Their Business should be our Business

People are in general beginning to wake up to the fact that they have forfeited control over their lives to transnational corporations, however, few have any real ideas what to do about this situation. There seems to be several approaches taken, with varying levels of success- none of which can fundamentally solve the problem. Primarily there is the spreading of consumer awareness, educating the public about the consequences of their choices as buyers. After this comes a period of increasing ‘media literacy’, where individuals learn to see through corporate propaganda and the misuse of media in its effort to draw attention away from these critical issues. The next stage usually involves some form of direct action- boycotting, protesting, internet activism, etc.
Unfortunately, this is pretty much where things leave off, with a growing popular awareness but little impact. Percieving and defining the problem and its sources is significantly easier than constructing a satisfying alternative. Indeed, this is often the very taunt of the global capitalist- our system may be terrible, but what alternative do you propose? Activists must retreat into silence, or else repeat the litany of globalism’s excesses, as though this would be sufficient to produce lasting change.
For this project to continue forward, and create significant results, we must first of all come to grips with some uncomfortable truths, ones which we would often like to ignore. The major one of these is that both business and globalism are instrumental in bringing nations out of poverty and increasing the standard of living for much of the world. We do ourselves a disservice by pretending otherwise. Of course, none of this mitigates the grotesque excesses which are threatening the fabric of our social and natural ecology, but only serves to point out that there are structures and tools utilized by global capitalism which are extremely effective at producing results.
Any truly sustainable revolution will have to be comprised of both a shift in values, and a shift in technique, with the former driving the latter.
Trying to fight corporations is untenable because we lack the tools needed to do so. Legislation primarily serves the interests of corporations, so turning to the government is no help either. What we need is to create our own structures, our own anti-corporate corporations which can exert as much leverage as their counterparts but in a beneficial direction. We need to become the producers of the sustainable products and technologies we wish to consume. We need to approach business not as the enemy of freedom and democracy, but as its most effective expression. Natually, this will require a complete rethinking of what business means- what ist purpose is, how it operates, the nature and role of profit. All of these things are feasible, for one simple reason: there are more of us than them. Corporations, unlike governments, cannot survive without our consent. And while a government can coerce its people into obediance, no corporation yet has the power to force someone to buy its products. We can abstain. Obviously, they can and do engage in manipulative and decietful practices to get us to consume, and work hard to narrow the range of true options available to us in an effort to dominate our lives, but they will always remain critically dependent on our dollars. This is the lifeblood that must ceaselessly flow through their corporate bodies if they are to survive, and we have the choice regarding what to do with this money. A modestly sized network of ten million people, each contributing twenty dollars, can easily create a fund worth two-hundred million dollars. This capital can be used to fund sustainable businesses completely outside the sphere of traditional financial and corporate institutions. They would have the freedom to define their own terms, to compete against corporations through innovative, sustainable products driven by an appeal to the higher values of consumer-citizens.

Here is an interesting essay on the nature and history of corporate metabolism.