[rad-green] Revaluing Capitalism for the Long-Term?

https://socialistproject.ca/2019/11/revaluing-capitalism-for-the-long-term/

Revaluing Capitalism for the Long-Term?


*ECONOMY <https://socialistproject.ca/category/economy/>  •  November 11,
2019  •  Kyle Bailey <https://socialistproject.ca/author/kyle-bailey/>*

In the wake of the 2007–08 financial crash, the mainstream debate has not
focused on the choice between socialism or barbarism, but rather on
‘reinventing
capitalism
<https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/purposeful-capitalism-economics-mariana-mazzucato/>
’.
*Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change, at the launch of ‘We Mean Business’ at the
NYC Climate Week in 2014.*

Faced with a populist ‘other’ ranging from ‘Trump and Brexit’ to the
popular but as-yet-ill-defined ‘socialism’ of Corbyn and Sanders, the
liberal bourgeoisie in the Atlantic heartland
<https://www.versobooks.com/books/1099-the-making-of-an-atlantic-ruling-class>
of
the global political economy has sought to reassert its waning hegemony by
way of a resurgent capitalist internationalism. They fear that neoliberal
globalization’s intensifying legitimation crisis
<https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-milken-conference-ray-dalio-20190502-story.html>
will
lead the growing masses ‘left behind’ by economic stagnation, social
inequality, and environmental injustice to ‘scapegoat’ the capitalist
system by embracing the ‘totalitarianism’ of the radical left or extreme
right.

In response, a leading fraction of the capitalist class has cohered around
a hegemonic project of economically ‘long-term’, socially ‘inclusive’, and
ecologically ‘sustainable’ capitalism as the apparent solution to the
system’s multidimensional and overdetermined organic crisis.

Economically ‘long-term’ means empowering ‘non-financial’ corporate
executives and their managerial cadres against ‘the capitalist threat to
capitalism’ posed by financial short-termism. Socially ‘inclusive’ means
responsibility to multiple stakeholders, rather than just to shareholders.
And ecologically ‘sustainable’ means something like a Green New Deal for
global neoliberalism.
Corporate Social Responsibility and Finance-led Accumulation

The broad contours of this project can be gleaned by examining the
relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and finance-led
industrial restructuring under neoliberalism.

With a lineage dating to 19th century corporate giants like Carnegie,
Rockefeller, and Ford – the so-called ‘Foundations of the American Century
<http://cup.columbia.edu/book/foundations-of-the-american-century/9780231146289>’
– and Lever, Boots, and Cadbury in the UK, CSR has more recently been
associated with the ‘Third Way’ project of neoliberal capitalist
globalization with a ‘human face’.

Following the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the
World Trade Organization, and the European Union, alongside growing US –
emerging markets integration, the period from 1992 until 2007 saw a second
wave of institutional restructuring in the capitalist world system
<https://www.versobooks.com/books/1527-the-making-of-global-capitalism>
designed to ‘lock in’ the neoliberal economic reforms of the 1980s.

Whereas the finance-led industrial restructuring of the 1980s enabled
multinational corporations (MNCs) to restore profitability by defining
their ‘core’ competences and divesting from non-core businesses, this new
wave of restructuring
<https://www.brookings.edu/book/trade-union-strategies-towards-global-production-systems/>
prioritized
expanding what remained of the core through new investments, the emulation
of US corporate governance practices, and the restructuring of corporate
supply chains.

In contrast to traditional CSR and philanthropy, which target areas outside
the corporate core, finance-led restructuring has seen the growing
integration of CSR and sustainability initiatives
<https://theconversation.com/feminism-washing-are-multinationals-really-empowering-women-120353>
into
the core operations of MNCs. Intended to augment the core capabilities of
particular firms, integrated CSR remains grounded in the ‘practical
realities’ of big business. The less autonomy CSR initiatives acquire from
the core operations, the better.
The Road from Rio

Understanding the evolution of integrated CSR requires examining how
capitalist states have sought to incorporate MNCs, nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs), and UN agencies into flexible and networked forms of
multistakeholder ‘global governance’ congruent with the reproduction
requirements of the post-Fordist global economy, and thus to organize them
into social forces capable of assuming greater responsibility for
reproducing and legitimizing neoliberal capitalist globalization.

Firstly, as the UN struggled to retain its legitimacy in a
‘post-Westphalian’ world, it called for ‘global partnerships for
sustainable development
<https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf>’
with all sectors of civil society in the run-up to the 1992 Rio Earth
Summit. With the Cold War officially over, this expanded notion of
development as entailing an ethical commitment to nature and society
provided a renewed Malthusian justification for Western foreign policy
interests and a global system of market-based inequality as the only means
of forestalling global resource depletion and the ‘tragedy of the commons
<http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/malthus-factor>’.

