What we should study is how these companies successfully laundered their reputations, such that we can hold modern corporations accountable for conspiring with genocidal or dictatorial state actors. This does not solve every ethical problem that underlies the contemporary corporation, but I believe that companies that are complicit in the mass extermination of human life should face the consequences. Hopefully, we're on the same bandwidth here.
And what's the solution? Do you propose killing everyone that worked for the companies in question during WWII? What about those not in Germany or occupied terretories? Since most of those people are long since dead, do you propose killing their children and grandchildren?
Anything done today for crimes 80 years ago will only serve to hurt those that weren't even around, and not really help those that were harmed.
Companies are not people and are not run by people, they have specific legal requirements and power structures that mean that the operate very differently from how most people that compose them want them to.
In any case, how people act is largely a consequence of their environment, i-e, the system. These can be environmental, political (as in, power relations), cultural, etc...
Corporate humanism isn't always a crime. Sometimes it is.
But even when it isn't, it is a sub-optimal strategy compared to maximizing as long as those that make the decisions have differing interests than those that bear them. And if they do not have differing interests, then why separate them?
You've just described a superset of what I'm talking about. These goals go hand-in-hand, and I'd say understanding the systemic reality is a necessity for dismantlement and/or reform.
I agree. I'm just suggesting that there is not really a fundamental distinction between genocidal corporations and non-genocidal corporations, rather that the issue probably comes from deeper.
I kind of just left it alone... it was intended to be sarcasm, but figured there's three ways it could be taken. Sarcasm/humor, genuine or false-flag.
The reality is that companies aren't people, and despite the concept of corporate personhood shouldn't be treated like it. Nobody working in or managing a corporation today was likely a part of said company during WWII.
Beyond the above, Sometimes "companies" have no choice. If your company, and its' resources, employees, etc. exist in a totalitarian regime, you're kind of stuck. If the country's leaders are willing to kill and replace you, then most people would simply comply. Many that worked in these companies during WWII passively resisted by slowing things down and hindering projects. Not enough to get them killed, but enough to keep things from going as bad as quickly as they otherwise would have.
A company is made up of its' people, from the leadership down... and that changes over time. Trying to hold a company to something done 80 years before is kind of meaningless. If it was called for and/or done at the time, or nearer the time that's different. Like many things, at some point you need to get over things that happened before you were born and concentrate on the now.
