2640 – Network (1976 movie)

Directed By – Sidney Lumet
Written By – Paddy Chayefsky

“Hi. I’m Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.”

If you ask me to name one movie that has continued to inspire and intrigue me and my friends, it is Sidney Lumet’s Network from 1976. To say it is just an excellent movie satire or a sharp movie critical of its time and age is to forget where we are and how we ended up where we ended up.

Network is the one movie that takes media theology to its limits, that performs the Mcluhanite mediasphere black mass without remorse. Network is relevant today because it reminds us that TV eschatology never left us. This movie prepares or anticipates within its own mediatic collapsology and technological convolutions some of today’s easiest society of control trappings, platform capitalism coordinates, and post-spectacle-drenched politics. If we blame TikTok, or today’s toxic antisocial platforms, we do that by forgetting how the society of the spectacle developed, how sensationalism became its lifeblood, and who its early (fictional) mad prophets were. To be part of the network and be a networker used to be such a rad cool thing – that is, till cultural critic and SF scholar Steven Shaviro wrote “Connected: Or What It Means to Live in a Networked Society”.

I watched and digested this artefact of the 1970s relatively late, but its tremors have been felt all around me. Its repeated viewing inexorably produced a kind of leitmotiv for our own understanding of politics, media, the spectacular, the performative and staged— and undoubtedly constitutes a sort of matricial mould for the ideas, practices, and post-spectacle tentacles that have arisen around the collaboration with Candidatura and CNDB dance center renegades (Bucharest Center for Contemporary Dance).

During the socialist era, the TV was a weird space, a sort of trimmed-down version of televisual reality. There were no late night shows, no reality shows, no horror movies, and even official news, weird ethno folkoric shows, commedy like Benny Hill, Norman Wisdom (very popular in Hoxa’s Albania I am told), Laurel and Hardy during the Cascadorii Rasului (aka Stuntsmen of Laughter) shows, Telecinemateca (with artsy works by Ingrid Bergman, Felini etc.), Mapamond, or the science, culture, history and tech weekend Teleenciclopedia which I never missed and had the honor of being the longest running Romanian TV show – from 1965 till today. During the Ceausescu’s socialist TV withdrawl, the Network was happening elsewhere – while we were on a TV diet of marches, Daciada olympics and Nadia Comoneci laurels. First, Romanian color transmission was live during the celebration of the eliberation day of 23 August 1983 (“eliberation from the Fascist joke” lest we forget that Romania was an ally of Germany and a willing participant in the Holocaust). At the same time, all around the capitalist world, Rupert Murdoch (Fox Network) and Berlusconi’s Videocracy tabloidization was reshaping everything and changing the rules of the game.

After 1989, we all got free cable, and we got more networked and cabled than Western Europe (at least if you had a relative or a friend who could unsramble your pay-per-view signal). Alltogether, we, the famished semiperipheric “telespectators” of the East Bloc (the name for viewers and TV audiences in Romanian), were shaped by this media ascetism during socialism when we had only had a few daylight hours of TV in the 1980s. Of course, this ignores the videotapes and the semi-legal dubbed version of Western movies (Jackie Chan, Terminator, Rambo, Chuck Norris, and other Cannon Group bangers) that poured into the country during that time. All the aspirations about the West were partly influenced by a few selected morsels like the Dallas series that was legally screened during that time. Then, in 2000, a portal opened with OTV or Oglinda TV (translated as Mirror TV) where nothing was sacred and where everything para-normal became normal. The hypernormal and the new normal, 2012 apocalyptic messengers, Big Eartquake predictors, faith healers, disaster area survivors, they all got their 5 minutes of glory, they all manifested on this TV station founded by Dan Diaconescu (another presidential TV candidate).

Looking back, before 1989, even the official propaganda visits, official meetings, 23 August celebrations – the TV program were rationed, rationed like the high-calorie food at that time. Most of the illegal/semi-illegal animation, movies, and documentaries you got from the neighbouring more liberal countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and URSS during perestroika.

