The Corporation as a Political Battleground: The Privatization and Economization of the Corporation

The corporation stands at the centre of the global economy. Corporations account for a dominant percentage of the world’s biggest economies, wield enormous political and economic power, and are leading drivers of the climate crisis. A number of debates and discussions about how to manage, govern, curb or transform corporations have sprouted in recent years. The climate crisis has only exacerbated these discussions, as corporations are to an increasing degree ascribed responsibility for the sustainable transition. However, we argue, it is a feature of the corporate form that it is a legal technology designed to evade responsibility and to shift accountability, liability and profit between legal and natural persons. Furthermore, successive political struggles over the corporate form and its purpose among economists, legal scholars and philosophers have successfully exempted the corporation from social responsibility, accountability, constituencies other than shareholders and purposes other than profitmaking by conceptualizing the corporation as an exclusively private, economic, market-based actor. Making the corporation more accountable, responsible and democratic, or imbuing it with a societal purpose, requires an understanding both of the corporation as a political battlefield and of the political struggles over the nature and purpose of the corporation through which the corporation has been exempted from societal purpose. This is especially pertinent in the context of the climate crisis and the sustainable transition, as scholars, activists and politicians alike all ascribe to the corporation the type of responsibility that it has been institutionally designed to evade.