Corporate Maternalism

Critics of industrial capitalism have often depicted it as an economic system that destroys the fabric of society. Mills and factories extracted workers from farm, neighborhood, parish, and guild and made them subject to the so-called tyranny of the machine. Friedrich Engels observed in the rise of large-scale industry a “veritable despotism independent of all social organization,” with workers as its beleaguered subjects. Engels’s friend Karl Marx indicted capitalism for having “pitilessly torn asunder” social ties and leaving workers exposed to an impersonal cash-nexus relationship with their employer.