United Fruit Company in Guatemala, Shell Oil in Nigeria, BP in Iran... there are countless examples of corporations paying off people to do their dirty work for them
The East India Company, Pinkerton Investigations...
What did you think my point was, I'm interested to see how I could be more clear in the future.
A democracy is structured to be open and conflict is embedded to force decision-making by consensus and compromise.
Corporations are structured to be closed, authoritarian structures.
We're lucky there isn't much history of corporations having state-like scale + monopoly on legitimate violence. Super lucky.
If it has the latter, it is, by definition, the State. Irrespective of scale (and state-like scale is meaningless.)
That's been the case before, it's not a great thing. In the late 18th and early 19th century, a few magnates were arguably more powerful than the US government. They certainly ran the US government. A lot of the protections we have today are a response to that time period
But since we've basically given up on stopping monopolies and mega-mergers the companies and now so big and control so many things they have power without competition to keep it in check.
I'm a pro-government liberal who is extremely wary of the power of global corporations, but I still take some solace in what this says about our system.