[Peace-discuss] Blair To Brown - The Killing Will Continue

[C. G. Estabrook]

Corporations are now the dominant legal form of capitalist control of 
the economy.  That wasn't always so.  When Marx tried to understand the 
workings of 19th-century capitalism (his primary concern -- he had very 
little to say about socialism), he was primarily analyzing the effect of 
  concentrations of money in the hands of individuals or families.  The 
corporate form developed through the century; the corporation became a 
person in American law (by a legal back-door) only at the turn of the 
century.

Real persons exercising their freedom in ways so as to accumulate money 
don't do so in isolation but in the context of an economy that should be 
democratically run.  In a situation where a few real persons on an 
investment committee of a corporation make decisions that determine what 
will be produced and what jobs will be available (and therefore how 
money can be accumulated), the freedom of many real persons to use their 
talents of head and hands -- what makes them human -- doesn't exist: we 
lose control of those abilities because we have to rent them to the 
owners of capital in order to live.  Of course that freedom can be 
regained only democratically, not in isolation. --CGE


John W. wrote:
> At 06:31 PM 7/23/2007, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> ...
>> The paragraph you quote from anarchist writer Rudolf Rocker --
>>
>> "We speak of national interests, national capital, national spheres of 
>> interest, national honour, and national spirit; but we forget that 
>> behind all this there are hidden merely the selfish interests of 
>> power-loving politicians and money-loving business men for whom the 
>> nation is a convenient cover to hide their personal greed and their 
>> schemes for political power from the eyes of the world."
>>
>> -- incidentally makes clear why libertarians and the anarchist left 
>> are opposed to one another.
>>
>> Anarchism is left-wing socialism (as Rocker says elsewhere, "All 
>> anarchists are socialists, but not all socialists are anarchists"), 
>> and socialism is that critique of capitalism that demands an economy 
>> based on production for use rather than production for profit.  
>> Anarchists add that production must be under democratic control.
>>
>> Modern American Libertarianism, although it's verbally consistent with 
>> Enlightenment Liberalism in asserting the essential need for freedom 
>> to human nature ("liber" is Latin for "free"), errs by asserting that 
>> that freedom must also belong to "legal persons" -- corporations.  
>> They don't seem to notice that freedom for concentrations of money is 
>> precisely what takes away freedom from real persons, who have to sell 
>> what makes them human, their work of head and hands, to those 
>> concentrations of money in order to eat regularly.
>>
>> Anarchists, at the other extreme of the political spectrum, want to 
>> establish that freedom for real persons, and that means bringing 
>> concentrations of money under democratic control. Otherwise the "free 
>> economy" merely presents "the selfish interests of power-loving 
>> politicians and money-loving business men for whom the nation is a 
>> convenient cover to hide their personal greed and their schemes for 
>> political power from the eyes of the world."  --CGE
> 
> 
> Serious question, Carl:  Why distinguish corporations?  What about 
> concentrations of money in the hands of individuals or families?  In 
> other words, what about "real persons" exercising their freedom in ways 
> so as to accumulate money?  What do anarchists want to do about that?
>