RE: Corporate Rule in Sci-Fi

I think you're more likely to see a corporation exercise soft power on the local government (when you're responsible for 95% of the local economy or whatever, they can't really say no). Actually governing is too much work.

If a corporate state actually gave a shit about its "employees", paying for their food, water, healthcare, education, and so on, then yes, they would be a socialist state.

But a corporate state wouldn't give a shit about that. Healthcare is expensive, and education is expensive and useless, if all your employees are expected to do is rote manual labour in factories or mines. Such a corporocracy would end up being more akin to a feudal state than a communist utopia.

edited 17th Aug '15 4:16:10 PM by Tungsten74

The thing is, in any kind of sci-fi setting there probably won't be any jobs like that. Hell, they're rapidly dying out today. The problem any potential MegaCorp faces isn't a lack of cheap labor (that can be automated), it's a lack of the highly-trained and educated work force that can't be replaced by simple machines.

So the one thing they really would have to invest heavily in is education, especially as governments stupidly reduce funding for that all over the world. And we're seeing this already. The computer science school I went to? At least half of their money came not from tuition payments but from various business sponsors. So did most of their equipment.

edited 17th Aug '15 4:28:20 PM by MattStriker

The thing with the Evil corporation models, and why it's so popular, is that we DO have many, many examples of corporations being evil when set to rule.

case in point: Africa. In the early stages of colonialism the mother governments set up concessionary companies and royal charter companies to rule there newly conquered territory on the cheap while still being able to make tons of money of them, while the company of course could use the natural resources. However rule under these company's was. . . horrible. The Congo saw something 2-15 million people die under the rule of King Leopold II the second who's one law was "Make money!".

Ultimately though these company's did become unprofitable as they had trouble balancing profit and doing things a government is suppose to do in the face of African resistance.

If you can stomach it you might be interested in studying the real world examples of company rule, the East India and the dozens of African examples, just keep in mind that African Company's practically where mustache twirling villains and it can be a bit sickening to read about, just look up the history of the Congo and you'll see what I mean.

Human beings are cheaper than robots. Self-replicating, too. Why spend millions in R&D to make effective mining bots when a colony of wage-slaves with hammers and picks could get the job done for a much smaller investment?

The Ancient Greeks had steam-engines, yet they never did anything with them because they didn't need to save labour: they already had a ton of slaves doing all the shitty menial jobs that no free man wanted to do.

Honestly, your argument hinges on the existence of machines that can carry out every menial task, including (presumably) growing and harvesting food. But if that's the case, then such a society would be a post-scarcity communist utopia anyway, rendering corporations moot.

edited 18th Aug '15 1:24:21 AM by Tungsten74

So, to have MegaCorp acts like moustache-twirling villain, you need countries with very cheap labors, where life standard's so horrible that cheap full meal is pretty much standard wage in general.

EDIT: After thinking about it, I came to conclusion that to have your usual, long-lived, evil Megacorps, first thing to do is to make a very strict caste system, with limits education and livelihood on lower caste, and instill beliefs that every caste, at least, is fundamentally different. The middle group should be made to be uncaring as strong as possible toward the lower group.

Also, this goes without saying, but corruption is need to be severely limited. VOC, despite their success in East Indies (now Indonesia), got bankrupted because their leaders are basically too much money-hungry.

Also, Ethische Politiek, which mostly used to widen the pool of recruitable talented people among locals, end up becoming first step on the rise of Indonesian Patriotism.

edited 18th Aug '15 2:44:28 AM by RBomber

Humans are actually a lot more expensive in operation than robots, and they need a lot more time before they can start working. Yes, the initial investment is higher, but you break even extremely quickly and it's all pure profit from then on. In addition, after a new technology has been around for a while machines get cheaper over time as the technology and manufacturing processes mature. The first industrial robots were massive investments. Today you can get a factory's worth of them for the price of one 1970s model back in the day. The cost of human workers on the other hand stays relatively stable.

Again, this is already very much in progress. 90% of the jobs existing right now will not exist in another 30 years, and there's nowhere near that number of new jobs being created by new technological developments.

And it's not going to lead to any kind of post-scarcity utopia either. What it is leading to is a world where everybody who isn't part of the fortunate elite will be left to starve.

Then who are the corporations going to sell shit to? There's no point making products if your entire client base is dead. Hell, there's no point in running a corporation at all if all your needs are met by an army of robot servants.

