> close isn't quite enough, kendall. it's like being a little bit
> pregnant. ;-)
Eh, it seemed close enough to cast some doubt on Chris Doss's blanket denial.
A little googling turned up this further elaboration of his point:
Q: You view corporations as being incompatible with democracy, and
you say that if we apply the concepts that are used in political
analysis, corporations are fascist. That's a highly charged term.
What do you mean?
A: I mean fascism pretty much in the traditional sense. So when a
rather mainstream person like Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of
[British economist John Maynard] Keynes, describes the early postwar
systems as modeled on fascism, he simply means a system in which the
state integrates labor and capital under the control of the
corporate structure.
That's what a fascist system traditionally was. It can vary in the
way it works, but the ideal state that it aims at is absolutist --
top-down control with the public essentially following orders.
Fascism is a term from the political domain, so it doesn't apply
strictly to corporations, but if you look at them, power goes
strictly top-down, from the board of directors to managers to lower
managers and ultimately to the people on the shop floor, typists,
etc. There's no flow of power or planning from the bottom up.
Ultimate power resides in the hands of investors, owners, banks,
etc.
People can disrupt, make suggestions, but the same is true of a
slave society. People who aren't owners and investors have nothing
much to say about it. They can choose to rent their labor to the
corporation, or to purchase the commodities or services that it
produces, or to find a place in the chain of command, but that's it.
That's the totality of their control over the corporation.
That's something of an exaggeration, because corporations are
subject to some legal requirements and there is some limited degree
of public control. There are taxes and so on. But corporations are
more totalitarian than most institutions we call totalitarian in the
political arena.
(From http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sld/sld-1-01.html)
And this:
Corporation are tyrannical organizations. They are totalitarian
institutions. In fact, if you look at them...that what is a
corporation...it is an unaccountable private tyranny in which power
comes from above, from the owners and the managers, orders are
transferred down below and inserted inside the system. You take your
orders below and above and you transmit them below. At the very
bottom people have the right to rent themselves to this tyrannical
system. It is essentially unaccountable to the public except by weak
regular career apparatus. In fact, it is a totalitarian institution.
And if you look at their intellectual roots, it happens that they
come out of the same neo-Hegelian conceptions of the rights of
organic entities that led to bolshevism and fascism. We have three
forms of twentieth century totalitarianism: bolshevism, fascism and
corporation. Two of them, fortunately, were dissolved, disappeared
mostly. The third remains. It shouldn't. Power should be in the
hand of populations.
(From http://www.zmag.org/hoodbhoychom.htm)
> i expect chomsky, like many of us on this list, is looking for a way to
> characterize all the "fascist like" behavior and thinking, the social
> darwinism, etc., that exemplifies contemporary US society.
>
> i'm waiting for carrol to come up with the bon mot.
Don't hold your breath.
Best,
Kendall