Abolish corporate personhood.

• Author: Edwards, Jan
• Position: Thinking Politically

Five years ago, members of the US section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) began studying and researching how corporations became so powerful. Inspired by the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) we discovered the hidden history of "corporate personhood"--the legal phenomenon that provides constitutional protections to corporations. Not only is corporate personhood a key component of corporate power, it is one of the greatest threats to democracy that we have ever known. Most people, however, have never even heard of it. In September, 2001, WILPF launched a campaign to abolish corporate personhood. The goal of this campaign is to delegitimize the institution of the corporation as a political entity. The following article is by WILPF members Jan Edwards and Molly Morgan.

Colonies, constitutions and corporation

The history of the United States could be told as the story of who is, and who is not, a person under law. Women, poor people, slaves, and even corporations had long been considered persons for purposes of following the law. This is because early laws were written "No person shall ..." Corporate lawyers had tried to avoid these laws by claiming corporations were not persons and therefore not required to follow the law. So it was decided that for purposes of following the law, corporations were persons. This allowed corporations to sue and be sued in court among other things. But corporations were not persons with rights in the law, and neither were women, slaves, indentured servants, or poor people. We know some of the ongoing story of human beings' struggle to gain the rights of persons under law, but how did corporations gain these rights?

To understand the phenomenon of corporate personhood, we start by looking at the foundation of US law, the Constitution of the United States of America. This document was written by 55 gentlemen cleverly described by one historian as "the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed." Many of them wrote and spoke at length about the inability of the common people to be self-governing.

The word "democracy" appears nowhere in the Constitution. The Constitution only mentions two entities: We the People and the government. We delegate some of our power to the government in order to perform tasks we want government to do. In a representative democracy, this system should work just fine.

The problem is that the phrase "We the People" is not defined in the Constitution. In 1787, in order to be considered one of "We the People" and have rights in the Constitution, you had to be an adult male with white skin and a certain amount of property. This narrowed "We the People" down to about 10% of the population. Those who owned property, including human property, were very clear that this was rule by the minority.

So here was the first definition of who gets to be a person in the United States. Ninety percent of the people, including all the immigrants, indentured servants, slaves, minors, Native Americans, women, and people who did not own property (the poor), were, legally, not "persons."

Without using the words "slave" or "slavery," the Constitution ensures that even if slaves get to free soil, their status as property remains the same. This is just one of the clauses defining property in the Constitution. It also defines contracts, labor, commerce, money, copyright, and war as the province of the federal government. So the Constitution, the foundation of all US law, was not written to protect people--it was written to protect property. The Constitution does contain some protection for people in Section 9, but the Bill of Rights is the concentration of rights for We the People.

Constitutional fallacies

Most people believe that the Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights, guarantees our rights to freedom of speech, religion, and press, to peaceably assemble, and so forth. People of all political stripes say this. But the truth is, it does no such thing. Almost all of our constitutional protections are expressed as the absence of a negative rather than the presence of a positive...