Noam Chomsky: Classical Liberals Condemned Corporations as a Return to Feudalism

Noam Chomsky on Regulating Corporations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wYPgSDjYrI

Transcript:

In fact, in my opinion, corporations are themselves illegitimate. I take a very conservative position on this. As you may know, the modern corporation was created about a century ago by state intervention, mostly judicial intervention. There wasn't any legislation about it. But when corporate law, in the current sense, was established in the early 20th century by the courts, there were people who bitterly opposed it, namely conservatives. There used to be conservatives in those days; now the term's around, but not the concept.

Conservatives bitterly condemned that as a return to feudalism, which in a way it was, and a form of Communism. That was the reaction to the radical revision of corporate law in the United States and elsewhere to grant corporations—collectivist legal entities—the rights of people of flesh and blood. It was a major attack against classical liberal principles, and conservatives, meaning classical liberals, were bitterly offended by that. And I think they had a good point.

Corporations are private tyrannies. A corporation, if you look at its structure, is about as close to the totalitarian model as anything human beings have created. The control is completely from top to bottom. You can be inserted in the middle somewhere, like a junior manager, take orders from the top, and hand them down below. At the very bottom, people are allowed to rent themselves to it; it's called getting a job.

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