Explain my new signature line

[markses]

If you can, beee-atches! :evilgrin:

No, seriously. Do it. A friend of mine had to do it for PhD exams.

[liberalhistorian]

1. The sole driving force , and hence concern, of

a business is PROFITS, getting and keeping PROFITS. The bottom line, the ONLY thing that matters to most businesses, is PROFITS. This often means doing things that are against the best interests of its workers, its customers and suppliers, and society as a whole.

Indeed, screwing workers out of fair wages and benefits, squeezing suppliers, and adopting and implementing policies that may cause great harm to society (for example, covering up pollution or pathogens that may cause illness or even death) are very common practices of businesses in their ever-increasing search for more and more PROFITS. The greater good of individuals and society as a whole gets cast aside like yesterday's garbage.

This is why it's so frightening to think that a business would have a soul, since souls are supposed to be concerned with the needs of people and society as a whole.

And this is why the legal concept of corporate personhood, first delineated in 1896 by the Supreme Court, has done so much damage because it affords corporations and businesses rights to which they should never, as entities concerned solely with PROFITS, and NOTHING ELSE, be granted, rights which should only be granted to individuals.

So there! Now, I only have a B.A., but did I pass the test?

[markses]

3. Hmmm - It's a good essay answer, I must admit

However, I'm not sure it's what Deleuze has in mind. It's far more terrifying when businesses STOP being solely about PROFIT and actually start to take an interest in the so-called "greater good of individuals and society as a whole." The business as driven by pure profit motive was easy enough to understand, and easy enough to combat. The business that takes an interest in the individual and social good inflects those values towards business - it takes dominion everywhere, as Wallace Stevens might say. So, the last bit of lived experience outside the circuit of capital is folded in: there is no outside any more. That may be what is terrifying to deleuze, but also perhaps promising. When one is terrified, one is forced to respond in some way. The danger is in responding in the OLD ways, or of responding in ways that were more appropriate to the older form of capitalist organization, when businesses were only about profit. the challenge of the terrifying spectacle is to respond in new ways, not to the business as solely profit-driven, but to the business that cares, the business with a soul. But I'm just riffing here. I don't know how my friend answered the question, but I know she's wicked smaaart.

[Blue-Jay]

2. Explain mine.

I haven't been able to yet. The surrealism of it just makes me laugh.

[markses]

4. I don't know how to respond to yours

All I know is that I remember it, in daydreams....and in nightmares. :evilgrin:

[RandomKoolzip]

5. Is it a reference to Milton Friedman's famous quote

about corporations intrinsically lacking conscience?

[Doc_Technical]

6. Somewhere deep in my addled mind

I dimly recall something about a court decision, in the late
19th Century, that put corporations on the same legal level
as individuals?

[guitar man]

7. It's called "Corporate Personhood"

http://www.wilpf.org/corp/corp-personhood.htm