Secondly, faced with a growing ‘anti-globalization’ backlash, a
high-profile group of MNCs
<http://unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9%2F(httpAuxPages)%2F67924234EC32460FC125705A002F5FC3%2F$file%2FMovBus.pdf>
went
beyond defensive posturing and ‘greenwash’ in order to actively shape the
CSR reform agenda ‘from above’. Among them were industrial giants like BP,
Dow Chemical, Dupont, Ford, IKEA, Migros, Rio Tinto, Shell, Tata, Toyota,
and Unilever, as well as banks, institutional investors, accountancy and
auditing firms, and credit rating agencies engaged in ‘socially
responsible’ investing, reporting, and certification.

Seeking more legitimate ties with governments, NGOs, trade unions,
universities, and UN agencies, business organizations such as the World
Economic Forum <https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_25874.P001/REF>
(WEF),
the International Chamber of Commerce
<http://archive.corporateeurope.org/icc/intro.pdf> (ICC), and the World
Business Council for Sustainable Development
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282816770_World_Business_Council_for_Sustainable_Development_The_Greening_of_Business_or_a_Greenwash>
(WBCSD)
cultivated notions of ‘corporate citizenship’, ‘stakeholder value’, and
‘partnership’ as the basis for rebranding themselves as major public
international organizations and NGOs rather than as private ‘merchants’.

A key milestone in this process of forging ‘win-win’ solutions through
public – private and business – NGO partnerships was the creation of the UN
Global Compact
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233276772_Taming_Corporations_or_Buttressing_Market-Led_Development_A_Critical_Assessment_of_the_Global_Compact>
with
big business. Announced at the 1999 World Economic Forum meeting by Kofi
Annan – whom Perry Anderson once described
<https://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n09/perry-anderson/our-man> as the ‘academically
dim son of a manager for Unilever in colonial Ghana’ – the Compact remains
the world’s largest voluntary CSR initiative, having been pitched as a
‘coalition to make globalization work for all’.

Thirdly, disillusioned with the inability of capitalist states to curb
environmental destruction after Rio, NGOs seized the apparent
‘opportunities’ afforded by neoliberal globalization and the ‘retreat of
the state’ by embracing market-based, voluntary strategies for regulating
corporate behaviour
<https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cc33/233f3499fba0ee47cb1af19c84a2ba211736.pdf?_ga=2.26597629.1996136818.1572414140-740380254.1572414140>
.

The neocolonialist World Wildlife Fund <http://www.pandaleaks.org/> led the
way constructing multistakeholder global partnerships for sustainable
development, including the Forest Stewardship Council
<https://fsc.org/en> launched
with B&Q in 1993, the Marine Stewardship Council
<https://www.msc.org/> co-founded
as a joint venture with Unilever in 1996, and the Roundtable on Sustainable
Palm Oil <https://rspo.org/> established with Swiss retailer Migros in 2003.

Surpassing mere co-optation by big business, this strategic shift reflected
the growing corporatization of NGO activism
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-revolution-will-not-be-funded>, blurring
the boundary between NGOs and MNCs in a similar way to the emergence of
‘activist companies’ such as The Body Shop.

More fundamentally, it presupposed the broad shift from ‘producer’ to
‘consumer’ politics inaugurated by the Reagan–Thatcher counter-revolution
<https://brill.com/view/title/21833?lang=en>’s smashing of the labour
movement. Whereas producer politics expressed the collective power and
organization of the working class, the advent of consumer politics marked
its effective decomposition, disorganization, and atomization.

These three sets of examples serve to illustrate how the ongoing
dialectical interactions among corporations, NGOs, and public agencies have
transformed the interests and identity of each while leaving capitalist
social relations fundamentally unaltered.
From Rio to Paris

Faced with new social, political, and market pressures after the financial
crisis, in our post-Occupy world even the CEOs of the largest corporations
admit that capitalism has lost legitimacy and needs to be ‘saved from
itself’.

Perhaps the most articulate spokesperson for this fraction of capital is
Paul Polman, who championed a supposedly long-term, multistakeholder, and
inclusive form of capitalism while CEO of Unilever
<https://www.ft.com/content/e7040df4-fa19-11e8-8b7c-6fa24bd5409c> from
2009–2019, representative of big business on the UN High Level Panel
<https://www.un.org/sg/en/management/hlppost2015.shtml> which devised the
Sustainable Development Goals in 2012, Chair of the WBCSD
<https://www.wbcsd.org/Overview/About-us/Our-team/ExCo/Paul-Polman> from
2012–2017, and, since 2018, as Chair of the ICC
<https://iccwbo.org/media-wall/news-speeches/unilever-chief-paul-polman-named-chair-icc-worlds-largest-business-organisation/>
and
Vice-Chair of the Global Compact
<https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/personnel-appointments/2018-04-20/mr-paul-polman-netherlands-vice-chair-board-united>
.

