“Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism. … The left's attack on corporate capitalism is, when examined, an attack on economic forms possible only in collusion between authoritarian government and bureaucratized, nonentrepreneurial business. It is unfortunate that many New Leftists are so uncritical as to accept this premise as indicating that all forms of capitalism are bad…”

"The Death of Politics", Playboy magazine (March 1969)

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Karl Hess25

American journalist 1923–1994

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"The Death of Politics", essay in Playboy (March 1969) http://fare.tunes.org/books/Hess/dop.html; also available in Hess's autobiography, Mostly on the Edge.

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Context: The "corporatization of America" during the past century has been an attack on democracy—and on markets, part of the shift from something resembling "capitalism" to the highly administered markets of the modern state/corporate era. A current variant is called "minimizing the state," that is, transferring decision-making power from the public arena to somewhere else: "to the people" in the rhetoric of power; to private tyrannies, in the real world.