The Return of Corporatism

We have been examining different conservative ideologies. But there are also different ideologies and policy prescriptions on the left. One that seems to be coming back into vogue is “corporatism.” This had its origins with Mussolini.

Kevin D. Williamson explains in his National Review article Elizabeth Warren, Corporatist:

“Corporatism” is one of the most misunderstood words in the political vocabulary. American progressives use it to indicate the domination of the state by business interests, when in fact it means something closer to the opposite: the subordination of commerce and industry to political mandates.

Corporatism is a concept closely associated with the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. The word “fascism” surely has earned the stink attached to it, but it, too, is widely misunderstood as a body of policies. As George Orwell wrote back when fascism was still something of a going concern, the word “fascist” is used as very little more than a term of denigration.

But the corporazioni of the Italian fascist model were not the profit-oriented private concerns we now call “corporations.” They were something closer to consultative associations, in which the interests of business owners, workers and workers’ organizations, and the Italian state were, in theory, all represented. The concept, which is a variation on socialist central planning, was that privately owned businesses were entitled to a profit, but not too much profit; that the workers were entitled to as much compensation and to such working conditions as were consistent with the overall health of the Italian economy and state; and that the state was entitled to coordinate these calculations and negotiate the related interests, and also entitled to have its interests trump those of either the business owners or the workers.

Fascism more or less disappeared as a brand name after that unpleasantness toward the end of the first half of the last century, but corporatism never really went away. The German workers’ councils that are much admired by many American progressives are corporatist undertakings; Senator Warren’s agenda is fundamentally corporatist. It would impose federal charters on businesses with more than $1 billion in revenue and empower the federal government to dictate to those firms the composition of their boards of directors, their compensation practices, the details of their internal corporate governance, their personnel policies, the scope and content of their political speech, and much more. She calls the legislation she is proposing the “Accountable Capitalism Act.”
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Williamson also sees corporatism in the way progressives are using corporations to enforce their political ideology–as in tech companies that censor conservative speech and fire conservative employees; and in big businesses that use economic threats against states that are insufficiently pro-LGBT or pro-abortion.

Photo: http://www.ilduce.net/foto-benito-mussolini/43-2/ This file was derived from: Benito Mussolini (primo piano).jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64572838

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The Return of Corporatism