Corporate Magna Carta

The rise of corporate power since the end of the nineteenth century has brought radical and profound changes to both to the fabric of our everyday lives and to that of global geopolitics. It has brought radical and profound changes to our systems of government and the capacity of everyday people to influence the course of our individual and collective destinies.

Since corporate power has been predicated on the seeming working assumption that it is both absolute and sovereign, many of these radical and profound changes have been harmful and destructive ones, coming into conflict as they have with the freedom, rights and wellbeing of people and groups around the world. These by contrast have not been considered sovereign, but rather incidental, an afterthought, an inconvenience, an obstacle to be overcome.

Ideology has been brought into the service of the absolute power of corporations. The ideology of corporate personhood has alleged that corporations are the same as flesh and blood persons, and have the same rights as a result. In doing so, it has established a second master for the law, without establishing why, or the conditions under which the law might preference one master over the other – other than, of course, the ability to leverage their own way.

The ideology of the free market has alleged that the power to buy and sell in the market is the highest form of freedom to which a modern civilized society can aspire, a freedom that corporations as legal persons acting under market conditions have as much right to share in as any other. This it has done despite the damage done to the freedoms of others in the name of market freedoms, due to the overwhelming power of corporations to leverage their own way.

Corporate leveraging has taken the form of, amongst other things, funding the election campaigns of candidates for political office, thereby influencing their behavior while in political office. It has taken the form of using the mass media to promote favourable views and filter facts and information to suit its own purposes. It has taken the form of capturing institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank and using these to impose neoliberal austerity on national governments through shock therapy. It takes the form of compulsion through threats of capital flight.

The fruits of these abuses are increasingly impossible to hide. Around the world the mass of humanity is thrust into deeper and deeper levels of poverty, misery and hardship as wealth is transferred upwards to the increasingly opulent few, while free market ideologues patience, that a rising tide lifts all boats. Contrary to this myth, however, even the IMF now admits that ‘trickle-down’ economics, is a red herring, a phurphy, a chimera. Not only can it not be proven, but the evidence supports the opposite conclusion.

Corporate power does not like to take responsibility for the harm it does to others. Free market ideology is based on a willing confusion of freedom and license; freedom being the ability to do what you want as long as you respect the equal freedom of others, whereas license is doing what you want regardless of the consequences for anyone else. Corporate power likes to confuse license with freedom, to accuse those who call them account for their trespass on the freedoms of others and abuses of the rights of others of trying to abuse their rights and trespass on their freedom, when that is exactly what they are guilty of. It like to play the victim and blame those its victimizes for being in its way.

Corporate power is like a child who only knows its own wants. It is like a narcissistic adult who wants all the rights of personhood and none of the responsibilities, who wants to have their cake and eat it too, who has no sense of boundaries, and who sees those around them purely as extensions of its own will, brought into being to be used and abused as it sees fit. How does such a haughty and brazen power as this exist in a world that dares consider itself civilized, or even yet accuse others of lacking civilized sensibilities?

If it accepts personhood, which it apparently quite covetously does, corporate power should also accept responsibility for respecting the rights and freedoms of all the other persons on the planet, as the option that reflects an understanding of the meaning of right and wrong and that is capable of prioritizing this understanding over its own susceptibility to naked avarice. It should take the opportunity to learn that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too, that in life there is give and take, that there are boundaries, that flesh and blood people have inalienable rights of our own, that freedoms are for us to stand in front of and defend for everyone, rather than hiding behind like cowards as we covet our own privilege.

To that end we invoke a Corporate Magna Carta, a new incarnation of the original English charter drafted in 1215 not only to draw limits to the power of the English king, but to establish that there are limits, that we cannot simply do whatever we like regardless of the consequences for anyone else, that freedom means respecting the equal rights of all. The corporate power of today is a Neo-aristocracy, the world they are building for us a Neo-feudalism. Except this time the power is not national, but global, and it is private, mostly invisible, and almost completely absolute.

So too then is our Corporate Magna Carta global, but we are for everyone. The Corporate Magna Carta is for anyone engaged in organizational, educational or cultural work in pursuit of freedom, equality, social justice and the solidarity of humankind to invoke. Invoking the Corporate Magna Carta demonstrates to ourselves, to those who exploit and oppress us and to everyone watching that we are united in defense of our rights against the absolutism of corporate power, that the power of the many has the potential to be at least as great as the power of money, and that we are not going away.

