Plutocracy : Warframe

I never know how to start a blog post so I will just go straight to the point.

This post is mostly my musings about Corpus society, partly substantiated with canon lore, partly extrapolation from whatever other crumbs we get.

A group of very serious men

Corpus society is stratified in five classes. Starting from the bottom up we have the debt slaves, the crewmen, the Elite, the Board of Directors and at the very top we have the Founder.

Currently the Founder is Parvos Granum, but, as the Deadlock Protocol (DP) told us, any of his (male?) descendants have a birthright to claim the role of being an heir to the whole of Corpus. How succession happens is not known, whether it is when Parvos dies, whether it can happen while he still is alive, it's all up in the air. The former seems more likely, as Nef put forward his claim of succession on the belief that Parvos is long dead.

The Board of Directors are the elite of the elite, they rule the Corpus and dictate all of its inner and outer workings. Again, as per DP, there are 14 members, currently two are known, Nef Anyo and Frohd Bek, with Frohd being the current Chairman. So it means that the Board are the overseers of Corpus but there is also one person who stands above them, as a sort of manager's manager. There is no information on whether being a Chairman grants you any special privileges (for example, the ability to veto a vote, but then again DP started due to a stalemate, so that is unlikely anyways). That kind of makes a Chairman useless but perhaps it is a representative role or there are other ways to make the role mean something, perhaps the Chairman appoints new members.

Speaking of choosing members - nothing is known about the other members of the Board. In-game events lead to believe that it has to be due to exceptional achievements (it is mentioned that Frohd initially favored Nef due to his work on terraforming Venus, perhaps a reason why he was chosen as Alad's successor).

My personal interpretation adds that all the members of the Board represent a key industry in Corpus or perhaps an influence sphere, sort of like lobbying groups. The Corpus are a society based on commerce and accruing profit, therefore it would make sense for each member of the top-of-the-top to, in some, represent a bargaining power in trade relations. Or simply it is a group of people so unimaginably rich that they can simply pay their way through life.

The Elite are self-explanatory: rich Corpus leading a lavish lifestyle similar to the Orokin, far removed from regular society. They're essentially the aristocrat class who have so much generational wealth that increases with each passing generation they are practically untouchable financially. Most of the CEOs and leaders of Corpus come from this class, with very few exceptions (Frohd Bek, Nef Anyo, but he is a special case).

The Crewmen: these are also what we, the Tenno, know as enemies whenever we enter a mission. They have different tasks and abilities but what unites them that they're all manual laborers who work alongside Corpus proxies. They are like the middle class of Corpus - most of them live a relatively comfortable life but due to how the system is built it is very unlikely that a crewman might advance to Elite status, however, it is easy for a crewman to become a debt slave. 

Corpus in-game lore mentions that  crewmen are "purpose bred" implying either a Grineer type cloning or some sort of Brave New World test tube baby deal. Since we are never told how exactly this factoid plays out, but some lesser characters (Bak Vondu) mention family, it is possible that Corpus reproduce "naturally" and do have familial bonds or at least an understanding of their genetic/biological origins.

I would say the difference is that the Elite are the ones with designer test-tube babies, usually sons, conceived via IVF and carried by a surrogate with the specific goal of creating a "perfect child". As the Elite function as aristocrats, it would be natural that their children are raised much like royalty - they have to follow specific etiquette, they are allowed to mingle only with people of equal social status and all of their schooling is done with one goal: to fill out their future role. 

As a canon example I use the fact that Frohd was raising Darvo to be his successor to the Board, however, Darvo left his father and the Corpus lifestyle behind, much to his father's dismay.

What happens to crewmen who miss their bills and taxes one time too many? They become debt-slaves.

Debt slaves are the backbone of Corpus society - they do all the dirty work that even crewmen won't do and that proxies cannot do due to the danger it poses (e.g. work in radioactive areas or with radioactive materials). The debt slaves are the polar opposite of the Elite in that they accrue debts generationally, sinking a single individual so deep in debt they can never hope to elevate themselves even to crewman status, forever doomed to perform thankless labor for practically no pay, as it all goes back to paying the debt they have to their own employer. 

Thankfully, due to select philanthropists and Perrin Sequence efforts, there are cases of debt slaves exiting poverty permanently and either continuing their life as Corpus or converting to Perrin.

The Perrin Sequence in itself is an oddity, as they are an off-shoot of Corpus. They call themselves Perrin, to differentiate from Corpus, however non-Corpus still count them as Corpus but might regard them more warmly, depending on faction. Their goal is to live closer to the ideals that the Founder, Parvos Granum, preached - self reliance where every man and woman is able to make a living with their labor. They are outside of Corpus society for obvious reasons and do not fall into the known hiriearchy. Most Corpus see the average Perrin as a failed Corpus and only regard their president, Ergo Glast, as an actual threat to Corpus society.

I might make a post about my ideas regarding the Sequence some other time~ Another thing is exploring the philosophies of specific characters, as I was inspired by someone else's analysis of Solaris (and Nef Anyo).

Thanks for reading!