The Village Versus The Feudal Private Enterprise—The Corporation.

The foundational fractals of human organization and civilization have entailed—in Africa, and in those indigenous societies that have emerged from it—the following: The Individual, the Family, the Community or Village, the State or State Government.

That aside, during much of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first century thus far, the dominant colonial narrative around the world, and even among the colonized elite in Africa—i.e. among the Mis-Educated Than His Ancestors or the METHA—is the emergent entity, from out of the ashes of the feudal systems of European life, the Corporation.

The Corporation is now a certain artefact of the dominant European, colonial, and missionary life. It has largely become so ubiquitous, and unquestioned, because western scholars and their historians have had a way around making simple things look not so simple in their colonizing verbiage. That is, the colonizer-scholar tends to make everything—even the simple and common sense ideas—read and articulate as though they are more complex, even more advanced than the astronomical Mathematics of the famed Dogon Space Sciences.

The corporation is one such complex idea of these colonizer-scholars and their students. Traditional life in Africa, much like most indigenous societies around the world, hold as a given, the straightforward iteration of human material existence and social interaction as follows: The Human Being, the Family (nuclear and then extended), the Community, the Village, and then the State or the Government of that Village or group of villages.

However, western and colonial society—a result of European military dominance of the past few centuries—have added the contrived iteration of a fourth axis: the Corporation, which is not like the rest, and which is not beholden to the individual, or to the village or to the State. Yet, it is somehow imagined as a form of Private Enterprise. Although, it is also imagined as separate from all others. That is, a corporation can be as little as an individual and it can also become even bigger, and more powerful than the state.

In other words, as an artefact of colonial (missionary European) life and dominance, the corporation takes on a life of its own. It answers to no one because it is a private entity, not a public one. It is not accountable to anyone as its own members can come and go, or more appropriately, the members of the corporation can be hired and fired at will. The corporation is then the modern interpretation of the chattel slave plantation of Antebellum America or the feudal lordship of European tradition, with its members as its slaves or serfs.

In this manner, the corporation feeds on the individual, the family, the community and the state, yet it is not required to engage in the maintenance of its fodder unless of course that too accrues profit. Since the members of the corporation are not permanent, i.e. since its members are not linked to the corporation through blood relations, or through ethnicity, language, religion, or such, the corporation is unaccountable to the well-being of its members. It is only interested in maximizing the exploitation of its members.

Put another way, if that profit maximization takes on the form of keeping the serfs alive, the corporation will keep its serfs alive. If it entails working the slaves to death, the corporation will work them to death. If it entails reproducing its slaves to make more slaves, then that is what the corporation will do. If the profits can be increased by killing the slaves or by sending its men to war, the corporation kills them in whatever way it deems it fit for profit.

The corporation is a soulless entity with the face of private individuals, but with the power of a state. Therefore, it wields tremendous power that does not belong to or serve the village(s) but its own profiteering and exploitative motives.

The corporation has become even more powerful in the colonial era as it has continued to fund and implement the constant erosion, often by (military) force, of the power of the state. The corporation has risen to prominence in this manner by excising the duty of the individual to the village, calling these ideas as Conservatism—or the love of small government.

It has also propounded many theories that destroy the cohesion of the village, that scatter the community, and shutter the internal cohesion of the nuclear family (deriding for instance the husband-wife dichotomy in favor of a partner-partner corporation), in a continued propaganda to “empower” individuals or “women”—calling these new, contrived ideas liberalism, or neoliberalism, or even individual freedoms.

Axiomatically, what the corporation purportedly seeks is not what is does. The corporation, like the feudal lordships of Europe before it, like the slave plantation European merchants of Antebellum America of just yesteryear, who have manufactured the idea, has sought and succeeded in actually eroding the rights of the individual by making the village or the state incapable—even completely and militarily inept—at defending the rights of the individual within the very corporation.

By posing as either conservative (or neoconservative or neocon) or by posing as liberal or neoliberal or as the angels of individual freedoms (rugged individualism), the corporation has usurped and supplanted the power of the state or village to protect the individual, and it has convinced the individual, either directly or by proxy, to accept the belief in the ineptitude of the community or village or state to protect the individual from the very serfdom, colonialism or slavery that the corporation ultimately demands and imposes.

The result is a rugged individual that is unmoored and who is linked to nothing other than himself: He is unaccountable to a wife and children (if any); he does not visit his father’s village let alone partake in the rituals of that village; and he imagines himself as living in a global environment in which his allegiances (or his home) can be nulled and switched from one to the next at whim.

Thus, the corporation has produced an itemized entity—man or woman or neither—that is unaccountable to no part of his environment and who cannot expect what little is left of the traditional village or state to save him from the exploitation of the corporation.

If the colonizer and his exploits must be defeated, his corporation must go down along with him. The advanced civilizational consensus of the African Village is incompatible with the idea of the primitive and feudal Corporation, and the African Family remains diametrically opposed to the narcissism of rugged individualism and the profiteering appeal of the reduced itemization of life itself.