corporate magic and human gifts

from _Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic_  (c) 1982 ,by Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe, pp. 494-496    

How Odd the Corporation.  Consider some of the strange attributes of the dominant corporate non-persons of our era, “magical” attributes built into them by legal fictions.  For one thing, these “legal persons” are almost ectoplasmic in their increasing independence:  they are independent of people.  (First stockholders wither away with “managerial revolution” … then managers lose power as it “passes down into technostructure,” … finally, with automation, many workers are not needed either.)  Corporations are independent also of place, of nationality, of stated purposes … or anyone's goals. … In the end, they even become free of the profit motive; they cause governments to prop them up … .  They have mysterious powers that ordinary individuals do not possess:  Their taxes are lower; they do not liquidate their property at death but are immortal; they have limited liability while individuals do not.  They started as voluntary associations but become governments that evert individuals from membership.  Instead of being regulated by governmental authorities, they often capture these and turn them into additional independent, policy-free, autonomous, impersonal entities. … Even without a lawyer, any citizen of the United States, simply by using forms contained in books … can create dozens of nonpersons who are recognized at law, have to file tax returns, and can outlive him, can live forever, in fact.  …  Increasingly they influence our basic political thought … .  In our daily lives, we increasingly confront or work for, or are entangled by, these legal non-persons, and they feed our growing helplessness. ….   The non-persons create their own social force fields, thereby defeating the “general will” or “reason” or the rational state, just as they baffle the individuals who at one time projected this state.  They refract law like power prisms; they bend general rules to particular cases.  Increasingly they are ruled by compacts, agreements with other powers rather than general laws … .  They fight law, then settle out of court on an ad hoc basis that reflects their power, thus refracting law.   Originally corporations were powerful engines that individuals or groups of people used to get rich; they still provide a living but personal control wanes … .  For long periods, some people are on top of these organizations, they ride the lion, they have power; but even they are retired or fired or early retired or forced out in the end.  Meanwhile, they try to amass enough money to be “independent.”  Wealth increasingly turns back into pure money (which is mana) as ownership evaporates, what Barzelon calls “the paper economy.”  Berle has shown that the percent of personal wealth held in cash, securities or other paper has grown enormously; real property passes into the hands of non-persons.  Thus property, power, status translate back into mere money, which derives from mana, from magic, and is simply some fractional value notation for a quality-space position in a consensus that is no longer there.  …  Community and nomos have vanished so thoroughly that egos strive increasingly just to amass enough coined and minted magical power to escape from pseudo-community into private worlds.  The desire for capital to escape arises at a time when engineered inflation and government tax policies make such escape increasingly difficult … .  Economic status and economic wealth are pursued as economic power slips out of the hands of even the managerial class.   *  *  * 



  Gifting  

A gift of grace
A gift beyond price
Outside of grumbling space,
hold me deeply in your heart, your mind
granting lucid respect and affection
that I might live.
That I might gift …  


April 7, 2007 libramoon