“Born Bad” by Derrick Jensen
February 22nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Limited liability corporations first came into use during the 18th and 19th centuries. They were designed to deal with the myriad of limits exceeded by our culture’s social and economic system.
The Railroads and other early corporations were simply too big and too technical to be built or insured by the incorporator’s investments alone. When corporations failed, as they often did, the incorporators did not have the wealth to cover the damage. No one did. Thus, a limit was placed on the investor’s liability, on the amount of damage for which they could be held liable.
Limited liability has allowed several generations of corporation owners to economically, psychologically, and legally ignore the limits of toxics, fisheries depletion, debt, and so on.
To expect corporations to function any differently is to engage in make-believe. We may as well expect a clock to cook, a car to give birth, or a gun to plant flowers. The specific and explicit function of for-profit corporations is to amass wealth. The function is not to guarantee that children are raised in environments free of toxic chemicals, nor to respect the autonomy or existence of indigenous peoples, not to protect the vocational or personal integrity of workers, nor to design safe modes of transportation, nor to support life on this planet. Nor is the function to serve communities. It never has been and never will be.
To expect corporations to do anything other than amass wealth is to ignore our culture’s entire history, current practices, current power structure and its system of rewards. It is to ignore everything we know about behavior modification: we reward those investing in or running corporations for what they do, and can therefore expect them to do it again. To expect those who hide behind corporate shields to do otherwise is delusional.
Limited liability corporations are institutions created explicitly to separate humans from the effects of their actions–making them, by definition, inhuman and inhumane. To the degree that we desire to live in a human and humane world–and, really, to the degree that we wish to survive–limited liabilty corporations need to be eliminated.
[This article first appeared in the March 2003 issue of the Ecologist.]
