I've just finished two books well worth reporting on, both by David C. Korten:
The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism (1999) and
When Corporations Rule the World (first appearance in 1995, most recent revision in 2001).
Given my current interest in the corporation as the villain in world affairs, notably in globalization, I'm surprised I didn't see these books sooner.
In the first, on the post-corporate world, the central thesis is that capitalism is the order of the world and that its goal is money. Period. Korten proposes instead that we design our world into one centered on life, or the organism. In response to insights from the new biology, science is going from the machine metaphor to the organism metaphor. We now have the knowledge and the communications technology to function with a global species intelligence--to make a conscious collective choice to act differently, to accept responsibility for our impact on the continuing evolution of life and consciousness on our planet. Capitalism is to a healthy market economy what cancer is to a healthy body. Curing the capitalist cancer will require ending the legal fiction that corporations are entitled to the rights of persons and excluding corporations from political participation. This message is very powerful, and Korten develops it well. His presentation is weakened, however, by definitions that seem to be peculiar to himself, e.g., that separate capitalism from the free market.
The second book, on corporations ruling the world, is a practical and persuasive description of the present situation and what can be done about it. The global financial system has become a predator that lives off the flesh of the productive economy. Korten's recommendations include globalizing consciousness, localizing agriculture, recycling, organizing our living spaces to reduce dependence on the auto, shortening the work-week to 20 or 30 hours, letting people rather than corporations make political decisions, levying a tax on financial transactions and increasing taxes on the wealthy and on luxuries, one hundred percent reserve requirements for banks, anti-trust enforcement, getting corporations off the welfare rolls, pay equity (that is, reducing the disparity in pay between the worker and the CEO from, say, 500, to around 10), choosing the UN over the Bretton Woods organizations for corporate accountability, a guaranteed annual income for everyone, including children, thus ending Social Security and pensions and "welfare." And more. In short, joining The Living Democracy Movement to make a civil society. "...[W]e are each learners in an unfolding process that requires us to look with a critical eye and an open mind for the spark of goodness in each person and the kernel of truth in each idea."