Moreover, what's the point of making robots to fill out every single role required to support a modern population of humans, and then letting that entire population starve to death? There's no point making a robot bus-driver if no-one's taking the fucking buses.

edited 18th Aug '15 6:46:37 AM by Tungsten74

Your country, maybe, but not my country. Not yet.

My mother is working on Agricultural Ministry's R&D, and every year she has to fight tooth and nail just to introduces improved farming technique. My country is supposed to be agricultural country.

Less of an issue under corporate rule.

Competition would drive development. If the farmers won't use the latest techniques they'll be displaced by the farmers that do. Granted, this puts the old farmers in the lurch but a corporation honestly isn't going to care.

Indeed, if the population is starving there would be a new low end food market. No, what we'd end up seeing is that humans suddenly have a lot of time on their hands.

Then the solution is to either turn the robots into Replicant-style expiring commodities, or to give them human personalities and rights a la Pluto.

Either way, the scarcity problem can be solved, like anything else. The question is more whether everyone involved wants to.

The most probable way a corporatacracy could take over America:

Tired of so many bad candidates, the American people decide to elect Mickey Mouse. Thus, all of the United states is run like a Disney theme park. Combat gear is refitted with Mouse Ears. Government agents are called "Cast Members". Schools have Hidden Mickeys in them. And they successfully unperson the existence of Song of the South.

That, uh, sounds like Abandoned By Disney and Room Zero.

It could work, but it would have to be some kind of corporatocracy or oligarchy. Some people claim the USSR and Soviet Union could count, but this totalitarian socialist government wouldn't count for multiple reasons: it has the dictatorship of the proletariat model described by Karl Marx, had a command economy that lowered its ability to be profitable, offered state-paid healthcare, and owned everything to the point where - like most nations - the Soviet Union had some kind of financial debt at all times. Corporate rule would be an oligarchy or a situation where a corporation has a monopoly on one main industry and nearly controls everything by extension like a banana republic or the modern tech industry in American politics. Some other businesses can rebel, but the monopoly would take away the resource they really want to have, so they play ball. The Corporation might want more than one monopoly, but ruling everything would probably be too costly and require many corporate leaders to run industries they know nothing about, which tends to lead to disaster and less profit and the ultimate collapse of corporate rule (again, look at certain banana republics). Also, you pay for your own healthcare and own items, possibly by getting a job with some other company not directly owned by the main corporation, resulting in more money going to the company in charge while maintaining a circulation of capital instead of stagnating the economy. Finally, it is still a market economy so the corporation still competes with the other companies (even if they have no interest on stepping on the main company's monopoly) and the black market that will inevitably crop up, though said competition will be less than having any direct competition.

Edited by tyler775 on Mar 12th 2020 at 6:49:43 AM

I'm assuming, based on what's already been said, that any kind of for-profit corporate entity can't afford to do what so many moustache-twirling Weyland-Yutani types have done and wage war against a government (assuming said government is on the same technology level as them). Since the old 'conflict drives innovation' fallacy only really applies after the war has ended when the economy picks back up; war would simply be a massive drain on profits for the minute possibility of some return in the future. Not to mention getting both your employees and potential customers needlessly killed.

I say this because I was thinking of including a backstory element in one of my sci-fi settings that demonstrated this in action. A vast government-contracted trading company - basically the East India Company IN SPACE, acquiring most of its influence through making shrewd deals with local government entities - made the unwise decision of declaring outright war on a state entity after said state entity emphatically told them they wouldn't deal with them under any circumstances. Which ends with the company running out of money, their mercenary army turning on them after discovering they're not getting paid, and their parent government hastily dissolving the company and then cutting contact with the wider galaxy in an attempt to avoid retribution.

If a corporation was acting as a government wouldn't they not be making any profit since they would be the ones making the money they pay their citizens with?

The underlying reality is that any corporation in a position to replace a government would become a government, since it's easier to just tax citizens than it is to market things to a customer base.

In a setting I'm writing right now, the eventual capital world of an interstellar federation would be a corporatocracy in the sense that there is a government, but the corporations (it's not just one MegaCorp, but several working in a cartel that dominates national economy by controlling and regulating the entire supply chain between corporation and corporation without any state involvement) have so much lobbying power that they pretty much dictate national policy. This causes friction between the government and the protagonists, as the latter possess an alien mobile shipyard with nanotech fabricator bays the corporations really want for themselves in order to maximize profit by minimizing manufacturing expenses, hence the corporations constantly pressuring the government to nationalize the shipyard. That and the corporations just flat-out don't like that the shipyard makes the protags an economically independent post-scarcity society where even having a job is optional, which is anathema to business.

