Corporate influence lurks almost everywhere we go. Decisions about what we buy and what we do are greatly affected by seemingly invisible corporate insiders. No matter how low profile you get, from the music we listen to, to the schools we study in, to the medicine we take, these are all handled heavily by corporate powers.

This “dominant institution of our time” has been scrutinized by UBC law professor Joel Bakan. And his book, The Corporation (that lead to the documentary and a still active website,) has become an important piece of investigative work.

Even thought it’s been four years since the film’s release, Bakan’s thoughts on the topic have only sharpened. We had a chance to speak, about his counter-conspiracy groundings, about his work, and for the first time publicly, about his next big project.


We’re focusing on conspiracy theories and I understand The Corporation isn’t based on conspiracies, but we thought this would be a good opportunity to talk to you about the impact that you’ve achieved with the film and how your opinions have changed or grown since it was released.

Joel Bakan: In writing The Corporation book and film, one of my ambitions was to counter conspiracy theory thinking about corporations and their power in the world - to challenge the notion that the problems caused by corporations are somehow the result of nine people in a dark room figuring out how they’re going to take over the world. I was more interested in the systemic problems raised by the legal nature of the corporation as an institution. So, far from being about a conspiracy, or some kind of secretive process, I was concerned with what we, as a society, had done, in the plain light of day, by creating the corporation as we have. And so The Corporation is very much a counter-conspiracy kind of story. It’s a story about how the structure of an institution that we fully take for granted, that we support legally, financially, politically and every which way, actually has some very devastating effects on the possibility of creating a viable society and a sustainable future. 


Do you feel that too much hype is given to conspiracies and if so, if that takes away from things that are happening in the “real” world?

JB: I believe that conspiracies happen and in fact I even talk about a conspiracy in The Corporation - a conspiracy of business people who, in the 1930s, tried to enlist the services of a former Marine corps general, Smedley Butler, to overthrow President Roosevelt and become a fascist leader of the United States. The ambition of the conspirators – among whom were some of America’s leading bankers and business people – was to turn the United States into a fascist dictatorship, modeled on Germany and Italy. The plotted coup failed because the general blew the whistle to the authorities, but that was a real conspiracy, historically documented, and would have had absolutely profound impacts on the United States and the world as a whole. So I don’t want to suggest that conspiracies don’t happen. At the same time, I do think that conspiracy thinking has an easy appeal that sometimes can divert attention from the systemic, and often quite mundane structures – such as the corporation - which may lie at the root of social and political ills.


Your film has been recognized for capturing key characters, the interviews you did were with the leaders involved in corporations, relevant to your subject. Did you achieve what you had hoped through your film?

JB: One of the things that was most surprising to me, in writing the book, and in making the film with Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, was that the people involved in the various industries that we talked to tended to be pretty decent types and were concerned about the state of the world, sometimes very concerned about it. But they talked about how the structure of the corporation not only gave them license, but actually required them, to do pernicious things – that when they were in their corporate capacities they felt compelled to do things that, in their roles as normal human beings, they would never do.
The problem, I came to realize, is not so much with human nature, but rather with the way that we as a society seem prone to create structures, such as the corporation (and there are many others throughout history) – social, economic, and political structures – that channel human behaviour in destructive and sometimes evil ways. 

And the reasons why we do this – why we create these structures that belie our best human sensibilities and motivations – are incredibly complex: they have to do with power and ideology, sometimes conspiracies; they have to do with the way that knowledge is produced in society; the way that the media is structured; the way that we are taught to see ourselves and others; the material conditions in society that define the range of choices and opportunities we have. It’s very, very complicated, how we somehow, seemingly blindly, become complicit in creating and maintaining systems that ultimately may destroy us. And I don’t have the answer to why or how that happens. But I don’t think it is simply the result of a conspiracy, or several conspiracies, though undoubtedly conspiracies do happen and are at least a part of the story. 


You talk about the system being inherently flawed and the psychopathic-type personality that corporations adopt – given that, how do you think the power of corporations can be tamed, or how can public interest ever be promoted?

JB: I guess the short answer to that – and the simplicity of the answer belies how difficult it is to put it into practice – the short answer is that we really need to find a way to make corporations democratically accountable in the sense that, we as a society, we the people, the democracy, the democratic citizens, are put fully in charge of creating the appropriate balance between the interests that we have in corporate wealth creation, and the interests that we have in protecting ourselves from the harms and exploitation inevitably caused by corporate wealth creation. Needless to say, we need to produce things in a society, to create things and jobs, to trade – these are all things that we need to do. But at the same time, we need to ensure that in the process of doing those things, we don’t destroy the very environment that sustains us, we don’t destroy our children’s health, we don’t exploit people.

