Companies Can't Be Apolitical

One of the most common things I hear from people is that companies should be "apolitical". The most formal way this concept is expressed is that a company should make decisions based on what maximizes profits and not political opinions. Unfortunately, the statement "companies should only care about maximizing profits" is, itself, a political statement (and one I happen to disagree with). Thus, it is fundamentally impossible for a company to be truly apolitical, for the very act of attempting to be apolitical is a political statement.

How much a company can avoid politics generally depends on both the type and size of the company. Once your company becomes large enough, it will influence politics simply by virtue of its enormous size, and eventually becomes an integral part of political debates whether or wants to or not. Large corporations must take into account the political climate when making business decisions, because simply attempting to blindly maximize profit may turn the public against them and destroy their revenue sources—thus, politics themselves become part of the profit equation, and cannot be ignored. Certain types of businesses embody political statements simply by existing. Grindr, for example, is a dating app for gay men. It's entire business model is dependent on enabling an activity that certain fundamentalists consider inherently immoral.

You could, theoretically, try to solve part of this quandary by saying that companies should also be amoral, insofar that the free market should decide moral values. The fundamentalists would then protest the companies existence by not using it (but then, they never would have used it in the first place). However, the problem is that, once again, this very statement is itself political in nature. Thus, by either trying to be amoral or moral, a company is making a political statement.

The issue at play here is that literally everything is political. When most everyone agrees on basic moral principles, it's easier to pretend that politics is really just about economic policy and lawyers, but our current political divisions have demonstrated that this is a fantasy. Politics are the fundamental morals that society has decided on. It's just a lot easier to argue about minor differences in economic policy instead of fundamental differences in basic morality.

Of course, how companies participate in politics is also important to consider. Right now, a lot of companies participate in politics by spending exorbitant amounts of money on lobbyists. This is a symptom of money in general, and should be solved not by removing corporate money from politics, but removing all money, because treating spending money as a form of speech gives more speech to the rich, which inherently discriminates against the poor and violates the constitutional assertion that all men are created equal (but no one really seems to be paying attention to that line anyway).

Instead of using money, corporations should do things that uphold whatever political values they believe in. As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words (or money, in this case). You could support civil rights activism by being more inclusive with your hiring and promoting a diverse work environment. Or, if you live in the Philippines, you could create an app that helps death squads hunt down drug users so they can be brutally executed. What's interesting is that most people consider the latter to be a moral issue as opposed to a political one, which seems to derive from the fact that once you agree on most fundamental morals, we humans simply make up a bunch of pointless rules to satisfy our insatiable desire to tell other humans they're wrong.

We've lived in a civilized world for so long, we've forgotten the true roots of politics: a clash between our fundamental moral beliefs, not about how much parking fines should be. Your company will make a political statement whether you like it or not, so you'd better make sure it's the one you want.