Chapter 4: The System of Economic Law
4.4. Corporate Organization Law
The second pillar of communist economic law is the corporate organization law, which defines the nature of communist corporate organizations. Corporate organization law is roughly equivalent to the company law in capitalist legal systems, but in a communist society, there are of course no profit-making companies such as joint-stock companies.
Therefore, the legal nature of a communist corporate organization is an incorporated association, but it is not a profit-making corporation, but a non-profit production corporation. A production corporation is granted legal personality, and certain rights are guaranteed within the scope of the law.
A major feature of the communist corporate organization law is that it includes the labor organization law. In other words, since the basic principle of the operation of a communist corporate organization is worker self-management or labor-management joint decision-making, an internal labor organization corresponding to this is permanently established.
The specific types of communist corporate organizations have already been discussed in my On Communism (see my article), so here I will only summarize them from a legal perspective.
Communist corporate organizations can be roughly divided into socially owned enterprise and self-managed enterprise, the former being production business organization and the latter production cooperative. In terms of operation, large-scale production business organization is equivalent to co-determined enterprise. Planned economy is limited to the former socially owned enterprise-production business organization.
The latter, self-managed enterprise-production cooperative, engages in off-plan free production activities and also engage in barter, so in that sense it is similar to a commercial enterprise, but as mentioned above, it is not profit-making in the legal sense of distributing profits to shareholders as the owners of the company, as is the case with a joint stock company.
An intermediate form between these two is the production business corporation. This is similar to a production cooperative in that it engages in off-plan production, but because its large scale makes self-management technically difficult, it is a large enterprise with a co-determined internal structure similar to a production business organization.
There is also the cooperative labor group, which is a small business organization smaller than a production cooperative, but this is not a corporation but a group of workers. However, as long as it is officially registered, when conducting business, the entity is conveniently given status as a single legal group similar to a corporation.
👉The table of contents so far is here.
👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.
