Bottle, Bordiga

1) Bordiga is an absolute mess to try to actually understand, but his famous quote is quite pertinent:

The hell of Capitalism is the Firm, not the fact that the Firm has a boss.

There goes Bottle, quoting those evil Communists again. 

2) No, no, no. I'm not quoting my hero Communism, i'm putting out an idea that i think most people don't really understand. In fact, a lot of you don't realize you actually agree, turn around and advocate for the complete opposite, then complain that things didn't go the way you thought they would.

Did you know Orwell was an ardent Democratic Socialist? I bet you didn't. He also coined the absurdist term Tory Anarchist. The point is that  all the buzzwords are nonsense, he steadfastly despised Authoritarianism. So did Bordiga.

Let's tackle it. What does it mean?:

The hell of Capitalism is the Firm, not the fact that the Firm has a boss.

Two lowercase nouns, two capitalized nouns, and 100+ years of psychotic people arguing that their interpretation of Marx is the correct one. Feel free to jump in whenever...

3) So, what's a Firm?

The simplest answer is that the Firm is the business entity selling their particular brand of goods and services to consumers for profit. The slightly more accurate answer is that the Firm is the business structure itself, the corporate functions that form the network of goals, rules, procedures, etc. The most realistic answer is that the Firm is the collective identity you refer to when you say "i'm the parts puller at Jimbo's Junkyard." 

The question isn't what you do, the question is what does Jimbo's Junkyard do, but we have to walk through the structure to actually see it. You pull a list of parts out of old cars and Joe delivers them to customers. That's it as far as your actual work. You guys don't determine the price or collect money or anything like that, that's part of what the Firm does. On one hand, it's sort of true that Jimbo's Junkyard sells used car parts, but it's more accurate to say that the Firm acquires capital and sells the whole process to customers. They coordinate the process of acquiring old cars and selling the parts from them. 

In this abstract setting, there are no laws; only actions and consequences. Either customers are happy and keep buying used car parts from Jimbo's, or they aren't and they stop. Jimbo's could find great success stealing cars and chopping them up as long as customers were still happy and paying Jimbo's for doing it. Companies still take that approach all the time. Remember, most people don't care until it affects them personally, but knowing that Jimbo's steals cars is often enough to dissuade the majority of customers from supporting that particular Firm. Regardless, the only legal mechanism we have for regulating Jimbo's activities is suing them and using force to stop it. 

But what if that isn't actually Jimbo's practice? Jimbo's employs people to go out and buy old used cars, but Scooter is secretly embezzling that purchasing money and boosting cars. That's certainly not Jimbo's fault, so they fire Scooter.

The point is that nobody actually knows, and that's the hell Bordiga is talking about. It makes little difference if the Firm has a boss, owner, board of directors, what have you, the bad part is that the Firm can say whatever it wants, define its goals with the best intentions, but the Firm doesn't actually do anything. It is an opaque and impenetrable shell around the actual business.

What remains is to try to understand why or how or even if this is an inherent feature of Capitalism.

4) You're not going to like this last part. It doesn't matter what Capitalism actually is, it doesn't matter how you actually define it. Like a great number of ideologies, it is merely the invisible structure that absolves people from responsibility. It lets the wealthy ignore poverty, it lets greed motivate our actions without the penalty of remorse, in short, it's the defense people use for taking advantage of each other instead of making an actual trade.

Regardless of what Bordiga was actually thinking at the time, what it means is that the ideology itself is antagonistic; it perpetuates itself as the solution to a problem it creates: breaking away from an established company that is failing to start a new company. The problem with that is the fact that the company itself doesn't actually do anything beyond defining its own internal structure, and measures its success not by its positive or negative impact, but by how much money it can make for as long as possible.

You don't have to agree with that sentiment, but  it's certainly not a crazy way of describing the world. Especially if it turns out that you do agree with that sentiment.