CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

A Hard Reset for Corporate Power

General Motors headquarters, Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Earlier this month, Hawaii became the first state in the country to pass legislation aiming to get corporate money out of elections by using the law of business organizations. The groups supporting this innovative approach see it as part of a broader Corporate Power Reset movement. They want to stop artificial entities created by the law “from spending money or contributing anything of value to influence candidate elections or ballot measures.” They say that corporate charters, which are a state-granted special privilege, should not contemplate a right to interfere in electoral politics.

The legal theory is this: corporations are creatures of state law. States create corporate charters and define the powers corporations possess. Rather than directly regulating election spending, proponents argue states can instead rewrite their corporate codes to clarify that corporations were never granted the authority to engage in electoral spending in the first place.

The legal theory is this: corporations are creatures of state law. States create corporate charters and define the powers corporations possess. Rather than directly regulating election spending, proponents argue states can instead rewrite their corporate codes to clarify that corporations were never granted the authority to engage in electoral spending in the first place.

But the real importance of the Hawaii legislation and the Corporate Power Reset movement, as I see it, goes far beyond elections and campaign contributions. It goes to a fact at the heart of our political and economic system: the state is the author of corporate power. And if the corporate form is the product of the state, it is worth asking what other powers and privileges have been concocted by political power on behalf of economic power. This movement therefore invites a much broader and deeper reconsideration of the corporate economy as a whole. If this corporate system and its history were better understood, the billionaire and trillionaire ruling class would no longer be able to take cover under the benign language of liberalism.

Contemporary political conversations talk a lot about the problem of money in politics, but they almost never acknowledge that modern corporate power did not arise from a system of liberal rights and open competition. Even the basic corporate privilege of limited liability is far from a natural right. The state-capital complex is fundamentally a system for the manufacture of asymmetric relationships and material inequalities. The Corporate Power Reset movement restarts a long-running conversation about where power is actually located and encountered. One of the under-discussed features of our system, whatever its name, is the formal state’s delegation of much of the coercive governance of day-to-day life. Americans today most often encounter the power of the state in their relationships with their employers. The power of corporations within this system is not a withdrawal of political power, and it should not be mistaken for one. It is a highly effective obscuring of political power within the language of law.

The corporate form is designed to be anti-competitive, to create special advantages. The origins of the corporation lie in state-created monopolies and in colonial violence and extraction, and the modern corporation arises alongside several other similar legal fictions created to concentrate capital and insulate its holders........

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