A Commentary on Joel Bakan’s “The Corporation, The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power”.

Abstract

Joel Bakan's book, The Corporation, appeared in 2004, along with a film by the same title done in collaboration with the author. In the aftermath of several scandalous US corporate bankruptcies, both book and film found receptive audiences wanting an explanation of the failures that went beyond the claim of a few 'bad apples.' Bakan provided an appealing argument: " the corporation is a pathological institution, " he wrote, " a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies. " He hoped " by revealing the institutional imperatives common to all corporations and their implications for society… to provide a crucial and missing link in people's attempts to understand and do something about some of the most pressing issues of our time " (2). The book, however, is as much a failure to provide an understanding of the corporation, as it is a statement on the lack of a popular and critical explanation from the left. In Chapter One, Bakan addresses the question of how corporations came to control and dominate almost all aspects of our lives. The answer is a mix of historical facts and romance. The power of the corporation, begins the argument, lies in " its capacity to combine the capital, and thus the economic power, of unlimited numbers of people. Joint-stock companies emerged in the 16th century… " (8). There is little to debate here: the corporate form emerged with the growing accumulation of capital and the consequent need to have a structure that reflected this accumulation and its continuous expansion. But the meaning of the rise of the corporation is not drawn out: the emergence of the corporation represented the increasing concentration of the means of production and labour, that is the socializing of the productive forces, albeit within the capitalist mode of production. It was the transformation of individual private property into capital—ever more powerful collective forms. Related to this concentration was the growing need for the separation of ownership and management; capital was no longer individual but now aggregated, and since ownership increasingly took the form of disparate shares, no share or group of shares carried the sole right to manage. Although the industrial revolution completed the dominance of corporate capital over all spheres of economic reproduction, Bakan points to what then was a continuing barrier to corporate expansion—the question of liability. With the coming of legislated 'limited