The more we invoke the Corporate Magna Carta, the more we become visible to each other, to see just how many of us are in the same boat, and the more we educate each other about what is at issue and about what at stake. Corporate power appears neither to care about the rest of us or even about its own longevity; though its unrestrained greed it is destroying the fabric of global society and destroying the capacity of the world to sustain life. As against this we say: no more, you are killing us, and you are killing the planet. We say enough is enough; no more.

The Corporate Magna Carta is where we draw the line. It is not up for negotiation, to be watered down such that it becomes a toothless tiger. It is not to be adopted as a party platform, to be sold down the river at the first opportunity. It is to unite those of us who care enough to do so to defend ours and each other’s rights and freedoms, because we live in society, because we are bound by solidarity, and because ultimately our fate is a collective one.

The Corporate Magna Carta

Human individuals have inalienable rights, including but not limited to the following:
1. the right to exist, to come and go as we see fit so long as we respect the equal rights of others;
2. the right to control the conditions of our own lives;
3. the right to engage in productive activity cooperatively and independently of physical or economic coercion so that we might feed, clothe and house ourselves;
4. the right to control the fruits of our labour as the fundamental guarantor of our economic independence.

The inalienable rights of human individuals exist within the public sphere, which exists outside and beyond the realm of corporate absolutism, of the absolute sovereignty of private corporate power. The public sphere exists because the common good exists, and the common good exists because we are all equal, and no one deserves special privileges that come at the expense of anyone else’s rights, freedoms, health, wellbeing or happiness.

Human beings are all equal in rights because we all possess a human consciousness, one we can easily verify by talking to each other, since language is a human intelligence. We may not all be equal in talents and aptitudes, but rights are neither a talent nor an aptitutude, and they are inalienable.

Around the inalienable rights of human individuals there are boundaries that may not be violated under any circumstances. To violate those boundaries is to place oneself outside of the protection of the moral right, if not the law of the land which often upholds things other than the moral right. To be outside of the protection of the moral right is to lose claims to corporate personhood, and therefore to moral legitimacy, even if upheld by a corrupt law.

Violators of the boundaries protecting the inalienable rights of human individuals will be identified by -their readiness to invoke the assumption that they are beyond criticism, that there is no difference between criticizing their conduct and policies and attacking their rights, freedom or wellbeing, that they are perpetual victims and that those who are doing nothing more than attempting to call them to account for the consequences of their actions are the victimisers.

Since imbalances of wealth are also imbalances of power, the guiding democratic assumption will be that the onus rests on power to justify itself to the individual. If this proof can’t be met – which is to say, convince the other party as opposed to talking to oneself – then the power is illegitimate, and likewise the imbalance of wealth. If the corporate power wants personhood, then it must accept the onus of responsibility for justifying itself to human individuals. If it can’t or won’t do this, then it forfeits legitimacy and the moral right.

The desire to hoard endless value derives from a sickness of mind and a poverty of spirit that, through the power of money drags down everything around it. The sickness of mind gives rise to the pathological and predatory mentality that sees the world and everything and everyone in it as objects whose greatest value resides in its exploitability for profit. The poverty of spirit gives rise to an unwillingness to do anything because of the inherent moral rewards of selfless concern for others, but only if there is something in it for them. The sickness of mind covers for the poverty of spirit by assuming that everyone else is the same, and that if they don’t prey on other people, they will be preyed on in turn. The poverty of spirit covers for the sickness of mind through a general preoccupation with the self, born of an infantile regression that forgets how to tell the difference between the self and others as extensions of one’s narcissistic psychopathy. The main goal of culture and education must be to challenge this psychopathy and the sickness of mind and poverty of spirit that gives rise to it.

If those who exercise the power given to them by the doctrine of corporate personhood have become unbalanced in this way, it is incumbent on them to take responsibility for their sickness and seek appropriate professional help. If those who are sick with a kind of gold fever refuse to help themselves and insist on imposing their sickness of mind and poverty of spirit on the rest of humanity, then they must not act surprised when they find themselves confronted by organized opposition.

In the face of the abuses of corporate power, we must be organized, in our workplaces, in our communities, in our homes. No one is an island; our fates as a species are conjoined. We cannot abuse, exploit and oppress others or tolerate the abuse, exploitation and oppression of others without detracting from our own existence. We must not create new forms of oppression, but rather maintain a basic harmony between the means we employ and the outcomes we desire.

We live on borrowed time. Alternatives to a final descent into geopolitical chaos and ecological Armageddon are still possible, but the longer we wait to find ways to challenge corporate-driven incursions into our rights, freedoms and wellbeing, the harder they will be to recover. And recover them we must, as the only way to bring the world into a more sustainable, just and sane future is to bring it under the directly democratic control of those of us with an interest in that future, which is everybody.