Liberation Audio22 Kesä 2023

Corporate personhood, monopoly capital, and the precedent that wasn’t: The 1886 “Santa Clara” case

How do the actual people in charge of corporations manage to remain protected from the consequences of the countless crimes they commit year after year? How is it that when CEOs make clear and obvious decisions that habitually violate every existing worker-won regulation, from the Clean Air Act to the Civil Rights Act, with very few exceptions, they charge the corporation—the “artificial” or “unnatural” person—instead of the CEO—the actual, “natural person” who made those decisions? The legal grounds that corporations have the same protections and rights as “natural persons” is commonly justified by the 1886 Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. As we’ll see, the Court’s decision in the case didn’t establish any precedent for corporate personhood, nor did the Court make any ruling on it. To the extent that the Supreme Court even debated “artificial,” “corporate,” and other kinds of personhood, they did so to facilitate the transition from “free competition” to monopoly capitalism in the country. In this article, we explore the Santa Clara case before turning to debates within the institutions of power in the U.S. over the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. These debates can only be understood if situated within their historical, political, and economic context: the transition to monopoly capital in the U.S. To conclude, we explore the case’s destructive legacy, or the way it was illegitimately used to set precedent for the growth of monopoly capital. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/corporate-personhood-monopoly-capital-and-the-precedent-that-wasnt-the-1866-santa-clara-case/

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Jaksot(364)

Overproduction: The absurdity of suffering amidst surpluses

A popular coal-miner’s riddle from the 1930s summarizes one of capitalism’s most visible and absurd contradictions. After a daughter asks her father why their home is so cold, he tells her they don’t ...

11 Tammi 202517min

Thomas Sankara: Assessing the 3rd year of a revolutionary process

The eighth installment in Liberation School’s series of previously untranslated works by Thomas Sankara is published on the day Sankara was born in 1949. We would like to thank Bruno Jaffré and the ed...

3 Syys 202451min

The class struggle in every commodity: Use value and exchange value

Every year, Pew Research publishes a study on the U.S. population’s political priorities. Their 2024 report shows that, like the previous years, “no single issue stands out after the economy,” with al...

31 Heinä 202415min

Capitalist contradictions and revolutionary struggle: An introduction

Hearing or reading about the “contradictions of capitalism” in an article or at a rally might be intimidating, like a foreign language or a term only a certain group can understand. While the contradi...

12 Huhti 202419min

Capitalist urbanization, climate change, and the need for sponge cities

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2009 report, 2008 was the first time in history that over 50 percent of the world’s population resided in cities instead of rural areas. Because of th...

19 Joulu 202320min

Extradition of Alex Saab: U.S. takes effort to starve Venezuelans to new lows

Note: Following the original publication of this article, Alex Saab was extradited to Miami on October 16th 2021, and remains in prison awaiting an appeal. On March 18, The Cape Verde Supreme Court a...

18 Loka 20238min

From allies to comrades

Despite its association with sovereign nations involved in wartime alliances, the term “ally” has become influential in activist circles on the US left. Attention to debates over what it means to be a...

16 Syys 202326min

Liu Liangmo: China’s anti-imperialist, anti-racist, Christian revolutionary (pt. 2)

Liu Liangmo’s story is as remarkable as it is unknown. An anti-imperialist, pro-Communist Christian, with a significant relationship to the Black Liberation Movement and the Indian Freedom Struggle, L...

26 Elo 202324min