So there’s a balance that needs to be struck, and the balance is one to be made through democratic processes, it needs to be made with appropriate information, good information about what’s going in the world. One significant problem in this regard is that our information comes to us primarily from for-profit corporations – corporate media – which are naturally aligned with other for-profit corporations, and which are set up to serve the needs of those other corporations by selling them advertising space. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just that this institutional symbiosis inevitably leads to a tilted process of knowledge production, one that’s sympathetic towards, celebratory, uncritical and sustaining of, the operation of corporate consumerism. And it is not only the media. Increasingly, science is being influenced by corporations, particularly in areas like the pharmaceutical industry, as, more and more, research is funded by corporate sources. So the regulatory system increasingly makes its decisions on the basis of partial information, which only compounds its more general capture by corporations, through lobbying, campaign financing, and other channels of corporate influence. 

I’m not a utopian and I’m not really even a radical. I’m not saying we have to overthrow corporate capitalism and create a completely new system. That’s just not realistic, even if it were desirable. I am interested in talking about what people can do tomorrow, or next week, not in the possibility of some utopian future. And what I think people can get activated over as citizens, today and tomorrow, is trying to regain our sense of responsibility and power to actually create a reasonable balance between the creation of financial wealth in society, through corporations and their activities, and broader public interests. Especially over the last 30 years, we’ve kind of lost our sense, both of power and of responsibility, to do that. How do we regain it? I think the best place to start, not necessarily to end, because maybe we’re capable of better than this, but the best place to start is with our existing institutions of democratic governance – try to make them work better, try to make them actually democratic, actually accountable; believe that we do have this power as citizens and that we can use it and that in fact it’s our duty to that.


I notice on your website you have a link to a page where people can tell you small battles being won. What kinds of things are you hearing? Are you satisfied by the examples people are submitting?

JB: There are examples - in Argentina, there is a vibrant whole workers cooperative movement; in the film and book we show how the people in a region of Bolivia successfully resisted the privatization of water. To some extent, and I’m not saying that I particularly like the recent budget of the Liberals of this province, but to some extent, I suppose, the carbon tax can be seen as at least reflecting a sense that government has a role to play in reducing emissions. And that’s an important message in an increasingly anti-public regulation ideological environment. So I think when you look around you do see examples, both of actors in civil society, in the non-governmental context, and in the context of official governmental institutions, you do see examples, all over the place, of successes. But do those all add up to something that can be said to really be turning things around? I don’t think so.


What kind of platform do you think the Internet is for launching positive activism?

JB: I think the Internet is a very complicated issue. On the one hand it is becoming increasingly encroached upon by corporate interests and advertising. So it’s undoubtedly part of the problem in terms of the deepening and broadening commercialization of society. But it also is undoubtedly part of the solution in that it provides a mechanism for activists around the world to share their stories of successes, and to organize for success.

The anti-globalization protests, beginning with the APEC protest in Vancouver and the WTO protest in Seattle, were very much Internet driven. The Internet was a necessary part of organizing these events, of getting the word out. The Internet is also a powerful tool for monitoring corporations and their activities. It’s much more difficult now for corporations to hide their nasty activities, whether it’s Shell in Nigeria or sweatshops in Bangladesh – you just type ‘shell in Nigeria’ or ‘sweatshops in Bangladesh’ into your search engine, and up pops a wealth of information. Now it’s true you have to sort through the information, and be wary of its reliability, but the fact remains that within five minutes you can get information that would have taken hours in the library. So to that extent I do think the Internet has some radical potential, in terms of both disseminating information and organizing political action.


What kind of modern thinkers do you turn to, to deepen your understanding of the issues that you’re involved with, as a lawyer, an academic and a modern thinker yourself?

JB: I read a lot of people and its difficult for me to answer that question because I think thinkers – and I believe this about myself too – have their good, and their not-so-good, thoughts. So rather than idolize this or that thinker, I like to collect great thoughts. It’s the same for me with hockey – I’m more interested in plays than in players. I’m more interested in various types of situations and strategies on the ice. You can take a team of mediocre players and make them a stunning team. Or you can take a team of superstars and they’ll be awful. So it’s the same with thinkers for me. You can put together the greatest all star team of thinkers, put them in a room and tell them to solve the problems of the world, and you’ll likely end up with a much worse set of solutions than what you might get from the workers running cooperatives in Argentina, or just a random sampling of citizens. 


Did you always have that perspective or did it emerge as you went through law?

JB: I’ve never been someone who jumps on a particular bandwagon. If I was that kind of person, I wouldn’t have written The Corporation. The project was nowhere near any of the law professor bandwagons passing my office. It was completely outside the box of what I was supposed to be as a legal scholar. But I had an idea, and an idea about how I wanted to disseminate that idea. I thought it was crucial that people understand the true nature of this institution – the corporation – that was vying for control and domination of the world.  


What are you working on right now?

JB: I’m teaching at UBC, in the Faculty of Law, which, I might add, has been wonderfully supportive of my work on The Corporation. I’m also working on another project, which I hope to have finished in a couple of years.


What’s the topic?

JB: It’s about the way that we as a society are destroying childhood, as a concept and a practice. I tend to be quite secretive about my work until all the pieces are in place, so I won’t say more about it at this point. The idea is to make a film and write a book, in much the same way I did with The Corporation. Suffice it to say that it’s not based on a conspiracy theory.