Every corporation begins as an idea—an answer to a problem wrapped in capital and structure. But over time, it becomes something more: a living system that produces not only goods and services, but also behaviors, hierarchies, and identities. It becomes a mode of production, in the Marxist sense—a machine that shapes how people relate to their work, and to each other.

Inside a modern company, ownership and labor rarely coexist. Capital owns, labor performs. Between them lies a vast and invisible bureaucracy designed to translate decisions from the top into motion at the bottom. What fascinates me isn’t the existence of hierarchy—it’s how thoroughly it organizes consciousness. People begin to speak the language of performance metrics, key results, and deliverables. The dialect of capital becomes their mother tongue.

When I worked in large enterprises, I could feel that translation happening in real time. Each meeting was a ritual of consent: align to the goals, sign off on the roadmap, echo the mission statement. Everyone meant well, but the result was often a kind of corporate alienation—a quiet separation between what one does and what one believes in. The system doesn’t demand loyalty to ideas; it demands loyalty to motion.

This structure isn’t accidental. It’s optimized for scale. Bureaucracy turns subjective judgment into reproducible process. It lets the company behave predictably, like an algorithm. But predictability is also control. The higher you climb, the less you build and the more you authorize. The corporation doesn’t abolish class; it repackages it. Titles replace ownership, and “responsibility” becomes a proxy for power.

The most striking part is how self-reinforcing it all is. A company’s structure rewards those who adapt to it. The more fluent you become in its grammar—its OKRs, budgets, compliance matrices—the further you advance. But fluency in the system often means distance from the work. This is the quiet contradiction at the heart of corporate life: authority rises as proximity to creation falls.

I sometimes think of corporations as self-organizing intelligences. They learn, evolve, and replicate. They consume labor, generate value, and reinvest it to sustain themselves. They are not evil; they are efficient. But that efficiency comes at a cost—an erosion of agency. Workers don’t own the product of their labor, and leaders don’t own the consequences of their systems. The result is collective amnesia. The machine runs, but few remember why.

The real challenge, then, isn’t to overthrow this model—it’s to understand it. To recognize that power, ownership, and accountability drift apart as organizations scale, and that this drift produces the alienation we all feel but rarely name. Once you see the pattern, you can begin to act inside it consciously instead of unconsciously.

The company isn’t just where we work. It’s where we live a significant fraction of our lives. Understanding it as a social and economic organism is the first step toward reclaiming some measure of autonomy within it.

Jorge Luis de la Torre — I put the C in GRC. I bring compliance to the table.