But then there was the first televised networked “Revolution”, the Live Revolution of 1989 (“in direct”)- if Gill Scott- Heron could well affirm in 1971 that “Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, decades later Harun Farocki and his co-author Andrej Ujica after raiding the media archives of the TVR (Romanian National TV) with the help of photographer and director of the Contemporary Art Museum Mihai Oroveanu manage to prove that in the Romanian case it looked (at least from the thousands of tapes they watched) it felt otherwise. Videograms of a Revolution (1992), just three years after the events, brings you at 106 minutes takes through the entire whole televised outpour of affective overflow and mediatic bathing that this event occasion for the millions of viewers that basically only “connected” from their homes, on their TV sets to the occupation of the National TV station, the ‘truth telling’ and adhésion rituals, the sloppy Ceaușescu couple trials and their ignominous ‘live’ excecution, the constant threat of invisible pro regime ‘terrorists’ from Arab countries (conjuring up recycled images of Saddam? Assad ? loyal guards rather than CIA trained mujahedeen or even racist stereotypes from Chuck Norris or Bronson movies). In fact as the balcony speech pf Ceaușescu (also televised) shows is the way authority not only cracks, but how it’s almost like a glitch, how the TV streaming made the regime look suddenly fragile, shaky, and embattled. Nobody knew what to expect, but new enemies needed to be fabricated and names, acronyms, hymns where chosen out od an emerging repertoire.

Foucault in a late 1983 comment on Kant’s reference to the French Revolution as a measure of whether humankind is actually progressing – in Conflict of the Faculties sounds vaguely as if it’s all about this Romanian Videodrome videogram of a 1989 (200 years from the French one!) Revolution that is being lived as spectatorship not a direct participant:

“What is significant is the way the Revolution exists as spectacle, the way in which it is greeted everywhere by spectators who are not participants, but observers, witnesses, and those who for better or worse, let themselves be cought up with it… What is important…is that all around the Revolution there is he [Kant] says, ‘sympathy of aspirations which borders on enthusiasm’ ‘.

And this was the feeling transmitted on Bulgarian TV, by a cohort of French journalists celebrating a French Revolution in Bucharest, Romanian Jewish immigrants to Israel wanting to enroll against the ‘terrorist’ threat etc. everyone joining tele-visually from afar. It’s also not about the material forces acting, or the messy antagonist and often irreconcilable situations on the ground but about how the Romanian revolution is being televised, recovered, recieved, how streaming the fall of Communism is galvanizing the viewer abroad and giving liberalism its new consumerist raison d’être to refashion the East, renewing these foreign spectators and enabling them to be transformed.

Network’s postmodern contribution was fundamental because you could understand in retrospect how one got to exploitative 24h/7 media massacre snuff splatter that the Nightcrawler makes de rigueur but also the Romanian Revolution a TV show. Probably only Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point could see far enough across the 1968 countercultural blast. Network talk about cathode ray prophets, live suicides of TV anchorheads, unusual but easy to monetize forbidden shows, ratings wars, and a general cynicism and malaise regarding the whole corporate planetary capitalist mediascape. It is a proto-cyberpunk movie, while there are no SF elements, but its worldview considers corporations as the new nation builders and imaginative communities (yet some of them exist only as historical, broken building blocks of monopoly capital, like who remembers IBM?!), these corps were the new statal formations supplanting the 19th c nation states. At least in theory. Network States anyone?

Network speaks with ease about employing extremists and terrorists to do their own TV reality show as part of the 1970s Network, the very anti-capitalist anarcho revolutionaries, subsuming all the fractal dispersion of far left groups and liberation movement shards into their televised feed. This almost comes close to 2000s Karlheinz Stockhausen naming the terrorist attacks as a masterpiece, or Boris Groys saying that Bin Laden after 9/11 was a video artist because he actually communicated via VHS tapes with a global audience.

This is the same strange, oppressive yet ecstatic techno-libertarian reconfiguration hailed by Snow Crash, without the technologically laden prophecies, the tech solutionism and the smoggy California ideology atmosphere that seems to fester nowadays.

