All watched by corporations of loving grace? It’s time we punctured the feverish toxic dream.
“The world is governed by market forces”
― Alan Greenspan
“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining”
― Judge Judy
Ladies and gentlemen we are passing beyond the point of no return.
One might forgive advertisers and marketers falling occasionally for the temptations of grandiosity. After all boosting the visibility and significance of everything is what we do. And it can be hard to accommodate ourselves to the truth that for the most part we play but a small role in the glorious humdrum banality of people’s everyday lives. Little wonder perhaps, that we yearn to amount to more. To spark movements, promote causes, create better futures, ignite conversations, and yes, make the world a better place, one virtuous, purpose-driven (but still oh-so-profitable) corporation at a time.
But there are voices in the business community who want to go even further. So much further that (to borrow the words of William Gibson) one suspects that there must be some kind of Simon Sinek event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more grandiose in purpose, or more denying of complexity.
The story they tell us is that a broken politics has created a void.
In his letter to CEOs, Blackrock Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Laurence Fink declared that:
“Unnerved by fundamental economic changes and the failure of government to provide lasting solutions, society is increasingly looking to companies, to address pressing social and economic issues”.
Addressing the Seeds and Chips conference (“the leading food innovation summit in the world”) this year in Milan, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Starbucks Howard Schultz opined:
“It is a volatile time in America. It is a volatile time in Europe. It is a volatile time in the Middle East… We have lost something. We have lost our sense of humanity, we have lost our sense of conscience, we have lost our sense of citizenship. Governments across the world are having difficulty taking care of their citizens. I believe we have an individual and collective responsibility [as businesses to our] employees, communities and the planet. We can’t wait for the government [to act]. The role and responsibility for business today has changed dramatically. We must step up and do more for our people and the communities we serve.”
Former CEO of Unilever, Paul Polman maintained that:
“Now we can be cynical about politicians, we can be mad about them, we can laugh at them but that doesn’t serve anything, we have to fill that void…. While trust in companies is low and trust in CEO is sometimes lower, the citizens of this world still see the private sector as a solution provider to many of the problems.”
Richard Edelman tells us that their data demonstrates:
“Consumers are looking to brands to fill a void in global governance left by divided and populist government. My purchase of products each week makes more of a difference than my vote every four years in the broader debate on issues such as tolerance, environment and education. I want brands to stand with me.”
A piece in Fast Company contends that:
“Public trust in government is at an historic low and trust in brands is on the rise. … The current hope is for companies to be vehicles of change in the world. Today, brands stand out by standing for the very things that are going unattended to—trust, transparency, accountability, purpose, inclusion, and action”.
Another piece in Fast Company wants us to believe that:
“The more mobility people have - physical and virtual - the more their loyalty will pass to whomever provides them with security and skills. This is how companies excel where governments have failed.”
Marketing Magazine (Australia) tells us that:
“We are losing faith in our governments at an alarming rate… Eroded faith in the state has created a societal vacuum for courageous brands to fill… Let that sink in a moment. A majority of us now place more faith in brands to change the world than traditional social institutions”.
And goes on to say:
“Study after study has shown Australians no longer know who or what to believe in. We once looked to our institutions for leadership and stability in turbulent times – but many Australians have clearly lost that sense of trust. This is why we should consider if brands have a role to play in filling the gap in a world without leaders”
Sarah Kaplan of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management suggests that:
“Companies are increasingly a positive force for society and, as people see their governments let them down, [they] see companies replacing that role.”
A director of creative strategy in New York wants us to believe that:
“Creatives aren’t expected to take a supporting role in fixing societal ills. We’re now expected to take the lead.”
The Network for Business Sustainability tells us that:
“Where Friedman was wrong was in assuming that corporations cannot understand societal problems or environmental challenges, which he viewed as the exclusive responsibility of elected governments. It is true that corporations are not democratic institutions designed to reflect the broad ‘public interest’. But today's representative governments have become all but incapable of addressing society's real challenges”
Nature might abhor a vacuum, but marketers and business leaders evidently love a good one. In their minds, the void created by dysfunctional politics and the resultant erosion of faith that it can achieve anything can only be filled by the market and the corporation. “With faith in the world’s leaders seemingly at its lowest for decades, a consensus is building that there is an opportunity for businesses to step in and lead the way”, as The Daily Telegraph contends. Never it seems, has profitability been no noble.
Who needs politics, when we can buy our way to a better world?
Rather than rely on sclerotic, inefficient, dysfunctional governments, we are told, the marketplace can solve all our needs and problems. Buying is like voting, the rhetoric goes - through ethical/green/low-impact purchase decisions, consumers can reengineer markets, reward, encourage and promote the practices of the virtuous corporation, penalise those of the not-so-virtuous corporation, and further the issues and values that matter to them.
