Why corporate personhood matters and what it means

An interview with Molly Morgan, a member of the leadership team for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom's campaign to abolish corporate personhood

CITIZENS WORKING: What does it mean to talk about corporate personhood? Is the problem that corporations are treated like people or is the problem that corporations are not treated like regular people? For example, corporate criminals are rarely punished like street criminals.

MOLLY MORGAN: Corporations were given the legal rights of people for the purpose of thwarting democracy and maintaining minority rule. That was the drive behind legal strategies of railroad barons and lawyers, and it has worked well. But unlike a human being engaging in corporate crime, the corporation can’t go to jail. It’s not a thing, it’s just an abstraction and that’s part of the reason that the strategy of corporate personhood was a brilliant one - they created this artificial thing that could be endowed with any kind of powers and any kind of characteristics. Corporations can live forever and live in many nations at once and cut off parts of themselves and this is the entity they have given legal rights and personhood to.

CW: Corporate reform is a mainstream political issue these days, but there are a growing number of people who think we have to go deeper and look at some of the fundamental reasons behind why corporations got so powerful. Can you explain how looking at the legal doctrine of corporate personhood would accomplish that?

MM: We appreciate people looking at reform, but we think it needs to go much deeper. We’re using corporate personhood as a way to go deeper into changing the system of corporate power. We’re trying to examine our society and see what’s happened as a result of decisions made, to give people a better handle on the history. We chose corporate personhood because it was not difficult for the average person to understand and we’re hoping that’s a way to get people to look at the system more broadly and deeply, once they see how corporate personhood came to be and how it allowed corporations to gain so much wealth and power, people will look at the whole system and see what can we do differently to get different outcomes.

CW: Corporate personhood is not something many people are talking about right now. How do you build a movement and make it part of the debate?

MM: Making it part of the debate is the first step, just letting people know it exists. Most people have never heard of corporate personhood. One of the things we’ve done is to design a basic flyer that explains corporate personhood in the simplest ways, so people can start to understand what that is, and people can start to talk about it, on the street, on the train, with their family. A century ago, corporate personhood was something people all over the country talked about. This part of the campaign is relatively new.

CW: One of the critiques against altering corporate personhood is that legal protections for corporations are necessary to conduct business and without them, the economy would grind to a halt. What do you think would happen if the constitution were altered so that corporations no longer enjoyed the same legal protections as natural persons?

MM: This kind of scare mongering is a routine threat used by capitalists and power mongers for centuries, that the economy would collapse was used to say we can’t get rid of slavery, can’t give workers a 10 hour working day, and we can’t have trade unions. This is a hollow argument. If the constitution were altered by amendment, the next day things wouldn’t immediately change. People with a constitutional amendment would be able to challenge laws and practices on the books, the ways that corporations participate in lawsuits and public processes would change. People, generally speaking, have an interest in living a satisfying life and living in healthy communities and the business world is part of that. The vast majority of business is small business, the percentage that giant corporations employ is a single digit, and small businesses don’t have any real benefits from corporate personhood.