Re: <nettime> draft article on WTO

[Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com>]

david teh <davtehaa@arts.usyd.edu.au> writes:

> i am also staunchly NOT anti-corporations. it was not a 
> glance at the hefty Corporations Law that made me so, 
> either, but a gradual awakening to the sheer density of 
> corporate entanglement by all individuals in a society 
> like ours.  these 'bodies' mediate all of our 
> activities so thoroughly - they are providing our 
> parents with anaesthetics, prams, and disposable 
> nappies; they are playing an integral part in actually 
> feeding us every day; they are providing the 
> infrastructure necessary to bury us.  not to mention 
> that most of us work for or with them.

The people who are feeding us, providing us with goods, and services are
the laborers working for the corporation.  It is very likely that these
laborers would be able to continue their production if the corporation was
removed and other ways of organizing the already socialized production
were put in place.  There is no need for the process/organization by which
this production is managed and coordinated to be given legal recognition
as a person, and to appropriate the goods produced from those who made
them.

The confusion between the corporation, and the socialized production
process which it manages and appropriates is part of the rhetoric of
capitalism.  We are told that the things we see around us were built by
capital, when in fact they are built by labor.  It was not dollars that
drove all the rivets and pulled cable on the Golden Gate, it was men.  
You can build a Golden Gate without capital, you can't build it without
labor.

An example of a socialized production process which produces a very
complicated technological object which most people assume can only be
produced when guided by the rational hand of a corporation, is the Debian
GNU/Linux project.  Considered by many to be the best GNU/Linux
distribution, if not the best Operating System, it's done entirely with
volunteer labor.  The results of this labor are available to everyone.  
It is organized with a constitution (a very simple one at that), a voting
system, informal comitees, and lots of discussion.

Because we are convinced that capital is the only motive force that drives
production, and that without it our world will crumble, we let ourselves
be led around by reformist notion that do little, if anything.  We must
recognize that it is our labor, both manual and intellectual, that
produces the things we need, and that this labor does not need to have
it's process managed by capitalists and the results taken as private party
by them.

An anti-corporatism that does not attempt to re-organize the socialized
production which corporations presently manage and parasite, is going
nowhere.  It is not the fetishistic humanizing of the corporate body that
is the root of the problem, that is a symptom of the bourgeois attachment
to "rights", like the right to ownership, which must have a legally
recognized body to attach too.  They take as their own what the workers
produce, and they direct the production process not with the well-being of
their workers, or their customers, but with the rate of profit, as their
final judge.



-- 
Craig Brozefsky               <craig@red-bean.com>
it's alright 'cos the historical pattern has shown / how the
economical cycle tends to revolve / in a round of decades
three stages stand out in a loop / a slump and war then peel
back to square one and back for more -- Stereolab "Ping Pong"


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