According to this logic, buying consumer goods is not merely consumption, but the exercise of power and influence. As the Ethical Consumer magazine puts it:
“The way we spend our money can help to change the world. Every time we shop we're voting with our wallet. When we buy from brands that have a positive impact it’s like voting for a better world. By carefully choosing what we buy and looking behind the brands we can choose products that have a positive impact on people, the planet and animals.”
In fact, for some of the proponents of ethical consumerism, buying isn’t merely like voting, it is voting. In fact it’s better than voting. A contributor for Forbes magazine for example, writes that:
“Through markets, we are slowly and unintentionally instituting a form of pure democracy, in which we vote all day long, in dozens of transactions, that reward or punish actors for their values.”
Similarly, Richard Edelman writes in ‘The Next Giant Step’, an essay he wrote to accompany the release of the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report:
“My purchase of products each week makes more of a difference than my vote every four years in the broader debate on issues such as tolerance, environment and education”
Key to they argument is the assumption that the production (supply) of goods is largely dependent on demand, and thus it is consumer choices which will - should they make the right choices - drive sustainable business practices. And it is a pervasive argument. Many of the solutions proposed in the reports co-developed by the UN with private sector involvement rely on just this supply and demand analysis, in which progress towards sustainable development is reliant on consumers ‘voting’ with their purchases and making rational, ethical choices. B Corps too, advances the claim that “you have voice and power beyond the ballot box. By buying from, working for and doing business with B Corps, you vote for what you believe in. Every day is election day.”
Who needs politics, when we can buy our way to a better world?
In fact, who needs the institutions and processes of democratic government when we can have corporations?
After all, the familiar argument goes, whether it’s running buses, schools, prisons, utilities, or supplying things like healthcare, electricity, housing, surveillance, and welfare services, the private sector, will always perform better than government.
The public sector we are told, is slow, unresponsive, inefficient, unmotivated and undisciplined as it is by the profit motive. Governments, argues Angela Wilkinson, senior director of the World Energy Council and an associate fellow at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School tend to be innovation-averse. They wait for the market to innovate and then scramble to adopt and scale the solutions and technologies developed by the private sector. Moreover, when governments do finally get their act together, they implement decisions for entire populations, without prototyping or testing ideas on smaller populations first. “You can’t use the word ‘experiment’ in government: it’s a nasty word, because it means you can fail,” says Wilkinson.
In contrast, the private sector, we are told, is dynamic, innovative and - driven by the profit motive and the competition of the marketplace - above all, efficient, Thus the story goes, business is the innovative problem-solving force. Too cumbersome to be an engine of growth and innovation, the state should be limited to providing the ‘basics’ such as regulation, infrastructure, and patent-granting. As Tom Wilson, chairman and CEO of the Allstate Corporation and vice chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argues:
“It’s multinational corporations, and not governments or non-profits, that have the vast human and financial capital, advanced technology, international footprint, market power and financial motivation to solve the world's the world's most daunting problems.”
Government cannot solve the big issues, but happily there is nothing, we are told by Deloitte, literally nothing, that the marketplace and the corporation cannot solve:
“We assert that yes, you can create markets — or at least market mechanisms — around problems like environmental cleanup, transitioning from welfare to work, and even human trafficking. In fact, markets and economic ecosystems are developing around all manner of societal problems. The buyers in these markets purchase impacts or outcomes: healthier communities, kids who can read, reduced recidivism. The sellers provide outcomes: they design cheap, solar-powered lights; write the code that tracks salmonella outbreaks using government data; and build the cross-sector networks to fight scourges like human trafficking.”
Not only can markets and corporation solve the big issues, but it is predicted that people will increasingly expect or demand that the void left by dysfunctional politics and ineffective government be filled by other actors. Here for example, is Jeffrey Puritt, president of the DX and CX solutions provider Telus International:
“An intersection is coming where society will expect corporations to fill the void in the face of government cuts, and, likewise, corporations will expect their societal influence to increase as their social capital becomes the force of change in communities, countries and even entire global industries”.
Who needs politics then, and who needs government, when corporations and the marketplace can solve our needs and problems so much more effectively and efficiently? As contributor for Forbes magazine enthuses, “as a sclerotic outdated political system increasingly fails to meet public needs, commerce is filling the void.”
It’s an idealistic, hopeful, and ambitious, story we’re being told.
It’s also toxic, corrosive bullshit.
The marketplace is not a democracy.
It seems that marketing departments today aren’t satisfied convincing people that they can buy their way to a better version of themselves but want to convince us that we can buy our way to a better world. But the argument that money spent on consumer goods are not just votes for more virtuous products and corporations, but are votes for what kind of world we want to live in suffers from three fatal flaws.
