Is Corporate Capitalism the best we’ve got to offer..?
Out Now
Is Corporate Capitalism the Best We’ve Got to Offer?
by Michael Schluter
(256 pages; published by Relational Research)
The starting point for this book is a simple proposition: that if we are serious about transforming capitalist economies, we will need to start by looking at how these systems connect us as human beings.
Much of the institutional apparatus they contain is unfit for purpose because it is blind to the way such connections actually work. In today’s global society, few relationships are personal. Instead, we are linked en masse through vast, complex networks (financial, political, social, digital) whose shape and rules of engagement exert a powerful influence on behaviour while being, wholly or partly, beyond individual control. How we treat one another at a global level, and how effectively we cooperate in social and environmental crises, is to a significant degree a question of what behaviours these mass links incentivise. Consequently, the major challenge facing us is not ethical: rather it is to design companies, markets and government in such a way that the pursuit of wealth, justice and sustainability does not become self-defeating.
The failure of such systems to connect people as human beings makes them relationally unstable – often actively disincentivising trust, loyalty and engagement across networks where these qualities are badly needed.
For Example
Capital markets are designed to channel investment funds toward business. But they make businesses relationally unstable by imposing fiduciary duties on directors that incentivise short-term profitability over long term sustainability. Result: between 2009 and 2015, Volkswagen installed software on 11 million diesel cars that deliberately under-reported emissions.
The Treaty of Lisbon in 2007 was designed to further European cooperation. But it also made the EU relationally unstable by cementing a centralised EU administration in which national electorates were further removed from control over policy. Result: the vote share for Eurosceptic parties has more than doubled since 2004.
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