anarkhos

Introduction

Let us consider a fact of modern life.  The majority of workers not employed by government work for corporations.  The concept of the corporation has so completely embedded itself within our culture that few of us can conceive of work without the corporation.  I would like to propose, however, that the corporation is not only unnecessary, but hinders productivity, lowers our standard of living, makes us dependent upon serial servitude, and diminishes our freedom.

The Rise of the Corporation

Like most artificial constructs, the corporation arose as an answer to the needs and constraints of its time.  At the dawn of the industrial age, workers were drawn from their agricultural pursuits into the cities where sufficient capital could be amassed and organized into productive entities.  From the perspective of the productive machinery, these workers were little more than subsystems of the larger productive construct.  They were necessary because the level of technology did not permit artificial constructs to provide their services.  The productive entity, a manifestation of the capital of a small set of owners, gave rise to the corporation.  The corporation created a continuous existence for the productive entity.  Additionally, it provided a legal framework for the construction of a social entity, entitled to rights and subject to responsibilities under the law.

This makes sense when one considers the nature of industrial age production.  The productive entity was composed, primarily, of large mechanistic constructs, geographically bound, and owned by a set of individuals separate from the productive process itself.  Workers were interchangeable.  For most industrial tasks, the worker brought little of value to the workplace that could not be imparted upon any worker with on-the-job training.

This construct, the corporation, was centered around the means of production and the individuals who were able to amass the capital to purchase or create the means of production.  From the perspective of production, workers were little more than replaceable parts.  The philosophy of management that emerged within this corporate construct reflected this disposable interpretation of the early industrial worker.  With no direct stake in the corporation and no plausible argument for their intrinsic value qua unique productive entity, the worker was viewed as a necessary evil within the productive process, held in suspicion, and denied the basic respect owned to any rational entity.  Hierarchical management structures were employed.  Workers were paid as little as they would accept and the profits they helped create were given to the stock holders.

The Late Industrial Age

The industrial age changed the conditions of its own development.  As more individuals moved from the agricultural economy to the industrial economy and the level of technology increased, the roles of workers became more specialized.  Additionally, adapting to the new economy, former peasants become industrial workers.  With this change in occupation came a change in identity.  A working class consciousness arose and with it came worker organization.  Workers realized that they could unify into unions, apply their combined efforts towards collective negotiation for better wages and more humane treatment, and responded with strikes and slowdowns when employers refused to negotiate.

Simultaneously, worker consciousness gave rise to new political philosophies.  In some countries, workers responded with revolutions.  In others, uprising were met with state supported violence.  Those countries whose ruling classes had foresight, responded by encoding minimal workers' rights into law.  Corporations responded by voluntarily modifying their policies to undermine calls for unionization.  The product of these forces was the emergence of lasting relationships between workers and corporations.  Many individuals would remain employees of the same corporation for their entire working life.  The rate of pay and the level of benefits of employees improved.

The Post Industrial Age

The industrial age created an environment from which emerged several derivative economies.  With the rise in wages a service economy emerged.  Workers, with greater access to capital, turned their surplus earnings towards home ownership, entertainment, and services.  The means of production remained beyond the reach of most workers.  However, as the ownership of corporations became a commodity workers were able to purchase small portions of ownership in a large assortment of corporations.  As this became a major foundation of investment towards retirement, corporate ownership became a preferred method or speculation.  No longer tied to the long term prospects of a corporation's productive capacity, a corporation's value became nothing more than a gambling mechanism.  Investors, concerned about the reactions of other investors to news about the economy and short term earning reports of corporations, traded their stocks according to psychological factors.  In an effort to preserve investor confidence, corporate executives began to focus more and more on the bottom line of the next earnings report.  Often the most expedient method to ensure proper short-term performance was to fire workers, thereby reducing overhead.  The era of lifetime employment had come to an end.

The emergence of the trading and service economies had a profound effect on the developed nations.  High paid workers became less desirable.  Factories were moved to undeveloped nations.  The wealthy made their money by trading corporate stock and other forms of speculation.  The poor moved into the service industry.  The vast middle would have been lost if not for the rise of yet another economic construct: the knowledge economy.

The Knowledge Economy

Various factors created the conditions from which the knowledge economy emerged.  Technology has the nature that it builds upon itself at an accelerating rate.  Further stimulating this geometric rise was the Cold War and its associated arms race.  The Western and Easter Blocs invested ever increasing portions of their GDP into the development of advanced weaponry and symbolic endeavors such as the space race.  Proxy wars, such as the war in Vietnam, drove more and more of the young into universities where they could escape conscription.  The combination of accelerated investment in technology and the increase in university students pushed technological advancement to the edge of chaos.  Huge leaps were made in computer technology.  With these advances emerged an economy based more and more on human intellectual capital and less and less on steel and coal.  What machinery remained in the productive process became progressively cheaper until the average knowledge worker could afford to purchase machines that were often superior to those of their workplace.  As the worker has become the means of production itself, the relationship between the corporation and the worker has become unstable.

The Post Corporate Economy

So, here we stand, at the beginning of a new millennium, computers in our homes, knowledge in our minds, and yet we still go to the corporate office and toil for the benefit of our corporate owners.  We have within our reach the means to find others with whom we can combine our productive capacity without the need for corporations.  We can form partnerships oriented towards specific tasks and products, distribute the profits amongst ourselves, and keep the royalties.

The corporation reduces our productivity by imposing hierarchical and bureaucratic constructs upon intellectual activities which are dynamic and non-hierarchical in nature.  The value we create through our intellectual toil is squandered on the mechanisms of corporate organization.  As intellectual workers with access to computers and the Internet we do not need to support the overhead of office space, human resources departments, managers, secretaries, investors, and all of the other trappings of corporate life.  Free of these systemic burdens we can keep the profits of our labor and improve our surplus earnings.  With access to a greater surplus we can apply these earnings to the construction of a better society.

Knowledge workers should think seriously about their potential as free agents.  By claiming our productive capacity as our own and retaining ownership of our creations we can free ourselves of the fluctuations imposed upon employment by the trading economy.  We can become a model for of liberation for other workers.  It is time for the corporation to fade into history.  Let us assert our freedom.

The Virtual Collective

We call for the emergence of the virtual collective as the new basis for production.  We should take advantage of mechanisms for self organization and registration of our talents and interests.  Through electronic discussion groups we should form networks of individuals who seek to combine their talents in productive pursuit.  Upon identifying tasks or new products, we should form virtual collectives with individuals in possession of complementary talents and work collectively in our own interest.  Through the application of this formula, we will accrue an ever increasing ownership of intellectual property.  This ownership and the profit derived from it will free us from the need to work only to survive.  With this increased freedom we will be empowered to pursue our fields of interest unrestrained by the ever nagging need for the next paycheck and dependency upon the corporation.  More importantly, with access to greater capital we can express our ethical motivations through the application of our capital towards social transformation.