The folk singer Sarah Ogan Gunning did a song in the 30s called "I Hate the Capitalist System." When it was collected around then, the musicologist said, why don't you sing it, "I Hate the Company Bosses." Gunning said, well, I hate them too, and sang it that way. Twenty years later Barbara Dane came around to record the song again. This time Gunning insisted on doing it the original way. "I had twenty years to think on it," she said, "And I was right the first time around." Dane herself did a record with the song as the title song. --jks
>
>>'Corporations' are about sociology and the practical
>>economics of industrial organization. Capital is
>>more abstract. Not exactly opposing concepts.
>
>Agreed; corporations are the institutions through which the social
>relation that is capital operates. But what I object to about the
>anticorporate rhetoric is that it effaces that social relation - it
>doesn't see the class relations behind the institutional/legal form.
>It reifies the corp.
>
>>I might also note -- in fact I definitely will --
>>that the empirical study of corporations reveals
>>controlling motives other than profit maximization,
>>a shortcoming in Marx that dovetails with his
>>focus on "capital."
>
>That was true from Berle and Means through the elder Galbraith. Now,
>maximization of shareholder value is the only thing that matters. The
>soulful corporation of the 1950s and 1960s is dead.
>
>Doug
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