4 ms·

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 (2011)

82 points by simonpure 3y ago

pg_1234 3y ago
https://archive.ph/SJzYd https://archive.ph/SJzYd
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bedobi 3y ago
nothing to see here folks, just a polemical amateurish regurgitation of pop doom econ tropes
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  From 2011, no less. Like, the past 12 years alone refute the prediction of corporate decline.
  - QuantumG 3y ago
    The comedy here is that he says this decline started in the 1990s. Since then corporations haven't really done anything have they? There hasn't been fundamental changes to every part of our lives driven by corporate decision making, has there?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  I'm not much of a r/latestagecapitalism fan myself, but there is something to important to explore in the history and concept of the corporation, and I'm disappointed every time someone brings it up and fails to make any of the important points. Somehow, at some point in the past that I haven't been able to precisely identify, everyone decided that corporations were legitimate "things", and started acting as if they should be. And I'm not sure why. We see practically nothing either in common law or in various national constitutions that authorize governments to create the damned things. It's quite bizarre, and more than a little dangerous. Stross likens them to gigantic, slow-as-dirt artificial intelligences designed explicitly with psychopathic motives. And most of the time it feels wrong to try to dispute that.
  - somat 3y ago
    Corporations are governments. At some point you say "we want this operation to be run via rules" so you make some rules and form a government that runs under those rules. You usually will need a license to form a sub government from whatever larger government you will be operating under. Related, think how a town incorporates in order to form their own local government.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      This analogy breaks down rather quickly. The government is a government because it has a monopoly on violence to enforce its rules. Even your tiny little village can constitute a police force that can arrest, subjugate, and in the face of extreme resistance, kill. No corporation is authorized to do that in any circumstances at all. While I certainly invite criticism of these entities, bad criticism benefits them.
      - namaria 3y ago
        >The government is a government because it has a monopoly on violence to enforce its rules. That's the definition of State. Governments are just administrative bodies.
        NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        These words of yours are synonyms. If there were a state without any government (some lawless anarchy), the idea that the "state" could still have a monopoly on violence is laughably asinine. You must be from some European country where "government" means something like "Congressional session" or whatever. I have little interest in wading through all that semantic nonsense.
        namaria 3y ago
        The separation is useful. Corporations are governed. There's no debate to be won, we're talking about understanding society better. Put your guard down, man...
- potsandpans 3y ago
  your appeal for people to not read it made me curious enough to read it. why are you so scared?
smodo 3y ago
A little too much hand waving here for my taste. The ambitions set out by the author are huge and underpinning the entire thing is an individuals reading of some (Western) history books. Then there are a lot of personal inventions like ‘reach’ to describe corporate power. Surely there are well established academic concepts for this.
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  There are a lot of posts like this here on HN: history by lumpers. They try to discern large-scale patterns or one or two keys that unlock a coherent, consistent interpretation of history. I am a splitter. It turns out that every interpretation produced by lumpers depends on oversimplifying or flattening the past in ways that are demonstrably wrong. Lumpers say that that doesn’t invalidate their larger point. The details are just the decorative garnish, not the fundamental point. It is self-evident, to me, that that is wrong. But I’m a splitter, not a lumper. I didn’t choose to be a splitter after carefully considering the alternative(s: it’s a continuum, of course, more than a binary state). Splitting comes natural to me. The details really do matter. You can’t inductively build useful models of human being on top of incorrect or inaccurate observations of humans being in the world. How much lumping, or splitting, one can tolerate is one of those mysterious facts about yourself that are black boxed even to your inspection. De gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Have you read Peter Turchin? Maybe ultimate lumper, as he tries to find formulaic equations for rise and fall of societies? I would make one counter point to Lumpers/Splitters. If you have all the details, you can loose the ability to use that data. It is a problem in all fields, millions of data points can obfuscate what is happening, a nice trend line is over-simplified, but lets you make some judgments. Have you seen all of the books on WW2 or Civil War, do you need to read them all and know all details before you can make any judgments, or form any opinions. Or can you read an 'overview' that leaves out the details but gives the broad strokes. Guess I've seen too many people go down the 'details' rabbit whole, and in the end not produce anything but more details that aren't adding. But, have to caveat. I think it is very valuable that people are out there doing detailed research, so there are details available. Just think there is also a lot of value in finding patterns. And I'd disagree that history is too complex to find patterns. Same old problem. The more simplified the model, the more it could be inaccurate, but the more detailed the model, then it is overfit and not providing any information. Do you need to know what was going through the minds of every civil war solder at Gettysburg, every movement, to know who won?
fuzzfactor 3y ago
It should be easy to keep in mind that the American colonies were founded by multinational corporations for the benefit of multinational corporations.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  The term “multinational corporation” is a modern concept. It is not really applicable to the period in which the English Virginia Company or the Dutch West India Company existed, as the global economic and political system was fundamentally different. They certainly didn’t have much to do with the political system of the United States. English Republicanism and Whig liberalism is where the roots of American democracy lay.
  - fuzzfactor 3y ago
    I wasn't mentioning democracy, politics, or liberalism. At all. That has nothing to do with corporations. If some corporations of the time were not multinational, they wouldn't have acted outside their own homeland. Are you saying there were no investors or shareholders involved in colonizing the Amrericas? Quite simply today's multinationals are direct descendants of the ones of old. I naturally assume it can be easily seen that today's global economic and political system is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago. What alternative motivation would be an accurate explanation for the organizations founding the overseas colonies? And who else would have been capable at the time?
syntheweave 3y ago
This article has lodged in the back of my mind for years. Not the details of it, but the idea of distinguishing when and where corporate power exists into categories, and likewise, the idea of the corporate form being in decline, in a non-prescriptive way(which is what this comments section seems to be straw-manning for). The conclusion it reaches is...also not exactly in detail what's happened lately, but also directionally correct. Big Tech's growth hit a cap. There is growing interest in better information sources, and a sense of the Internet reclaiming its roots. There are plenty of "indie creators" of various stripes, many just hanging on and struggling against Big Tech platforms, but also many finding a better space than within industry. The last few years had interruptions to Taylorist time, which sent people on radically different trajectories. I still think there's something in it, even if the grand statement being made is the kind of thing that needs its own book.
friesfreeze 3y ago
I think that the most important aspect of corporations is limited liability and that is barely mentioned in the article - but maybe that’s a narrow way of thinking about it.
- zzbn00 3y ago
  There is a nice and very long comment in the post regarding limited liability corporations. They existed for a before limited liability, especially through common law structures. Interestingly they were largely banned in UK after the bubble referred to in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Act
magwa101 3y ago
[dead]

