>Doug, a friend sent me the question below. Have you written about the
>issue? Any suggestions from you or others about sources? Thanks, Uday
>
>Does Doug Henwood have any opinion on the Supreme Court case entitled (I
>believe) Santa Clara county vs. Union Pacific Railroad? I think it's
>from around
>1894 or so....it's the one where supposedly the court ruled that
>corporations
>had the same rights as persons before the law...
Nope, never wrote specifically about this decision, but I've got some problems with the legalistic critique of the corporation that usually cites things such as this. I'm never clear on what's being counterpoised to "The Corporation" - some form of state or collective ownership, or a smaller-scale capitalist ownership, or what. I don't see how you can organize the complex production of complex stuff across time and space without something like the corporate form. This critique seems to focus on the specific legal arrangement rather than the class relations it embodies. And it seems to offer only a legalistic challenge to the existence of corporate capital, rather than any kind of popular mobilization. What's the point? To get the Supreme Court to realize it made a terrible mistake 107 years ago?
Doug