Home » Opinion » Book review
Corporate power pervades every facet of our lives
By Wan Lixin |
June 12, 2010, Saturday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
LAST year a matchmaker tried to "fix up" one of my cousins with a young local woman.
But his eligibility was questioned when it was learned that he works for a small private enterprise, while the woman in question works for a US company among the Global 500.
Although her connection with the Global 500 is just a few screws she helps to fasten in the assembly line, this tenuous connection in no way lessens her arrogance. The cousin was rejected as beneath her.
According to "Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance" by Ellen Schwartz and Suzanne Stoddard, corporations have an all-encompassing impact on your work and personal life.
In China, such companies are invariably Western, thanks to three decades of aggressive effort at making China a paradise for foreign investment.
Some patriots still stick to Zhonghua toothpaste, little knowing that brand is now owned by Unilever.
When my wife is cooking with Jinlongyu oil, does she know she is actually patronizing a Singapore-made product?
When my son goes to his kindergarten he is always encumbered with a school bag with Disneyland cartoon images printed on it. That's almost the only kind available at Carrefour, where nearly all the above items have been procured.
Carrefour is quality and low-price incarnate, though few realize that competitive pricing is no longer possible, because Carrefour is almost the only store of its kind in the area.
Sometimes corporate control is deliberately understated, or not stated.
When I pay my water bills, it does not usually occur to me that the money would end up in the account of a French water service company.
While we are flooding the rest of the earth with tissue paper, toys, shoes, underwear, and handbags, the control of our vital necessities has been, subtly yet firmly, shifted to the hands of the Global 500.
Corporate control is pervasive in government, education and the media, usually couched in such revered words as science and technology, innovation, growth, prosperity, and progress.
When Paul Hawken says in his "The Ecology of Commerce" that "there is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world," he has in mind the physical destruction of the earth.
Schwartz and Stoddard are more hard-hitting in their condemnation by including such things as negative impact on democracy, living wages, health care, the nutritional value of food, and even mental health.
In China we are seeing similar changes: business becomes the sole business of government, while public services are being outsourced to big corporations. The result: education is increasingly dictated by the margins of textbook publishers, the medical services controlled by pharmaceutical companies, and our food morphed into some food-like stuff.
Our very worth and dignity is now chiefly judged by machines, and advertisements in service of machines.
As Jeremy Rifkin says in his "The End of Work," "The wholesale substitution of machines for workers is going to force every nation to rethink the role of human beings in the social process."
That presupposes at least some leisure time to think in the first place, but a plethora of modern devices have made that well nigh impossible.
We are mostly wage slaves.
And when we are not working, we are sitting before televisions or computers, which entertain us by showing how others live. Life itself has been a spectator sport.
During long commutes to and from work, a commuter can be plugged into electronically stimulated excitement galore.
In case you forget to bring these gadgets, the non-stop advertisements in the buses and metro will escort and entertain you every step of the way until you can again be plugged into your office computer, or a factory assembly line takes over.
"The 22,000 advertisements we see each year are crafted by people whose job it is to make us unhappy with what we have and who we are," the book claims.
As the book was published in 2000, this number needs updating.
When people's lives are dominated by machines, they lose touch with each other.
"We live in the Information Age. Translation: too much information, too little meaning and too little wisdom," the book observes.
Our whole society has been organized in such innovative ways as to produce winners and losers, and none else.
"No corner of our lives is too trivial -- or too important -- to be exempted from the compulsion to rank ourselves against one another ... Our lives are not merely affected by, but structured upon, the need to be 'better than'," writes Alfie Kohn, in his "No Contest: The Case Against Competition."
In this age of relentless technology, frenetic activity and fear of being left behind, people are seldom distracted by such trivia as how lifeless their life is, or what kind of an earth they will leave for their children.
But his eligibility was questioned when it was learned that he works for a small private enterprise, while the woman in question works for a US company among the Global 500.
Although her connection with the Global 500 is just a few screws she helps to fasten in the assembly line, this tenuous connection in no way lessens her arrogance. The cousin was rejected as beneath her.
According to "Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance" by Ellen Schwartz and Suzanne Stoddard, corporations have an all-encompassing impact on your work and personal life.
In China, such companies are invariably Western, thanks to three decades of aggressive effort at making China a paradise for foreign investment.
Some patriots still stick to Zhonghua toothpaste, little knowing that brand is now owned by Unilever.
When my wife is cooking with Jinlongyu oil, does she know she is actually patronizing a Singapore-made product?
When my son goes to his kindergarten he is always encumbered with a school bag with Disneyland cartoon images printed on it. That's almost the only kind available at Carrefour, where nearly all the above items have been procured.
Carrefour is quality and low-price incarnate, though few realize that competitive pricing is no longer possible, because Carrefour is almost the only store of its kind in the area.
Sometimes corporate control is deliberately understated, or not stated.
When I pay my water bills, it does not usually occur to me that the money would end up in the account of a French water service company.
While we are flooding the rest of the earth with tissue paper, toys, shoes, underwear, and handbags, the control of our vital necessities has been, subtly yet firmly, shifted to the hands of the Global 500.
Corporate control is pervasive in government, education and the media, usually couched in such revered words as science and technology, innovation, growth, prosperity, and progress.
When Paul Hawken says in his "The Ecology of Commerce" that "there is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world," he has in mind the physical destruction of the earth.
Schwartz and Stoddard are more hard-hitting in their condemnation by including such things as negative impact on democracy, living wages, health care, the nutritional value of food, and even mental health.
In China we are seeing similar changes: business becomes the sole business of government, while public services are being outsourced to big corporations. The result: education is increasingly dictated by the margins of textbook publishers, the medical services controlled by pharmaceutical companies, and our food morphed into some food-like stuff.
Our very worth and dignity is now chiefly judged by machines, and advertisements in service of machines.
As Jeremy Rifkin says in his "The End of Work," "The wholesale substitution of machines for workers is going to force every nation to rethink the role of human beings in the social process."
That presupposes at least some leisure time to think in the first place, but a plethora of modern devices have made that well nigh impossible.
We are mostly wage slaves.
And when we are not working, we are sitting before televisions or computers, which entertain us by showing how others live. Life itself has been a spectator sport.
During long commutes to and from work, a commuter can be plugged into electronically stimulated excitement galore.
In case you forget to bring these gadgets, the non-stop advertisements in the buses and metro will escort and entertain you every step of the way until you can again be plugged into your office computer, or a factory assembly line takes over.
"The 22,000 advertisements we see each year are crafted by people whose job it is to make us unhappy with what we have and who we are," the book claims.
As the book was published in 2000, this number needs updating.
When people's lives are dominated by machines, they lose touch with each other.
"We live in the Information Age. Translation: too much information, too little meaning and too little wisdom," the book observes.
Our whole society has been organized in such innovative ways as to produce winners and losers, and none else.
"No corner of our lives is too trivial -- or too important -- to be exempted from the compulsion to rank ourselves against one another ... Our lives are not merely affected by, but structured upon, the need to be 'better than'," writes Alfie Kohn, in his "No Contest: The Case Against Competition."
In this age of relentless technology, frenetic activity and fear of being left behind, people are seldom distracted by such trivia as how lifeless their life is, or what kind of an earth they will leave for their children.
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