82 points by simonpure 3y ago

pg_1234 3y ago

https://archive.ph/SJzYd https://archive.ph/SJzYd

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bedobi 3y ago

nothing to see here folks, just a polemical amateurish regurgitation of pop doom econ tropes

dmvdoug 3y ago
From 2011, no less. Like, the past 12 years alone refute the prediction of corporate decline.
- QuantumG 3y ago
  The comedy here is that he says this decline started in the 1990s. Since then corporations haven't really done anything have they? There hasn't been fundamental changes to every part of our lives driven by corporate decision making, has there?
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
I'm not much of a r/latestagecapitalism fan myself, but there is something to important to explore in the history and concept of the corporation, and I'm disappointed every time someone brings it up and fails to make any of the important points. Somehow, at some point in the past that I haven't been able to precisely identify, everyone decided that corporations were legitimate "things", and started acting as if they should be. And I'm not sure why. We see practically nothing either in common law or in various national constitutions that authorize governments to create the damned things. It's quite bizarre, and more than a little dangerous. Stross likens them to gigantic, slow-as-dirt artificial intelligences designed explicitly with psychopathic motives. And most of the time it feels wrong to try to dispute that.
- somat 3y ago
  Corporations are governments. At some point you say "we want this operation to be run via rules" so you make some rules and form a government that runs under those rules. You usually will need a license to form a sub government from whatever larger government you will be operating under. Related, think how a town incorporates in order to form their own local government.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    This analogy breaks down rather quickly. The government is a government because it has a monopoly on violence to enforce its rules. Even your tiny little village can constitute a police force that can arrest, subjugate, and in the face of extreme resistance, kill. No corporation is authorized to do that in any circumstances at all. While I certainly invite criticism of these entities, bad criticism benefits them.
    - namaria 3y ago
      >The government is a government because it has a monopoly on violence to enforce its rules. That's the definition of State. Governments are just administrative bodies.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        These words of yours are synonyms. If there were a state without any government (some lawless anarchy), the idea that the "state" could still have a monopoly on violence is laughably asinine. You must be from some European country where "government" means something like "Congressional session" or whatever. I have little interest in wading through all that semantic nonsense.
        namaria 3y ago
        The separation is useful. Corporations are governed. There's no debate to be won, we're talking about understanding society better. Put your guard down, man...
potsandpans 3y ago
your appeal for people to not read it made me curious enough to read it. why are you so scared?

