corporations as people

Michael Perelman michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Fri Apr 20 20:11:13 PDT 2001


I have no idea where Ian found this one, but decades before this judge, Henry Carey defended corporations using Fourierist language, describing the corp. as an agent of cooperation, meaning that the employees were cooperating.

On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 12:07:42PM -0700, Ian Murray wrote:
>
>
> > Ian Murray wrote:
> >
> > >"The problem...of restraining corporate and individual combinations
> > >and monopolies,
> > >is the problem of restraining a species of communism; it is communism against
> > >communism, and the question is, how far communism ought to go in restraining
> > >communism. The general rule is that it ought not to go at all. The
> > >general rule is
> > >that commerce should be free...
> > >[Judge Seymour Thompson, 1891]
> >
> > So restraining the corporation is a bad thing, right? A kind of anti-communism?
> >
> > Doug
> ****************************
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm
> Three cardinal facts of capitalist production:
>
> 1) Concentration of means of production in few hands, whereby they cease to appear as
> the property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production capacities.
> Even if initially they are the private property of capitalists. These are the
> trustees of bourgeois society, but they pocket all the proceeds of this trusteeship.
>
> 2) Organisation of labour itself into social labour: through co-operation, division
> of labour, and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences.
>
> In these two senses, the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property and
> private labour, even though in contradictory forms.
>
> 3) Creation of the world-market.
>
> The stupendous productivity developing under the capitalist mode of production
> relative to population, and the increase, if not in the same proportion, of
> capital-values (not just of their material substance), which grow much more rapidly
> than the population, contradict the basis, which constantly narrows in relation to
> the expanding wealth, and for which all this immense productiveness works. They also
> contradict the conditions under which this swelling capital augments its value. Hence
> the crises.
>
> **************************
> 1] says it all, change the forms of trusteeship; there are folks like Peter Brown and
> Edith Brown-Weiss that look at the idea of global trusts in novel ways. Brian Barry
> has some interesting ideas in the last part of Democracy Power and Justice that are
> very intriguing as well. Let's do some hard utopistics on this stuff. We don't need
> to run away from organizational ecologies that have 200,000 people working in them by
> any means. Whiskers clearly thought they harbored within themselves a propensity for
> different forms of asset ownership/stewardship as well as governance. And with the
> capitalists already showing a willingness to abandon those aspects of the
> nation-state they don't like we should one-up them with different models. Hell the
> world market is consolodating itself and with citizens mobilizing across time and
> space a lot of shit is up for grabs again; there is enormous opportunity.....
>
> Ian
>

-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu



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