[liberationtech] Fw: [progressiveexchange] Facebook interfering with activism Pages

[Yosem Companys]

I was referring to the US, not to Europe.  Corporations law appeared in
England first and spread from there to other countries including the United
States.  But more primitive forms of corporations existed in the forms of
guilds, though they could hardly be called corporations for they were based
more on social norms than on profitability, among many other distinctions.
 Corporations like the East India Company were not based on corporations
law; they were based on state charters for specific purposes, such as large
infrastructure projects or exploration, as you state below.  So you could
say they were mixed public-private ventures.

(c.f. Coleman
http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Social-Theory-James-Coleman/dp/0674312260;
Micklethwaith & Woolridge
http://www.amazon.com/Company-History-Revolutionary-Library-Chronicles/dp/0679642498;
Kieser http://www.jstor.org/stable/2393566)

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 6:08 PM, Erik L. Arneson <dybbuk at lnouv.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Sep 2010, Yosem Companys wrote:
> > Exactly, and think about the fact that corporations are a fairly modern
> phenomenon.  We didn't really have corporations in the US until after
> > 1860, and corporations did not dominate the US economy until the early to
> mid 20th century.  What today is done in corporations was once done in
> > the US in voluntary associations, or more rarely, in corporations of the
> era, which were joint ventures created by the government to engage in
> > large-scale projects such as building canals, ports, railroads, etc.
>
> Well, I'm not sure that's true.  We went through a phase of big
> corporations before the current one.  Think of the various East Indies
> companies and the horrible stuff they managed to propogate.  Currently
> we have big evil corporations doing all sorts of evil things to
> individuals and groups, but it's at least more subtle and far less
> bloody than wholesale, unapologetic annexation of entire subcontinents
> to our empire.
>
> The US never had an East Indies company, but all of the European ones
> were seriously chopped down to bits right around the same time US
> corporations started using the 14th Amendment to work their "magic."
>
> --
> Erik Arneson <dybbuk at LNouv.com>
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>
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