While I may not believe in everything that the book advocates, I do believe in much of it. And Bakan uses a number of interesting and moving stories to present his case. I very much recommend the book; the subject matter is ever more important in the wake of somewhat recent corporate scandals, and the frightening power of the corporation internationally.
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
Article comments
1 - Phillip Winn
I haven't even read the book, and already I'm agreeing with the way you've described it. A corporation acts like no sane person, and publicly-traded corporations even less so.
It's always been amazing to me how a group of essentially-honest people can form a company and collectively make incredibly poor decisions that none would make individually.
Thanks for what sounds like a balanced review of an interesting book.
2 - John St.John
I have ordered the corporation and should read it before offering a review.
He is correct that the corporation is a Frankenstein monster, but I do not see any way that it can be reformed any more than Frankensteins creation could have been.
Issac Asimov's robot had the prime directive--"do not harm a human being". The unstated prime directive of the corporation is "the bottom line before anything". It was created to avoid investor liability by separating ownership from liability. This can not be done under common law. If you own a pit bull who eats a neighbors child; you are liable and not the mutt.
3 - John St.John
The essential problem of the corporation is that it is not owned. Nobody owns a corporation: neither the controlling interests, nor the ordinary portfolio owner. Common stock does not give the stockholder any ownership. He is actually a limited partner and is entitled to a share of the profits. A limited partner is not allowed to interfere in any way with the running of the business.
Everyone in a corporation is an employee and the employee selected by the Board of Directors to take liability is the CEO. That is why CEOs are paid so well and why a good CEO like Chainsaw Al is a sociopath.
Corporations should not be taken over by the government; they should be taken by their employees as the Argentine pottery workers did. The corporation should become a cooperative. This would solve the problem of ownership and no one would get hurt. The investors would be investors,as they are anyway, and the owners would be the workers.
The Mondragon coop in the Basque sector of Spain has been manufacturing machine tools and appliances for twenty years and even have their own banks. They are running into trouble now because of the corporation outsourcing for cheap labor and raw materials.
We must turn a predatory organization into a social organization.
4 - sydney
Excellent book review!
I agree 100% with Bakan's view of Corporations. I also agree with his view that Corporations are here to stay.
However, why is that Americans are so opposed to those approaches that Bakan outlines for controlling the psychopathic nature of corporations?
What have we to gain by controlling them? What have we to lose by not controlling them? Isn't the choice obvious?
The bush Government has done more than most administrations to REMOVE these controls. Americans don't seem to care.
It’s a major socialist belief in Canada that Capitalism needs to be controlled to a certain degree, and that controlling corporations is central to this process.
What does Dave Nalle and some of the other corporate whores have to say about this :-) I'm very curious.
5 - Scott
Thank you all for your compliments on the review.
As to your questions and concerns, Prof. Bakan in his book does quite a good job to discuss some of these issues. I am not a pure socialist, and in the province in which I live (BC) we are going through an election presently, and I will probably vote for the more conservative leader, mainly because I believe that privatization does have its place. But like Bakan argues in the book, we have to be careful how far we take privatization; some institutions needed to be institutions which serve the public, and not the bottom line. And interestingly enough this is an issue that it is at the top of the headlines in the U.S. with Bush proposed privatization of Social Security. This whole question is an important discussion indeed!
6 - John H. St.John
The corporation is the best of all of the books that I own dealing with the corporation problem. Thom Hartmann's book Unequal Protection is another good one. However when I turn to the last pages looking for a solution, there is nothing there that makes sense to me.
Benito Mussolini's definition of fascism was the best: "fascism is the marriage of corporation power with state power. If our government is not married to the corporations, it is certainly shacked up.
All of the Farben companies survived the war, and Mitsubishi as well as the Italian corporations are still in business. Ford and General Motors as well as GE and IBM helped put Hitler in power and we know where they are.
I also believe that the key to ending corporations is a dearth of understanding that the corporation business form is fundamentally illegal.
Seperating ownership from liability is a subterfuge to avoid liability.
Nobody owns a corporation and someone has to own the damned thing. The only way this can be done without revolution is for the workers who now are running the thing to be given ownership. This would not take anything away from anyone
and investors would still be investors, and get their fair share of the profits.
There is a new union movement coming with the split of major unions from the AFL CIO. When John L. Lewis's mineworkers split from the AFL and started the CIO they built industrial unions. This split is going to build something also. I hope they take the lessons of the Argentinian workers Take.
7 - hank
Good book. Review is unintentionally confused, if not precisely confusing, grammatically speaking.
It's unfair to Dr. Frankenstein, by confusing the man with his creation. The analogy breaks down because a person created the monster, and corporations are monsters created by people, then later given status _as_ people under United States law by two court cases, one of which didn't really do that, the second of which said the first court did, and made it so.
If Dr. Frankenstein's monster had a name, it'd be easier to refer to it without confusing its creator with his creation.
If Dr. Frankenstein had created the Munster Family, including Uncle It, then he would be It's creator. Since he did not, the exceedingly rare spelling "It's" has no proper use anywhere in the review.
8 - Sigit Kurniawan
Yup, this book said about the grand ism which penetrated and destroed all of our elements of live. It named Neoliberalism.
9 - Bob A. Booey
Phillip Winn is such a Communist, for the love of Rand :)
In all seriousness, I haven't read the book, but I thought the documentary based on this book was pretty good.
I think the DSM-IV diagnosis schtick is pretty clever and they make a pretty good case for it.
I did watch the extras at the end of the DVD and I thought Bakan and the producers had very few ideas on how to move past corporations or limit the harm they do to society.
They present a good critique, but don't provide many answers for reform.
That is all.
10 - Mahi Shah
"Corporation" by Joel Bakan, is a wonderful book that reveals the real face of it by diminishing its outerlook which everybody sees everyday and believes in it......
11 - pamina
The title of this review is incorrectly punctuated. The title gives the impression that the reviewer is Joel Bakan. Can be changed to "Review of Joel Bakan's 'The Corporation'".
12 - ABrady
Scott wrote: "But an important point that he makes is that the corporation is given its existence by laws, and that same law which creates the corporation can also dissolve it."
It is highly unlikely that the law that created the corporation will dissolve it, simply because corporations have no real existence in law. Corporations exist only in contemplation of law (Darthmouth vs. Woodward) therefore corporations that were given existence by law were given such existence illegally.
Corporations are not in fact, or in law, persons. They were made persons because without personhood they would have no rights. Only people have rights. No law can change that. First corporations became natural persons (via the 14th amend) then they became artificial persons via legislative acts government. What kind of person is a corporation, natural or artifical, and where is the Act of Congress making it either one?
Corporations came into existence by corrupt justices of the supreme courts and our government, which by the way is also a corporation.
Corporations and free persons cannot co-exist in the same nation, and that is the only reason they were given personhood. If it wasn't for the help of corrupt supreme court justices and government corporations would have no "legal" existence, simply because, as the Darthmouth court stated above, corporations exist only in contemplation of law. A corporation is an artificial being (being does not mean person).