it's quite the opposite. individualism doesn't make any sense in the context of socialized production. corporate personhood is conceptually a collectivist concept, rooted around the idea that the entire corporation exists as a singular entity, rather than as a collection of individuals. abolishing corporate personhood would be a return to liberal individualism. pretty much everybody across all spectrums is terribly confused on the topic...
the function of corporate personhood as a "legal fiction" was simply to provide standing. let's go back to before corporate personhood. let's say a corporation sold you something with false advertising, or endangered your health. you would have no legal remedy to reverse the situation that involved the corporation itself because you couldn't sue because they didn't have standing because they weren't people. rather, you'd have to sue the individual within the corporation that was responsible. this was considered impossible, due to the socialization of production (which is just a fancy way to say that the nature of modern production is not reductionist). it neither made sense to sue an individual worker, nor a middle manager, nor a corporate director. so, we constructed this fantasy that the corporation itself is an entity.
that itself is not a problem. without the existence of corporate personhood, many important environmental and aboriginal cases could not have gone forward at all, let alone amounted in victory. the left doesn't really want to abolish this. it's just infamously (and stereotypically) clueless about law.
rather, the thing the left should seek to abolish is the other side of corporate personhood, which is limited liability. see, we live in a class system. so, when they set up this fantasy of a corporation as a person, they naturally set up a legal shield around investors. certain people will make lame excuses about how this is designed to encourage risk in investment. even if this is true, and it isn't, it was just the investor class blatantly legislating itself above the law, we shouldn't want to encourage investments that are risky because they're environmentally damaging or investments that risk people's savings. it's institutional insanity.
...but what's going to happen if you abolish corporate personhood is that the worker on the oil rig making shit wages is going to become legally liable for any mistakes he might make. collectivists of any kind should strenuously oppose this!
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Bushrod Rust Johnson
What a load of collectivist, progressive shit. Corporations have the same rights as people because the individual persons who are part of corporations do not give up their individual rights just because they form groups. The law does not say and has never said that corporations are literal people.
George Merkert
Corporations are collections of people working together to achieve goals but they're not the least bit democratic. "One person one vote" is the democratic ideal but that ideal has no place in governance of a corporation. Corporations are governed by boards of directors whose charters demand that they pursue profit as their only goal. That leaves out a raft of important goals like providing clean water for all citizens, administering justice, securing our country's borders. The law does, in fact, give corporations literal Constitutional rights. Notably, the right of free speech which has been interpreted by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United ruling to mean that corporations have the right to give unlimited amounts of financial support to any political cause or public official. That means that the small groups of people (Boards of Directors) that govern corporations and who can command control of many million$ use that money to influence whatever political issue they choose. That means corporations – whose wealth comes from the collective efforts of many people but whose wealth is controlled by only a very few – have vastly more power to influence our country's political process than any one individual US citizen can have. That violates the democratic principal of one person one vote. With which part of this thinking do you disagree?
Bushrod Rust Johnson
+George Merkert
The reason why constitutional rights, such as speech, should apply to corporations is that denying them any right would effectively also deny an individual's rights. When an organization "speaks", it is actually an individual choosing to speak or a collection of individuals choosing to speak. Preventing anyone from spending money on causes they support also results denying individuals or organizations of individuals the means to communicate or organize. Anyone should be allowed to spend as much of their own money, including any money they have been authorized by others to spend, as they want on any cause they support. If this results in undesirable political outcomes, then the real problem is the stupid powers granted to government. This includes all economic and social issues. Without these powers, there would be much less reason to spend money on political causes. If someone does not like what a corporation or other organization is doing with its money, that person can choose not to invest or do business with the organization. Once you voluntarily give your money away, it is no longer your money. And you are still free to vote however you like, how a corporation spends its money actually has no discernible physical effect on anyone's ability to vote.
