Corporations are a structure of workers. Both the structure and the workers are essential. Workers without structure doesn't produce much value leading to a poor society. Politically created structure leads to bad outcomes so also leads to a poor society. Capitalist created structure creates a lot of value and leads to rich societies. There might be alternatives, but so far capitalism is the only known way to create such structures at scale.
I don't understand the argument in this response: unions exist within capitalist systems, and are an integral part of our capitalist system. Our concept of a "union" does not apply to non-capitalist systems. Extolling the virtues of capitalism is, at the absolute best, completely orthogonal to the legitimacy and value of unionization.
Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a top-down manner by the state. They're a form of collective organization and bargaining, the sort that is singularly responsible for the quality of life and workplace protections that we all take for granted.
> Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a top-down manner by the state.
Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions? Why not just organize as workers and call yourself a union? Can even create a workers party, like they have in basically every other single other developed country, and then that workers party can stand up for your rights. But that workers party isn't a union. Basically every single developed country except USA has labor parties. Democrats aren't a labor party, they are a party of mostly lawyers.
> Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions?
I'm not. I'm not a communist, and I don't think I asserted that I wanted a state-enforced union anywhere. Stronger protections for collective organization and bargaining would suffice in my book.
Edit: And, for what it's worth, you can't just create a union in the US. You need to be recognized by the NLRB for any collective action to be considered legitimate and protected under the law.
It is also ownership of said structure. If you have a thousand workers. One person can own the output of those workers. Those workers can produce 10 billion dollars in revenue and the owner gets owns all the profit and the workers pocket 1 billion in aggregate.
It's fair trade in the beginning because of high risk during the founding of the company but the tradeoff becomes less fair as the risk lowers and the company becomes more mature.
Corporations are a pattern of relations (social and economic) that are socially reproduced and codified by the legal system. The current body of law is a strange attractor for among other things, the reproduction of corporations as they exist today[1]. The way capitalism is coded is at the expense of experimenting with other systems[2]. Instead of experimenting with alternative systems of economic organization, we see an ongoing attempt to level all forms of alternative economic organization. In effect, the notion of "capitalism is the only known way" becomes a prescriptive rather than descriptive - a normative statement rather than a observational one.
If we were truly looking for more advanced forms of organization beyond the status quo, I would expect that economic imperialism would not exist. Instead, even more aspects of basic society are capitalized and in recent decades also codified using the inflexible mechanisms of computer code. The last remaining hold outs do so at their own expense[3]. So no, I don't think we're exploring the possibility space of superior economic technology, we're stagnating.
3. Market, political, cultural, economic forces all contribute to the complete and total capture of universal capitalism. Those who wish not to comply face political, social, and economic sanctions from the individual to national levels.
