Cato Ad Infinito

[Charles Brown]

I am glad Carrol has mentioned the form of
constitutional amendment as a way to approach
the legal concept of corporation. I think it
would be necessary to include in the Amendment
for a right to a decent job and living that I have
mentioned before, a provision abolishing the
legal doctrine of the corporation as a person.
Doug asks what to substitute. I would say a 
legal form that is a democratic structure, i.e.
with the membership as a whole having 
sovereignty , not an elite minoirity on a board
of directors or clipping coupons,
with the workers at an enterprise as part of the membership
of the entity, lets call it a collective or soviet. 
As for the bean counting, experts dedicated
to the interests of the workers in the enterprise
and the whole class would have to be trained up 
to do it and be loyal to the producers.

The Constitutional Amendment Carrol speaks of
would have to include an amendment of an
amendment. That is the 28th Amendment would
amend the 5th Amendment such that jobs and
a decent living of the majority in the collective
would take precedence over the private property
rights of any actual person, and of course the
socialecconmic enterprise would no longer be
a person, with right to "just" compensation for
taking of private property.

In other words, for example, a plant could not be closed
without the enterprise taking steps to 
put those laid off in new jobs or income.
The means of production would be 
owned and controlled in the interest of
the producers who use those means
of production.

It is important to emphasize this legal method of
revolution, (even though we know that the 
bourgeoisie will probably use violence before
they would allow a legal revolution) because
communists are always accused of being
terrorists and undemocratic. The Constitutional
Amendment process is the most democratic
in the bourgeois system (which is not saying much)
and it is peaceful and eminently legal.

Charles Brown

   Detroit


>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu> 08/14 11:33 AM >>>
Doug writes: "It is pretty surreal that a corporation should be treated
as a person, but, on the other hand, I'm not sure what the folks who
make a big deal out of this want to see in its place. Any suggestions?"

This surreality of corporations can (ought to) figure prominently in
anti-capitalist agitation, and a more coherent left with the mass basis
might even (if the proper technical hook could be devised) organize
campaigns of mass action around a demand to cut the privileges of
corporations. (Analogue: say the anti-war movement had launched
petitions for a constitutional convention to write an article forbidding
the use of U.S. military outside the 48 (not 50) states.)

Such a constitutional change is no more (and of course no less)
inconceivable than through legal means changing the status of
constitutions. Foreign use of troops and privileges of corporations are
NOT policies that a capitalist regime can choose or reject. They are
part of the very fabric of a capitalist regime, and to eliminate them is
inseparable from the elimination of capitalism.

So it would be silly to seriously want to "replace" corporate "human
rights" with something else; but properly formulated and embodied in a
program of mass struggle, the critique of these rights can help
illuminate the inner destructiveness of capitalism.

Carrol