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• Remuneration for effort and scarifies rather than for property, power or output; • Participatory planning rather than markets or central planning; and • Participatory self-management rather than class rule.
• The eroding of capitalism through setting up alternative structures and organisations to capitalism (e.g. cooperatives). The book favours the last option when discussing, for example, the Association pour la Taxation des Transactions
Unlike these alternatives, current government focuses
financières et pour l’Action Citoyenne (Association for
on ‘business, regulation and policy’ (p. 195) where,
the Taxation of financial Transactions and Citizens’Action)
under the camouflage of deregulation, pro-business
or ‘ATTAC’ - https://www.attac.org (p. 248), ‘fair trade
re-regulation is taking place under the ideological
organisations’ (p. 250) and LETS ‘local exchange trading
guidance of neoliberalism. An almost classic example
systems’ (p. 251). Almost inevitably these alternatives to
has been ‘food labelling’ (p. 203) and the prevention of
capitalism can lead to a ‘social economy’ (p. 258) in which
what has been known as “the traffic-light system” (green
‘business practices (e.g. entrepreneurship) and business
is good to eat, yellow is okay to eat, and red: do not eat too
logic (e.g. profits) [no longer] colonise (civil) society and
often). After corporate lobbying and €1bn expenditure
government’ (p. 258). This establishes a ‘social economy
on public relations (PR), the traffic light food labelling was
– always embedded in society’ (p. 259), rather than the
banned in Europe (Phillips 2003). Corporate lobbying, the
current state of affairs where society is embedded in the
ideologies of corporate social responsibility and business
economy as supplier of labour and buyer of products, thus
ethics as well as a solid and well-financed PR campaign
featuring as an appendix to corporations. In corporate
paid off handsomely. This and many other things are
capitalism, people have two functions. Firstly, they supply
cloaked in what is euphemistically called ‘business ethics’
labour and secondly, they are customers. Capitalism needs
(p. 211). Business ethics has mutated into being more than
us to work and to buy things.These ‘things’ are often things
just a cloaking devise. It has metamorphosed into a fully
we do not really need and we buy them with money we
functional ideology (Klikauer, 2017b). Not surprisingly,
do not have to impress people we do not like. The book
the author of the chapter on business ethics reaches
ends with a conclusion called ‘rethinking ownership –
the conclusion that ‘business does not lead to significant
the market versus the commons’ (p. 274), arguing that
changes’ (p. 215) – change has never been the task of
we need to move beyond markets and property while
business ethics. The task of business ethics is PR (Stauber
avoiding “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Harding 1968).
& Rampton, 1995; MEF, 2003).
In summary, Birch’s book on business and society is
Indeed, the idea of business ethics is ‘to gain the trust of
unparalleled by any other in the field.
consumers’ (p. 218) and to get people to trust capitalism and its corporations. This occurs even though many
Thomas Klikauer is a teacher in the Sydney Graduate School
people of our globe are all but excluded, as the chapter
of Management, Western Sydney University, Australia
on ‘business and social exclusion’ (p. 225) illustrates. A
Contact: t.klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au
particularly useful idea to incorporate those excluded into capitalism came from Mohammed Yanus/ Grameen
Reshman Tabassum is a PhD student in the Department of
Bank. Rather than incorporating people into the profit-
Management, Deakin University, Australia.
generating system of capitalism and making them
Contact: rtabassum@deakin.edu.au
internalise the rules of corporate behaviour (Mander, 2001; Benson & Kirsch 2010), there is also ‘resistance and [there are also] alternatives to corporate capitalism’ (p. 241). These alternatives to capitalism take, according to Erik Olin Wright (p. 242), four forms: • The taming of capitalism, which is essentially the socialdemocratic “please be nice” solution to capitalism’s pathologies; • The smashing capitalism, i.e. the revolutionary uprising of the working class against capitalism that appears to
Benson, P. & Kirsch, S. (2010). Capitalism and the Politics of Resignation. Current Anthropology, 51(4), 459-486. CNN. (2017). Libya’s slave markets. Retrieved fromhttps://edition.cnn.com/ videos/world/2017/11/29/libya-slave-trade-cnntalk-lon-orig-mkd.cnn Fayol, H. (1916). Administration industrielle et générale (Industrial and General Management). London: Sir I. Pitman & Sons, ltd. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Harding, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162, 1243–1248.
be nowhere in sight; • The escaping from capitalism that often means joining a hippie commune as far as they still exist; and finally, vol. 61, no. 1, 2019
References
Higginbotham, W. (2017). Blackbirding: Australia’s history of luring, tricking and kidnapping Pacific Islanders. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/
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