Corporatism in American life: how to join a group where nothing is ever contested

So many organizations and groups, including political groups, and religious ones, like churches and synagogues, are like little non-profit companies (which is what churches and the like are legally in America) that one belongs to or joins out of a shared sense of purpose. This encourages the members, though internal debate is stifled and mostly nonexistent in any and all cases where the terms and stakes of the issue might cross the borders of identifications. Non-profit organizations usually have a "mission," given in a statement that is much like the "thesis statement" a student writing a paper for a college course needs to have. This principal belief (let's call it that) has to be shared, and at meetings and in conversations within these institutions people only discuss practical questions based on the Belief, ways of realizing it.

Discussion is limited in the business world when it is more important to get business done. Organizations, and individuals, that are committed to some purpose will naturally tend to be interested in ideas that can help them realize it, while excluding any that would call it into question.

This is even true in academia. No one is ever allowed to challenge the beliefs of a professor in a seminar. The justification for this is that research generally follows some line of inquiry, and the prof sets its boundaries, while expecting their graduate students at least to help them with data and support staff labor, so that they can most effectively pursue their line of inquiry and the promotions or fame that can come with it. That profs usually align themselves with projects that they imagine as political in the sense of changing the world in the right way, and always actually or potentially under attack and needing to be defended, strengthens the tendency, as does the way in academic and art world life so much of what is done follows an explicit gift economy all the while that the capitalist exchange economy and its use of labor are in the background.

These groups also tend to have rituals of joining (as armies often do), and their function is to mediate the transition between being a mere private individual (in armies, the name of the first rank, designating the scope of one’s concern, which ranges from the private to the general) and a Member. This can take the form of being told to “set aside your ego” and leave your individuality outside the factory (or prison) gates. From the point of view of entry into the group of a liminal subject, one is informed, in a very Cartesian modernist gesture, that their character is considered empty and void, a zero, meaning that the group manages progression through its hierarchy and assigns entrants a value of zero in that. It also often takes the form, in America, of preceding the confirmation of membership with declarations of outrage against one’s oppression in the larger society as an individual holding a deviant identity (these are in many cases de rigeur, which is now revealed to be that of the group and its comforting safe space. In this case, the group belonging is the cure for not only social alienation but social antagonism, recoded as oppression by way of the naming of the individual in terms of the group. The group as imagined as providing an empowerment that is grounded on a prior oppression, with joining a liberation. Recognition of this is often given by showy declarations of voluntary enthusiasm that have the force nearly of an oath; this is especially important in non-profit organizations: “I’m so enthused,” and the project to which we are committed is so vitally important.

This is also why one frequently learns of open discussions with audience participation (usually passive only) programmed by some organization. These discussions are rarely inclusive. If a political topic is involved, the panel is almost always all leftists, or all conservatives, etc. The tacit function of these discussions may be to present the authoritarian use of ideas in propaganda as if it were part of the democratic discussion people want to imagine as existing. This will make the positions agreed upon (at the outset, but demonstrated in the talks) seem all the more compelling in their likely truth and justice.

All groups and organizations that fit this model mirror life in the corporate business world. Unlike in traditional societies, one is not born into a "community," spending his or her whole life there; one joins one, and their entirely voluntary participation takes up only a part of their time, usually a small part. Just as in high school American students often join several clubs and organizations at the school, partly for recognition of social concern and "leadership" (especially important when applying to college).

Most interesting is the functioning of these organizations in our democracy, to the extent that it (partly) is that. At the center of democracy is not voting or majority rule or sovereignty of the people, but ideas of conflict or antagonism, confrontation, argument between persons (and groups). This may be considered a domestication of war, particularly on the feudal model, where war is a constant possibility facing every local ruler and the persons grouped underneath him. Voluntary associations or groups formed for a purpose, rather than just being a component of life in a territory, family, and ethnic group, play a stabilizing and supportive role in capitalist democracy. Within them, social antagonism is ruled out in principle. The "members" are in presumed agreement about all the essential beliefs that keep them together, or that go with their keeping together.

Some people think that joining an organization that shares your particular belief (not shared by everyone, or even most people outside your "niche") is the appropriate way to proceed with having it. This obviously fits a model of social life that is liberal but not democratic.

One could easily find oneself compelled, through force or one's own ethical rigor, to shut up and say almost nothing most of the time, as a consequence of the felt need to walk one's talk, to give substance to their beliefs, to live what they otherwise merely believe. This is very common in America. Its results are usually uninteresting. This is what the hippies did: they thought they could drop out of mainstream society and create a different world. But it was a totalizing and thus 'abstract' negation, which as Sartre said of anarchism, always leads nowhere. What such people are doing is trying to establish the ideal form of their employment.

Neo-feudalism is not a degeneration of capitalism. Capitalism is neo-feudalism, with the corporation replacing the feif. The only alternative that developed to it was the national state and its replacement of a universal society for inclusive/exclusive communities. (These can be thought as truly universal, with the nation only an instantiation of it, an idea actively promoted in Communism, but already advanced by the French Revolution with its ‘Rights of Man and the Citizen’, which identifies citizenship with personhood.).