Apex
Press, 2001; 336 pp. 

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Review
by Tom Stephens 

    The
members of POCLAD, the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy,
have compiled a superb book of essays from the late 1990s, entitled
Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy, for people to read
and for transnational corporations to suffer such consequences.
The taboo subject of the book is what contributor Greg Coleridge
succinctly describes as “the illegitimate authority of corporations
to govern, and the dangers this poses to democracy.” For
political activists in the service of social justice, labor rights,
environmental quality, and peace, it’s a tremendous breath
of fresh air. 

If
you read this book, you’ll learn from corporate anthropologist
Jane Anne Morris that social justice activists too often “follow
the gambling addiction model,” doing the “same old thing”
over and over again and fooling ourselves that it might work next
time, largely because our minds have been colonized by corporations.
How much more comfortable, to respond to every e-mail petition sent
your way, write your congressional representatives and local newspaper
editors regularly, and send checks to NGOs, rather than reading
and learning about the unsightly transnational 900- pound gorillas
running our world into the ground. 

Richard
Grossman is a co-founder of POCLAD, and author or co-author of one-third
of the 72 essays in the book. If you read this book, he may undermine
most of what you thought you knew about regulatory and administrative
laws (what he calls “a stacked deck, granting corporations
legal clout while disadvantaging peoples, communities and nature”).
Grossman also describes some of the broadest consequences, when
“activists toe the line of managerial prerogative and other
claimed corporate property rights,” which may fundamentally
change the way you think about the nature of the society we live
in and what should be done about it: “Today corporations exercise
governing roles as they direct massive amounts of capital, control
jobs, production, trade, technology and property. They dominate
our elections, write and pass our laws, educate our judges in jurisprudence,
shape public policy debate.”  

The
essays are grouped into eight parts, from “Starting Point”
to “Point of Departure.” There is considerable overlap,
and repeated discussion of a few controversial and interrelated
concepts, such as corporate “personhood” under the Fourteenth
Amendment, the judicial transformation of American law to favor
property rights in the late 19th century, and the key relationship
between “regulating” corporate behavior and “defining”
corporations. Amid this flowering of history, theory, and the politics
of law, the editor has tried to organize the diverse viewpoints
and subject matter in a logical progression from abstract ideas
to concrete actions. 

This
book contains over 300 pages of critical analysis regarding corporate
history and ideology,  a wealth of thought-provoking information,
and the essential gist of the POCLAD program. Some of the most important
essays include: 

• “Taking
  Care of Business; Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation,”
  by Richard L. Gross- man and Frank T. Adams, is
  an extended excerpt from the authors’ 1993 pamphlet of the
  same name 
• “Corporations
  and the Public Interest; The Development of Property Concepts
  in the U.S. ‘Just Us’ System,” by Karen Coulter,
  does an outstanding job of reframing concepts like “property,”
  which are usually taken for granted, although in reality their
  meaning and importance are fundamental, contested legal and political
  issues for generation after generation 
• “Revoking
  the Corporation,” by Richard L. Grossman, sounds a call for
  “citizen authority over the subordinate entity which is the
  modern, giant corporation.”  
• “Asserting
  Democratic Control Over Corporations; A Call to Lawyers,”
  by Richard L. Grossman and Ward Morehouse, runs down some
  of the prominent corporate legal doctrines that have enabled corporate
  domination of democracy, and calls on peoples’ lawyers to
  strategically “resist corporate harm-doing in ways which
  begin to weaken all corporations” 
• “Some Lessons
  Learned,” by POCLAD, condenses their several years
  of education and agitation into seven broad points underlying
  all the essays in the book 

The
whole project stems from a sophisticated understanding of power,
what it is, where it comes from, how to get, keep and use it, and
how important it is, that is too often neglected by social justice
activists and our organizations. It comes down to who has the effective
power to define what is important, and therefore to decide what
will be done, in an astonishingly broad array of cultural, economic,
political, and legal contexts.