Citizens far from United

I've been absorbed in a discussion chez Kos to a diary by Adam B to a remark made (somewhere else) by Eugene Volokh, in reference to the infamous Citizens United decision, and asking what if Congress were to ban corporate speech (i.e., money) on issues of legislation instead of elections—so that Google, say, would not have been able to mount its protest this week against the loathsome SOPA bill. How would we feel about corporate speech then? It was one of those Talmudic questions to which "Not going to happen" is not an acceptable answer—meant to elicit the underlying principles on which that discorporate entity "the Left" bases its objections.

So the conversation turned quickly to the question of whether corporations are persons [jump]
(not, a participant sternly advised, relevant to Citizens United at all), and at last that of whether money is a form of speech (Buckley v. Valeo, 1976)—questions, in other words, of metaphysics, which are, let's face it, a lot more fun than law (and if that isn't a searing indictment of the law, I don't know what is...). And I had a ghost of an idea that made me want to come back here and think aloud for a while.

Stipulate, then, that a corporation isn't a person. So what is it? Is it some kind of superorganism analogous to a beehive or ant colony, with a will and agency of its own? That was the horror-movie picture I had in my head at the time of Citizens United, a patched-together paper-and-flesh Creature slowly stalking consumers and swallowing them whole, and "speaking" by cutting a check to the PR firm that could interpret its inarticulate groans.

Or is it what Willard Mitt Romney says, making a lot more sense than he's been given credit for on this issue, "people" in the plural—the shareholders, I suppose, who animate it with their entrepreneurial spirit into something not equivalent to the sum of its parts? In which case does it speak at all, or is it those individuals doing the speaking, invested with its authority?

Of course he had no idea what they were asking, and by the same token they had no idea that he wasn't answering.

Leading me to position 3, a little everyday cynical nominalism: Corporations don't exist at all. They are an imaginary construct through which some collectivity of individuals works to accomplish some particular set of purposes—not just the shareholders but the workers too, and not greater than the sum of its parts except in the sense of its legal status (limited liability). Although they may appear to go haywire from time to time (think of an army at war!) it's always human error, or crossed individual purposes, not the intentionality of the Creature itself. Or evil individuals like your Koch brothers, naturally.

Moreover, there is no such thing as corporate speech. It's not in the first place money: money isn't speech the way an amplifier isn't a guitar. It's the little man behind the screen that's doing the talking, and the money that makes it boom so loud, a tool for drowning out the speech of everybody else.

So Buckley is as stupid as you always thought it was, no question about that, and Citizens United is a little stranger. Or maybe a lot stranger. (Narratologically speaking, it's just a mess of conflicting and cross-cutting desires, and it's hard to figure how it ended up doing a singular thing, although it plainly did. Maybe I'll try to tackle it some day.)