The Folklore of Capitalism by Reeve Robert Brenner

Author:Reeve Robert Brenner [Brenner, Reeve Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, General, Economic Policy
ISBN: 9781351482707
Google: HSEuDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35865143
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

The Personification of Corporation

IN which it is explained how great organizations can be treated as individuals, and the curious ceremonies which attend this way of thinking.

ONE of the essential and central notions which give our industrial feudalism logical symmetry is the personification of great industrial enterprise. The ideal that a great corporation is endowed with the rights and prerogatives of a free individual is as essential to the acceptance of corporate rule in temporal affairs as was the ideal of the divine right of kings in an earlier day. Its exemplification, as in the case of all vital ideals, has been accomplished by ceremony. Since it has been a central ideal in our industrial government, our judicial institutions have been particularly concerned with its celebration. Courts, under the mantle of the Constitution, have made a living thing out of this fiction. Men have come to believe that their own future liberties and dignity are tied up in the freedom of great industrial organizations from restraint, in much the same way that they thought their salvation in the future was dependent on their reverence and support of great ecclesiastical organizations in the Middle Ages. This ideal explains so many of our social habits, rituals, and institutions that it is necessary to examine it in some detail.

The origin of this way of thinking about organization is the result of a pioneer civilization in which the prevailing ideal was that of the freedom and dignity of the individual engaged in the accumulation of wealth. The independence of the free man from central authority was the slogan for which men fought and died. This free man was a trader, who got ahead by accumulating money. There was something very sacred in the nineteenth-century conception of this activity. In the ‘seventies the most popular text in economics was one originally written by a clergyman, Bishop Francis Way land, and revised in 1878 by A. L. Chapin, President of the Congregational College at Beloit. Joseph Dorfman, in his brilliant book on Thorstein Veblen and His America,1 summarizes this philosophy of the holy character of the trader’s function as follows:

1) “God has made man a creature of desires” and has established the material universe “with qualities and powers . . . for the gratification of those desires” Desire is the stimulus to production and invention. 2) To satisfy desires, to obtain pleasures, man must by “irksome” labour force “nature to yield her hidden resources!’ 3) The exertion of labour establishes a right of PROPERTY in the fruits of labour, and the “idea of exclusive possession is a necessary consequence.” Originally the object belongs to the producer “by an intuitive conception of right, and the act of appropriation is as instinctive as the act of breathing.” The right of property may be conceived as “a law of natural justice,” as Bowen of Harvard put it, because “the producer would not put forth his force and ingenuity if others deprived him of their fruits.” Thus is established 4) “The Right of EXCHANGE.

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