Nor are there in Network, like in the later Videodrome, organically mutated manifestations of TV hybridization and snuff programming. Of course Network is not perfect and its gender politics is entirely fucked and predictably mysoginstic – with Faye Dunaway being the vixen femme fatale absolute machiavellian that aims to grow and use everything to rule the ratings. In a way Ceaușescu lost the ratings and one could see it on TV during 1989. Writing about tys fateful year of 1989, Susan Buck-Morss remarked that television became all important throughout the events. Massive social transformations seemed gonbe a matter of gaining airtime and satellite TV was busy staging “revolutions”, and demonstrating that “we won” and that “the army is with us” (in Romania’s case). Storming the TV station was now equal to storming the Bastille of Winter Palace.

Maybe this is the first cinematic instance where “networking” (in its narrow sense as TV networks) is not the Matrix escapist VR, nor a technophiliac hollographic universe, but a Black Mirror transmedia world that you can only exit by entering, by jacking and hacking into. A sprawling, corporative, and inescapable tele-visual mediascape became the natural habitat of audio video speech acts.

TV upends the hegemony of image and cinema because, for Michel Chion, the difference between cinema and TV “…lies not so much in the visual specificity of their images, as in the different roles of sound in each.” For Chion, TV is simply put “illustrated radio” and images are reduced to mere add-ons. TV is a murmuring medium that is driven by sound, no signal/snow, speech, and music, a soundtrack in need of visual coverage. The sound is no longer supplemental, propping up images but the other way around, images need the authoritative voice of a newscaster, an expert, a celeb, a pundit or a YouTuber, a streamer to convey meaning, caustic wit, to announce meteorological freak events, plunging markets, comment on twitch about politics through video games, anchor rhythmic and wobbly music, or decode deep fakes and AI-generated video. One could look at the medical checkups of the dictatorial couple Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu before their trial amnd sentencing in silence, just trying to read their lips and facial expressions. The dead TV set is also a portal, an opening into another dimension and creepypasta non-existant TV shows as we know from Poltergeist (1982), Paranormal activity franchise (2007-), and the excellent Jane Schoenbrun I Saw the TV Glow (2024).

Instead of a conspiracy, we are immersed in the daily rituals of programming, screen & face time, streaming, franchising, notification for premieres, and next episode for your binge. But if there is also something ritualic and initiatic, tele-evangelizing prosperity gospel to Howard Beale’s appeal to the audience in his Pauline moment, that’s because it was already happening in the US (and with Radio – see Vatican as well as Hitler’s use of the medium), so Beale is struck down. In the end the new prophet of TV is being introduced into the inner chambers of corporate power and creed, and particularly into its capitalist worldview that is definitely post-ideological, post-political, post-historical (Fukuyama’s and Koyeve’s Last Man beckoning?), eminently transnational, post-democratic and deeply cynical about East/West blocs underlying arbitrary partitions. There is your business naturalism, where business is equated with the (Darwinistic?) Hobbesian forces of nature and where the only totality that exists is a financialized one. Who said this movie does not get better by the year?

You may be repelled by it, but its rhetoric force speaks of itself and even rings of the capitalism realism aptly identified by Mark Fisher later on. Thr more so because it’s not after thr fall of the Berlin Wall but a talk of the elites that basically made up their mind. With the caveat that this is still ideology but ideology shifts depending ok who’s doing the packaging and how – and believe me, yet I again, brutal IMF conditionalities included you still need an ideology and an ideology needed a voice, a receptacle, and TV channeling, the madder the better. It’s also pretty far from the messy reality of material forces on the ground, of actual Global South rebellions and anti colonial movements and somehow close to the Schmittian ‘political spirituality’ and cynism of today. It is also darkly funny because this last denouement is a tête-à-tête with power, something that we are maybe familiar with from the last Trump and Jelensky meeting. I will give you this monologue in full bc it is, without a doubt, one of the most incredible pieces of cinema writing:

Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!! Is that clear?! You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: But why me?

Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

imdb

2630 – The Council of the Gods (Der Rat der Götter 1950)

The Council of the Gods (Der Rat der Götter, director: Kurt Maetzig 1950) is an East German propaganda film based on Richard Sasuly’s book IG Farben from 1947. Sasuly was one of the first to write and investigate the implication of Big Business oligarchy in the Nazi War effort. His book is not easy to find – so I would recommend a look at the detailed notes from Gravity’s Rainbow (a book by Thomas Pynchon where IG Farben plays a key role) wiki. Council of the Gods from 1950 is considered one of the first movies marking the new antagonism between former anti-Nazi allies and new Cold War enemies: the West vs the Soviet Union and its satellite states. The title refers to the powerful council of German Chemical & Pharma Cartel IG Farben from 1930 to the Nurnberg Trials and after.

Notable trough its absence is the IG Farben Building (also known as Poelzig /Abrams building or even The Pentagon of Europe) built between 1928-1930 in a Modernist New Objectivity Style by Hans Poelzig to host the corporate HQ of the world’s largest chemical conglomerate. The biggest building in Europe at the time, despite its dimensions IG Farben kept its modernist elegance, a true coporate arcology, a hive of Ersatz alchemy – an empire of new material substitutes and molecular derivatives, synthesizing and developing rubber, oil, the first antibiotics, methanol, as well as Zyklon B and explosives.

Till 2014, the building’s name has been changed several times, with various episodes of imposed deletions and renaming – interesting in themselves, as well as a proposal to host the European Central Bank.

At the time of the filming, between 1949-1950, the building hosted United States High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG) and its staff. Starting with 1947 all associations with its dark past had to be cast off, and on permanent orders it had to be called by all stationed military personnel as “The Headquarters Building, European Command”.

[Verwaltungsrat (supervisory board of directors, 11 members in 1926) of IG Farben, Germany, together with (front, left) Carl Bosch, chairman of Vorstand (executive board of directors). 1926.]

The movie itself was banned in West Germany and military commandants of West Berlin’s three occupation sectors registered an official complaint to the Soviets.

But critics also came from the Social Realist side, such that State Secretary for Press and Agitation Hermann Axen criticized “The Council of the Gods for over-emphasizing the roles of the capitalists” and because it employed just one common worker (Uncle Karl – portrayed by Albert Grabe). It is also possibly the first movie to articulate anti-capitalist and anti-American economical positions after the war (Alexander Stephan). Friedrich Wolf and his Soviet co-author, Phillip Gecht used beside Sasuly’s book many judicial papers linked to the IG Farben trial as well as an accident occuring at BASF works in Ludwigshafen that killed 280 workers on 28 July 1948.

“a dictatorship of monopoly capitalism. Its ‘fascism’ is that of business enterprise organized on a monopoly basis, and in full command of all the military, police, legal and propaganda power of the state. […] Hitler was pushed to the top, without support of a majority of the people, by a coalition of the heavy industry leaders and Junker militarists.”  (Robt Brady, American economist, describing the Nazi state, Sasuly, IG Farben 1947, page 128 and 14)

Monopoly capitalism should ring a bell or two even in today’s global climate.  I was not particularly interested in the colourful propaganda tactics of the movie. But it is maybe significant in its employment of ‘tabloid’ style accusations directed at the upper class society – as a womanizing, cruel, lusty and promiscuous group without any moral sense and that is interested only in rising quarterly profits and talking about rare breeds of dogs. Even so, it is quite refreshing (imagine nowadays!) to see such a complete index of decadence and human rottenness directed at the Old Privileges of the Big Business. It is really amazing how even some of the Oriental decadence makes its way into the collections and lush bourgeois interiors (in a stark contrast with the modernist interiors of the actual IG Farben building).

They are full of chinoiseries and Hindu sculptures. The arch villain of the movie privy councillor Mauch is leading his pre-War business partner, the American Germanophile Standard Dutch Oil Mr Lawson into a secret alcove behind a Chinese folding silk-screen/paravan. The discussion takes place literally behind the screen. The room is full of (archeological loot?) Japanese or Chinese lamps, antiques, aquariums and temple- bells. It is as if the imperial luxury (also the occult powers) of the Orient are invoked to sustain the secret deals, the conspiracy talks.

