Corporate personhood has emerged as one of the more contentious issues of our ongoing economic malaise. In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision fully cranked open the spigots of corporate campaign cash, making political pay-for-play proudly and unabashedly explicit. In August of this year, the normally smooth and weathervanish Mitt Romney ran afoul of the haybale set at the Iowa State Fair when he informed an angry interlocutor that “Corporations are people, my friend.” And of course, the Occupy Wall Street movement is currently pushing the corporate personhood issue front and center, as it becomes undeniably obvious that the normal operation of big business is one of the primary mechanisms for the upward shunting of wealth and power to the infamous 1%.

But the identification of corporations as people has a much longer history in America. Some conflict can be traced to beginnings of our republic, when Hamilton and Jefferson clashed over the desirability of centralized public, private, and banking entities. There was also the festering resentment of the American colonists over the monopolistic and rapacious behavior of various crown corporations. The chests dumped at the Boston Tea Party, remember, belonged to the loathed East India Company, an early form of the corporation called a joint-stock company. But the true landmark events in defining business entities as people came in the form of Supreme Court rulings. Long before Citizens United, the Dartmouth College vs. Woodward decision in 1819 established that, for legal purposes, corporations are artificial persons afforded the same protections as natural citizens. The main issue in Dartmouth was the recognition of corporate charters as private contracts subject to the Contract Clause in Article One of the Constitution. Later, in 1886, the Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad decision further locked in the idea of the corporate person by granting equal protection under the 14^th Amendment, a section of the Constitution originally designed to protect freed slaves.

Since Santa Clara, the matter of corporate personhood has been essentially settled in the eyes of the courts. Certainly, subsequent rulings have allowed private business entities to be regulated by state and federal governments, but this has not eroded their status as individuals vis-à-vis the Constitution. The only real surprise is that it took 120 years between Santa Clara and Citizens United to officially codify the corporation’s dominance over our politics via the legal mechanism of cash as free speech.

With this long legal history, the battle to de-personify corporations is a losing proposition. Taking into consideration existing case law and the death-grip that big business has on our federal political system, the only real solution would be a Constitutional Amendment that explicitly limits protections to natural persons. Needless to say, people shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for this to happen. A much more promising avenue would be for people to become more like corporations. Just as business entities have piggybacked onto legal protections originally designed to help flesh-and-blood citizens, we American mortals should co-opt the strategies and structures that corporations have used to such great effect. We should turn the corporate tools of scale, specialization, centralized purchasing, and limited redundancy to our own domestic advantage. And along the way, we could perhaps find ways to grab legal shelters designed for corporations and bend them to our own benefit.

What would this mean for people to become more like corporations, and why would anyone want to do that? After all, one of the main pleasures of domestic life is that it is not like the workplace. The family is a “haven in a heartless world,” in Christopher Lasch’s memorable phrase. But the point here is not to harness the spirit of the corporation, which is single-minded pursuit of profit, but rather its collective form, which use combination, cooperation, and coordination to maximize efficiency. The simple fact is that the individual and the nuclear family are no longer adequate home-bases from which regular people can approach the wider economy. The old algorithms of work, wage, and household are no longer functional, and no amount of new debt, stimulus, or austerity is going to recreate the fleeting conditions of decades past. In the last 40 years, major trends in technology, globalization, finance and corporate structure have driven the real value of labor way down. Wages and salaries for virtually all sectors have stagnated or declined, except for a very small sliver of technical fields. And even those spheres will probably soon see the same eroding effects, as technology and globalized labor supplies eat into their temporary advantages.

We can talk all we want about job retraining, beefed-up technical education in our schools, or the new Green Economy with its fantastic new careers. But the brute economic fact is that economic growth no longer requires a large percentage of highly-skilled, highly-paid workers. Globalized and technology-based economies can churn out tons of stuff without having millions and millions of engineers and web designers raking in sweet salaries. This declining value of labor input is what helps push all of the surplus value up the chain to the tiny majority that controls larger and larger swaths of our total economy.

Like the long history of corporate personhood, it will not do us any good to swim against these long-term trends. Labor unions are not going to suddenly make a comeback and jack up everyone’s paychecks. Nor are we going to magically transform our gargantuan workforce into an army of bio-engineers and open-source programmers. And the Occupy Wall Street movement, noble as the intention might be, is not going to set off a powderkeg of political discontent that ends up forcing massive redistribution of wealth or FRD-style federal spending.

But what is doable is the formation of small domestic groups or co-ops, larger home-bases from which people can approach the economic and political spheres. Inside these domestic corporations, people can share revenue, combine and centralize their purchasing, specialize their labor participation, and group their investments. They could also pull members out of the outside workforce altogether, bringing functions like child care and eldercare in-house. Lighter forms of these domestic corporations might look something like co-housing, while more committed versions would involve outright cohabitation. The overall saving in housing costs would obviously be maximized in cohabitation models.

Now of course, collective living in domestic corporations would cut directly against the American grain of individualism and nuclear family predominance. But as permanent as our current arrangements might seem, they are really just the temporary flowerings of a style of capitalism that strives to maximize excessive, redundant and, frankly, unnecessary consumption. And there is ample evidence, from exploding legal and illegal drug use, to pervasive personality disorders, to chronic American obesity, that our current lifestyle is profoundly unsatisfying and unsettling.

The social support structures of the past are all but gone. Labor unions, small town economies, fraternal organizations, and traditional churches have all been eroded by the relentless march of turbo-capitalism and the hyper-individualized consumption patterns left in its wake. It is clear that beleaguered and exhausted citizens and workers need some sort of new platform from which they can intelligently and efficiently engage the workplace, the marketplace, and the political sphere. In a word, people just need some space – space to breathe, move, experiment and innovate. If we try to go it alone, as individuals, couples or families, we will never get that socioeconomic space opened up, and our levels of anxiety and depression will continue to mount. But if we can leverage the collective tools of the corporation to our own personal advantage as flesh and blood people, then new vistas of opportunity could open up for a more fully human economy and society.