Human Rights after Corporate Personhood offers a rich overview of current debates, and seeks to transcend the "outrage response" often found in public discourse and corporate legal theory. Through ...
THEY WILL REPLACE U.S.: AI AND THE HALLUCINATIONS OF CORPORATIONS
ABSTRACT: I address AI as a manifestation of the corporate form in U.S. culture, and as it relates to the dreams of (or ascribed to) fascism and corporations. The merger of state and corporate power represents the trajectory of the corporation—to take over the state; elide accountability, empathy, transparency and (human) agency; and trade places with (and finally eliminate) people. The merger of state and corporate AI—a final stage of corporate speech, networking, and legal ontology—facilitates the takeover of human personhood by corporate personhood, and I trace the effects of that process in the systemic inversion of norms. Corporate personhood is part of a zero-sum game in which rights, speech, and identities are appropriated from people. When AI technology is grafted onto political systems and social media, the ensuing hallucinations are nightmares. The corporation always has been a posthuman simulacrum of persons, and its AI, in its wake, dreams of eliminating workers and people altogether.
The corporation—a return to origins?
This paper contributes to contemporary debates in political theory about the power of business corporations by offering a genealogy of the corporation through the lens of a series of historical mutations of the corporate form. Originally, there were two corporate forms, both non-profit: member corporations (today's associations) and property corporations (today's charitable foundations). The contemporary business corporation arguably is a hybrid of both of these original forms, introducing unique commercial features (shares with profit distribution rights that are transferable). These commercial features are largely responsible for the corporation's extractive nature, that is, its tendency to prey on non-shareholder interests. The future of the corporation may well lie in a partial return to the two original non-profit forms. Two corporate forms developed in the nineteenth century can provide the format for such a return: cooperatives (which reinforce the idea of membership) and foundation-owned companies. The cooperative structure is a halfway house between a business corporation and a member corporation (association), and in a parallel fashion, a foundation-owned company is a halfway house between a business corporation and a property corporation (foundation). If we want to reduce corporations’ extractive nature, facilitating the spread of cooperatives and foundation-owned companies seems the way forward.
We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
What kind of sanctions could keep a non-human corporation in check?
Shareholder Democracy Is a Corporate Governance Myth That Won’t Die
In a new article, we challenge one of corporate law’s most persistent narratives: the concept of “shareholder democracy.” With people on opposing sides of recent high-profile battles at compa…
Democratic Ownership Funds: Creating Shared Wealth and Power
Recent decades have seen a rapid and little-discussed transformation in corporate ownership structure, with vital consequences for company behaviour and inequality.
AI and the Dangerous Fiction of ‘All Lawful Use’
Dunstan Allison-Hope and Iain Levine argue that human rights commitments are essential for all companies selling their products to governments worldwide.
Pluralistic: Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment (19 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance.
Neoliberal Fascism as the Endpoint of Casino Capitalism
This article explores neoliberal fascism as a distinctive political formation within the current historical moment. In doing so, it first analyzes neoliberalism as a project that has since the 1970s destroyed all the commanding institutions of democracy while consolidating power in the hands of a financial elite. In addition, it analyzes neoliberalism as a movement, that produces and legitimates massive economic inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism creates the conditions for right wing extremists to mobilize the anger of white disenfranchised working class populations by both appealing to the economic injustices they experience while simultaneously blaming and directing their frustrations towards non-white minority groups such as immigrants, blacks, and Muslims. It is precisely this merging of the social, political, and economic hardships produced by neoliberal capitalism and its appropriation of the discourse of white supremacy to divert attention from its worst excesses and failures that a neoliberal fascism is produced. Â More specifically, I argue that in the face of 40 years of neoliberalism with its production of massive inequality, a frontal attack on the welfare state, and the erosion of civic institutions and culture, there has been a resurgence of fascist discourses and a populist fascist political movement. Neoliberal fascism represents the conjoining of the most extreme elements of casino capitalism with the discourses of racial cleansing, and white nationalism. The article concludes by examining how atomization, fear, and anxiety have become the breeding grounds of fascism and what it means to revive education as a central tenet of politics so as to address the task of not simply resisting oppressive economic structures, but also what it means to engage in the massive challenge of changing individual and collective consciousness as a precondition for collective struggle and the building of new social movements. Author Biography Henry Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy
Accountable Capitalism Act
Political commentator Matthew Yglesias wrote that "Warren's plan starts from the premise that corporations that claim the legal rights of personhood should be legally required to accept the moral obligations of personhood."[2] The New York Times columnist David Leonhardt called the proposal "the most intriguing policy idea to come out of the early 2020 campaign".[3]
Corporations and the Nazi regime
It is apparent, 90 years after the beginnings of the Nazi period, that large corporations played an important and lamentable role in Nazi power and administration, and the implementation of the atr…
Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein, and the Cost of Civility-Theater Liberalism
“Talking across divides” is laudable—until it becomes a license to launder antidemocratic and dehumanizing ideas.
Pivot to People: It’s Time to Build the New Economy
Today’s calls for ethical, humane, responsible, regulated and beneficial technology, compounded with venture capital’s virtue signaling in…
Opinion | The Age of Interdisciplinary Slop
The corporate jargon of change masks the decimation of intellectual life.
How Artist Corporations became law
The Artist Corporation (A-Corp) is a new legal business form designed specifically for artists and creators. It simplifies shared ownership, protects creative missions and intellectual property, and creates infrastructure for collaboration and future benefits like group healthcare. This piece explains how the A-Corp came to be. For an
Anthropic takes shot at consulting industry in joint venture with Wall Street giants | Fortune
The enterprise services firm with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman puts Anthropic in direct competition with McKinsey and the like.