There is also a great scene with a multi- armed Bodhisattva sculpture that is being packed inside a car as the Nazi go on the run and the goods are shipped elsewhere. The comment is that this Oriental sculpture is a representation of greedy Capitalism/the Council. While talking about economic spheres of influence, about oil and synthetic fuels, about selling patents for various inventions, they softly touch a crystalline sounding bell. It is not really so bizarre if we think that there has been such a love affair btw Nazi mysticism, Ariosophy and Hinduism and that after the war, some former insiders started proclaiming Adolf Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu (see The Lightening and The Sun by Savitri Devi ‘Hitler’s Priestess’).

The  board of directors was nicknamed “Council of The Gods” by employees and so is named in a painting by Hermann Gröber from the 1920s with Carl Bosch and Carl Duisburg facing each other. Carl Krauch (1887-1968) a Nazi War criminal and industrialist was a longstanding member of the board and general committee, and chairman of the supervisory board, 1940 to 1945, succeeding Carl Bosch as chairman of IG Farben. He was the model behind privy councillor Mauch in the movie. What was more noteworthy in this epic Stalinist docu-drama is this detailed critical depiction of industry and chemical science. Wolfgang Schivelbusch is an historian who wrote about the perception, and the cultural and artistic impact of electrical technology with an emphasis on artificial lighting systems, the arrival of streetlights as the shimmer of modernity (Lichtblicke : Zur Geschichte der künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert München/Wien 1983, published as Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century Uni of California Press 1995). In an article in the Cabinet magazine he discusses the so-called “rye and iron thesis” of the rise of Nazis in the 20th Century. This thesis pits new modern industries such as chemistry and electricity versus the old agriculture and heavy industry alliances that started controlling German foreign policy. The militaristic “rye” Junkers from the Prussian East and the “iron” Ruhr region barons building a new navy lead to the 1918 defeat, Hitler & all that in one version of history.

A kind of typical Nazi Germany stole the MayDay – to gain support from the German working class, here is a depiction of 1928 IG Farben celebration.

In this hypothetical scenario, both electrical and chemical industries would have produced a more peaceful, enlightened (literally) and more pragmatic policy, instead of the heavy industrial mindset of Krupp & Thyssen. The truth of this is still being debated today – conspiracy sites proclaiming the chemical superiority over the Leninist ideals of electrical current and electrification. Even in Germany itself we have the opinion of none other but ex-Dadaist, economist, Spartakist and terrorist Franz Jung (1888-1963). In his novel from 1923 Conquest of the Machines inspired by numerous setbacks and major disillusions concerning the workers struggle, he puts his last hopes on the electrical workers and engineers.

Collage art by John Heartfield dedicated to Franz Jung.

The Council of the Gods makes it clear that only proper ideological positions can out-balance the destructive potential of technology and capitalist greed. It is a film that struggles with the depiction of some of the most beloved symbols of Socialism: factories, furnaces and industrial architecture and its immediate results – the basic chemical substances of modern synthetic industry. The opening scene is really great – we basically see the huge IG Farben facility where the good guy, the chemical scientist Dr Scholz is being employed in the Research & Development Department labs. He is nearly suffocating together with his female co-worker, coughing his lungs out while trying to open the windows to let some air in.

Especially in Romania this scene should be evocative – the alchemist potential of chemical industry was used as decorum and as a symbol of the country’s progressive ideals and autarchic drive – while its rulers have been blamed and satirized as self-styled chemical wonder makers with fake doctoral credentials. As the chemical industry was leaking out, its refineries and plants were at the symbolic forefront of homegrown detergent, pesticide and fertilizer revolutions. The chemical industry was always caught in the powerful dream of autonomy and self-sufficiency, but also a foster child of fossil fuel capitalism.