Arguing that capitalism requires a ‘new [socially embedded] corporation
<https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/our-insights/business-society-and-the-future-of-capitalism>’
in order to ‘evolve’ and ‘focus on the long-term’, Polman abolished quarterly
earnings guidance
<https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/maybe-its-time-for-ceos-to-put-shareholders-second/article14507016/>
for
shareholders and implemented the ten-year Unilever Sustainable Living Plan
<https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2017/04/13/inside-unilever-sustainability-myth>,
currently the most ambitious example of integrated CSR yet undertaken by a
large firm. In 2014, he stated
<https://www.cgdev.org/blog/surprising-and-sensible-remarks-unilever-ceo-paul-polman>,
without irony, that Unilever is ‘the world’s biggest NGO… The only
difference is, we’re making money so we are sustainable’.

Polman is also a leading member of two groups promoting ‘long-term
capitalism’.

The Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism <https://www.inc-cap.com/> began as
an initiative of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society
<https://henryjacksonsociety.org/2012/05/14/throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater/>
co-chaired
by Dominic Barton
<https://blackrocktransparencyproject.org/2018/08/27/how-canadas-infrastructure-bank-was-created-by-and-set-up-to-benefit-blackrock/>
–
the UK-based Global Managing Director of McKinsey and key long-term
economic strategist to the Trudeau government – and Lady Lynn Forester de
Rothschild
<https://www.politico.eu/article/economist-magazine-shareholders-british-commerce-rothschild/>
–
a New Jersey-born Democratic Party insider who married into the Rothschild
banking dynasty after being introduced to Sir Evelyn de Rothschild by Henry
Kissinger at the 1998 Bilderberg conference and spent her honeymoon being
hosted by the Clintons at the White House. Motivated by a ‘progressive’
anti-communism, the Coalition aims to empower corporations to better
articulate the ‘long-term value’ they create for shareholders and
stakeholders. Its first conference, co-hosted
<https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/fiona-woolf-cbe/fiona-woolf-lord-mayor-london_b_5395670.html>
by
the City of London in 2014, included companies accounting for over
$30-trillion in investable assets – one third of the global total – and
speeches <https://www.inc-cap.com/videos/> by Bill Clinton, Christine
Lagarde, Mark Carney, Larry Summers, Arianna Huffington, and HRH The Prince
of Wales.

A week after Kraft Heinz’s aborted hostile takeover of Unilever
<https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cnbc-battle-soul-capitalism-explained-one-hostile-takeover-george>
in
February 2017, ten CEOs representing the Coalition gathered at Unilever
House on London’s Victoria Embankment to launch the Embankment Project for
Inclusive Capitalism
<http://www.ethicalcorp.com/ceos-and-investors-unite-tackle-trust-crisis-heart-capitalism>,
which seeks to formulate new metrics for measuring and reporting long-term
value creation related to non-financial performance, ‘intangible’ assets,
and social and environmental impacts.

Focusing Capital on the Long-Term <https://www.fcltglobal.org/> was formed
in 2013 as an outgrowth of collaboration between Barton and Mark Wiseman –
the President and CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board created
in 1997 to reorient the Canadian Pension Plan toward financial markets
<https://socialistproject.ca/2019/08/canadas-vampire-pension-plan/>. FCLT
Global decries the problems of quarterly capitalism
<https://hbr.org/2014/01/focusing-capital-on-the-long-term> and seeks to
‘change the investment strategies and approaches of the players who form
the cornerstone of our capitalist system: the big asset owners’. In 2018,
Wiseman left CPPIB to join his wife at BlackRock – Unilever’s largest
shareholder – which, like the CPP, is heavily invested
<https://amazonwatch.org/news/2019/0524-wall-streets-sustainable-darling-is-profiting-from-climate-change>
in
the military and fossil fuels.

So-called ‘sustainable finance’ is also central to the Green New Deal,
which, for big business at least, promises to reboot and relegitimise a
stagnant world economy through the roll out of new green technology and
infrastructure. Just as MNCs sought to hegemonize the Rio process, so too
have they sought to shape the post-crisis reform agenda before, during, and
after the 2015 Paris Agreement
<https://therightsofnature.org/paris-financialization-of-nature/>.

Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan Advisory Council
<https://www.unilever.com/sustainable-living/our-strategy/our-sustainability-governance/>
includes
the former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change, Christiana Figueres, as well as Avaaz founder Ricken Patel, Forum
for the Future co-founder Jonathan Porritt, Kavita Prakash-Mani from WWF
Markets, and Harvard’s John Ruggie – another Democratic Party insider and
the intellectual architect of the UN Global Compact.

