>>You've got to watch these folks that talk about "the corporation"
rather than "capital." But Barber won't talk about capital, since to
do so would be to participate in "the arid debate about capitalism
and socialism."
Doug
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Yup, but I think we're dealing with something that's akin to the village atheist problem of the 15th-18th century. Being anti-corporate is a way of talking that allows others to come at the problem of capital in a way that's non-threatening as a first step. Talking about socialism/economic democracy today is a lot like trying to say god is dead back then. Also capital is very polysemous; we have to unbundle it's forms and getting people to look at the corp. as the main institutional skeleton of the multiple dimensions of capital puts people on a pathway out of whatever model[s] of capital they currently have. The main form of capital as social relation that people experience in their everyday lives is the corp. and the employer/employee relation; that is STILL the major loci of oppression, stress and inequality in their lives.
BB, to his credit, does say that we need to build a "nation" of democrats before we can achieve socialism.
>>Corporation speaks to not just any capital, but to
capital concentrated in the hands of huge business
enterprises. The organizational dimension is not
trivial.
mbs
********
Yup. capitalism is too abstract, still, for many people. Using corps. as windows onto the systemic problem of capital[ism!]must be a user friendly, self-enabling tutorial process. Frankly it's worked like a charm out here on the left coast. To be technical, it's a sorites process of diseducation
>>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.
Doug
*************
That's one way of reading the texts in which capital is antagonist. But don't you prefer texts that seduce you into the conclusion via your own participation in outrage rather than bludgeoning you like the Trots. Remember, not too many people are reading, let alone writing, the way Ol' Whiskers did. Again, trying to talk about class is like trying to talk about atheism [now/back then]. How do we make conversation about capital/class ENTICING............
>>I think it's the other way around. Capital as a social class relation
is all too real. The corporation is an attempt to mask those class
relations by, among other things, separating owners of capital from
workers by means of large layers of managers and other flotsam.
RO
*******
People experience this concretely as asymmetries of accountability. When conversations drift in that direction tossing in class discourse in a non-threatening way can catalyze gestalts and vocabulary enrichment. I've seen it happen many, many times.
>>Maximum s/h value = maximum profit growth over the short to medium
term. What other motivations are there?
Doug
seems a little imprecise. and what about animal spirits?
mbs
********
Hello!; multiple equilibria---undecidability---'god what does management think their trying to accomplish'. All those MBA's out there wouldn't know if they were profit maximizing or what...computational complexity and all that. See Gordon's "Fat and Mean" for a hint. Big firms are a combination of evil empire and a confederacy of dunces, I kid u not; it's why military men fit in so well there [didn't Maxine Berg write about that connection somewhere?].
Can we get rid of all the animism and soul talk too. Practicing
de-reification is hard work but CB's on to something with his very wise crax
:-)
Ian