The first flaw in the purchases-are-votes argument as political economist Terry Hathaway notes, is that despite the rhetoric, it’s never election day. Consumer purchases for and against virtuous companies and practices are not added up in a system of collective decision-making with society and markets dutifully following the majority vote. Writes Hathaway notes:
“This discourse thus presents a bizarre inversion of reality, whereby consumers are collectively responsible for corporate decisions, rather than corporations themselves. This fiction facilitates the divisive nature of ethical consumption whereby it is other individuals who are at fault for failing to consume in line with particular values, rather than blaming the corporations who have sought to maximise profit themselves and the system that encourages this behaviour.”
The second flaw in the purchases-are-votes argument is that it pretends that the market is a democracy operating as a ‘one person one vote’ system. But because it’s a market in which goods and services are bought, some people have more ‘votes’ than others. Some people are priced out of the market altogether, have no ‘voting’ power at all. Consider for example, that a whole factory-farmed chicken costs from around £2 per kilogram, while an organic chicken costs about four times that.
And finally, the idea of the vigilant, hyper-engaged ‘ethical consumer’ who thanks to hyper-transparent corporations has complete access to the information they need to make informed and virtuous choices (not just about the products they buy, but about the entirety of the production and distribution chain - as well as all the other global activities of the corporations that make and own them) assumes a level of mass-market engagement and activism that is simply not found. The only similarity between the marketplace and politics is the absence of total transparency.
Ethical/conscious consumption is a seductive story - because it lets us believe that as University of Toronto sociologist Josée Johnston argues, “shopping is a powerful force for social and environmental change”. It’s as if, as the late Mark Fisher put it: “Western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products”.
Conscious/ethical/sustainable/green consumption choices may well make us happier and healthier. And they may well satisfy people’s sense of personal morality. And who’s to argue with that? Or with to companies choosing to act as responsible citizens However, the ideology of ethical consumerism as the key lever for transforming society depoliticises change, distracting us from confronting the cold reality that effecting fundamental change in how we live is a matter of power and politics, not just going to the right shops and buying the right things. Writes the journalist Alden Wicker:
“On its face, conscious consumerism is a morally righteous, bold movement. But it’s actually taking away our power as citizens. It drains our bank accounts and our political will, diverts our attention away from the true powerbrokers, and focuses our energy instead on petty corporate scandals and fights over the moral superiority of vegans.”
And what of the bigger claim and ambition - that corporations can fill the void that governments can no longer fill?
All watched over by corporations of loving grace?
Don’t get me wrong. Capitalism is great. As the author and management thinker Charles Handy put it “By creating new products, spreading technology and raising productivity, enhancing quality and improving service, business has always been the active agent of progress. It helps make the good things of life available and affordable to ever more people. This process is driven by competition and spurred on by the need to provide adequate returns to those who risk their money and their careers”. This, as Handy reminds us, this is in itself, a noble cause.
And let’s acknowledge the importance of markets. As Debra Statz, professor of ethics in society and professor of philosophy at Stanford University puts it:
“They allow vast numbers of people who are otherwise completely unknown to each other to corporate together in a system of voluntary exchange. Through markets, people are able to signal to one another way they, want, disseminate information, and reward innovation. Markets enable people to mutually adjust their activities without the need for a central planning authority. Furthermore markets are widely recognised as the most efficient way we have to organise production and distribution in a complex economy”.
It’s important too, to acknowledge that corporations are, for the most part, filled with good, decent, honourable, ethically-minded people. Who want to do the right thing for their communities, their families, society, and the world around them.
But asking that the public entrust corporations take over the provision public goods and expecting people to live their public and private lives all watched over by corporations of loving grace requires an industrial amount of wilful optimism, when we consider, for example:
In embracing the ideology of shareholder value, corporations have already chosen their purpose. And it is a choice not an obligation - the corporate code of Delaware, where the majority of Fortune 500 businesses are incorporated, states that corporations can be formed for any lawful purpose.
In 1993, Congress amended the tax code to encourage corporations to tie the bulk of their executive’s compensation to stock price as a means of “tying pay to performance”, and equity-based compensation now accounts for the vast bulk of executive pay at Fortune 500 firms. Ideology and compensation have resulted in the corporation being firmly oriented around the short-term.
Most so-called ‘long-term’ incentive plans don’t have a performance horizons of more than three years or less.
Senior company executives are willing to decrease discretionary spending on such areas as research and development, advertising, maintenance, and hiring in order to meet short-term earnings targets.
Senior company executives are willing to delay new projects, even if it means sacrifices in value creation.
