Why I Remain Unconvinced that Corporate Capitalism Leads to Genocide

In my opinion, the claim that corporations and their Western parent nations are perpetrating a massive genocide against the global south does not hold water for two reasons.  First, it requires an expansion of the definition of “genocide” to something that is so broad as to have very little in common with other events commonly accepted as genocide.  Second, the claim ignores significant portions of Western history and the work of Lemkin himself, both of which suggest that the uneven distribution of resources will resolve itself as it has in the past, lending credence to Lemkin’s theory of the “slow progression” of dominant cultures over others. 

When we remove the trappings of intent, race theory, history, etc. from our understanding of the genocides we have studied we are left with many cases of a powerful group acting on a powerless one.  The Nazis rounded up the Jews and gassed them, the Ittihadists marched the Armenians through the desert until they starved to death, and the US Army massacred technologically inferior Indian tribes.  The genocide against the global south, however, rests on the premise that corporations, the West, or other large bodies of affluent white people impose an uneven distribution of resources on the rest of the world.  Governments do this via trade agreements; corporations do this by providing what some consider to be sub-standard wages that afford individuals a low standard of living, and rich white people are guilty because they continue to purchase goods provided by the corporations paying low wages. 

This model entirely lacks the intent to destroy which is present in every other event which is commonly considered to be genocide.  Corporations exist simply to make money, and so market pressures, not personal prejudices, will determine the actions of a corporation.  For example, it is a central tenet of economics that when there is a surplus of a good, the price of that good will go down.  In the case of corporations, that good is labor.  If there is a larger number of workers in the global south than there are jobs available, the wages for those jobs will remain low, especially in the presence of government policies that encourage corporate investment.  In this case, the race of the workers is a non-issue, as are their religion, national origin, sexuality, ethnicity, or any other group identity.  Any degradation of culture that takes place is not intentional, as the only intent of the corporation is profit. 

In addition, workers take low paying jobs because those are the jobs that are offered.  As Tracey mentioned in class today, there was a time when American corporations provided only low paying jobs under a decidedly laissez-faire government to immigrant and working class laborers.  When events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and materials like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle began to spread awareness of immigrant and working class conditions, the workers, among others, began to agitate for protections in the government.  This resulted in governments passing labor laws and the rise of strong unions to counter the immense power of corporations.

The fact that similar efforts have taken place and been successful in every developed Western state leads me to two conclusions.  First, it strikes me as being just another facet of the process of stratification, with the state acting as a mediator between the interests of the worker (high wages, to ensure a high standard of living) and the interests of corporations (low wages, to ensure high profits).  Second, as I mentioned before, Lemkin himself made room in his definition of genocide for the spread of culture.  He was speaking with colonies and empires in mind, in terms of dominance and submissiveness and advancement, but this example may just be a variation on that theme.  If, for example, the political/economic model described above is more efficient than a present economic situation (communism, or perhaps subsistence farming) and ultimately leads to a higher standard of living for all members of a state, why should we stop it?  Labeling it genocide jumps the gun and irresponsibly attaches a term with violent connotations and history to something that is just not so.  Are low wages and a low standard of living unfortunate?  Certainly, but history, and the fact that the economy of Mexico is expected to double in size in the next eight years would lead us to believe that they will not be victims for long.