Corporate Personality and Human Commodification - Part 3 (of 3)
Political Reflections about Soulless Artificial Legal Beings
Part 1 explained how the legal concept of “corporate person” swallowed up “natural persons” — human beings.
Part 2 explained how the amalgamation of “corporate persons” and “natural persons” produced a commodified society.
Now, I present some political reflections.
Property, Inequality, Government
As we saw in Part 2, the Santa Clara case bent Adam Smith’s individualist economic theories to protect corporations, despite Smith’s clear antagonism to the corporate form of business.
But Smith had more to say in his Inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations:
“Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.” …
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
The 1879 federal circuit court decision in Southern Pacific Railroad Co. v. Orton illustrates Smith’s statements.
The court ruled in favor of the railroad against a homesteader’s challenge to the railroad’s claim of land title.
The judge, Lorenzo Sawyer, was one of the two circuit judges who decided that corporations have 14th Amendment rights in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case four years later. [See Parts 1 and 2].
In the Orton case, Judge Sawyer stated the facts as follows:
The defendant homesteader, Pierpont Orton (whose first name Sawyer never uses):
…“possessed all the statutory qualifications required to entitle him to pre-empt a portion of the public lands, with his family [for a homestead]….”
….“[he] settled upon the tract…where he has ever since resided and cultivated …, performing the requisite acts to acquire a pre-emption right.”
…“[he] offered to file a pre-emption claim on the land, but his offer was rejected by …the land-office.”
Sawyer said the case came to the court after “a hearing …by order of the Secretary of the Interior…[which] rendered a decision in [Orton’s] favor, from which [the railroad] appealed….”
Sawyer rejected the authority of the Secretary of the Interior, saying:
“There is no authority …for the Secretary of the Interior to … [open the tract to homesteaders]”
Sawyer then broached the topic of corporate personhood, the concept he would ramify in the Santa Clara case in 1883.
He said:.
“Creation of a corporation is the bringing into being of an artificial person….”
“To create, or bring into being, a corporation …[is to create] a special denomination… vested…with the capacity of perpetual succession, and of acting… as a single individual.”
“When such a being is brought into existence, a … legal entity, a person, has been created….”
“Corporations, being once created, … have the physical capacity, through their officers, to do anything that a natural person may do…[and] having powers and privileges not possessed by individuals”
Sawyer said that corporate persons are beholden only to their creators:
“The United States has done all in its power to vest the [land] title in the company. The state has not complained of any misuse or abuse of the corporate powers of the company. All parties in interest being satisfied, strangers cannot complain.”
“Whether a corporation has violated its charter by misuse or abuse of its corporate franchise by usurpation of powers, is a question between it and the state alone.”
“The defendant [is] a mere stranger, without any interest whatever, [and] cannot raise [a] question….”
Sawyer concluded:
Orton “was a naked trespasser without right, and without the ability to acquire any right….”
The rejection of Orton’s homestead claim quickly increased tensions between the railroad and the Settlers' League formed in 1878 by would-be homesteaders at Mussel Slough, near Hanford, CA, to challenge the railroad.
On May 11, 1880, almost five months to the day following the Orton decision, the Southern Pacific asked US marshal Alonzo Poole [with three other men] to dispossess a number of would-be homesteaders.
An argument erupted at the scene, followed by gunfire. Two railroad men and five homesteaders were killed.
Five Leaguers were arrested and convicted on charges of resisting a US marshal.1
“Do not a number of the Mussell Slough settlers lie in Santa Clara jail today because a great railroad corporation set its envious eyes on soil which they had turned from desert into garden, and they in their madness tried to resist ejectment?”
Henry George, The Land Question,1891 (1911)
The corporate person is worse than a monster.
What Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein tried and died for — the creation of an unnatural being by scientific conjuring — the doctors of jurisprudence accomplished with legal legerdemain.
One crucial difference between Dr. Frankenstein’s creation and the creation of the law is that the “monster” had feelings and compassion:
I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept ... over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants....
For a long time I could not conceive ... why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing....
The strange system of human society was explained to me. I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble blood. …
What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.
In sharp contrast, Justice Field and Judge Sawyer said in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad:
It is impossible to conceive of a corporation suffering an injury or reaping a benefit.... The legal entity, the metaphysical being, that is called a corporation, cannot feel.…
Perhaps it is the notion that a corporation has no soul (from Pope Innocent IV, lifted into English law by Sir Edward Coke and Sir William Blackstone) that has allowed the corporate person to so far outstrip its human origins that it now threatens to consume the earth in a mad war for global domination.
Fascism is the most thorough swallowing up of human beings into “legal personality”.
