We Don’t Need a Corporation to Raise a Chicken or Vote

June 23, 2008 Next Page »

Adam Price, Plaid Cymru’s election campaign co-ordinator, sent a mailshot to Plaid Cymru supporters two months ago asking “Are you on Facebook?”. Fortunately, we are not. Here’s why …

Facebook is an American corporation. It exists to make a pile of money. That is the purpose of a corporation. It makes money by providing what is dubbed a ’social networking service’ and saturating users of such a service with advertising.

Nowadays, Welsh politicians of all parties bandy corporate brand names as if they held talismanic political properties. It is an absurd and exploitative relationship.

Why would we surrender our privacy to a commercial proxy to become “involved” with Plaid (or any other Party) ? That is not a means to engage in a political discourse, it is means to become herded like sheep, controlled and exploited.

Technology is being used as if it was value free or neutral, but it is not. The decision to use Facebook, or indeed any other corporate brand, signifies “this is what we value”.

Instead of using small-scale, locally provided technology that ultimately benefits the wider community, Mr Price of Plaid Cymru has voted for large-scale, centralised, corporate-owned technology that benefits only the pockets of the few.

At the local level the same pattern is repeated. In Aberdare, political parties almost exclusively use corporate-owned and highly centralised media like Trinity Mirror, one of the UK’s largest newspaper publishers. The rich diversity of locally produced and owned newsletters, websites and suchlike are ignored and devalued. Small is not beautiful in the eyes of our politicians.

Ballot Box But they are wrong. We are reminded of the advice of farmer and writer Wendell Berry in his essay on local economics and the nature of freedom. Berry writes about economic problems and the use of corporations …

We need to reconsider the idea of solving our economic problems by “bringing in industry.” Every state government appears to be scheming to lure in a large corporation from somewhere else by “tax incentives” and other squanderings of the people’s money. We ought to suspend that practice until we are sure that in every state we have made the most and the best of what is already there. We need to build the local economies of our communities and regions by adding value to local products and marketing them locally before we seek markets elsewhere.

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don’t need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

- Compromise, Hell! by Wendell Berry. Published in Orion Magazine November/December 2004.

By outsourcing part of the political process, Plaid Cymru are ‘bringing in industry’ and relying on a corporate behemoth instead of solving the problem by simple, effective tools owned by local people.

We don’t need a corporation to raise a chicken and we don’t need one to help us vote.

Filed Under Corporations, Local, Media Analysis, Politics

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We Don’t Need a Corporation to Raise a Chicken or Vote

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