Corporations as social persons

 

Although the person of the human being serves as a fundamental narrative reference, it has not been the most active economically in this mythical plane , a role that has corresponded to the legal person of commercial, industrial and financial companies, which we could group under the general term of corporations , a metaphor that suggests the formation of a physical body to which to attribute a set of economic activities. Of course, since corporations are groups of human beings, the actions of corporations are carried out by men, as is the case with collective social persons (tribes, villages, cities, states), but corporations are more active than other social persons from the moment they determine the economic order in a way that the individual subject cannot. Its modern legal origin occurs in the fictional person, which appears in the 13th century (in the ecclesiastical sphere) with different forms of non-individual social grouping  (collegium, universitas). Precedents can be found in the commercial functioning of city-states, ruled by an elite who used the city as a whole, as a platform, much in the way that, for example, the British East India Company used British society  for its economic control over India . 

Despite their fictional origins, corporations are not fictional social persons any more than other social persons may be. Their identity narratives are inextricably linked to mythical-ritual axes and their economic actions are perfectly congruent with those of other social persons. 

Corporations , like any other social person, cannot construct their own mythical- ritual axis , but rather define their personal narrative based on the economic and primitive relationships in which they find themselves, in a complex mimetic relationship . The corporate citizen narrative, which now presents them as a member committed to the welfare their society, has emerged not from the legal actions they carry out within a mythical-ritual axis (litigating, paying taxes), but only from those more general actions, linked to the most basic emotions and that allow easy harmonization with different axes, in order to be transnational. Thus, for example, corporations that in the West maintain a narrative of gender equality and freedom , cannot base their identity merely on such a narrative if they want to act in societies whose mythical-ritual axes exclude the equality and freedom of the gender person (including homosexual persons, and the different combinations and varieties of sexual orientation), in which these narratives are openly denied, and even punishable by law. The minimal narrative of transnational identity is the narrative of globalization, whose economic foundation is the same as the expansion that led cities to become states, analogous to that of any biological population, from bacteria to mammals, and whose primitive determinations are the narratives of the universality of human political law .