What's "Corporatism"?

The phrase was first used by Benito Mussolini. He described it as "the merger between state and corporate power". Very similar to fascism.

I've used this term before, and now I've found an article that goes into detail about how this phrase pertains to the U.S. form of government.

I'll paste some of the article here. If you're interested in the rest, go to the link I've provided.

What is American Corporatism?By Robert Locke
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 13, 2002


We are probably heading into some economic heavy weather which will spur needed debate on what's right and wrong with our economy. This will require our being clear about what kind of economy we really have. I have mentioned before that we increasingly live not in a capitalist society but in a corporatist one, and I would like to flesh out this notion.

What is corporatism? In a (somewhat inaccurate) phrase, socialism for the bourgeois. It has the outward form of capitalism in that it preserves private ownership and private management, but with a crucial difference: as under socialism, government guarantees the flow of material goods, which under true capitalism it does not. In classical capitalism, what has been called the "night-watchman" state, government's role in the economy is simply to prevent force or fraud from disrupting the autonomous operation of the free market. The market is trusted to provide. Under corporatism, it is not, instead being systematically manipulated to deliver goods to political constituencies. This now includes basically everyone from the economic elite to ordinary consumers.

Unlike socialism, corporatism understands that direct government ownership of the means of production does not work, except in the limiting case of infrastructure.1 But it does not represent a half-way condition between capitalism and socialism. This is what the West European nations, with their mixed economies in which government owned whole industries, tried to create until Thatcherism. Corporatism blends socialism and capitalism not by giving each control of different parts of the economy, but by combining socialism's promise of a government-guaranteed flow of material goods with capitalism's private ownership and management.


For the rest of the article, go to:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...le.asp?ID=3054

I find this the best way to show how our government operates, and where their interests lie. This article shows why it's going to be so difficult to get rid of.