Aetius Romulous
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.
Wall Street
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.
