Campaign Finance Ethics: A Marxist Perspective on Citizens United

Introduction: The Citizens United Decision and Its Ethical Stakes

In January 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision regarding fundamental aspects of campaign finance law, raising serious political, economic, and ethical questions about the nature of freedom, expression, and representation in the United States. The decision arose from arguments about whether a film produced by a politically aligned nonprofit could be banned under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms. The Court effectively ruled that corporations could not be limited in their ability to advertise for or against political candidates using funds from their own treasury. This ruling overturned two previous decisions that had constrained corporate political influence and opened the door to full-scale media campaigns from corporations and unions seeking to advance their interests through the political system.

Perhaps more importantly, the decision upheld the controversial view that corporations are persons — not just legally but politically — and that money is a form of speech protected under the First Amendment. This view carries ethical implications alongside its political and legal ones, because it effectively neutralizes the political power of the individual — the very thing the Bill of Rights was designed to protect. By allowing corporations to deploy money as political expression in amounts far beyond the reach of the average citizen, the Court's decision perpetuates and aggravates the oppression of the weak by the powerful, and in the long run undermines the very freedom it ostensibly seeks to protect.

In order to understand the ethical problems underlying the Supreme Court's decision, and campaign financing in general, we must first consider the political and economic rights at stake. The Founding Fathers were deeply concerned with ensuring political expression for all citizens — though their definition of "citizen" was far more limited than it is today. They were equally concerned with economic freedom; indeed, it was economic oppression by the British government that fueled most of the revolutionary sentiment among the colonies. In devising the Constitution and its accompanying Bill of Rights, they attempted to forge a government that would be broad in representing the wishes of the populace and providing for the common good, yet limited in its reach over an individual's personal, political, and economic freedoms.

Political and Economic Rights in the American Constitutional Framework

The First Amendment, protecting free practice of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government, was a key component of this endeavor. While it appears simple and straightforward, its practical application has been deeply problematic — especially as regards freedom of speech. In a key Supreme Court decision in 1976, the Court ruled that money is a form of speech and that limiting the quantity of money spent on political expression is equivalent to limiting the quantity of expression itself — in other words, a violation of the First Amendment (Kairys, 2010). This is a troubling conclusion if one reads the First Amendment as ensuring that all citizens have an equal right to voice their political opinions. If most citizens generally have an equal ability to speak, then equal political voice should follow. But this reasoning collapses when "speech" is extended to mean "money." In a capitalist economy, people do not have equal amounts of money, and therefore do not have equal access to political expression. Those with more money have a bigger — potentially far bigger — voice.

Beyond questions about what the First Amendment protects, there are also questions about who it protects. There is no doubt that the drafters of the Bill of Rights had individuals in mind when crafting the amendments. Since then, however, another political and legal entity has come into being: the corporation. The concept of corporate personhood emerged in the nineteenth century, as it became clear that corporations required a legal presence in order to enter into contracts, pay taxes, and shield workers from personal liability (Mayer, 1990). This legal presence was later extended to include the corporation as a constitutionally protected "person" with rights to equal protection and due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Corporate Personhood and the First Amendment

In the twentieth century, courts continued to favor the treatment of corporations as constitutionally protected persons, and it was this tradition that the Supreme Court affirmed in its 2010 campaign finance decision. While there are rational arguments both for and against treating corporations as legal persons for certain purposes, the ethical arguments are more subtle. The most significant ethical issue concerns the tension between the values and interests of corporations and those of individuals within a capitalist system — a tension that becomes acutely visible when corporations are granted the same political rights as the citizens whose labor sustains them.

In his seminal nineteenth-century work Das Kapital (1867), Karl Marx analyzed the fundamental value structure underlying a capitalist economy. In Marx's analysis, commodities have two measures of value: use value, which is determined by the commodity's usefulness to the consumer, and exchange value, which relates one commodity's value to another based on the "congealed labor" involved in its production (Marx, 1996, p. 24). The goal of any capitalist is to accumulate surplus value — that is, to achieve an exchange value that exceeds the cost of labor. In a money-based system, this is accomplished through wage-labor: individuals sell their labor as a commodity to the capitalist, who then sells the product of that labor for more than the labor cost, thereby accumulating surplus capital. The most effective way for the capitalist to maximize this accumulation is to pay the lowest wages for the highest level of production.

This dynamic creates a fundamental tension of interests between wage-labor and capital. The wage laborer works to advance his or her own health and happiness, while the capitalist seeks to exploit that labor in order to maximize profits. This structural antagonism is not incidental — it is, in Marx's view, the engine of capitalist society itself, and it has direct consequences for any political system that exists alongside or within it.