George Merkert
Thanks for your answer but I don't understand how denying a corporation a right denies an individual a right. A corporate executive when speaking for his/her organization is speaking with the power of the collection of individuals that make up that organization. Executives hew to the ideas that the Board of Directors of the corporation have authorized the executive to promote. The BOD represents the interests of the organization as a whole and not the interests of any individual within the corporation. Individuals with less power in the corporation may have very different ideas than the official line of the organization that they work for and depend on for a paycheck. So I don't see how when a corporation speaks it's speaking for an individual. If I'm missing your point, please clarify so I understand.
Bushrod Rust Johnson
+George Merkert
Quite simply, there are no exceptions in the first amendment. Corporations don't actually speak unless at least one real, individual person speaks. The views of a collection of individuals are still also the views of at least one or two individual individuals, and any of them has the right to speak or refuse to speak as an individual or as a representative or in support of the views that a collection of individuals may or may not hold. If any member of a formal organization feels strongly enough against the views of the majority of the other members, they are free to attempt to persuade them otherwise or are free to stop supporting it, working for it, giving money to it, or owning a part of it. The other members should be free to send them packing, too. Nobody is entitled to be a part of any private voluntary social structure or force the other members to run it a certain way.
deathtokoalas
it's quite the opposite. individualism doesn't make any sense in the context of socialized production. corporate personhood is conceptually a collectivist concept, rooted around the idea that the entire corporation exists as a singular entity, rather than as a collection of individuals. abolishing corporate personhood would be a return to liberal individualism. pretty much everybody across all spectrums is terribly confused on the topic...
the function of corporate personhood as a "legal fiction" was simply to provide standing. let's go back to before corporate personhood. let's say a corporation sold you something with false advertising, or endangered your health. you would have no legal remedy to reverse the situation that involved the corporation itself because you couldn't sue because they didn't have standing because they weren't people. rather, you'd have to sue the individual within the corporation that was responsible. this was considered impossible, due to the socialization of production (which is just a fancy way to say that the nature of modern production is not reductionist). it neither made sense to sue an individual worker, nor a middle manager, nor a corporate director. so, we constructed this fantasy that the corporation itself is an entity.
that itself is not a problem. without the existence of corporate personhood, many important environmental and aboriginal cases could not have gone forward at all, let alone amounted in victory. the left doesn't really want to abolish this. it's just infamously (and stereotypically) clueless about law.
rather, the thing the left should seek to abolish is the other side of corporate personhood, which is limited liability. see, we live in a class system. so, when they set up this fantasy of a corporation as a person, they naturally set up a legal shield around investors. certain people will make lame excuses about how this is designed to encourage risk in investment. even if this is true, and it isn't, it was just the investor class blatantly legislating itself above the law, we shouldn't want to encourage investments that are risky because they're environmentally damaging or investments that risk people's savings. it's institutional insanity.
...but what's going to happen if you abolish corporate personhood is that the worker on the oil rig making shit wages is going to become legally liable for any mistakes he might make. collectivists of any kind should strenuously oppose this!
Bushrod Rust Johnson
+deathtokoalas
Actually, in limited liability, individual employees, board members, and investors still can be held legally liable for fuckups or deliberate wrongdoings that can be traced back to them. Limited liability protects individuals who weren't personally responsible for a problem, but investors and owners still risk losing up to their entire investment. Speaking in terms of individuals making a personal choice to include themselves in or leave an entity consisting of a collection of other individuals at will does make sense, this is not the same thing as "collectivism" of positive-rights based rights, responsibilities, and entitlements. When I use the word "collectivism", anyway, I am talking about people telling other people what to do for intentions (but often not results) of a subjective "greater good".
deathtokoalas
+Bushrod Rust Johnson
"Limited liability protects individuals who weren't personally responsible for a problem" .
