized. Same with gays: a couple of bachelor farmers may share a house, but to create a movement you need a whole gay subculture - gay bars, gay presses, gay organization - and that only happens in cities.
What created cities? Capitalism and business. What created wages? The same. What created mass education? It wasn't only idealism, it was the need of business for competent workers and managers.
The ideas and the moral imperatives of the left did not come from business, but the conditions in which those ideas could spread did. The people who argued for equality for women, blacks, gays were radicals in the wilderness, branded as complete nutcases or utopians, until capitalism created cities, wages and mass education.
So if we want to see women's rights, minority rights, gay rights, better housing, food and medicine for the poor, social security, and environmentalism spread around the world, what needs to happen first? Based on past history, you would have to say that the more that capitalism spreads and creates wealth, cities, wages and education, the more the left can fight its battles and win its victories. The left needs the capitalists in order to succeed. We hate you, but we need you.
And strangely enough, in order to succeed capitalism needs the left just as much, and has benefited from the left just as much. But that's for another essay.
Go to #2. The Corporations Need the Left
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