Notes on "The Corporation" (2003)

The movie "The Corporation" is available here for now:

Overall, this is the kind of documentary that is in my wheelhouse. It has some of the big names I like – Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky – and a bunch of other people as well, just sitting around and calling the current organization model of the corporation a psychopath if it is a person.

What’s missing is a lot in the timing. In the movie, corporation is almost at its peak. It is before the financial crisis, but it is before the Citizen’s United Case, allowing corporate speech in the form of money, and it is largely before the rise of social media. If the film were to be updated, I feel that these aspects would really push the case more towards what the producers were trying to prove. 

As a historical form of organizing capital, it might not have started badly. The documentary speaks of early joint stock organizations (but for some reason leaves out the Dutch and English East India Corporations, huge malefactors in their own right) and then moves towards the more contemporary world. In this world, the corporation is global, so even individual states have less power of what they can do in terms of exploiting the people and the land for their own ends, ignoring the externalities they generate so that they can grasp at these short-term gains. We look at intellectuals from think tanks giving cover to sweatshops as job creators to learning how Monsanto only paid 80 Million Dollars to the American victims of agent orange but there was nothing for the Vietnamese people. All these are costs of doing business for the corporation, a soulless entity given personhood in a perversion of the 14^th amendment.

It is biased, and if you go in knowing that, it’s’ not that much of a problem for me. What is a problem being that the documentary takes pains to show what a soulless beast the modern corporation is, but it doesn’t directly address the economic system that the corporation is working within? I wish I had a concordance of the script of the movie, but it struck me about half of the way through that no one said the world “capitalism” at all. It eventually came up, but only at the very end. By my count it was mentioned four times, and one of those four times was when it was shown written out on a billboard in the shot. This is important because the corporation didn’t just happen. Growing from the enclosure movements to global corporations takes a whole ideological system that encompasses the economic and political systems – it is this ideology of capitalism is the true thing that trickles down and makes the concept of the corporation seem like it has always been here. It is this ideology that is so persistent that we don’t even question it even in a documentary critical of its fruits.