In a world of fragile mortal beings, the corporation is a cyborg.
A corporation is nothing more than a legal construct, a packet of documents and papers that conforms to law (or more properly, has law conform to it). The corporation is a “virtual person” — a cyborg. It has been unchanged in its essential form since the first corporations were designed in the early 17th century. Its purpose was — as it is today — to concentrate the capital of individuals, provide that concentration with legal protections and rights under law and legislation, and to then use that concentrated capital to create profits from projects beyond the scope and reach of individual mortal men.
This corporate cyborg proved to be so remarkably adept at concentrating capital and earning returns on investment that the corporations use today has become essential in a marketplace dominated by other corporations. Individuals have no chance of competing, expressly because the intended purpose of a corporate cyborg was to defeat the meagre returns and profit of mortal individuals. Corporations were created, and are still employed, precisely because the individual cannot provide capital and returns on the scale that the corporation can. The corporate format works like a charm.
The concentration of capital is an important and necessary function however. Without a framework for the concentrated power of capital, it is hard to imagine how the great works of our modern civilization could have been developed. From the early railroads and canal systems, through to the worldwide network of fiber optic cables and satellite systems, the corporate format has wrought great and wonderful things. We are all a species much advanced because of it.
But while the current corporate format certainly does these things — it also does a great deal more. Modern corporations, for instance, have an unlimited lifespan, and outlive the original purpose of the capital and the humans that designed it. Limited liability joint stock companies can and regularly do shed appropriate risk, or avoid it altogether — risks no human would ever take on themselves, or any society would otherwise accept.
Corporations enjoy separate, beneficial tax treatment. They also have the use of an arcane accounting system they themselves created for their own use. Corporations, by nature, abhor competition and naturally gravitate towards monopoly, as they have clearly been doing in the last 30 years or so. Unlike humans, the corporate cyborg has no ethics, morals, or social responsibilities — its simple, binary purpose is solely to maximize profits at the complete expense of every other issue. Corporations have developed their own legal standing as ruthless profit harvesting individuals before the law.
There are also the unintended consequences of the commensurate concentration of power by increasingly oligarchic corporations in a liberal democracy. The naturally occurring power of astonishing sums of money and influence on simple human legislators in a society obsessed with consumer vices. The flagrant usurpation of a democratic process that should provide checks and balances but no longer can. Concentrated capital in concentrated corporations that regularly spend small fractions of their profits to bribe and influence lawmakers. Small fractions of profits that have become hundreds of millions of dollars annually as a simple cost of doing business. Amounts of cash no single human with a single worthless vote could ever hope to overcome.
The corporation has become the de facto governing force of 21st century society, cyborgs pushing aside and making the individual state moot. Far from one world government, the earth is teeming with one-world corporations. 21st century schizoid man.
The essential issue of our time is that western liberal democracies are ill equipped to handle unbridled corporatism; they have goals and motivations that are completely at odds with each other.
Many people conflate “corporatism” with “capitalism”, most believing they are one and the same. They are not. It is possible to have a robust capitalism that answers to the social imperatives of democracy; however, the corporate goals of capitalism are entirely at odds with the social necessities of democracy. It is entirely possible — and desirable — to isolate corporatism through law and legislation, however the contemporary ideology of capitalism and free markets believes that the two – corporatism and capitalism – are indivisible. An attack on corporatism is an attack on capitalism. And an attack on capitalism is heresy.
Corporatism is not capitalism
The failure of democratic institutions to separate out corporatism from capitalism ensures that every instance of conflict between corporations and social welfare will end in the triumph of corporate interests above those of progressive liberal democracy. With each victory, power is transferred from humans to the mechanical corporate format.
When we talk of the growing divide between concentrated wealth and capital in America, and those without access to that concentration, we are not talking about freedom, liberty, capitalism, or socialism. We are talking exclusively about the beneficiaries of the corporate concentration of capital, wealth… and the power that flows from that. Virtually every human member of the wealthiest percentiles in every western capitalist nation has that wealth not from hard work, production, or nature, but because they have benefited personally from the use of a corporate cyborg, (where they have not retained their capital from the last aristocratic age).
It is impossible to reach the upper percentiles of wealth and income without the use of the corporate format. Every “rich person” is incorporated in some form somewhere along the way, often, like pharaohs, under pyramids of cascading corporations. The protection of corporatism and the fabulous wealth it produces provides the essential machinery that is chewing away at an American middle class of blithely stoic individuals and families. With tax protection, legal shields, and multiple hedgerows of corporate layers the wealthiest Americans are growing fabulously wealthier while everybody else is…not. This confers increasing power as well as privilege to an ever decreasing group of Americans, each of whom sits astride a corporate revenue stream from either finance, Insurance, or real estate (the FIRE economy), none of which contributes production, manufacturing or material goods. These Americans make money from money and in no other way.
A real and present danger of this corporate firewall of wealth is that it is threatening the very structure of American society. Still a relatively homogeneous group, Americans can yet believe they have the individual opportunity to somehow rise to the top in a unique society without class or class distinction. The exponential growth of the chasm between rich and poor over the last generation threatens to demolish this American dream. While arguments rage about politics, economic theory, and dogma, a class system is developing that may yet convince a majority of Americans that they and their children are permanently stuck on a social diet of franks and beans. It is an entirely open question what these tens of millions upon tens of millions of disenfranchised Americans will do when that sudden realization washes over them.
It doesn’t have to end this way.
Fixing this should be a simple matter. Through law, legislation, and charter, corporate cyborgs could be brought to heel and made to serve the interests of a wider social welfare. It would be an extremely populist position that would have wide support across the west. Democracies are ideally suited to deal with popular signature evils that threaten the body politic as a whole. And the corporation cyborg in its present incarnation is indeed a popular, signature evil. One mortal man, one mortal vote, one common mechanical enemy.
Many options are available through the laws and legislation on which all corporations receive life. As a democratic society, we can implement popular changes through elections free of corporate interference — if we choose to. Over time, perhaps a generation, corporations can be tamed in such a way that they can return a healthy profit for shareholders while at the same time being responsible to liberal democratic societies and social welfare.
Nowhere is it written that the current corporate format is final. Corporations can be changed and massaged by humans with the will to take them on. There is no law, natural or otherwise that says they can’t be. Corporations can be made to behave and act in any way that we humans, as a free society, see fit.
Don’t make the mistake of confusing corporations with business. Business and capitalism is still business and capitalism — all we are doing is custom designing a legal format for our new and complex world, a format that has been essentially unchanged since the early 17th century. However, as long as the myth that corporatism means capitalism persists, this transfer of power from the people to oligarchic corporate cyborgs will continue unabated, as it has for several generations now.
