Abstract
AbstractIn this paper I use South Africa as a reference point to discuss the company as a juristic person and its relationship to natural persons through the concepts of subjectivity and personhood. I do this in an attempt to reveal that granting of juristic personality as ‘the company’ is not a neutral, organic or inevitable product of the law and economy but a construct symbiotically bound to the colonial state. Underlying this juristic personhood is colonial ideology which perpetuates racialized and gendered poverty and inequality as systemic oppression, in order to deliberately facilitate and maintain conditions of domination and exploitation. Rather than taking the conventional business and human rights starting point that accepts the corporate structure without critique, it is argued that by reorienting away from juristic personality as purportedly ‘neutral’ and reframing the construct, the powers of the company might be curtailed, thereby interrupting these continuing colonial logics.
Highlights
I do this in an attempt to reveal that granting of juristic personality as ‘the company’ is not a neutral, organic or inevitable product of the law and economy but a construct symbiotically bound to the colonial state
While the colonization of South Africa is attributed to the Dutch in 1652, it was executed by the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) which, under Dutch law, was an independent legal person.[52]
I embarked on an interrogation of the legal fiction/construct of juristic personality
Summary
Beginning at the Very Beginning It is trite that corporations have immense power that sometimes rivals that of states.[1]. I wish to complicate this consideration with the observation that the company is not a neutral vehicle, but a repository of power that simultaneously obfuscates its instrumentality in systemic racial and gendered oppression while presenting as a morally neutral profit-seeking actor In this way, it shields otherwise implicated human actors from accountability while allowing them to syphon benefit and displace risk/harm onto vulnerable members of society – the oppressed that it has systematically rendered vulnerable.[15]. I demonstrate that this is gendered and racialized, and that these intersecting forms of oppression are incorporated into the very design of the company, which is rooted in colonial-apartheid ideologies Having painted this picture, I return to the nature of the company as a juristic person and how, as a purportedly ‘neutral’ instrument, it obscures the accountability of the human actors responsible for, and who benefit from, company power while displacing risk and harm onto society
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