Capitalism is not a law of nature, it is a body of law, written by specific men, on specific dates, with names that appear in notarial deeds and court judgments. That law organizes two regimes that are almost never named as part of the same system. One imposes on the wage earner a total subordination, monitored, with no clear time limit, comparable to what a political scientist would call totalitarian if a state exercised it over its citizens. The other protects the owner of capital from almost any real consequence of their decisions, thanks to a nineteenth-century legal invention that, in its own time, was itself considered a scandal. Bhopal and the Valdez in Alaska show, with court records to back it up, how that second regime works when something goes wrong. The visible result of this architecture, people freezing to death on the streets of the richest cities in history, is not a defect of the system, it is a component that performs a precise function.
The subordination nobody calls feudal
Every employment contract under labor law in force, in Bogotá as much as in Zurich, contains something rarely named with precision, the legal subordination of the worker to whoever owns the means of production. This is not a metaphor. The employer decides the schedule, the pace, the physical location of the body for eight or ten hours, the way of dressing, in many cases the content of emails and the tone of voice used with a client.
If a country organized its entire population under a single command deciding their time, their movement and their speech this way, there is a technical name for that regime, and it is not a market economy.
No management manual calls this what it legally is. People speak of company culture, of goal alignment, of talent engagement, a therapeutic vocabulary that dissolves into generalities what civil law describes with far colder precision, a bond of legal subordination, one-sided, incapable by definition of reciprocity. The correct word disappears precisely because naming it would force the question of why such an asymmetric bond keeps presenting itself, in every contract, as an agreement between equals. The gap survives translation intact, because the discomfort it hides is identical wherever capital hires labor.
Nobody here proposes abolishing work. The question almost never asked in public is a different one, why subordination only ever runs in one direction. Capital owes labor no equivalent obedience, no reciprocal monitoring, no upper limit on what it can demand in exchange for a wage. That asymmetry was born neither of physics nor of arithmetic. It was born of a body of laws that can be read, dated and, in theory, amended like any other.
Limited liability, or how the summit disappears
In the nineteenth century, when European courts began recognizing the corporation as a legal person capable of owning, contracting and suing in its own right, the idea caused a scandal among jurists of the time. An entity with no body, no face, no biography, acquired full legal capacity, while the human beings behind it could lose, in the event of catastrophe, only what they had invested in shares. The rest of the damage, whether a poisoned river or an entire city, fell outside the personal balance sheet of whoever had made the decision. That balance sheet, not conscience, is the only thing corporate law protects with real rigor.
In France, the law of 24 July 1867 on commercial companies definitively freed the creation of joint-stock companies from the prior state authorization they had required until then, precisely because of the distrust that surrounded handing legal personhood and limited liability to a faceless structure. The law passed. The distrust, over time, turned into habit, and what in 1867 required state authorization is settled today in Bogotá, in Zurich or in Delaware within a few days of paperwork.
Bhopal allows this architecture to be measured against exact dates. On the night of 2 to 3 December 1984, a leak of methyl isocyanate at the Union Carbide plant killed thousands of people within hours and left medical after-effects that local organizations are still documenting four decades later. An Indian court took twenty-six years to produce a conviction.
On 7 June 2010, a court in Bhopal sentenced seven former executives of Union Carbide India Limited to two years in prison for death by negligence, twenty-six years after the gas leak. All were released on bail the same day.
None of those seven men ran the American parent company. Warren Anderson, chairman of Union Carbide Corporation at the time of the disaster, was briefly arrested in Bhopal itself, released on bail within hours, and never returned to India despite the extradition warrant pending against him since the 1990s. He died a free man, in Florida, in 2014. The law did exactly what it was written to do, punish the operational periphery and shield the center of decision.
The corporation itself did not disappear under the weight of the disaster either. Union Carbide was absorbed by Dow Chemical in 2001, which inherited the assets and, as documented for years by Amnesty International and the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, systematically refused to accept legal responsibility for cleaning up the site, still a source today of groundwater contamination affecting entire neighborhoods of Bhopal. The corporation as a legal person survived the catastrophe it caused, changed its name, changed its owner, and kept exactly the same immunity.
Exxon offers the same mechanics in a country that presents itself as the most jealous guardian of the rule of law. The oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off the coast of Alaska in 1989 and spilled roughly eleven million gallons of crude over an ecosystem several species have still not recovered from. A jury set punitive damages of five billion dollars against the company in 1994.
In 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States reduced those punitive damages to just over five hundred million dollars, nineteen years after the spill, establishing as a principle that the penalty should not exceed the amount of compensatory damages already paid.
No Exxon executive ever set foot in a cell. The company negotiated, appealed, waited, and the very law that in theory should have punished it ended up cutting by nine tenths the only figure ever imposed on it as punishment.