Trillions of dollars of corporate profits are being used to buy back shares - attractive if you want the company to hit its quarterly earnings per share target, and attractive if you’re one of the 500 highest paid executives of a US public companies and receive 42 per cent of your compensation comes from stock options.
Of those companies whose reporting is reviewed in the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Database, only 45 per cent of all companies commit to respecting the full range of internationally recognized human rights.
Only 8 per cent of FTSE 100 companies have attained carbon neutrality, with only a further 10% making the commitment to do so.
The impressive commitments and claims of the likes of IBM, Accenture, Google, and Apple notwithstanding, how companies define their carbon targets, and whether some of them are simply “greenwashing” by purchasing offsets, rather than reducing their actual emissions is hotly debated - and unlike financial disclosures, there is no clear, common standard for what should be included in a company’s emissions tally to begin with.
According to the International Monetary Fund, tax havens collectively cost governments between $500 billion and $600 billion a year in lost corporate tax revenue, depending on the estimate.
The International Monetary Fund also reports that for US multinationals, corporate profit shifting into tax havens has risen from an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of gross profits in the 1990s to about 25 to 30 percent today.
The United States loses an estimated $70 billion a year in tax revenue due to the shifting of corporate profits to tax havens.
While business leaders championed the claim that the tax cuts derived from Trump’s 2017 tax bill would lead to more investment and higher wages, one analysis of Fortune 500 companies found that 80% of the increased cashflow in 2018 stemming from the reduction in corporate tax instituted by Trump’s corporate tax cut went to investors through buybacks, dividends, or other asset planning adjustments.
The global policy watchdog Global Policy Forum notes, while the private sector is busy positioning itself within the UN as the solution to current global challenges - it is simultaneously busy attempting to evade UN oversight and regulation.
Oxfam’s analysis 76 of the world’s largest companies and how well they deliver on their commitments to the UN’s Social Development Goals (SDGs). Oxfam concluded that “Overall, the report’s findings are sobering in terms of companies (not) translating their commitment to supporting the SDGs into meaningful changes and new ambitions …. Instead of sparking more ambitious efforts, the SDGs appear to have so far largely remained a communications too”.
The response of The Council of Institutional Investors (a US lobby group of which BlackRock is a non-voting associate member) “respectfully disagreed” with the letter in which BlackRock CEO Larry urged chief executives to show how they made a positive contribution to society.
2018-19 saw barely a dozen proposals on environmental issues put forward by shareholders reach a vote across 1,500 of the largest US companies.
A proposal that Chevron should publish a report on its plans to reduce its carbon footprint won just 30.7 per cent of the votes cast.
The sustainable investment specialist Green Century Funds, won just 29.8 per cent support for a proposal for Amazon to publish a climate change report.
The number of shareholder-backed environmental proposals at companies in the S&P 1500 index dropped to just 13 in the year ended June 2019, down more than half from the 29 in the previous 12 months, according to Georgeson, the shareholder engagement and governance consultancy.
BlackRock and Vanguard, the world’s largest asset managers, were among the least likely institutional investors to support climate-related resolutions in 2019.
In 2019 BlackRock and Vanguard were also more likely to support management at fossil fuel intensive companies than they did across U.S. equities overall.
In 2019 BlackRock and Vanguard voted against all of the U.S. shareholder proposals backed by the Climate Action 100+ investor coalition.
At least 16 of critical climate votes would have received majority support of voting shareholders if these two largest asset managers had voted in favour of them.
While corporations are happy to lobby government on issues such as visas, IP protection, international trade disputes, and so on, they do little to lobby for climate change action.
Meanwhile Merck notes that climate change may lead to “expanded markets for products for tropical and weather-related diseases including water-borne illness”, Eli Lilly, anticipates that climate change may increase the risk of diabetes by “curtailing physical activity, disrupting traditional food supplies, and increasing food insecurity”, Home Depot is optimistic that, at the very least, it will sell more ceiling fans “should temperatures increase over time”, and Apple thinks that “as people begin to experience severe weather events with greater frequency” they will become increasingly glued to their mobile phones.
Etc.
Oh yes, let’s drain the swamp and be watched over by corporations of loving grace.
Except that the notion of the lumbering state is a propaganda fiction.
