Corporatism
Historically, corporatism or corporativism (Italian corporativismo) is a political system in which legislative representation is given to industries or professional and economic groups. The name has nothing to do with the notion of a business corporation except that both words are derived from the Latin word for body, corpus.Ostensibly, the entire society is to be run by decisions collectively made by these groups. It is a form of class collaboration put forward as an alternative to class conflict and was first proposed in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum which influenced Catholic trade unions. Catholic theologians decided to formulate this alternative to socialism that would emphasize social justice without the radical solution of the abolition of private property.
Gabriele D'Annunzio and anarcho-syndicalist Alceste de Ambris incorporated much of corporative philisophy in their Constitution of Fiume.
One early and important theorist of corporatism was Adam Müller, an advisor to Prince Metternich in what is now eastern Germany and Austria. Müller propounded his views as an antidote to the twin dangers of the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and the laissez faire economics of Adam Smith. In Germany and elsewhere there was a distinct aversion among rulers to allow markets to function without direction or control by the state. The general culture heritage of Europe from the medieval era was opposed to individual self-interest and the free operation of markets.
Under Fascism in Italy, employers were organized into syndicates known as "corporations" according to their industries, and these groups were given representation in a legislative body known as the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni.
According to various theorists corporatism was an attempt to create a "modern" version of feudalism by merging the "corporate" interests with those of the state. Also see neofeudalism.
This use of the term "corporation" is not exactly equivalent to the restricted modern sense of the word. Compare corporate state and militarism. Corporate in this context is intended to convey the meaning of a "body," as in corpus. Its fundamental concept is to reflect more medieval European concepts of a whole society in which the various parts each play a part in the life of the society, just as the various parts of the body play specific parts in the life of a body.
Some elements of corporatism can be found still existing today, for example in the ILO Conference or in the Economic and Social Committee of the European Union, or the collective agreement arrangements of the Scandinavian countries.
Corporatism is also used in reference to tendencies in politics for legislators and administrations to be influenced or dominated by the interests of corporations rather than citizens. In this view, government decisions are seen as being influenced strongly by which sorts of policies will lead to greater profits for favored companies. In this sense of the word, corporatism is also termed corporatocracy. If there is substantial military-corporate collaboration it is often called militarism or the military-industrial complex.
Corporatism is often used today to describe a condition of corporation-imbued globalism. Points enumerated by users of the term in this sense include the prevalence of very large, multinational corporations that freely move operations around the world in response to corporate, rather than public, needs; the push by the corporate world to introduce legislation and treaties which would restrict the abilities of individual nations to restrict corporate activity; and similar measures to allow corporations to sue nations over "restrictive" policies, such as a nation's environmental regulations that would restrict corporate activities.
Franklin Delano RooseveltÃÂs New Deal programs were the biggest jump forward into corporatism, though this was not fully understood at the time.
Free Market theorists like Milton Friedman would describe corporatism as socialism for the wealthy. It has the outward form of capitalism in that it preserves private ownership and private management, but as with socialism, government guarantees the flow of material goods, which under true capitalism it does not. In classical capitalism, what has been called the "night-watchman" state, government's role in the economy is simply to prevent force or fraud from disrupting the autonomous operation of the free market. The market is trusted to provide. Under corporatism, it is not, instead being systematically manipulated to deliver goods to political constituencies.
A permutation of this term is corporate globalism.
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