Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters

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Anti-corporatist sentiment reached all-time highs with the 1848 release of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. The political document helped frame all of history as a class struggle between corporate masters and their poor laborers. Anti-corporatist activists continue to harken back to this foundational text to inform their worldview. Generally, they believe that large corporations pose a threat to free society and that business tycoons are “manipulating government” and “creating false needs in consumers.”

Since 1980, Ephemera, Inc. has made buttons, magnets, and stickers out of their San Francisco, California headquarters. The company started out by producing pin-back buttons for local punk rock bands but later branched out to manufacture a variety of small trinkets. Today, they are located in Phoenix, Oregon and consider themselves a “maker of funny, sarcastic and offensive” buttons (Ephemera, Inc., n.d.).