In contrast to the rhetoric, the evidence clearly demonstrates how the State’s role goes far beyond just providing regulatory frameworks, infrastructure, and patent-granting. Here I rely on the work of Professor Mariana Mazzucato (once described by The Times as “the world’s scariest economist”), professor at University College London in Economics of Innovation and Public Value and founder/director of their Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
Mazzucato’s detailed investigation of the state’s role in innovation paints a radically different picture from the story we’re traditionally fed. As she puts it:
“Most of the radical, revolutionary innovations that have fuelled the dynamics of capitalism – from railroads to the Internet, to modern-day nanotechnology and pharmaceuticals – trace the most courageous, early and capital intensive ‘entrepreneurial’ investments back to the State”
Some examples:
Analysis of six different technology complexes (the US ‘mass production’ system, aviation technologies, space technologies, information technology, Internet technologies and nuclear power) has concluded that government investments played a fundamental role in bringing these new technologies into being. Moreover, each successful development of new technology was not just a result of funding and creating the right conditions for innovation but envisioning the opportunity space, engaging in the riskiest and most uncertain early research, and overseeing the commercialization process.
All of the technologies that make Jobs’ iPhone so ‘smart’ - semiconductors, microprocessors, touchscreens, multi-touch scrolling and gestures, TCP/IP, HTML, URL, HTTP, GPS - had already been invented thanks to public funding which had enabled the military to take on the burden of capital-intensive risk in developing them.
Of the 1,072 drugs approved by U.S. Food and Drug Administration between 1993 and 2004, only 357 were new drugs (or NMEs - new molecular entities) rather than just variations of existing ‘me too’ drugs. Of these, 75 per cent trace their research not to private companies but to publicly funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) labs in the US.
In the UK, it was research in the 1970s by the publicly-funded Medical Research Council (MRC) that led to the development of monoclonal antibodies – which make up a third of all new drug treatments for many different major diseases such as cancer, arthritis and asthma.
In the US, public funding of basic science has been instrumental in developing the vast knowledge base which biopharmaceutical companies are dependent on. For example, from 1978 to 2004, National Institutes of Health (NIH) spending on life sciences research totalled $365 billion. The budget for 2012 alone reached $30.9 billion.
The publicly-funded Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programme founded by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, provides more than $2 billion per year in direct support to small, independent, high-tech firms, and has helped the development of new enterprises, and has guided the commercialization of hundreds of new technologies.
The basic science of wind power was advanced by the U.S. Department of Energy through national labs and universities over the years, which drove down the cost of wind power and boosted reliability. After spending $1.2 billion, the cost of wind energy fell from approximately 30–50 cents/kWh in the 1970s to as little as 3 cents/kWh in the 2000s.
The financial and technological risks of developing renewable energy have been too high for venture capitalists to support, owing to the size and duration of the technical risks beyond the traditional proof of concept. Impatient venture capitalists want to finance technologies with low capital requirements that are close to market penetration. And as Mazzucato points out, they also lack the resources to fully finance the growth of capital intensive clean technology companies. They do pump billions into the clean technology sectors - but it is is dwarfed by the hundreds of billions of State funding committed to financing renewable energy projects.
Founded in 1990, First Solar became the first solar panel manufacturing company to lower its manufacturing cost to $1 per watt. The success of First Solar was built over a number of decades, during which venture capitalists entered at a relatively late stage and exited soon after the initial public offering of stock was completed. Much of the risk of investing in First Solar was underwritten by the US government, which supported the development and commercialization of their innovative thin-film solar technology - even helping in developing the manufacturing process.
The list goes on.
And while the role of government is not limited to merely the stimulation of economic life (and without wishing to deny that in many instances, the state could be vastly more responsive and efficient) the implication is clear. As Joseph Stiglitz notes, “markets on their own will not invest sufficiently in basic research, the wellspring from which all other advances come”. So if we want to slow down innovation and minimise risk-taking, then we should downplay and downgrade the role of the State, content ourselves with the unwillingness of venture capitalists to provide the long-term support needed for the development of radical innovations, leave it up to the corporation and the marketplace to solve all of society’s most pressing problems and needs, and just expect government to simply stand aside and provide ‘the basics’.
What’s really at stake.
But the real issue isn’t the fiction that we can buy our way to a better world, or the claim that corporations and corporations alone are equipped to solve the big issues.
The real issue is that over the past thirty-odd years, we’ve collectively, uncritically, and often quite unwittingly inhaled the story that as Mark Fisher observed, it is simply obvious that everything in society should be run as a business.
What we’re hearing is the advancement of an ideology that’s as old as it is pernicious - one that, in the words of the economic geographer and professor of anthropology and geography David Harvey “emphasizes the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace. It holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market.”
This isn’t merely an economic perspective that’s being promoted, but rather as Paul Treanor of The Hague University of Applied Sciences has argued “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs”.
Through its lens, every problem, every challenge, every opportunity, every human need, domain of activity and endeavour, is an economic one. It makes no distinction between a market economy and a market society, writes Treanor:
“There is only market: market society, market culture, market values, market persons marketing themselves to other market persons”.
