Noam Chomsky on Technocracy: What you do with a totalitarian state is eliminate it. A corporation is a totalitarian system.

 A corporation is a totalitarian system. Right now they're very big ones. They're HUGE command economies. Internally, they're modeled, they have pretty much the structure of a totalitarian state....An unaccountable control system....the only accountable is to investors, which means other banks, big investment firms, and so on.

So it's a take over of power by big totalitarian systems. Their roots are about the same as the other contemporary forms of other totaliarian systems: Bolshevism and Fascism. They all come out of late 19th Century, vaguely Hegelian ideas about the Organic Entities having rights above individuals and so on and so forth. 

There's actually pretty good scholarly work on the origin of 20th - the corporations got their current power mostly in the early part of the century. They're not like sort of engraved in stone - the rights of Immortal Persons - with things like free speech, all that kind of stuff. That's early 20th Century.

And it was not granted by legislation either, it was done mostly by courts and lawyers and so on. It's a form of totalitarianism and you don't ask it to be more soulful any more than you ask Stalin to be more soulful. These are institutional structures, they behave the way they do: you have to eliminate them.

Incidentally these were Truisms in the working class movements not very long ago. By now they sound weird but that's the sign of the Victory of powerful propaganda systems,  corporate propaganda systems. It's been driven out of peoples' heads what used to be everyone's understanding.

Go back a century ago to the AFL - a century ago at the national conventions - working people ought to own the mills and run them. They build them, they work in them, they ought to run them. 

Noam Chomsky - on the hypocrisy of the Soulful Corporation - talk in 1996 Vancouver labor union meeting

When I was talking about centralizing the legislative, executive and judicial functions in a top center I was actually quoting from a pretty mainstream Veblenite political economist back when I was...around the early 1940s, Robert Grady, who wrote a book on Business as a System of Power... he described quite well the way in which totalitarian institutions like corporations were developing in the industrial world with many counterparts to the fascist system.

There's more recent work when I mentioned scholarship, I had something in mind too. A legal historian at Harvard, Morton Horowitz, on the transformation of American Law.  the origins of the modern corporation and corporate law, in exactly these terms. These are descriptive terms.

So I could NOT find "robert Grady" from 1944 - although Robert C. Grady did write similar political science academic work. I did find this 1944 article related to Veblen and totalitarianism.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1944/03/technocracy.htm

Paul Temple

Technocracy:
A Totalitarian Fantasy

Myths and Realities About a “New Order”

(March 1944)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1944/04/technocracy.htm

part TWO