Daily Kos reviews Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc.:
“Quick: what’s the purpose of a corporation? If you think about it for a few minutes, you can come up with a justification about encouraging innovation by protecting investors from failing along with their ideas. The truth is, corporations are such a part of our lives that most of us are as likely to ask the purpose of the sun. And heck, every heartwarming story of a corporate CEO seems to start with the tale of how he or she drove three businesses into the ground before hitting it big, and who would want to mess with a system like that?
Rushkoff shows that corporations don’t owe their origins to a desire for fostering innovation or to open up the investor class. It wasn’t about building an “ownership society” or encouraging enterprise. Corporations were invented to stop all those things. They were invented because the ruling class saw that the middle class was ascendant, that the would-be bourgeoisie were expanding their wealth and threatening to squirm out from under the thumbs of their upper-class lords. The aristocracy created the corporation to perpetuate the control of the aristocracy.
Corporations are business at a distance. Work once (or twice, or many times) removed from the people who do the work. They allow difficult tasks to be performed by surrogates who may never had met the people they serve. They allowed the aristocracy to get their hands dirty without actually getting their hands anywhere near the dirt. It’s business, and life, lived as an abstraction. Why should we be surprised that modern corporations are increasingly reliant on complex and incomprehensible derivatives to fund their business, when they are themselves a kind of unquantifiable derivative of real people and real work?
If a casino can be described as a machine designed to extract money from those who come inside, a corporation is a machine designed to extract money from everyone it touches. Not just consumers, not just investors, but also anyone unfortunate enough to be in the way of resources the corporation hopes to exploit. The money from this machine is then funneled to a few people at the top. It’s pocket feudalism, designed to sustain by law the hierarchy that threatened to be undermined by pesky things like freedom and individual enterprise.”
