[WS:] It is not that. This is a wide spread belief rooted in the 19th century bourgeois mythology - predominantly British - portraying itself as harbingers of new brave industrial era, yada, yada, yada. Sort of the Piltdown man of political economy, if you will. Marx fell to it as well, because historical research at his time was not as well advanced as it is today.
However, there is historical evidence of organizations having all characteristics of capitalist corporation going back to the 12th century in Europe - although they were not formally called corporations. These included monastic orders, especially Cystercians, that owned property in their own right, used rational management of resources, produced for surplus, reinvested surplus, used voluntary labor, separated office from incumbents, and used collective control of the "corporation." In fact, vows of poverty and chastity were a device to institute corporate control of property and separate office from office holder against the backdrop of patrimonial control and inheritance prevailing at that time. Buddhist monastic orders in China operated on similar principles. Other forms included Italian city-states. My source on this is Randall Collins ("Weberian Sociological Theory", Cambridge University Press, 1987) who is a neo-Weberian, but some neo-Marxists (e.g. Brenner) also take a similar position.
There are several implications of this. 1. Capitalist enterprise (i.e. rational management of resources, formal bureaucratic organization, entrepreneurship i.e. investment to create surplus, selling on the market, and use of voluntary labor ) were not pioneered by the 17th century bourgeoisie, let alone British one. These forms appeared well before, as early as 12th century in Europe, but also in the Far East.
2.The individualist ethos of capitalist entrepreneurship is basically bourgeois, chiefly British, ideology attached to this mode of production,
However, this mode of production can operate on a more collectivistic basis, as monastic enterprises attest.
3. Historical development is not linear but rather follows ebbs and flows.
An organizational form may appear at one time, prosper for a while, then ebb when conditions become less favorable, and then reappear again.
4. Capitalism has many organizational form - what we see today is but one.
5. Conditions that led to the emergence of capitalist firm in the first place are not need to sustain its operations after this form establishes itself. For example, monastic asceticism and celibacy were necessary to free resources from patrimonial control and consumption socially prevalent at that time and use them for investment, but after enough surplus was generated and credit became available, asceticism and celibacy lost their economic function and became pointless religious rituals.
I think #4 is of a particular significance today. The Left tends to demonize capitalism and view it as a monolithic form that pre-determines all social relations - the base and superstructure thing. In reality, however, there is a lot diversity there. This is important, because the problem with this organizational form is not its rationality or preference of investment over consumption - but its social effects, especially social stratification. The Left has problems with social stratification - and rightfully so - but it tends to focus on the organizational form that underpins it and demonizes it. It is like being annoyed with potholes in the road, and calling for the destruction of the road that "produced" the potholes. This is an idealistic fallacy in my view, a false belief that the logic of something (i.e. an idea) determines with iron accuracy material outcomes. How is it different form believing that two abstract lines of the neoclassical economic theory crossing each other determine the fate of entire societies?
As I see it, the capitalist enterprise - as defined above - has many possible forms, and its chiefly US and British variety that produces sharp class stratification is but one possible, We do not need to look far to find different forms with different outcomes - e.g. Sweden which is still capitalist but has a much flatter social hierarchy. While we are at that, socialism used a very similar organizational form to that of Western corporation, similar management practices, control and allocation of resources etc. but it flattened social hierarchies even more than Sweden did. This implies that we do not have to throw the baby - rational organizational form - with the bath water - social stratification. We can retain one because it has clear benefits in the form of efficiency of resource production and management while getting rid of the latter which is basically a parasitic ad on. The fact that the enormous productivity of capitalist enterprise allows a substantial growth of parasitic corporate aristocracy and the small army of its lackeys - lawyers, consultants, lobbyists, hack propagandists etc. does not mean that we have to get rid of the entire enterprise to eradicate this vermin. To get rid of lice, you do not need to kill a person. I suspect that incapacitating no more than 5 -7 thousand 'captains of industry" and maybe a few thousand of their most dangerous henchmen - a small number in a country of 300 million - would decapitate the opposition to a political reform aiming to flatten social hierarchy. But that is veering too much from the original topic.
One more thing - I understand that libertarians and anarchists have issues with the rational organization itself - not just the social outcomes that it produces under certain circumstances, For these guys anything short of abolishing any organization that they cannot personally control simply will not do. But hey, libertarianism and anarchism are basically glorified affective disorders - sociopathy and delusions of personal control enshrined in political ideologies - a minor distraction in the normal operation of modern society. As they say in the old country, dogs are barking, the caravan moves on (pun intended).
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."