The Economist reviews the anti-corporate film from Canada, The Corporation. The article, titled The Lunatic you Work For (sub req'd), begins:

To the anti-globalisers, the corporation is a devilish instrument of environmental destruction, class oppression and imperial conquest. But is it also pathologically insane?

Corporations are entitled to the rights of a person under U.S. law. This legal fiction has helped the corporate entity "the freedom to flourish."

So if the corporation is a person, ... what sort of person is it? ... The corporation is a psychopath.

Like all psychopaths, the firm is singularly self-interested: its purpose is to create wealth for its shareholders. And, like all psychopaths, the firm is irresponsible, because it puts others at risk to satisfy its profit-maximising goal, harming employees and customers, and damaging the environment. The corporation manipulates everything. It is grandiose, always insisting that it is the best, or number one. It has no empathy, refuses to accept responsibility for its actions and feels no remorse. It relates to others only superficially, via make-believe versions of itself manufactured by public-relations consultants and marketing men. In short, if the metaphor of the firm as person is a valid one, then the corporation is clinically insane.

The film argues that it's not because bad people run big companies -- but that "through their psychopathic pursuit of profit, firms make good people do bad things." People do evil things in their corporate personas that they would never do in their private lives:

Human values and morality survive the onslaught of corporate pathology only via a carefully cultivated schizophrenia: the tobacco boss goes home, hugs his kids and feels a little less bad about spreading cancer. Company executives and foot soldiers alike will identify instantly with this analysis, because it is accurate.

The article argues that, while accurate, this picture is "incomplete." The "company-as-psychopath idea" actually originated with Max Weber a century ago:

Bureaucracies have flourished because their efficient and rational division and application of labour is powerful. But a cost attends this power. As cogs in a larger, purposeful machine, people become alienated from the traditional morals that guide human relationships as they pursue the goal of the collective organisation. There is, in Weber's famous phrase, a “parcelling-out of the soul”.

While we call the machinations of corporations "evil," their misdeeds pale in comparison to the Evils of more sinister bureaucracies -- "the psychopathic national socialism of Nazi Germany, communism of Stalinist Soviet rule and fascism of imperial Japan ... Infinitely more powerful than firms and far less accountable for its actions, the modern state has the capacity to behave even in evolved western democracies as a more dangerous psychopath than any corporation can ever hope to become."

The Economist review says the makers of The Corporation (and by extension, the anti-capitalist movement), have a "misty-eyed alignment of the state with the public interest. Run that one past the people of, say, North Korea."

The movie is based on the book The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan. The book explores the thesis that the corporate system cannot last because it is "a system programmed to exploit others for profit."