Corporate. Feudalism.

In the 1987 film Robocop we saw one vision of the corporatist "endgame." A giant corporation literally performing an hostile takeover of an entire city. OCP started by contracting to run civic services, then took over the police force, and finally by buying up all outstanding debt of Detroit planned to assume control over the city itself. Every aspect of law, taxation and services, zoning, and city amenities owned and operated by a for-profit corporation. This scenario presents an absolute return to feudalism, where the land and everyone on it was considered private property of the lord.

To clarify, feudalism was an ideology and a political system; while the economic system associated with feudalism was called manorialism. For most purposes, they can be synonyms but there is a distinction, however it does not need to be made here. It should be said though, that feudalism was a rational response to the collapse of Roman central authority, an attempt to secure safety for people on a local level that calcified into tradition over the centuries and outlived it's utility. The long medieval period is a great example of how tenaciously the powerful will defend their privilages in the face of popular protest, simple decency, or even economic efficiency. (Author's note, the argument has been made that the lords actually followed the villagers to the safety of hilltops, rendering the whole concept of feudalist security with the lords protecting the serfs moot. See
Villa to Village: The Transformation of the Roman Countryside (Duckworth Debates in Archaeology) for more information on the debate."

Corporate feudalism, on the other hand, has much more in common with the initial barbarian invasions that made medieval feudalism necessary. The difference is, unlike the story in Robocop, corporations seek control but not ownership. According to intellectuals studying the changing American landscape such as Noam Chomsky, ownership implies responsibility and even the possibility of accountability. Take stadiums for instance, the public "owns" it but the team makes all the really important decisions such as ticket prices and rental or lease rates, and corporate sponsors get to have their name on the stadium for a pittance compared to how much a stadium actually costs to build and maintain. Matt Taibbi documented an even uglier trend in the corporate takeover of public spaces. At least you can avoid going to a stadium if you want (though probably not the taxes extracted by the team to build the darn thing), but in Griftopia Taibbi reported how the city of Chicago gave away their entire parking meter system for a relatively tiny lump sum payment to foreign investors. So that for the next 70 years or so every time you pay to park in Chicago you are actually transferring wealth upward and not supporting street maintainence or some other public good. It could be argued that this is simply another instance of the "lords following the serfs" mentioned in the above note.

None of this is written in stone, it does not "have" to be this way. Human beings can organize their lives in myriad ways, corporate feudalism is just one way. The idea of a legal entity having rights akin to humans with souls to damn and bodies to kick it extremely troubling in the first instance. However, a corporation does not have free will the way a human does. A corporation is legally obligated to maximize return on investment, though that is permutating into maximize profit because it is hard to argue on any rational level that the outsized salaries and bonuses of management are actually in shareholders' best interest. The few examples above of privatization real or imagined trace a trend not just in the US but around the world, numerous scholars have studied the phenomenon, of modern-day lords following the serfs. Just as those medieval villagers were able to protect themselves from bandits and invading hordes before the lords showed up by moving to the hills, we were able to govern ourselves just fine before the corporate lords showed up to extract their cut. It is human nature for some to put themselves above the rest and try to make the masses serve them. It is also human nature to recognize that the few have no real reason to take so much from us and fight back.

The struggle continues.