Corporations Killed Our Commons

A California-based group called Friends of the Commons defines the commons as "the vast realms of nature and society that we inherit together and must pass on, undiminished, to our children." Or as many Native Americans put it, to the "seventh generation."

The "commons" is as old as the Earth itself but the term has come into use again today as a helpful way to think about various aspects of nature and society that are increasingly under assault by giant corporations.Vast realms of nature and society – Jane Anne Morris, a writer with the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy, points out that the commons is everything except what we the people choose not to include. In other words, the commons properly derives from decisions made by us, collectively – which presumes democratic self-governance.

It certainly wasn't a collective decision in the enclosures of the 15th, 16th & 17th centuries, when the English commons – lands worked "in common" by peasants for centuries – were fenced so that the landed gentry could pursue single crops for profit, like grain or sheep for wool.

There's a protest doggerel that sums up the morality associated with the commons from that time: "The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from the common. But the greater villain the law lets loose, who steals the common from the goose."

The creations of Enclosures, which has been called an old-fashioned word for privatization, helped spark the Cromwellian revolution that deposed and beheaded King Charles I in 1642.

Today, privatization refers to turning over to corporations – now considered the "private sector" – aspects of nature and society previously under the jurisdiction of government – the "public sector," with its authority ostensibly rooted in us, the public. The vast realms of nature and society are being increasingly privatized for the primary benefit of the few. However, it's not about good or bad people, good or bad corporations. It's about who governs.

My thesis here is that the fundamental commons today is We the People's promised authority to govern, the power to make decisions about matters affecting nature and society. There are two historical streams in U.S. history in this regard: one is about the decentralization of power, public decision- making, self-governance – about democracy; the other is about the concentration of power, private decision-making, governance by the few and the corporation as their governing institution. The fundamental impact of corporations on the commons, is the theft of our right of self-governance, a usurpation that enables the myriad harms and assaults on nature and society.

So what is a corporation? Ambrose Bierce describes it in The Devil's Dictionary as "an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility." It's called limited liability, a hallmark of the modern corporation, but 'twas not always thus.

During the colonial period, the royal chartered corporations – trading companies like the East India and Hudson Bay Companies – were extensions of the English monarch, institutions not only of commerce but of governance. It was through these corporations and the chartered crown colonies, like Massachusetts Bay and Virginia, that the colonists most directly felt the weight of English control.

So it's logical that once independent from England, the founders put corporations on a short leash, through state-issued charters that defined their purpose, length of capitalization and operation, made shareholders liable for harms done, and prohibited corporations from owning other corporations.

For example, the Pennsylvania legislature declared in 1834: "The corporation is just what the incorporating act makes it. It is the creature of the law and may be moulded to any shape and for any purpose that the legislature may deem most conducive for the general good."