The Corporation

In one sense no-one is fooled by the rhetoric of Neoliberalism, or at least Neoliberalism is accepted as purely rhetorical, a necessary fiction, a form of bad faith. No one really believes that the problems of the Seventies have been solved or that America is entering into a new period of openness, democracy and small government, deregulation and more power to the little guy. Everyone wants to talk the Superhuman, Creative Destructive talk but they are really walking the Monopoly and Regulatory Capture walk. The pervasive political cynicism of the Sixties and Seventies' continues and floods popular culture, and this is nowhere more evident than in the persistent roles of the Evil Corporation in some of the most mainstream Eighties’ Cinema.

James Cameron's Aliens and the next two films in the series (in which Ripley herself goes from plucky but terrified survivor to reborn genetically enhanced super heroine) exemplify the notion of the corporation and the military industrial complex as deeply unscrupulous exploiters and appropriators keen to weaponize the Alien that they have, it is revealed, sent the unsuspecting crew of the Nostromo to the planet in order to “collect”.

The neoclassical fantasy of a market swarming with intensely competitive small businesses and the waves of creative destruction that this brings about (and the necessity therefore of having generous bankruptcy laws in the State to allow the hardy entrepreneur to dust himself off and then re-enter the fray) is nowhere in evidence. The megalithic corporations of Terminator or  Robocop are immediately evident in the dystopian Sci-Fi and action movies of the Eighties in a way in which they simply aren't in early Seventies' Sci-Fi, which, as mentioned earlier, generally postulates the future as a troubled paradise in which everything appears fine but which rests on some terrible secret. These early societies are rational, technocratic an extension of the belief in planning and management, the immemorial evils of want disease and idleness will have been banished. Yet at the same time something vital is lacking, the need for “animal spirits”, the “return of the repressed” looms large. Yet the elements of a further technological utopianism, the “sunrise” industries of the coming decades, robotics, information technology and biotechnology are figured as nightmarish throughout the Eighties, not as in previous representations of technological advance because of the dark side of science itself but because of who will be in control of them, not humanity as ciphered in the figure of the scientist, the government official or the man in the street, but the businessman, the capitalist.

Neoliberalism is one of the ways in which, under the guise of freeing up capital from the chains of government, allows monopoly and consolidation of business interests to accelerate. Much of the fear of Corporate malfeasance in the Eighties comes from the corporate raiders who become the anti-heroes of muscular capitalism throughout the decade (beautifully literalized at the start of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life when a sleepy old law firm is overtaken and assaulted by a shiny new corporation) The “rebirth” of the Eighties is aswarm with pessimism, nightmarish imaginings and fears, the age of rapid automation and de-industrialization as well as the heavily leveraged corporate buyout, a golden age for private equity and venture capital when what was once termed the unacceptable face of capitalism takes on a rock and roll, rule breaking, bad-boy charisma. The ultimate poster boy for this is Junk bond market pioneer, philanthropist, visionary, idealist and convicted criminal Michael Milkin.

“Capitalism is that form of private property economy in which innovations are carried out by means of borrowed money.” Two sources of finance that help to crowbar the States and the west in general out of the crisis of the Seventies are the forced recycling of petrodollars, the aforementioned Junk bonds and that most important of all innovations in floating the consumer debt bubble of the next thirty years, the coming-ubiquity of the credit card.