Two different legal systems, two continents, two political regimes that present themselves as opposites, produced the same result. That is neither coincidence nor the isolated corruption of a judge or a prosecutor. It is the design. Different flags, different courts, the same architecture underneath.
Defenders of the system will say these are extreme cases, aberrations within a market that, generally, functions. The answer is simple, no legal mechanism is judged by its behavior in routine, it is judged by what it does when something breaks. A bridge is designed with the earthquake in mind, not Tuesday traffic. The law of limited liability was designed, with all the precision of its architects, with Bhopal in mind, with the Valdez in mind, and with every disaster still to come that has no name yet. Bhopal and the Valdez were not malfunctions, they were the mechanism doing exactly what it was built to do.
No ceiling on property, no floor beneath which to fall
The same body of law that protects whoever decides sets, in no consolidated capitalist country, an upper limit on what a person can accumulate in property or income. A human being can, without breaking any rule, own more land than they could cross in an entire lifetime, earn in a month what another worker takes decades to gather, and do so in a way that is perfectly legal, documented, even celebrated by the financial press.
In January 2026, Oxfam calculated that the combined fortune of the world’s billionaires grew by two and a half trillion dollars over the previous year, an increase almost equal to the total wealth held by the poorer half of humanity, roughly four billion one hundred million people. According to the same report, that sum would be enough, if directed toward the purpose, to eradicate extreme poverty twenty-six times over.
Retired French teacher Étienne Chouard, known in France for his critical interventions on constitutional law and citizen participation, frames the imbalance with a question almost never asked in public in these terms, why do many societies set a minimum income floor below which it is deemed unacceptable for anyone to fall, yet no equivalent ceiling above. The question is uncomfortable because it has no plausible technical answer, only a political one that nobody with the power to change it has any interest in saying out loud. Silence, in this instance, is not confusion, it is strategy.
The absence of that ceiling is not a technical oversight. Legislating a maximum income, three or four times the minimum wage for instance, requires no new technology and no economic discovery.
It requires a political decision. Nothing more.
And that decision never arrives, for the simplest reason of all, those who would benefit from its absence often take part in drafting the law that postpones it, or in funding the campaigns of those who draft it on their behalf. Nobody proposes, in a parliament, whatever would shrink their own fortune or that of whoever funds their campaign, that simple, that effective.
The street as a warning
One last link remains, the most uncomfortable to name because it appears in no code and no ruling. The richest cities on the planet coexist, street by street, with people who sleep outdoors and freeze to death in numbers that the municipalities themselves document every winter, without any government capable of waging wars thousands of kilometers away ever declaring itself unable to fix this on its own territory.
The simplest hypothesis, that the problem has no technical or financial solution, does not survive scrutiny. In 2008, the United States Congress authorized seven hundred billion dollars to rescue the financial system within weeks, without a referendum, without prolonged debate, without anyone first demanding proof of good conduct from the banks that benefited.
The money exists. What is missing is the will to spend it on someone who cannot pay it back with interest.
A second hypothesis remains, more uncomfortable still. That this visible misery serves a function. A body stretched out on a sidewalk, under cardboard, in plain sight of someone on their way to a badly paid job, communicates something without needing a single speech, this is what awaits whoever stops being docile. That body needs no plaque and no speech because the message was already understood before birth, it is learned in childhood, reinforced every time someone crosses a sidewalk without looking down, and inherited the way a surname or a mortgage is inherited. Nobody needs to say it out loud for it to function as a warning. The same law that shields Union Carbide and Exxon is the one that, through its silence on a maximum income and on a guaranteed minimum, lets that warning stand at every corner, every day.
None of this is written in physics or in human nature. It is written in civil codes, in judgments, in the incorporation papers of joint-stock companies, dated and signed by men with a first name and a surname. The same men, or their heirs, still sign such papers today. What one law of this kind did, another law of the same kind can undo…
G.S.
Sources
- 7 guilty in Bhopal tragedy that killed 15,000 (NBC News)
- Two years jail for Union Carbide execs 26 years after Bhopal gas tragedy (Legally India)
- Seven convicted in India gas leak (PBS Newshour)
- Former Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson died unpunished (Business and Human Rights Centre)
- Simple History of the Criminal Case Against Union Carbide (The Bhopal Medical Appeal)
- Dow Chemical must comply with new Indian Court summons on Bhopal disaster (Amnesty International)
- Dow Chemical Continues to Deny Legal Responsibility for Bhopal Disaster Victims (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre)
- Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, 554 U.S. 471 (2008) (Justia)
- Loi du 24 juillet 1867 sur les sociétés commerciales (Légifrance)
- Billionaire wealth jumps three times faster in 2025 to highest peak ever (Oxfam International)
- Billionaires are richer than ever, says Oxfam (CNBC)