Instead of politics we are to have the marketplace. Instead of elected representatives we now we must surrender ourselves the personal visions of billionaire business leaders. And instead of the citizen, of homo politicus, we are only and everywhere homo economicus - self-interested individuals seeking seek to enhance our own wealth and power with little regard for the impact on others.
Instead of citizens then, we are to remade as consumers. The words of Al Gore US Vice President, reveal how this ideology has infected culture and discourse:
“We are going to make the federal government customer friendly. A lot of people don’t realise that the federal government has customers. We have customers. The American people.”
The toxic, corrosive consequences of this ideology are writ large across society. I rely here on the analysis provided by the political theorist and First Chair of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley Wendy Brown:
As - in the name of enabling free markets, competition, and individual choice - public goods and services are defunded, dismantled, or siphoned off to the private sector, the very idea of public purposes or common problems begins to wither.
As the idea of public things, public purposes, and a concern with common problems and the common good -(i.e. citizenship) erodes, the very idea of a people, a demos, exercising its collective political sovereignty becomes dismantled.
As the concept and practice of citizenship is sucked of any real meaning, the contest of principles and ideas that once defined genuine politics is reduced to a degenerate theatre of performative gestures and identity signalling, empty of any real substance.
With all human activity transformed into marketplace participation, the idea of liberty is transformed into a purely economic one - the right to personal agency and independence, and the freedom to choose from what the market has to offer, unencumbered by the State.
Thus the guarantee of equality through the rule of law and participation in democracy is replaced with the idea of an equal right to choose from whatever the market has to offer. And because markets inevitably produce as Statz puts it, “stratification and sorting” of access and opportunity, the idea that there will always be winners and losers becomes normalised. The common bonds, interests rights and obligations of society become, as Edmund Burke wrote in his critique of the French Revolution, “disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality”.
As liberty and equality are thus transformed from being political ideas to economic ones, political power is repositioned as their enemy.
The end consequence of this for Brown is that most of us in the West have ceased to believe in the human capacity to craft and sustain a world that is humane, free, sustainable, and, above all, modestly under human control:
“In letting markets decide our present and future, neoliberalism wholly abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence. The neoliberal solution to problems is always more markets, more complete markets, more perfect markets, more financialization, new technologies, new ways to monetize. Anything but collaborative and contestatory human decision making, control over the conditions of existence, planning for the future; anything but deliberate constructions of existence through democratic discussion, law, policy. Anything but the human knowledge, deliberation, judgment, and action classically associated with homo politicus.”
And the genius solution business leaders and marketers are offering to this withering of politics, this gutting of democracy, this ideological cancer eating away at the idea of homo politicus? To actually increase the dosage of the very toxin that’s gouging out our culture and the body politic.
Sheldon Wolin, professor emeritus of politics and Princeton characterizes democracy thus:
“While it cannot be emphasised too strongly that democracy requires supporting conditions - social, economic, and educational - the democratisation of politics remains merely formal without the democratisation of the self. Democratization is not about “being left alone”, but about becoming a self that sees the value of common involvements and endeavours and find in them a source of fulfilment… To become a democrat [note that it’s a lower-case ‘d’] is to change one’s self, to learn how to act collectively, as a demos. It requires that the individual go ‘public’ and thereby help constitute a ‘public’ and an ‘open’ politics, in principle accessible for all to take part in, and visible so that all might see or learn about the deliberations and decision making occurring in public agencies and institutions”.
Yet what we ordinary people are being asked to sign up for (and are told we are actually asking for) is more rendering of more domains of human activity as marketplaces, more erosion of any sense of common problems, more undermining of the ideas of the common good, more diminishment of active citizenship, more vilification and corruption of politics, more narrowing of individual human worth and value to mere economic worth and value, more fragile, stressful, anxious, vulnerable lives, and of course more inequality. In other words, we’re being asked to sign up for what the historian, essayist and university professor Tony Judt calls, “an eviscerated society” in which “the thick mesh of social interactions and public goods has been reduced to a minimum, with nothing except authority and obedience binding the citizen to the state”.
The political scientist Professor Wolfgang Merkel of Humboldt Berlin University reminds us that:
“Capitalism and democracy follow different logics: unequally distributed property rights on the one hand, equal civic and political and political right on the other; profit-orientated trade within capitalism in contrast to the search for the common good; debate, compromise and majority decision-making within democratic politics versus hierarchical decision-making by manager and capital owners. Capitalism is not democratic, democracy is not capitalist.”
We are being asked to ignore the difference: “Commerce” a contributor for Forbes magazine gushes, “is beginning to challenge democracy as our highest means of expressing public values… As a sclerotic outdated political system increasingly fails to meet public needs, commerce is filling the void.”
God help us all.
It’s reckless, dangerous talk.
