Part IV: Reclaiming Our Systems

Part IV: Reclaiming Our Systems, Our Humanity, and the Future

We’ve seen the damage. A legal fiction with no conscience now has immense control over how we eat, how we heal, and how we live.

In this series, I’ve tried to trace how corporate personhood mutated into a monster with more rights and power than any single citizen. We’ve looked at how this structure turned our food system into a machine that profits from hunger and disease, and how it hijacked our health system to monetise sickness.

Now, I want to get to the heart of the matter: what it means to “kill the corporation,” and why I believe we must.

To be clear, this is not a call for chaos or to destroy all business. It is a call to dismantle a legal structure—the modern, shareholder-serving corporation—that I have come to see as incompatible with democracy, ecological survival, and basic human dignity.

The truth is, we cannot fix the future until we unmake the corporation as we know it.

The Corporation Was Built to Be Soulless

It’s not that corporations are uniquely evil. It’s that they are designed to be indifferent. And indifference, when it’s legally protected and economically incentivised, becomes destructive by default.

The modern for-profit corporation, as chartered under current law, has one primary goal: to maximise shareholder value.

That’s it. Not to serve the public will, steward the environment, or care for communities. Just to grow profit.

Even if the products cause harm, the factories pollute, or the lobbying corrupts democracy, it doesn’t matter. The executive has a legal duty to return value to shareholders.

When you give this entity the rights of a person—but none of the soul, body, or mortality—what you get is an immortal sociopath with a wallet and a legal team.

This isn’t a flaw in the system. This is the design.

Democracy vs. the Corporation

In my eyes, the corporation has become a rival to democratic governance.

It writes laws through lobbying. It floods elections with money. It outlasts court rulings, regulations, and even governments. It can move capital across borders, dodge taxes, and shape the stories we hear in the media.

And because it is legally a “person,” it can do all this while pretending to be just another citizen—a single voice in the crowd, not the one holding the levers of power.

I don’t believe democracy can survive while corporations are allowed to purchase outcomes, dictate public priorities, and evade responsibility behind the veil of legal personhood. We don’t elect CEOs or vote at shareholder meetings. If corporations are people, then we have created a ruling class of immortal entities who never die, never feel, and never have to answer to the living.

What It Means to Kill the Corporation

To “kill the corporation” is to end the specific legal and economic architecture that gives it this unnatural power.

For me, that means:

• Abolishing corporate personhood. Constitutional rights should belong to human beings only.
• Ending shareholder primacy. We need to redefine the purpose of business to include workers, communities, and the planet—not just stockholders.
• Revoking corporate charters for causing harm. A charter is a privilege, not a right. Any corporation causing systemic harm should lose its legal status to operate.
• Creating criminal accountability for executives. Limited liability should not mean infinite immunity. If a corporation causes harm, real people must be held responsible.
• Taxing and regulating excessive power. No single entity should be allowed to control markets or narratives. We should look to decentralise or dismantle them.

What Comes Next: New Models, Ancient Wisdom

Ending the corporate form as we know it doesn’t mean ending enterprise. It means building alternatives—models that serve life, not just capital.

• Worker cooperatives that share ownership and decision-making.
• Public-benefit corporations required by law to prioritise social impact.
• Community land trusts that protect local food systems and housing.
• Universal public services like healthcare and water, free from private profiteering.
• Local, regenerative economies rooted in resilience and cooperation.

None of this is utopian; much of it already exists. What holds these models back is the dominance of the corporate form, which crushes alternatives by design. We need to tip the balance—not in favour of a particular ideology, but in favour of our collective survival.

Because This Is About Survival

The modern corporation, at its current scale and power, is, in my opinion, incompatible with:

• A stable climate.
• A functioning democracy.
• A fair economy.
• Public health.
• Human sovereignty.

We are being consumed by a machine that we built and that many of us now worship as natural. But it is not natural. It is a construct. And what was constructed by law can be dismantled by law.

We made it. We can unmake it.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Future

This is the end of my series, but it’s the beginning of the work.

I’ve tried to trace the root of a thousand modern crises to a single, foundational error: giving the rights, power, and permanence of a person to a non-human, non-living structure, and allowing it to rule our world.

To “kill the corporation” is to reclaim:

• Food as a human right.
• Health as a public good.
• Work as a source of dignity, not servitude.
• Democracy as rule by the people—not by legal fictions with billion-dollar megaphones.

We don’t need a revolution of fire. We need a revolution of law, of structure, and of imagination.

The corporation is not a person.
It has no heart.
It has no soul.
It has no place in deciding the fate of our species.

It is time we write it out of our future.