I had a conversation with a friend yesterday in which she related a vision she had about the future. When I say vision - it was a term she used herself - she didn't mean to imply something mystical. We can conjure any number of futures in imagination, utopias and dystopias and anything else in between. But there is a difference between imagining possibilities - projections of hopes or fears - and suddenly seeing the thing itself.
Science fiction (of which both my friend and I are fans) has projected any number of futures in which the corporation has become the dominant governing factor - most of these are written as dystopias, but writers are generally anarchistic as a group and would tend to look at it that way.
However, what my friend saw, in this "vision" of hers, did not appear as just another fictional possibility, but as a very real projected result of the current realpolitik. She could see the lines stretching from here to there in logical, progressive steps toward corporate government that, unless something catastrophic intervenes, is the inevitable culmination of the forces visible today.
And I agree. And, I added, I think that people may accept and even welcome it.
There is envious talk now of the ability of governments like China's to get things done. Their state corporatism is a system that can decide on high speed trains, solar panel production, and seawater desalinization, point a finger and say, "Go. Do." The only other institutions capable of this kind of decision making are the huge multi-national corporations.
The institutions seemingly incapable of making decisions on this order are the 20th Century adversarial democracies. Particularly the United States. Which is now being held hostage by a 19th Century ideology making it unable to make a move into this century.
So I can see a future in which people become so disgusted and exhausted that they say OK. Go ahead, China. Monsanto. Make a decision. Any decision.
19th Century politics may have worked just fine when the rest of the world remained in the 19th Century. But we seem to be the only ones left on that planet.