Capital-backed organizations define membership and authority, constituting autonomous power

Evidence

Below such barriers, however they are deployed, the medium of the economy can make organizations attractive, or even deploy property ownership, safeguarded by law, in land or other assets simply to bring about the elementary conditions necessary for organized work to be possible. In this function the medium of the economy is also called capital. Organizations formed with capital (based on a division into property/non-property) then define conditions for joining and leaving and for subjection to authority, and thus constitute autonomous power. This applies to state as well as to private bureaucracies. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 787

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines capital as the economic medium’s way of constituting organizations that generate their own power.
• XREF: Butler/Janet and the reader’s broader social-structure reading connect naturally; the household-is-an-organization point parallels the Milgrom/Roberts-Weber-Hart reading of organizations as governance. — connects to: Administered organization acquires power over life and death beyond its members — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 731; Some associations merit autonomy so their members can develop their own institutions. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 5081