Re: Marx, law and the corporate form

[boddhisatva <foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

                In respone to bandt@xxxxxxxx,


        
        I am very interested in the subject you've brought up.  I feel you
may have been a little abrupt in dismissing the legal conception of ownership
from the superstructure.  An insight that helped me into this question is
that the legal form of the corporation is a protection, or a more complete
protection of the individuals engaging in an activity, rather than a creation
of an entity.  It's a subtle distinction, but important.  The corporate owner
is not given powers  (in liberal/bourgeois concept of rights) but
protections.  Free to arrange his affairs in a corporation before any such
legal entity existed, the capitalist found protection from the possible
pitfalls in existing bougeois law. Clever bourgeois lawyers found a new
technology of arraying and defining existing rights so that business could be
conducted smoothly.  It is important that the dangers to the corporate
owner's interests don't come from the crown or the workers, but from his
fellow capitalist.  The legal entities of business are technological
developments for parsing out the chips just the same as the abacus, the
computer, the bank.  They are exchange technologies.


        Thus they fall under the same categoriy as all other superstructure
technological developments that find their way into the means of production.




        peace

i


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