Let’s talk about freedom and democracy in the context of the real world.
If you are fortunate enough to have a full-time job, you spend at least 8 hours a day at the office; most of your waking hours. If you add to that your commute time to and from work, practically, your whole day belongs to your job.
Of course, at work, unless you are the owner of the business, your role, your duties, the workplace rules and regulations, are all dictated to you by your employer. When you eat, when you have your coffee, and in some cases, even what you are allowed wear and who you interact with at work, are all determined by company policy. Company policy is set by the CEO and executive staff; by the Board of Directors. A corporation is, essentially, a totalitarian institution, and you spend most of your life within the strictures of this institution.
Obviously, the company you work for determines your income. Your income determines where you can afford to live, what you can afford to eat, where you can afford to educate your children, the quality of healthcare you can afford for yourself and your family in case of illness. Your income determines your quality of life, your status in society, and largely influences the future of your children.
The company sets your working hours, your routine, your free time, and even how many days you are allowed to be sick every year without jeopardizing your livelihood.
The totalitarian control of the company you work for extends, in other words, into every area of your life. If you are a regular employee, you have no say in any of this, because businesses are not democracies. Here it might be useful to explain briefly the standard structure of corporations.
All significant decisions in a corporation are made by the Board of Directors (usually between 12 to 15 people). They select the management, determine business strategy; what, how, and where the company will operate, etc.
The Board of Directors is elected by the company shareholders; each shareholder has one vote per share owned. Essentially that means that the majority shareholder chooses the Board, and the Board is legally accountable exclusively to the shareholders, not to employees, and not to customers; and what they are accountable to do, is to deliver profits.
Corporate profits are distributed among the shareholders in the form of dividends, according to the number of shares each shareholder owns.
Employees do the work and create the profit, but have no role in decisions about the work they do, nor do they have any share in the profits they create; they have no vote in appointing the Board of Directors, nor any voice among the shareholders.
So, as explained above, what it comes down to is that nearly every aspect of your personal, day-to-day life, is subject to the diktats of your company for the sake of enriching corporate shareholders who have no commitment or legal responsibility for your welfare, and no accountability.
It is appropriate to wonder, given this reality, what political democracy actually means in the lives of most people? This question becomes even more important when we consider the broader impact of corporate influence on society, or rather, the influence of shareholders in society by means of the corporate system.
Through investment decisions, for example, and business strategies, shareholders, through their corporations, can decide which communities will enjoy development, which will have jobs, which will have services, and so on.
Opening or closing a factory, for instance, can either make or break a community. Their decisions can affect real estate values, rent prices, and city-planning. Even without active political lobbying, local governments, say, on a district or provincial level, are overpowered by the ability of corporations to affect conditions on the ground in their constituencies.
The leverage of large companies over policy is tremendous, just by virtue of the economic power they exert.
In America, it is common for one local government to compete with another to entice a company to open a facility in its particular state, to hopefully create jobs and development.
In order to attract the company, the local government will offer all kinds of incentives; land concessions, tax bonuses, preferred status in bidding for state contracts, and so on. Often these incentives will also include unofficial bonuses like relaxed regulations on environmental protection standards and worker safety, as well as promising that their labor force can be employed at cheaper wages than the workers in any competing state.
In this way, as you see, shareholders (through their corporations) are able to make local governments bend to their will, rather than to the will of their own electorates
As if this was not enough, corporations impose direct pressure for or against different policies through lobbying and political donations.
Since the last presidential election in the United States, corporate spending on political lobbying totals approximately $26 billion; and this does not include financial contributions to particular parties and candidates.
The economic power of shareholders, therefore, impacts our lives both on a personal level, and on a political level.
They dominate not only our day-to-day circumstances, but even the decision-making process of government.
Roughly 10% of the population owns 90% of corporate shares; that is 10% of the population exerting unparalleled control over our daily lives, controlling our governments, and controlling them without democratic accountability, exclusively for the sake of their own material self-interest.
It behooves us to ask what freedom and democracy mean under this system of private sector power, and to pursue the development of mechanisms that can empower the population to again, have some say in determining the conditions of their lives and the policies of their governments.