In a democratic society, which we would like to believe we aspire to.
And then those of us who are not too critical, imagine
we've already gotten there.
But if you're serious about democracy, then one of the things a democracy
ought to decide and put up to a vote
is what size enterprise we want.
If we don't want mega-corporations to have the kind of power that they do
in our culture, and they have captured most of the regulatory commissions
and they have dominated the two major
parties, that's obvious.
They shape the culture through their control of the media,
who are themselves monopolies and oligopolies,
and therefore are hardly voices of criticism.
Well, if we want to deal with that, then let's democratize
the enterprise in the following sense.
We should decide, Do we want any mega-corporations?
Do we want none?
Do we want something in between?
And let's not be fooled by people who say, Well, if you want modern
economical wealth, you have to have big corporations.
One of my teachers many years ago, John Kenneth Galbraith, made that argument
that we have to accept big corporations
because otherwise we wouldn't have the wealth we do.
Well, I have two answers to that.
Number one, that's a proposition that has never been proved.
Big companies always were small companies.
And if you ever talk to a big company honestly, maybe after two
or three martinis, they're used to that, you get the following story:
We were much more creative in this company when we were much smaller.
Now we're a big, unwieldy bureaucracy.
Everything takes very long.
We don't grow very fast. Hmm. Interesting.
Let's see how far that goes.
Maybe we'd be all better off with an economy that had fewer big monsters.
And even if it were true-I don't believe it is,
but even if it were, I certainly can be wrong.
Even if it were true
that we might not generate as much wealth
if we had smaller industries,
let me ask you a question.
Maybe there's a good argument for sacrificing some of the wealth we produce
to have a different way of relating to one another in our daily lives
because we are not under the pressure of a few big corporations.
The advertising coming at you from every corner.
The fact that you have to look at the Coca-Cola
young people cavorting on the beach 8 million times in your life.
That's not a choice you made.
That's their decision of how to get you to buy more Coca-Cola.
And that's because they profit from that.
Is that really the way we want our society to be shaped in the present
and the future by those who have sit at the top of these monstrous cities?
I don't think so.
Or maybe let's be even bolder and imagine that
we organize enterprises in our society.
Not only that they don't get to an overwhelming size the way we have today,
but let's
maybe make corporations into worker co-ops.
You know we advocate for that,
but one of the reasons we do is that they’re not governed by profit.
They're not governed by a competition that has to make them bigger all the time.
We can shape the economy we live in
to respond to our democratic needs.
What it's doing now is responding to
a small number of capitalists
who sit at the top of these big corporations.
I think, in fact, we could learn from the surges of pressure
against those kinds of industries in the past, from the efforts
they made noble that they were and struggle that they took,
that they were outrun by these big corporations
who used their money to blunt the effectiveness
of the movements against them to capture
the very regulators that the reformists set up.
Let's learn from that.
Laws, regulations?
It's not enough if you don't deal
with the very core of the problem:
how we allow private capitalists
to compete themselves into monopolies and oligopolies.
That's the root of the problem.
And that's what has to be changed if we're going to solve the problem.
It's not a complex idea.
It's only perhaps new.
And that's partly because those very forces
make it very hard to get these ideas out there and across
to the people who need to hear them, see them and act on them.