Did you even read the Wikipedia link you cited? The one which says this:
Conditions in the Lowell mills were severe by modern American standards. Employees worked from five am until seven pm, for an average 73 hours per week. Each room usually had 80 women working at machines, with two male overseers managing the operation. The noise of the machines was described by one worker as "something frightful and infernal", and although the rooms were hot, windows were often kept closed during the summer so that conditions for thread work remained optimal. The air, meanwhile, was filled with particles of thread and cloth.
About 25 women lived in each boardinghouse, with up to six sharing a bedroom. One worker described her quarters as "a small, comfortless, half-ventilated apartment containing some half a dozen occupants"...
Women were also given opportunities to attend concerts and lectures, in addition to experiencing city life. Still, at least one observer reported that most women worked so that a male relative could obtain an education. "I have known more than one to give every cent of her wages," she writes, "month after month, to her brother, that he might get the education necessary to enter some profession."
Yeah, I guess this is more than adequate by the standards of a slave. Which is exactly Chomsky's point -- and the point of the contemporary writers and labor organizers which he is citing:
The Lowell girls' organizing efforts were notable not only for the "unfeminine" participation of women, but also for the political framework used to appeal to the public. Framing their struggle for shorter work days and better pay as a matter of rights and personal dignity, they sought to place themselves in the larger context of the American Revolution. During the 1834 "turn-out" or strike – they warned that "the oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us,"...
Keep in mind that the source for this comes from a labor union organizer, and that this seems to be the worst they could find. From the original source, the quality of the air did not seem bad enough for the factory girls to be noticeably bothered by it.
You might want to balance your view with the writing of a woman who actually worked in the mill (http://books.google.com/books?id=RgwCAAAAYAAJ&printsec=f...): "I do not recall any particular hardship connected with this life, except getting up so early in the morning, and to this habit, I never was, and never shall be, reconciled, for it has taken nearly a lifetime for me to make up the sleep lost at that early age. But in every other respect it was a pleasant life. We were not hurried any more than was for our good, and no more work was required of us than we were able easily to do."
I suggest you read the book, it's a very different picture than you'll get from Chomsky or the labor organizers.
I'm not arguing that factory life didn't suck by our standards. But it wasn't some plot to keep the foot on the neck of woman or laborers. Life was hard because they simply weren't as wealthy back then, and so they had to work hard at whatever they did. The factory life was better than the alternatives, or else the woman would not have worked their.
> That's simply false. And the massive corporations that seem most soulless and Dilbert-like, often are basically arms of the state ( ie, government contractors like IBM).
No, wrong.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/index.html
Corporate personhood is not in the constitution, and being a 'natural person' came out as an unofficial side-effect of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, 1886 - A judge verbally said he thought that corporations had 14th amendment 'natural person' rights, that got added to the header by a clerk, and got quoted and treated as though it was caselaw. Perhaps you think we're arguing past each other, 'natural personhood' != tyranny, but without 'the right to petition govt', free speech, and be free from 'unreasonable search' etc, they wouldn't have nearly the legal protection & power that they do.
Perhaps the judge in the Santa Clara case made the right decision for the wrong reason. I do think it's incorrect to view the corporation as a "person". A corporation is a contractual agreement concerning shared property. A corporation does not have rights, the people who own it have rights (which in practice is the same thing).
Another way of thinking of it, is that equity holders hold the most junior debt. The idea that senior debt holders could come back and make the junior debt holders pay up more is ridiculous.
Now, I do think that owners (and bond holders) should in some cases be liable for third party torts and criminal activities of the company. I don't know what the actual law is about this issue. If there is never any liability, that's a mistake. But I doubt that's the case.
Source? My impression was that the point of the system was to make money, and that the girls were adequately treated ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls ). The main thing that sucked was super long hours. Many of the Lowell girls came from family farms that had too many mouths to feed. If a family produces more children than the farm can support, there is no escaping the hard life, no matter the political or economic system.
It was done mostly by courts and lawyers and the power they could exercise over individual states. New Jersey was the first state to offer corporations any right they wanted. Of course, all the capital in the country suddenly started to flow to New Jersey, for obvious reasons.
The corporation is a construct of contract law. There is no reason for it to be ratified by legislation. And contract law simply allows for scalable, voluntary transactions. And scalable voluntary transactions allow people to build large productive organizations that make stuff people want - cars, lightbulbs, transistors, etc.
It was a conscious design which worked as Adam Smith said: the principal architects of policy consolidate state power and use it for their interests.
No argument here. But note that this is basically an immutable law of history. You'll have the same luck ranting against it as ranting against "death and taxes". That's why anarcho-anything is a dead end. If you write abaout political matters with a goal of influencing policy, you're best off coming up with ideas that are mutually beneficial to both the state and the public.
It's basically court decisions and lawyers' decisions, which created a form of private tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even state tyranny was.
That's simply false. And the massive corporations that seem most soulless and Dilbert-like, often are basically arms of the state ( ie, government contractors like IBM).
A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it's designed for obedience and passivity.
Once upon a time the idea of the school system was designed for obedience and passivity. But Supreme Court cases in the 1970's have made effective discipline in schools impossible. As a result, the education system circa 2009 is Lord of the Flies.