Stakeholder capitalism: Difference between revisions

This is no reimagining of the fundamental purpose of a corporation, but just a better view of the old one. If your customers happen not to be, or care about, polar bears, then no need to lose any sleep about polar bears, or give shit about them when you wake up if you do. Your only decision is “whether me caring about polar bears will make more people buy my stuff, and thereby increase my bottom line”. This is untrammeled ''shareholder'' capitalism.

Under Joel Bakan’s theory, remember, it is not the ''shareholders'' who are psychopaths, but the [[corporation]]s they own, as distinct [[Legal personality|legal person]]s.

But on that one subject, they are totally, magically, ''necessarily'' aligned: each will say, “whatever else I care about in my life, members of the board, know this: ''I expect you to maximise my return''.”

Now you might argue that, since we are all shareholders in one way or another, stakeholder capitalism is really no more than paying attention to shareholders’ ''wider'' interests, not just their pecuniary ones. This way, polar bears get a look in if and only if their welfare is in the shareholders’ wider interest.

Besides, to ditch this narrow financial interest is to miss the single clinching insight. ''As long as it is all about return, there can be no arguments.''

Long ago, our forebears in ancient Mesopotamia hit upon a way to abstract pure, disembodied ''[[value]]'' from the relativising commodities or perishable [[Substrate|substrates]] in which it is usually embedded: they called that abstracted value “''[[Cash|money]]''”.