The Postmodern State: The International Corporation

Austin Morgan
Amorga14@uwyo.edu
Free to ignore international doctrine, engage in projects at the expense of countries on the global periphery and enforce its interests with military force. Is this a definition of a hegemonic international power? Of a totalitarian state, perhaps? Neither. I argue, instead, that this has become the new definition of the international corporation, which now has free reign to enact its agenda without interference. In this new evolution of the world system, the corporation has become the new state.
The unholy marriage between the corporation and powers previously allocated to the state facilitates the sinful reproduction of international strife for capitalist interest. Corporations with GDPs dwarfing those of entire countries have the ability to offer seductive economic opportunities to poor countries. These opportunities, while benefitting the countries’ political and financial elite, are often to the disadvantage the average citizen.
Among the many exploitative industries with which international corporations have busied themselves, resource extraction is the most prominent. Resource-rich countries often allow foreign companies to extract and sell their resources in exchange for a portion of the profit.
In order to facilitate the efficient extraction of resources, sections of the country- often rural- are blocked off and occupied by the corporation. These enclaves often require the state to cede its power in the region, giving it over to the corporate occupier. As political scientist Achille Mbembe argues, “this sort of enclave economy for resource extraction requires the exit of the state and the fragmentation of authority.” In other words, the state must cede its political control over certain regions to a corporate entity and with it, modern notions of corporate neutrality.
Free of state intervention in their affairs, international corporations are free to take measures to prevent local inhabitants from interfering in their projects. In order to control these enclave economies, private security forces are often employed. Though corporations claim that the security forces exist only to prevent insurgent groups from gaining access to valuable resources, their track record indicates a less than positive relationship with local populations.
The use of these private security forces, called “private military firms” (PMFs for short), are problematic for a number of reasons. PMFs recruit contractors from financially unstable countries so that they can pay their contractors meager salaries. PMFs often recruit from Peru, a country which suffered a 20-year internal conflict. As a result of the conflict, Peru has a surplus of men who are struggling to support their families. PMFs are able to exploit the needs of these men, paying them as little as $1000 a month for the dangerous work they do. In this way, the Peruvian proletariat is employed to further the economic projects of international corporations.
What has pushed us so far in this direction; namely, to the point wherein corporations can literally occupy other countries, enact a politics of control, and have it enforced by private security forces? Peter Sloterdijk provides us with a useful concept to help imagine our current trajectory.
Sloterdijk imagines global capitalism as a giant sphere, which, from the inside, appears infinite. When we push global capitalism to its most radical horizon, as we have done by failing to sufficiently regulate international corporations, the sphere does not reflect this drastic development; in its expansiveness, the system of global capitalism is able to conceal that there was any change at all. Hence, every sinister development within the all-pervasive sphere of capitalism-gone-global is made normal: the exploitation of South American coffee farmers, the massacre of indigenous peoples by private security forces—mere regularities.
Liberals use the phrase “corporate state” as a way to refer to the control corporations have over American politics. This is an impotent and docile threat compared to what I’ll call “the real corporate state”: a laissez-faire hell wherein capitalism, now armed with its own military, is free to exploit the peripheries of the world system and free to challenge age-old definitions of the most prominent geopolitical entity. At a time when the continuation of evil has become, as Hannah Arendt wrote, overwhelmingly banal, let me introduce to you the new state—no, the post-state: the international corporation.