Body corporate
A body corporate is a legal construct where shareholders can invest money with ‘a company’ of directors who carry out a certain business – with the legal protection that the investor stands to lose no more than the value of their investment. This insulates investors from any greater liability the company might create through their operations. What changed in the Twentieth Century was that companies were given the same legal rights as a natural person: This means that companies have ‘human rights’, they can sue public agencies, and they can make political donations. Unlike a natural person, though: They can’t die; are subject to less restrictive taxation; it’s far harder to bring legal prosecutions against directors or investors for harms cause, in part due to their greater wealth, and ability to liquidate the company to avoid prosecution; and the limited liability of the company allows them to cause great harm without any risk to the greater wealth of those backing the company – encouraging the kinds of risky behaviour most people wouldn’t inflict upon themselves.
See also: Human rights, Natural person, Statism.
Branding & brand identity
A brand is a collections of designs or trademarks, protected by intellectual property laws, which permit a company to exclusively manufacture items including those designs or labels. As consumerism developed the public adopted brands as part of their own identity, and aligned their outlook on life within the values or aspirations they identified with the brand. A key part of this is that the exclusivity of the brand, allowing its customers to signal their own virtue or identity through the brand – in part, because the higher cost of branded goods demotes economic status.
See also: Aspiration, Commodity fetishism, Conspicuous consumption, Consumerism, Intellectual property, Marketing, Symbolic value.
Bureaucracy
At the heart of the political state lies ‘bureaucracy’: the formal systems of laws, political administration, property rights and business practices which describe how society operates. Bureaucracy is largely ‘invisible’ because for most it is something we are accustomed to – which not only hides the power of bureaucracy, it regularizes ‘the violence inherent in the system’. Bureaucracy represents a means for power to facelessly enforce order by making people do things to one another that, without the justification of bureaucratic rules, would ordinarily appear callous or inhuman – as in David Graeber’s beautiful one-liner, ‘the police are bureaucrats with weapons.’ The class of people who make-up the bureaucratic state are also largely invisible, though they are often, from politicians to traffic wardens, ridiculed in popular culture despite the administrative power they hold. However, despite this power, bureaucrats can never truly make change against the wishes of society’s ruling elite because that would entail rebelling against the system of rules which they uphold – which would negate position they hold in society.
See also: Democracy, Professional managerial class (PMC), Property rights, Statism.
‘Business as Usual’ (BAU)
‘Business as Usual’ is a phrase denoting policies that, irrespective of what they state or intend, are structured to protect current economic and business practices from any radical or urgent change in order to minimize costs to special/vested interest groups. Under Neoliberalism, the imperative to protect private interests above the general public interest, and to privatize profits while socializing risks, require that politicians and regulators do not introduce any measure which restricts the power of private capital. The justification for this is usually framed around the ‘Fear, Uncertainty, or Doubt’ (FUD) about the effects of systemic change, when often the (usually ignored) objective evidence indicates otherwise (action on climate change being the best example of this delaying tactic). BAU usually involves phasing-in change progressively over time (i.e., delaying action), calling for technological change rather than changes to industrial practices (i.e., technofixes), or working within the structures of industry to make apparently radical change which the industry would have adopted in any case (i.e., greenwashing). Either way, the imperative is to prevent any action which would affect the capital accumulation of private interests.
See also: Bureaucracy, ‘Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt’ (FUD), Greenwashing, Neoliberalism, Technocracy, Technofix.