Said friction eventually culminates in the corporations getting the government to mobilize the military for seizing the shipyard by force, allegedly in response to the protags having irresponsibly misused it and started a war in the process. This fails and permanently tarnishes relations between the protags and the government, to the point where the protags are briefly declared personae non grata and declare independence in return, putting the shipyard beyond corporate reach for good.

This system doesn't last for more than a few decades before rampant corruption causes an economic downturn, which causes mass emigration and colonization of new systems. Although the government initially supports this, they eventually try to nudge the new frontier colonies into joining the federation by false-flagging pirate attacks and providing patrol forces against them, then forcing the issue with the security forces turning into occupation forces with the excuse that these colonies were founded by their citizens using their assets, so the place is rightfully theirs. This attempt falls through due to externally supported insurgency, causing a massive loss of face for the capital world.

Fast-forward a few more decades and mass emigration becomes a major issue due to critical manpower shortage in the factories, which causes the government to lock down the border to keep the corporate workforce from jumping ship, which causes the other nations to launch clandestine humanitarian refugee smuggling operations across the border when leaked documents reveal that the government is working on legislation to essentially make it legal for corporations vital to the national economy to conscript citizens into their employment by force to stay in business and keep the national economy afloat, which causes the corporations to double down and push the government into declaring war to protect their unsustainable business practices and perhaps even revitalize the nation via war economy - only for the government to swiftly get their asses kicked, as the other systems in the federation finally had enough of the corporations' bullshit dragging down the entire federal economy and collectively reneged on the mutual defense treaty they had with the capital world, leaving the capital world to be defeated and annexed by the target of the war declaration while they formed their own coalition where politicians are explicitly forbidden by law from accepting monetary donations from private entities, even through intermediaries like political parties.

"...where politicians are explicitly forbidden by law from accepting monetary donations from private entities, even through intermediaries like political parties."

Ah, so a political fantasy, then?

Not quite. It's basically a chaotic interregnum period following The End of the World as We Know It, where everyone's trying to pick up the pieces and figure out where to go now and how. That particular part was a case of "okay, that approach didn't work out in the end, let's try this instead". It's not meant to be an objective statement of which system of government is better or worse (since there isn't an answer to that and I don't think there ever will be).

The previous dominant power of the setting was a One World Order that's democratic on the municipal/regional level but autocratic on the state level, not actively repressing the populace by default (the preceding regime, which was brutally repressive, was overthrown in a violent global revolt the current administration participated in, so they know that sort of thing isn't going to fly with the masses) but very much willing to throw anyone who speaks up against the regime into gulags (since they know not everyone is going to accept their leadership, as evidenced by multiple active insurgencies against them).

The corporatocracy I described above would be one of the One World Order's successor states formed after the latter's abrupt dissolution, controlling the old empire's inner systems; the other would be a military junta based in the outer systems and formed out of the old regime's military, whose emergency takeover was rejected by the inner systems (who discovered just what the civilian government was up to behind their facade of benevolence and seceded on the spot) and the junta letting those systems secede was the only way to avoid a civil war at a time when neither side could afford one.

There are pretty much no true democracies in the setting as we know them. Even the protagonist faction are an autocratic dictatorship. Or to be more exact, they used to be an N.G.O. Superpower governed by two councils, one civilian and one military, until the civilian council was overthrown in a military coup led by a Messianic Archetype war hero when it turned out that the civilian council deliberately falsified intel about the military modernization program by the junta "actually" being preparations for an invasion, out of wanting the military to proactively keep everyone else in the setting from reaching technological parity with this faction. With the conspirators overthrown, the military council grabbed the aforementioned war hero and went "You're pretty much the only guy we trust not to abuse his power right now, so shut up, stop insisting that you're not qualified and take charge already." And despite the fact that he does alright, he still gets constantly shit-talked and demonized by every other nation's media as either a naive idiot who doesn't know how the world works or a crypto-emperor wannabe posing as Just the First Citizen, sometimes both at the same time.

Anyway. You get the point. Pretty much everyone's got skeletons in the closet, but only the corporatocracy ends up running itself into the ground by policies unsustainable in the long term that end up pissing pretty much every single one of their neighbors off to the point where said neighbors intervene for the sake of the corporatocracy's citizenry.

In the long term, the setting isn't going towards consolidation and unification, but further fragmentation and dissolution as no power or leader has the support to unite everyone under one flag ever again (and the one who does refuses to take up that mantle).

Edited by amitakartok on Apr 22nd 2020 at 9:22:32 PM