In 1931, Giuseppe Bottai, an important Italian fascist theorist and editor of the Critica Fascista magazine, explained the meaning of the “corporative state”.
Bottai wrote:
The Fascist State…had to act so as to have in its presence only individuals and groups whose position had been declared legal.
Individuals thus acquired the character of citizens, and their groups, the character of "juridical persons" — legal associations….
But those whom the recognized syndicates represent are not mere citizens…. Their position is…more specifically that of passive "juridical persons".
In a 2021 essay, Professor Laura Cerasi, University of Venice, explored how fascist theory saw the “corporative state” as a “totalitarian democracy”.
She said:
Passive, obedient and hierarchically unified… the distinctive brand of fascist totalitarian democracy was grounded in the negative qualities attributed to the ‘people’…
The ‘people’…were no longer seen as the sum of individuals…, but as a complete and perfect fusion of citizens ... that achieved their potential only in the state….
The ‘identifying of the people with the state’ accomplished through fascism …[was] considered as a ‘higher phase of the democratic idea’, and ultimately a ‘totalitarian and authentic idea of democracy’
The aim of corporate / state consolidation in US politics seems increasingly similar to the Fascist ideal of achieving a ‘passive, obedient, and hierarchically unified’ population.
The societal lockdown instituted in 2020 in the name of ‘public health’ brought to a fever pitch a negative conception of ‘the people’, through various campaigns to ‘protect’ people from ‘misinformation’ and enforce ‘social distancing’.
The US mode differs from Fascism by avoiding the label ‘totalitarian’ while relying solely on ‘saving democracy’ by authoritarian methods.
Corporate media promotes the image that life is the province of corporate persons.
"Be yourself," say the ads. "Buy this (mass-produced product)."
"We bring good things to life" (General Electric)
The Ultimate Guide to Emotional Marketing:
Dove’s marketing …focus[es] on ensuring every woman feels beautiful, making their product seem like a source of many emotions — acceptance, serenity, optimism, self-love.
Old Spice use[s] the “ideal image”…to insinuate that you (or your man, ladies) could be as handsome, accomplished, and suave as the actor in the commercial … all by purchasing and using the Old Spice product.
In a July 2016 article in Journal of Advertising, Professor Mark Deuze, University of Amsterdam, wrote:
Our lives [are] lived in media, rather than with media.
The media world and the system world have collapsed into the lifeworld.
Effective reflection on the role of media in our life is complicated because the lifeworld is the world we experience most directly, instantly, and without reservation.
All is not well in the collapsed world of commodified life.
The January-February 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review published an interview titled, “Advertising Makes Us Unhappy”.
The introduction said:
The University of Warwick’s Andrew Oswald and his team compared survey data on the life satisfaction of more than 900,000 citizens of 27 European countries from 1980 to 2011 with data on annual advertising spending in those nations over the same period.
The researchers found an inverse connection between the two.
The higher a country’s ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later.
Their conclusion: Advertising makes us unhappy.
Beware of calls for “social responsibility” from asocial “corporate persons”
A debate has been happening since at least the mid-20th century between those who say corporations should accept responsibility for social issues and problems and those who say the proper ‘social responsibility’ of a corporation is to turn social problems into economic opportunities.
An essay in the September 2016 issue of Journal of Cleaner Production by two scholars from the University of Groningen, Netherlands, dived into the discussion, focusing on global corporations adjusting “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR) policies to accommodate the rights of Indigenous peoples to “Free, Prior and Informed Consent” (FPIC).
They pointed out that:
FPIC is being deployed by companies to do whatever they want “while making this seem more socially acceptable”.
The notion of ‘corporate citizenship’ [is]… an attempt to legitimize the dominant position of corporations within society.
[Corporate Responsibility] issues [now arise] in the ‘post-national constellation’ — a form of society in which governments are no longer the only or most-powerful actors.
The authors concluded by saying:
The question … remains … whether … Indigenous rights will only be safeguarded insofar as they are compatible with a corporation's economic incentives.
The real question remains why humans should entrust “social responsibilities” of any sort to soulless, unfeeling monsters.
J.L Brown, The Mussell Slough Tragedy (1958), presents the story in great detail, relying on local contemporary accounts and document archives. The Mussell Slough fight is the climax of Frank Norris’ 1903 fictional work, The Octopus, A story of California.
Very interesting❤️❤️❤️
After reading this it occurred to me that corporate personhood, as fake as it is, is a mask for real, greedy persons to hide behind, so thanks, Peter, for exposing some of their shenanigans. As to "and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many..." has a correlation with the taking of resources, especially from Native lands, b/c the word "Indigenous", while widely used and accepted by many, is a reflection of "indigence", or as have heard a Native friend express it: Indigenous is like 'those poor people over there'.