corporations as people

Ian Murray seamus2001 at home.com
Fri Apr 20 11:58:11 PDT 2001


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

***************** Well, what came first the capitalist firm[s] or capitalist class relations? Given the ig-norance of the legal history of capitalism, there are some virtues of opening a red-green critique of the theory of the firm. I thought the whole point of past critiques of capitalism was that one could separate the issue of organizing the technologies of production across time and space from exploitative forms of property and contract.

Surely in the hyperspace of possible enterprise organizations and their p&c "rights" there are ones that don't give rise to internal oligarchies of power, mangled accountability to the creators of said wealth and the larger social community in which the enterprise is embedded, as well as pay ratios of 200+ to 1? Educating each other on this issue is a great entry point/window -albeit one of many- into looking at contemporary capitalism and contemporary tort and property law, worplace rights issues, different accounting protocols, the firm as a flow of ecological materials/energy etc. Climbing that learning curve will help sustain and broaden the critique of the Westphalian trade model and the BW institutions. Let a thousand corporate campaigns bloom and let's see how they link up and generate more systemic thinking about Capitalism and the possibilities for transmutation. Clearly people are willing to mobilize; after this weekend let's see how the dialogue develops, there's plenty of room in our growing tent.

Ian



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