corporations as people

[J Cullen]

>Uday Mohan wrote:
>
>>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

Generally, the populist movement was and is an effort to curb the 
power of corporations. The Supreme Court in the 1880s and 1890s took 
away most of the authority of states to regulate corporations, and 
the Santa Clara decision, in which the Court found, almost in an 
offhand manner and without hearing arguments on that issue, that 
corporations were considered persons under the law and were thus 
entitled to civil rights and due process. Among other things, this 
enabled corporations to claim protection under the 14th Amendment and 
other constitutional provisions that were designed to protect the 
rights of real people. In the ensuing years the courts found an 
increasing number of rights for corporations at the same time it was 
endorsing restrictions on the rights of colored people, labor unions 
and rabble rousers. Nowadays corporations have many advantages over 
natural persons and none of the liabilities.

Some in the populist movement would like to abolish corporations 
altogether, limit the length of their charters or otherwise limit 
their activities, seeking smaller-scale and locally accountable 
corporations; others (and I count myself among this number) would 
like to make corporations more accountable to states, communities and 
"stakeholders," such as workers and neighbors of industrial plants. I 
think there should be a popular mobilization to force some 
public-interest tradeoff for the limitation of liability of 
corporations and their shareholders. That probably would require a 
new Supreme Court to overturn the Santa Clara decision and all its 
illegitimate grandchildren, or a constitutional amendment to declare 
that corporations are not entitled to the same considerations as 
natural persons.

For more on the "personhood" of corporations, see the Program on 
Corporations, Law and Democracy, http://www.poclad.org/ or the 
Progressive Populist web site at http://www.populist.com.

-- Jim Cullen, Editor

    The Progressive Populist
-- 
-----------------------------------
JAMES M. CULLEN
PO Box 150517, Austin TX 78715-0517
Email: jcullen at austin.rr.com
-----------------------------------