December 9, 2009
Denial Industry
The other day I expressed my suspicions that global warming denialism stems at least in part from vested interest industry lobbying.
Looks like I was right. George Monbiot observes that:
“When I use the term denial industry, I’m referring to those who are paid to say that man-made global warming isn’t happening. The great majority of people who believe this have not been paid: they have been duped. Reading Climate Cover-Up, you keep stumbling across familiar phrases and concepts which you can see every day on the comment threads. The book shows that these memes were planted by PR companies and hired experts.”
…
“But people behind these campaigns know that their claims are untrue. One of the biggest was run by the Global Climate Coalition, which represented ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, the American Petroleum Institute and several big motor manufacturers. In 1995 the coalition’s own scientists reported that “the scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well-established and cannot be denied”. The coalition hid this finding from the public, and spent millions of dollars seeking to persuade people that the opposite was true.”
Add to this a supplicant and cowardly media delivering “balance”, and the outcome is grim. Not just because the prospect of global climate catastrophe increases as people adopt the ostrich position, but because one has to wonder what sort of a democracy we find ourselves living in.
I recently wrote about the potential values of democracy. But it’s worth doing some critical reflection on whether societies in which multi-national firms with revenues exceeding most nations’ GDPs, who use their industry power not only to lobby democratically elected governments but to manipulate the opinions of ordinary voters, can really be considered “democratic” in anything like the cosy, text-book sense.
Not that this is anything particularly new. Although the post-war rise of the limited liability multinationals dwarfing democratically elected regimes in a borderless economy is an important phenomenon that we’ve still to catch up with in our understandings of society, the sheer power of non-democratic corporate interests has been around a while:
“Small and exclusive committees of parties, or of party coalitions make their decisions behind closed doors, and what representatives of the big capitalist interest groups agree to in the smallest committees is more important for the fate of millions of people, perhaps, than any political decision.”
Those words were written in 1923 by German jurisprudential theorist Carl Schmitt, in the course of observing what he took to be the crisis of parliamentary democracy. Schmitt was an anti-liberal authoritarian, who via complex series of events ended up joining the Nazi Party. But what the man himself did is irrelevant: 86 years ago it was already observable that parliamentary democracy was manifestly not the seat of (all) the most important decision-making power in capitalist societies. Schmitt thought this was part of the crisis of liberal parliamentary democracy that was very much observable in the Germany of 1923.
But that “liberal democracy” has (thankfully) out-lived fascism and Soviet communism, doesn’t make Schmitt’s observation about where power lies any less valid. And we musn’t dismiss an observation because we don’t like where it came from. As Isiah Berlin said:
“I am bored by reading people who are allies, people of roughly the same views. What is interesting is to read the enemy; because the enemy penetrates the defenses.”
Grace said,
December 9, 2009 at 10:09 am
You might be interested in this article:
http://economia.unipv.it/pagp/pagine_personali/amajocchi/How%20big%20are%20the%20big%20multinational%20companies.pdf
“Multinational corporations are increasingly seen as excessively big and powerful, and as having dramatically increased in size and power. This perception has led to the view that the big corporations are threatening democratic institutions of the nation-states and that they pervert the cultural and social fabric of countries.
In this paper we analyse the size of large corporations and the recent trends in this size. Using value-added data (instead of sales) we find that multinationals are surprisingly small compared to the GDP of many nation-states. In addition, if anything, the size of multinationals relative to the size of nations has tended to decline somewhat during the last 20 years. Finally, we argue that there is little evidence that the economic and political power of multinationals has increased in the last few decades.”
Paul Sagar said,
December 9, 2009 at 10:38 am
Cheers, I will have a read. On the other side, remind me to email you a paper by Susan Strange arguing that MNCs need to be considered as significant actors in international relations theory due to the fact govts have to negotiate with them re attracting investment, making economic decisions etc.
Paul Sagar said,
December 9, 2009 at 10:50 am
Note also that schmitt’s point appears to be one not so much about big corporations ‘threatening’ democratic institutions, as making them irrelevant because it’s the economic impact of corporate decisions that really matters to peoples lives in parliamentary democracy.
I chose to frame this as ‘where the power lies’, but perhaps ‘where the significance lies’ would be more accurate (though the latter will have ramifications for the question of power).
However, if industry campaigns can actually shape popular opinion – and perhaps the climate example shows they can – then this does suggest that democratic institutions are in some sense threatened. We don’t need a naively simplistic model of corporations dictating to governments to hold that contention.
Rob said,
December 9, 2009 at 11:56 pm
I think it’s worth noting that Schmitt’s claim is different from the ‘shaping of popular opinion’ claim – unless we’re talking about decisions to shape popular opinion, which doesn’t seem to be his point. Schmitt’s claim seems to be something like, what really matters is the investment strategy of oligopolists X, Y, and Z, not your government’s fiscal policy. This, I think, for developed Western states, is pretty tendentious; governments could have regulated high finance if they’d chosen to, and it would have made a difference, for example. The claim about popular opinion shaping, if anything, seems to cut against that claim, because why would you shape popular opinion, if you can do what the hell you want anyway?
Paul Sagar said,
December 10, 2009 at 2:49 am
“I think it’s worth noting that Schmitt’s claim is different from the ’shaping of popular opinion’ claim – unless we’re talking about decisions to shape popular opinion, which doesn’t seem to be his point. Schmitt’s claim seems to be something like, what really matters is the investment strategy of oligopolists X, Y, and Z, not your government’s fiscal policy.”
Yes
“This, I think, for developed Western states, is pretty tendentious; governments could have regulated high finance if they’d chosen to, and it would have made a difference, for example.”
Ah, but could they? Easy to say in hindsight. And I don’t see any regulation on the horizon, just a windfall tax. But anyway, Schmitt’s point is surely that, regulated by government rules or otherwise, business decisions are likely to have a far bigger impact on many people’s lives than decisions made by politicians in a parliamentary legislature. (But note also that the “small committees” Schmitt talks about could quite easily cover business people and members of the executive discussing behind closed doors. We know this goes on in democracies…)
“The claim about popular opinion shaping, if anything, seems to cut against that claim, because why would you shape popular opinion, if you can do what the hell you want anyway?”
To cover all your bases, for a start. To maximise your advantage, for another. But mostly because, and to make the obvious Weberian point, no actor – state, individual or corporate – can ever “do what the hell they want to anyway”; the existing frameworks of legitimacy* serve to delineate what can and cannot be gotten away with. Hoever, if you find you want to do X but X is currently considered illegitimate, then you’ll be wanting to change the conceptions of X-legitimacy. How’d you do that? Well, changing popular opinion looks like a good bet…
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*being slightly sloppy in terminology – but you follow the basic Weberian point, I’m sure.
Simon Cowell and the Difficulties of Democracy « Bad Conscience said,
December 15, 2009 at 12:49 am
[...] authority over supporters. Darker voices succeeded him: Carl Schmitt (who we met last week), saw representative parliamentary democracy as in free-fall; dragged-down by the failures of [...]