I interject comments below.
>>> Tom Lehman <uswa12 at lorainccc.edu> 06/03/99 06:28PM >>>
I don't doubt for a minute that there is a lot of fuzzy thinking in the whole
corporate charter debate. Then again fuzzy thinking is a way of life in
corporatized America. The average person out there in the street has no idea
that corporate charters even exist. Or that one of the main thrusts of
American economy history and political economy has been the battle between
people and corporations; going all the way back to joint stock companies
chartered by the British monarchy.
Charles: I was reading how the joint stock companies opened it up so that the burgher-owner might move further and further from actually managing the enterprises as with the original more hands on, micromanagers of old , the bourgeoisie when they were a more vigorous actually working class. They become outside shareholders , as Doug says, or absentee coupon clippers.
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People in general have no idea that state legislatures charter corporations or set standards by which corporations may obtain licenses to operate in a state.
Charles: Delware is infamous in mid-20th Century monopoly capital as the state that chartered most of the biggies. The Duponts evidently had things set up nice for the rest of the ruling class, GM and all them.
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To most folks corporations are a given and not even a creation of the peoples representatives. They have no idea how corporations came into existence or what role they should play in the society.
Many states once had strong corporate chartering processes and unique ways to control corporations; some were ruled out of existence by the federal judicial process.
Charles: This is the original "deregulation" that Reaganism put the latest finishing touches on. The Fifth Amendment prohibits taking private property without "just" compensation, the Takings Clause. This is part of the Bill of Rights of course, so it has been operating for a long time to erode public control of private enterprise ("property") as a "taking" of that private property. Then there was that Substantive Due Process movement of the late 1800's which was to deregulate the corps. The bourgeoisie have been continually trying to "liberate" themselves from "Big Government" throughout U.S. history. This is why "libertarianism", rightwing anarchism, are ideological petit servants of the big corps. the big burghers. They are like attack dogs against "guvment" in general, and the corps reap the benefits by getting themselves deregulated.
Many if not most other unique methods of control by charter were lobbied out of existancece by the corporate interests. Even in violation of the law on the books at the time.
Either we control the corporations or they control us.
Charles: Give us liberty or give the corps. death.
I think you are implying that the states should regulate and control the enterprise form with the interests of the public and working masses of people's interest given priority over the narrow private interests of a few shareholders and executive's fortune hunting. This would be the reorganization of production aimed at. In other words, the states should actually exercise their "police powers" to protect the Peoples' health, safety and welfare with respect to the organization of production. And the laws of the land should be rewritten to make this clear and enforceable.
I'd say the best method for the latter is Constitutional Amendment.
Charles Brown
Doug Henwood wrote:
> James Farmelant wrote:
>
> >Don't such reformers fall into the error of confusing property
> >relations with the social relations of production?
>
> Yeah, and as far as I can tell they don't really think much about the
> organization of production. Their model seems to be an unexamined nostalgia
> for an era of small-scale competitive capitalism, an entity whose actual
> existence must be seriously doubted. Weren't early small enterprises
> actually local monopolies, and didn't it take larger firms with national
> scope to develop something approaching competitive markets? I don't see how
> you can carry on sophisticated production across time & space without
> something like the enterprise form - not one owned by outside shareholders,
> necessarily, or run by despotic managers, of course. But when I said that,
> Alex Cockburn denounced me as an apologist for capital.
>
> Doug