by Kent Chadwick

The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism
by David C. Korten
Kumarian Press and Berrett-Koehler Publishers,
Inc., 1999, 318 pages, hardcover, $27.95

Communism has failed. Capitalism has triumphed. Is history at an end, as Francis Fukuyama contends in his book The End of History? Is liberalism, global capitalism, and scientific materialism the omega point of human history that once achieved become final components of an everlasting political economy for all human societies? Can Hegel's dialectic have stopped?

How absurd. How positively Marxist to think that our current paradigm could be free of internal contradictions. And how beguiling the thought is to the affluent elite in the West. In fact, the essential messages of our political parties, our media, and our advertisers are all variants of that triumphalism. This "mantra continually propagated by our most powerful institutions brings to mind the human capacity for self-deception immortalized in the story of the emperor's new clothes," argues David Korten in his essential new book The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism. Using his analogy, the exuberant protests against the World Trade Organization can be seen as the equivalent of shouting loudly and forcefully that the emperor is naked, much to Bill Clinton's and Paul Schell's surprise and embarrassment.

But where do we go, post-WTO? In The Post-Corporate World Korten analyzes a variety of movements for change in many different parts of the world, and he concludes that: "Again and again we see the pattern. From passivity to protest, from protest to proaction, from local proaction to national and international alliance building." Korten's reasoned advice then to Seattle progressives is to take the next step from protest to local action: to stand up against local corporate domination and economic globalization; to envision and begin building a post-corporate society here in the Northwest. Korten's book is vitally important precisely because he complements his critique of finance capitalism's pathology with what is often lacking among progressives—a detailed vision of a new society and a practical sense of how to go about building it, now.

Korten is even more ambitious and devotes a quarter of The Post-Corporate World to proposing a new myth to live by, one that would replace the siren song of money with a renewed devotion to the story of life's evolution. "The challenge before us," Korten writes, "is to reverse our present backwards course and re-create ourselves as contributors to the advancement of life's epic journey. It starts with choosing life as our guiding metaphor and continues with deepening our understanding of life's ways in search of insights into the unrealized possibilities of our species." Here Korten is at his most speculative and idealistic, making this book more oriented to the already converted. While he imaginatively applies insights from contemporary biologists, Korten fails to connect his new myth with its historical antecedents in the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Michael Polanyi.

In contrast, his 1995 book When Corporations Rule the World is a carefully argued brief against corporate libertarianism, finance capitalism, and economic globalization that has persuaded thoughtful readers across the political spectrum.

Korten is uniquely qualified to speak to and perhaps persuade the economic elite, because, though now disaffected, he was one of them. Equipped with an MBA and Ph.D. from Stanford, Korten taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Business for five and a half years and then spent two decades working as an international development expert in the Third World for the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Korten eventually came to see, however, that the promises he and other development experts were making never came true, and that the projects they established only served the interests of the foreign experts, aid agencies, and multinational corporations, while often seriously damaging the culture and economies of the local people. In a remarkable about-face Korten has become one of the most trenchant critics of global capitalism. And having grown up in Longview, Washington he's brought his activism back to the Northwest and now lives on Bainbridge Island.

In The Post-Corporate World Korten summarizes the arguments that he made in When Corporations Rule the World with fervor: "...cancer is more than a metaphor for the relationship of capitalism and the global corporation to the market and democracy. It is a clinical diagnosis. Think of capitalism as a defective genetic coding in our economic system that causes individual enterprises to seek their own unlimited growth without regard to the consequences for society."

"Better," he argues, "that social relationships distort economic relations than that economic relationships be allowed to distort and destroy social relationships. A healthy market is not simply about making money. It is about meeting human needs in ways that enrich the soul and build community with reasonable economic efficiency."

What is most exciting about The Post-Corporate World is the alternative and comprehensive political economy that Korten proposes, one in which "living capital that is the source of real wealth." And he lays out a serious agenda for its creation that includes: starving the capitalist economy; nurturing mindful markets; starting from where you are; intervening at multiple levels; simplifying your life; buying small and local; reducing your automobile dependence; working for community economic self-reliance; creating a community currency; and joining the burgeoning global networks of cultural creatives who are rebuilding our world from the inside out.

Korten's work is essential reading for progressives. His ideas need to be engaged, absorbed, debated, and in large measure adopted.