The roots of this ideology, often labeled corporatism (a word derived from a vision of society as a single body), can be found in a line of primarily Catholic thought that evolved from reactionary beginnings but by the end of the 19th century included a firm commitment to ‘social justice’. That these ideas should lead to fascism was not inevitable. Corporatism also influenced the establishment of post-war West Germany’s social-market economy, a democratic success story if ever there was one.
The Nazis may have linked, in their rhetoric and in some measures, elements of their Volksgemeinschaft to corporatism, but it’s no surprise that Mussolini, the leader of a strongly Catholic country, did more to institutionalize corporatism than the Führer to his north, despite there being more than a touch of Potemkin about Italy’s corporatist structures. Thus employers and workers participated in ‘syndicates’ organized on an industry basis, and the Italian legislature’s lower chamber was eventually rearranged on nominally corporatist lines. At around the same time, corporatism became, to varying degrees, the political creed of other equally (if less bluntly fascist) Catholic states, including Portugal, Spain, Austria and Argentina.
These countries may have failed to measure up to corporatist ideals in practice, but that does not detract from corporatism’s potential as an instrument of social, economic and political control. To take one instance, Silvio Longhi, one of fascist Italy’s senior lawyers, explained that under corporatism, ‘the state recognizes and safeguards individual property rights so long as they are not being exercised in a way which contravenes the prevailing collective interest’; a less than reassuring reassurance.
Fast forward to 2019 and a statement by the Business Roundtable (which has now been signed by over 200 of America’s leading CEOs) purporting to ‘redefine the purpose of a corporation’. The longstanding principle that corporate executives’ primary obligation is to their shareholders has been ‘modernized’: companies are now to be run for the benefit of ‘stakeholders’, more specifically, customers, employees, suppliers, ‘the communities in which we work’ and, oh yes, shareholders.
If this statement were a one-off, it could be regarded as a piece of largely meaningless PR put out by businesspeople alarmed by the extent of American disenchantment with the existing economic order. Unfortunately, it is not. C-suite after C-suite is abandoning shareholder primacy (a concept denounced by Joe Biden as ‘a farce’) in favor of ‘stakeholder capitalism’. Stripped of euphemism, that means overriding shareholder property rights based on what Silvio Longhi would have described as ‘the prevailing collective interest’.
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