The very stickiness of petrol implicates its involvement with some of the dirtiest deals of German reunification. In the 1990 the East German remainder of IG Farben in Leuna, the older BASF Ammoniakwerk Merseburg GmbH – Leuna Werke was at the center of perhaps the biggest privatization scandal after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl mediated the transfer of this East German oil refinery into the hands of French oil giant Elf Aquitaine, via dubious transactions, involving huge kickbacks and ending up with criminal proceedings against manager Alfred Sirven, former head of hydrocarbon division “Mr Africa” Andre Tarallo and Elf Loik Le Floch-Prigent. Although few might remember this or might have followed it through, it represented the “biggest political and corporate sleaze scandal to hit a western democracy since the second world war” (The Guardian). It was all an overflowing black pool of neo-colonialism, French influence in Africa, lavish lifestyle, and payments to all the French parties to insure support.

Council of the Gods – cracks the Ubermensch promethean mythos, the catastrophic captains of industry and pollution who became god-like, deciding over and above everybody else. Julius Evola, an important apologist of martial elites and of the vertical hierarchies ultimately summarizes the God-like foundational (perenialist?) role of councils, board of directors and CEOs ultimately – God- like because of their loftiness, inner rituals, privy meetings, and of their abstraction from lowly humanistic and pietist social concerns.

Dr Schulz, the naive hapless employee is a bizarre character – he never follows his products to the end process, even if they obviously lead to annihilation of other creatures (lab animals in the first case). His basis for the raw production of chemical warfare gases needs to be in its final stage so he can oppose or protest. Even so, he tries to cover up what he knows, not only from his son, but also from the other chemical plant works (including his relatives). The final accident at the factory has to arrive in order for him and all the others to start the struggle for peace.

Gustave Le Rouge (not to be mixed up with Gaston Leroux his contemporary) – the prolific French sci-fi author from 1900 (La Conspiration des Milliardaires, 1899-1900) weaves his Julesvernian yarn around fictious and merciless cartels based on real life “robber barons” or captains of industry, to condemn the (increasingly) anti-European US oligarchy tryingo to inch its way on the Europeans former colonialist masters. Le Rouge of course is not an anti-imperialist per se, but a chauvinist Frenchman, completely incensed by the US hegemony making cultured France – passé. Yet his billionaire conspiracy involves at its core manicheian mephistophelic inventors tied to national interests (bad and good – mostly good when they are French) and their plans to deploy military ‘robots’ (invented in his story by an alternate Edison) to conquer the world. While all this talk about conquering trusts and mad scientists might sound bizarre to us today, it also strikes me pretty close to Elon Musk’s vetting of all the right-wing candidates in Europe. This is also a warning to all who cry out against the monopolistic class of some other nation, while hardly ready to get rid of their own rich plutocrats.

Today there is all this talk about the Russian (or Ukrainian, or Romanian) oligarchs but the term ‘oligarchy’ includes at its base the the olygopoly of monopoly capitalism in all its forms. Far from raw materials and hungering for dwindling resources, the chemical cartels have synthesized new political ideals as well as new chemical compounds. Industry has also conjured up a rationalized cartelization of state, politics and private industry like none seen before (as envisioned in the channeling of Walter Rathenau for example in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow).

Monument dedicated to Walter Rathenau assasinated by a right-wing nationalist groups (protofascists aligned to the nascent Nazi Party), Berlin.

Good or bad cartelization, luciferian or productivist, the 1900 was rich in various models of Leviathan Corporations as solutions to the future on both sides of the Atlantic and one of the most fantastic came out of the mind and pen of US businessman and inventor King Gillette (the man behind the replaceable Gilette razor). He was the author of several utopian socialist treaties The Human Drift (1894), World Corporation (1910) who envisioned the World Corporation and a unique, beehive MegaCity where the whole population of the country could be concentrated in buildings akin to the contemporary malls. One cannot minimize the Romanian fascist Iron Guard flirting corporatism. In 1940s Romanian Italian businessmen Iosif Constantin Drăgan (founder of Butan Gas) a controversial figure and one of the promoters of Romanian proto chronism wrote a couple of articles relevant perhaps to this idea of right wing cartelization and fossil fascism. Drăgan explained his views on the Fascist Iron Guard in 1940 in the pro-Mussolini newspaper Conquiste d’Impero in two articles entitled “The Mystique of Codreanu’s Legionnaires” and “Romanian Corporatism: Pieces of Legionnaire Doctrine”.