Thursday, August 9, 2012

Adolf A. Berle

We are well underway toward recognition that property used in production must conform to conceptions of civilization worked out through democratic processes of American constitutional government. Few American enterprises, and no large corporations, can take the view that their plants, tools and organizations are their own, and that they can do what they please with their own. There is increasing recognition of the fact that collective operations, and those predominantly conducted by large corporations, are like operations carried on by the state itself. Corporations are essentially political constructs. Their perpetual life, their capacity to accumulate tens of billions of assets, and to draw profit from their production and their sales, has made them part of the service of supply of the United States. Informally they are an adjunct of the state itself. The “active”— that is, productive —property of an organization increasingly is prevented from invading personality and freedom, from discriminating in employment and service against categories of men, in recklessly using their market control.
Passive property— notably, stock— increasingly loses its “capital” function. It becomes primarily a method for distributing liquid wealth and a channel for distributing income whose accumulation for capital purposes is not required. The corporation may, and indeed is expected to, retain earnings for the maintenance and enlargement of its capital plant and operations. The stockholder’s right to spend the income from or use the liquid value of his shares as he pleases is guarded as a defense of his right to order his own life.

1 comment:

  1. The Modern Corporation and Private Property
    by Adolf Augustus Berle and Gardiner Coit Means



    Property, Production and Revolution
    A Preface to the Revised Edition
    Conclusion
    by Adolf A. Berle
    Columbia University, December, 1967

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