Chaired by Polman and including Figueres among its 27 ‘visionary’ leaders
and CEOs, Richard Branson’s B Team <https://bteam.org/> is united under the
slogan of ‘People, Planet, Profit’. The Team is managed by Avaaz co-founder
and former McKinsey consultant Jeremy Heimans
<https://www.purpose.com/team/jeremy-heimans/> – a purveyor of ‘hollowed
out’ activism in the guise of his ‘New Power’ methodology for ‘flexible’,
‘networked’, and ‘leadership’ mass-movement building.

Under Polman’s chairmanship, the WBCSD elaborated principles for carbon
pricing and trading, announced its support for carbon capture and storage,
and led the Natural Capital Coalition’s international consortium for the
creation of a Natural Capital Protocol
<https://naturalcapitalcoalition.org/development/>, which aims to conserve
and enhance the world’s ‘natural capital’.

The WBCSD is also a driving force behind the We Mean Business
<https://www.wemeanbusinesscoalition.org/> coalition. Launched one week
before the New York People’s Climate March in 2014, We Mean Business is a
united front made up of Business for Social Responsibility, Carbon
Disclosure Project, CERES, The B Team, The Climate Group, The Prince of
Wales’s Corporate Leaders’ Group, and the WBCSD. The coalition calls for
world leaders to agree a market-based plan for fighting climate change and
claims the Paris Agreement will unlock over $13-trillion in new investment
<https://www.greenbiz.com/article/we-mean-business-paris-accord-13-trillion-opportunity>
.

And there’s more to come. Next year’s WEF Annual Meeting
<https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/10/davos-2020-wef-world-economic-forum-theme/>
will
focus on stakeholder capitalism and the Paris agreement. Complementing the
Business Roundtable’s recent statement redefining the purpose of a
corporation
<https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/19/is-us-capitalism-really-abandoning-the-greed-is-good-mantra>
as
promoting ‘an economy that serves all Americans’ rather than just
shareholders, the WEF’s governing bodies
<https://www.weforum.org/press/2019/08/world-economic-forum-appoints-new-members-to-board-of-trustees/>
–
which include the likes of B Team member Marc Benioff, Mark Carney,
Chrystia Freeland, Al Gore, Christine Lagarde, and Ursula von der Leyen, as
well as BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Royal DSM Chairman and Unilever
Advisory Director Feike Sybesma – will also publish a universal ‘ESG
scorecard’ to update its 1973 ‘Davos Manifesto’.
Conclusion

In an era of renewed class conflict marked by growing support for
as-yet-ambiguous socialist alternatives, this new ‘progressive capitalism’
is seen by the ruling class as the last, best hope for restoring confidence
in the system. Appealing to societal fairness and responsibility rather
than economic acquisitiveness and aspiration, it aims to redefine
neoliberalism as a progressive, dynamic force for reform in response to its
own crisis – a nostalgic ‘technocratic populism’ that mobilizes the masses
behind the CEOs, managers, and ‘experts’ who apparently know best.

Although typically presented in crypto-Polanyian fashion
<http://www.karipolanyilevitt.com/book-review-from-the-great-transformation-to-the-great-financialization-on-karl-polanyi-and-other-essays-edited-by-kari-polanyi-levitt-zed-books-london-2013/>
as
an effort to impose limits on the capitalist market by ‘re-embedding’
unsustainable finance in nature and society, those preaching the CSR gospel
are in fact the fiercest advocates of abolishing all such limits. Their
goal is to cement a renewed class alliance within the power bloc – a new
form of finance capital – in which asset owners, asset managers, and
industrial corporations collectively reshape capital markets in the name of
subordinating labour, nature, and society to the financialized logic of
global capital accumulation.

Moreover, big business’ strategy of colonizing the ‘public’ world of
governments, NGOs, and international organizations has blurred the boundary
between the public and private spheres. By seeking to ‘stakeholderise’
every conflict, MNCs embrace their critics in what Guardian journalist
  George Monbiot describes
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/08/corporations-public-life-unilever>
as
‘a dialogue that is open in the sense a lobster pot is open, breaking down
critical distance and identity until no one knows who they are any more’.
In this way, the new inclusive capitalism functions first and foremost to
pre-empt, co-opt, and neutralize demands
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/20/an-icon-of-the-left-tells-democrats-dont-go-socialist/>
for
more radical transformation advocated by labour and social movements – a
strategy consciously designed to split the left
<https://fortune.com/2019/05/30/capitalism-democratic-socialists/> by
giving ‘progressives’ the ideological ammunition they need to embrace the
system.

If the left today is to advance beyond ‘Third Way’ social democracy’s
embrace of financialized global capitalism, it therefore cannot settle for
a more or less progressive capitalism that merely compensates those ‘left
behind’ by neoliberalism at the margins, but must pose genuine
worker-centred socialist alternatives – a dual social and ecological
revolution that fundamentally transforms the exploitative capitalist system
which generates these inequalities, degradations, and oppressions in the
first place. •

Kyle Bailey is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York
University in Toronto.

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