That business leaders and their apologists should openly declare that the solution to ineffective or dysfunctional politics is sidestep it altogether and let the marketplace and the corporation to solve everything begins to look staggeringly naive when one considers the findings from the latest report from Freedom House on the state of freedom and democracy around the world in 2019:
“In states that were already authoritarian, earning Not Free designations from Freedom House, governments have increasingly shed the thin facade of democratic practice that they established in previous decades, when international incentives and pressure for reform were stronger. More authoritarian powers are now banning opposition groups or jailing their leaders, dispensing with term limits, and tightening the screws on any independent media that remain.”
“Meanwhile, many countries that democratized after the end of the Cold War have regressed in the face of rampant corruption, antiliberal populist movements, and breakdowns in the rule of law.”
“Most troublingly, even long-standing democracies have been shaken by populist political forces that reject basic principles like the separation of powers and target minorities for discriminatory treatment… Of the 41 countries that were consistently ranked Free from 1985 to 2005, 22 have registered net score declines in the last five years.”
To give up on democratic processes and institutions, to advocate less politics and more commerce in such a world, and to dream of a world populated not by sovereign citizens but depoliticised and disenfranchised consumers as a solution to a broken politics is not to behave nobly or responsibly - or to reluctantly but selflessly shoulder the burdens and tasks that are too much for others.
What we have here is a failure of imagination.
Let’s just revisit briefly and consider again some of the words of those telling the story of how the marketplace and the corporation can fill the void:
“Unnerved by fundamental economic changes and the failure of government to provide lasting solutions, society is increasingly looking to companies, to address pressing social and economic issues”.
“Governments across the world are having difficulty taking care of their citizens… We can’t wait for the government [to act]”
“The citizens of this world still see the private sector as a solution provider to many of the problems.”
A generous interpretation of these words would be to see people who want to be part of the solution, not the problem. Or simply people who are incapable of seeing the challenges facing us as anything other than a business problem. As Abraham Maslow reflected back in 1966, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
(Of course a more cynical interpretation would be to see it as evidence of predatory capitalism spotting a fresh and lucrative opportunity to exploit).
But there’s something even more troubling afoot, and the pattern is clear. For when otherwise sane and intelligent business leaders identify less politics as the solution for an eroding faith in politics and the institutions of elected democracy, advocate governance as the better substitute for politics, prescribe the corporation as the only meaningful remedy to a broken politics, and propose that the marketplace can solve the problem of our eroded sense of citizenship (the argument doesn’t withstand scrutiny from Ursa Minor, let alone close scrutiny) what we are witnessing is a lack of imagination.
We’ve lost the vital understanding that imagination gives us.
That capitalism “unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth”, wrote the political scientist Edward Luttwak “is an old-hat truth now disputed only by a few cryogenically-preserved Gosplan enthusiasts and a fair number of poorly-paid Anglo-Saxon academics. That the capitalist engine achieves growth as well as it does because its relentless competition destroys old structures and methods, thus allowing more efficient structures and methods to rise in their place, is the most famous bit of Schumpeteriana, even better-known than the amorous escapades of the former University of Czernowitz professor.”
But this cannot be the whole story. “Efficiency”, writes the Stanford Professor of Philosophy Debra Statz, “is clearly not the only value relevant to assessing markets: we have to think about the effects of markets on social justice, and on who we are, how we relate to each other, and what kind of society we can have”.
Yet it seems that economics and science have come to dominate how our culture sees itself, how it understands itself, and how it frames ‘knowledge’. And it has come at a price. As the cultural critic Henry Giroux puts it, “In a culture drowning in a new love affair with empiricism and data collecting, that which is not measurable - such as compassion, vision, the imagination, care for the other, and a passion for justice - withers.”
In his epic book The Master and the Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, the psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar Iain McGilchrist argued that we’re reaping the consequences of ‘left-brain thinking’ - analytical, logical, goal-oriented - conquering our world and minds:
“It is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand.”
(The idea of brain hemispheres governing different modes of thinking is contested by some, but McGilchrist’s argument probably doesn’t rest as much on biology as he himself argues).
For the writer Gary Lachman, the trick this analytical, logical, quantitative, goal-oriented way of knowing and thinking - that treats the world as objective and neutral, and reduces reality to what it can abstract from it and apply to useful ends - has been to convince us that its version of the world is the one, true, real one:
“That the thin, bare, poor, world that it abstracts from - i.e. ‘pulls out of’ - our thick, luxuriant, rich world is the ‘really real’ world, the one that ‘objectively exists’, while the one we encounter and love and struggle with is a kind of subjective illusion, housed within our island consciousness. It managed this trick solely because of the practical effectiveness it provides. Reducing reality to those parts of it that can be quantified and manipulated to our benefit that the new way of knowing the world quickly became the arbiter and guarantor of what was real and what was true. It worked no doubt about that. But at a price”.