smodo 3y ago

A little too much hand waving here for my taste. The ambitions set out by the author are huge and underpinning the entire thing is an individuals reading of some (Western) history books. Then there are a lot of personal inventions like ‘reach’ to describe corporate power. Surely there are well established academic concepts for this.

dmvdoug 3y ago
There are a lot of posts like this here on HN: history by lumpers. They try to discern large-scale patterns or one or two keys that unlock a coherent, consistent interpretation of history. I am a splitter. It turns out that every interpretation produced by lumpers depends on oversimplifying or flattening the past in ways that are demonstrably wrong. Lumpers say that that doesn’t invalidate their larger point. The details are just the decorative garnish, not the fundamental point. It is self-evident, to me, that that is wrong. But I’m a splitter, not a lumper. I didn’t choose to be a splitter after carefully considering the alternative(s: it’s a continuum, of course, more than a binary state). Splitting comes natural to me. The details really do matter. You can’t inductively build useful models of human being on top of incorrect or inaccurate observations of humans being in the world. How much lumping, or splitting, one can tolerate is one of those mysterious facts about yourself that are black boxed even to your inspection. De gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Have you read Peter Turchin? Maybe ultimate lumper, as he tries to find formulaic equations for rise and fall of societies? I would make one counter point to Lumpers/Splitters. If you have all the details, you can loose the ability to use that data. It is a problem in all fields, millions of data points can obfuscate what is happening, a nice trend line is over-simplified, but lets you make some judgments. Have you seen all of the books on WW2 or Civil War, do you need to read them all and know all details before you can make any judgments, or form any opinions. Or can you read an 'overview' that leaves out the details but gives the broad strokes. Guess I've seen too many people go down the 'details' rabbit whole, and in the end not produce anything but more details that aren't adding. But, have to caveat. I think it is very valuable that people are out there doing detailed research, so there are details available. Just think there is also a lot of value in finding patterns. And I'd disagree that history is too complex to find patterns. Same old problem. The more simplified the model, the more it could be inaccurate, but the more detailed the model, then it is overfit and not providing any information. Do you need to know what was going through the minds of every civil war solder at Gettysburg, every movement, to know who won?

fuzzfactor 3y ago

It should be easy to keep in mind that the American colonies were founded by multinational corporations for the benefit of multinational corporations.

williamcotton 3y ago
The term “multinational corporation” is a modern concept. It is not really applicable to the period in which the English Virginia Company or the Dutch West India Company existed, as the global economic and political system was fundamentally different. They certainly didn’t have much to do with the political system of the United States. English Republicanism and Whig liberalism is where the roots of American democracy lay.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  I wasn't mentioning democracy, politics, or liberalism. At all. That has nothing to do with corporations. If some corporations of the time were not multinational, they wouldn't have acted outside their own homeland. Are you saying there were no investors or shareholders involved in colonizing the Amrericas? Quite simply today's multinationals are direct descendants of the ones of old. I naturally assume it can be easily seen that today's global economic and political system is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago. What alternative motivation would be an accurate explanation for the organizations founding the overseas colonies? And who else would have been capable at the time?

syntheweave 3y ago

This article has lodged in the back of my mind for years. Not the details of it, but the idea of distinguishing when and where corporate power exists into categories, and likewise, the idea of the corporate form being in decline, in a non-prescriptive way(which is what this comments section seems to be straw-manning for). The conclusion it reaches is...also not exactly in detail what's happened lately, but also directionally correct. Big Tech's growth hit a cap. There is growing interest in better information sources, and a sense of the Internet reclaiming its roots. There are plenty of "indie creators" of various stripes, many just hanging on and struggling against Big Tech platforms, but also many finding a better space than within industry. The last few years had interruptions to Taylorist time, which sent people on radically different trajectories. I still think there's something in it, even if the grand statement being made is the kind of thing that needs its own book.

friesfreeze 3y ago

I think that the most important aspect of corporations is limited liability and that is barely mentioned in the article - but maybe that’s a narrow way of thinking about it.

zzbn00 3y ago
There is a nice and very long comment in the post regarding limited liability corporations. They existed for a before limited liability, especially through common law structures. Interestingly they were largely banned in UK after the bubble referred to in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Act

magwa101 3y ago

[dead]