Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Democracy: The Mainstreaming of a Radical Discourse

• In Event: 121 - Section on Marxist Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Marxist Research

Abstract

Though deeply embedded in corporate law, corporate personhood lay obscure from public view and marginal to mainstream legal discourse until at least the late 1990s. Indeed, many lawyers remained unaware of the Dartmouth or Santa Clara decisions, nevermind Kasky, until Citizens United v. FEC in 2010. Yet in 2012, Mitt Romney felt compelled to argue that, “corporations are people, my friend,” when confronted by a Move to Amend activist in Iowa. In this paper, the author shows that the emergence of corporate personhood as a matter of hot debate was not the result of some undirected organic process, but rather, of deliberate reframing and strategic organizing. Activists and public intellectuals inspired by the work of Richard Grossman and the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) attempted, beginning in the early 1990s, to help Americans “rethink the corporation, rethink democracy” in order to assert popular sovereignty over economic and other institutions that “govern our lives.” The author draws on extensive interviews and archival research in showing how POCLAD and associated social movement organizations developed the corporate personhood frame in public use today and situates POCLAD’s work within a broader contemporaneous democratic turn by social movement actors in which democracy became not just a means, but an end.

Author

• Ben Manski, University of California, Santa Barbara