And for Lachman, the price we have paid is that we’ve marginalised or forfeited our imagination - and the knowledge that unlocks.
This isn’t about fantasy and escaping reality but in the words of the writer, philosopher and novelist Colin Wilson, “the ability to grasp realities that are not immediately present”. Imagination he argued, is the ability to reach beyond our physical senses and show us aspects and dimensions of reality that we would miss without it. It’s the ability to imagine ourselves as intimately participating in and existing as part of our surrounding natural and social environments. It’s the ability to look beyond what is merely useful and seek out (and indeed create) what is meaningful.
Small wonder then, that we are so incapable of thinking of ourselves as anything but homos economicus. Small wonder that we struggle to see our interconnectedness, our interdependency, and the truth that some things are too important, too valuable, and too meaningful to be bought and sold.
If we don’t want sovereign citizens to be disempowered and reduced to mere ‘consumers’, if we don’t want to give up on the idea of common goals, needs, and problems, if we don’t want to kill the idea of shared responsibilities, if we don’t want to consign the concept of the common good to the dustbin of history, if we don’t want to suffocate the contest of ideas we know as politics, if we don’t want to allow popular participation in the decisions affecting the direction of our lives and communities to wither, if we don’t want to institutionalise and normalise inequality as the acceptable price of other people’s so-called ‘freedom’, then we need to reject the underhand, half-literate, elite-enriching gaslighting campaign that wants us to believe in the omniscient, infallible marketplace and the fiction that the corporation alone can save us all.
And we will need to engage as Giroux calls for, in “a revival of the radical imagination”. For while they might enrich us immensely, science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economics alone are ill-equipped to help us navigate and understand how we wish to live, how we wish to relate to each other, how we wish to govern ourselves, what shared ideals we wish to hold, what kind of common bonds we wish to create, what kind of public life we wish to have, what responsibilities we wish to share, what fairness means, what equality means, what freedom means, what democracy means (or should mean), and what sort of lived reality we want for ourselves.
Sorry.
I am out of my depth here, and it was never my desire to stray into the choppy waters of politics. I have strong political convictions and views, but I choose to air them privately, happy to content myself scribbling away here about creativity, brands, communications, and marketing - “write about what you know”, as the old advice goes.
I am with the author and management thinker Charles Handy when he says (and it bears repeating):
“By creating new products, spreading technology and raising productivity, enhancing quality and improving service, business has always been the active agent of progress. It helps make the good things of life available and affordable to ever more people. This process is driven by competition and spurred on by the need to provide adequate returns to those who risk their money and their careers”.
And I am with Handy when he reminds us that this is a noble cause (this too, bears repeating).
I also believe that the challenges of a growing world population, rapid urbanisation, increasingly strained food, water, and energy supplies, conflict and climate migration, delivering zero carbon emissions by 2050, while increasing output threefold in order to meet the demands of consumers in developing nations, ageing populations, workforce shortages, providing people with health insurance, social security, and unemployment insurance in an economy which exposes them to more uncertainty and greater risks, and of course the ravages of climate change will all require partnership and collaboration between the private sector and the State. We’ve already seen how much can be accomplished when the resources and capabilities of each are combined.
I acknowledge too, that from the perspective of the corporation, it’s not all pathological value-extraction. In some quarters, the conversation is at long last turning from the pursuit of shareholder value to the creation of stakeholder value - a concept that recognises as Mazzucato has characterised it, that corporations are not really the exclusive private property of one group of providers of profit-sharing financial capital:
“As social entities, companies must take into account the good of employees, customers, and suppliers. They benefit from the shared intellectual and cultural heritage of the societies in which they are embedded and from their governments’ provision of the rule of law, not to mention the state-funded training of educated workers and valuable research; they should in return developer benefit to all these constituencies… And governments that want to achieve innovation-led growth should ask themselves whether employees are more likely to share great ideas in businesses in which they are valued, or in ones where thy are simply appendages to profit-making machine that is then siphoned off to a few shareholders”.
As communicators whose effectiveness rests on our connectedness to the outside world, I believe that we should be seeking out, encouraging, and helping those organisations and businesses who have the courage and vision to want to reimagine their place and value in things.
But when corporations and business leaders, along with their parasites and unthinking cheerleaders, park their ideological, philosophically impoverished, intellectually blinkered, self-serving neo-liberal tanks on my cherished democratic lawn, I feel it my duty to politely yet firmly ask them to leave. For, as the great American poet e.e. cummings wrote, "there is some shit I will not eat".
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