..and this is equivalent to the investor class legislating itself above the law. if you profit from organized crime, that's called money laundering. if you take part in it through financial aid, that's called abetting a crime. yet, shareholders are protected from accusations of the sort through the concept of limited liability. shareholders are guilty by means of enabling and should be prosecuted strenuously for it. this would provide a strong disincentive for investing in unethical companies, which would prevent them from existing. it's the thing that leftists actually want, even if they lack the education to articulate it. it's a neat trick to use a concept of collectivism that isn't remotely relevant in context. collectivism is a dozen different things depending upon how one applies it. it can be a type of political organization, sure. yet, that's not what we're talking about. it's obviously certainly not "individualist" to gather a group of people together that function as a unity and declare them a singular entity - a corps, or a machine. a holistic whole. a hierarchical (unfortunately) hive. politically, that's called "corporatism", which is a type of political collectivism, and forms the ideological underpinning of our concepts of corporate legal personhood. right-wing liberals and individualists oppose this idea, by definition. of course, one can also have right-wing collectivists (like nazis or stalinists) but i don't wish to commit the error you did.
Bushrod Rust Johnson
+deathtokoalas
Money laundering and abetting involve intent to support a crime. Limited liability doesn't protect people who directly enable or cause something through deliberate actions or negligence. It provides a limit to how much an employee, officer, or investor can be held responsible for not being able to babysit every fucking thing every moment. Companies already have plenty of incentive not to operate unethically because of the risk to owners and investors, and potential investors. Anyway, you know limited liability isn't going anywhere and you can't do anything about it. How is it not individualist for an individual to choose if he or she wants to associate with other individuals, as opposed to being forced to associate with others (what collectivism actually is)? Corporatism is what happens when you give government powers to set policies favorable to one business or another- which is what really enables most of whatever your hangups with THE CORPORASHUNS are. I'm not sure you can be sure you didn't commit a bunch of errors. Lets get one thing clear: collectivism is using force to tell other people what's "good" for "everyone".
deathtokoalas
+Bushrod Rust Johnson
i'll say you're providing a consistently right-wing idea of responsibility, but you're not addressing the core of the argument, which is that leftists do indeed think that shareholders should be liable for the consequences of their investments. investing in exxon comes with a high level of foresight that they're going to likely be involved in both negligent and genocidal behaviour. it ought to be the shareholder's responsibility to do that research before they invest and, if they don't, they ought to be prosecuted for it when it happens. the legality is something that would swing on a shift in philosophy. i mean, you're deriving your ideas from liberal axioms, but if we were to reject those liberal axioms then other conclusions would follow. obviously, the current incentive systems aren't working very well. corporatism is not at all what you think it is. you're using a colloquial definition that aligns more properly with a type of mercantilism. corporatism came out of an idea to merge guilds with the state by creating monopolies across industries. that worked itself out in the fascist era through the creation of large trusts that were under the control of state departments. i don't have the interest to explain this much further, other than to say you're not even close to it and you need to read up on the topic if you want to converse about it. mercantilism and corporatism are not related ideas, but you seem to have confused them as equal. none of this has anything to do with my basic observation that supporting corporate personhood is viewing the corporation as a holistic entity (a collectivist idea) and that rejecting corporate personhood is viewing the corporation as a collection of individuals (a liberal idea). to extrapolate it further through analogy: if these concepts were properly understood, thatcher would have said that corporate personhood could not exist because a corporation is merely a collection of people, and all the opposition to thatcher would have gasped and said she was out to lunch about it.
Bushrod Rust Johnson
+deathtokoalas
"Genocidal behaviour", prosecuting shareholders, your simplistic view of things in terms of "left" versus "right"... I can see you are a well rounded and level headed person to have a discussion with. If someone within a company really did initiate some form of genocide, it should be really easy to hold that person accountable. Even the shareholders would have a valid moral and monetary claim against them. You are fucking hyperbolic and ridiculous.
deathtokoalas
+Bushrod Rust Johnson
not at all. it's relatively common for mining companies in latin america to literally commit crimes that are banned under the rome convention, which was a convention on war crimes. mass rape. burning entire villages. i claim that investors share responsibility for these crimes by enabling them through their investment. and i'd argue that the directors of these companies should be prosecuted as war criminals.
Bushrod Rust Johnson
+deathtokoalas
This is shit that happens with easily manipulable and corrupt governments in third world shitholes that don't respect individual liberty, markets, and property rights. It doesn't matter how companies are set up. They get away with shit.
