Fascist means, green ends

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In ‘What is Fascism?’ (1944), George Orwell complained that the word ‘fascist’ had been applied to so many groups, (including conservatives, socialists, communists and Catholics), beliefs and even species (dogs!) that it had been reduced to something close to meaninglessness. And yet, he observed:

‘Fascism is…a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it?… To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any color, are willing to make.’

That was true then, and it’s true in 2021 — except that we should now add some of today’s harder-edged greens to Orwell’s list. A good number of their precursors in interwar Europe would not have been so diffident.

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The Great Reset: If Only It Were Just a Conspiracy

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Writing for The Spectator US, Ben Sixsmith gets to grips with “the Great Reset” now being proposed by the World Economic Forum (“Davos”).

And yes, despite a name that sounds as if it were conjured up in some of conspiracism’s danker fever swamps, the Great Reset really exists:

“The World Economic Forum, which organizes the annual conference Davos, has launched an initiative called, yes, ‘the Great Reset’. It has its own website.”

Indeed it does.

But, after noting the involvement of “partners” such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, IKEA, Lockheed Martin, Ericsson and Deloitte, Sixsmith doubts whether the Great Reset can be seen, as some like to suggest (even allowing for a bit of hype) as “socialist Left Marxist” or a “global communist takeover plan.”

Fair enough, not least because the Great Reset is, in essence, corporatist, not communist. The participation of companies of the type that Sixsmith mentions is, in reality, the participation of certain members of their senior management, using shareholder funds for purposes that have nothing to do with the bottom line and everything to do with the wielding of power within a system akin to a concert, with the state — if not necessarily the government — acting as the conductor.

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The Dangers of ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, Andy Puzder took aim at Joe Biden’s embrace of “stakeholder capitalism,” the doctrine now being touted as a replacement for the quaint notion that a company should be run for the benefit of those — the shareholders — who own it. Stakeholder capitalism is a modish name for what is just another expression of corporatism, an old ideology with a sometimes sinister past that, because of the power it gives to the unelected and the unaccountable, will never fall far out of style. That, in this case, it involves playing around with other people’s money only adds to its sleazy appeal.

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High Stakes

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In a CNBC interview, former Goldman Sachs Asset Management Chairman Jim O’Neill became the latest figure to use COVID-19 as a recruiting sergeant for a preferred cause — in O’Neill’s case, “stakeholder capitalism.”

CNBC:

“People that run really successful businesses have to be thinking about something a bit more than just an outright obsession with maximization of profit and playing their own role in trying to deal with some societal challenges,” he said.

O’Neill, who is currently Chair of Chatham House, said companies could be moving into a new era of “stakeholder capitalism,” where they must act beyond the interests of their shareholders.

O’Neill [also] said politicians could find “huge political appeal” among younger voters by requiring companies to emphasize environmental issues.

O’Neill is hardly the only person to embrace stakeholder capitalism. To take just a few examples, it has been touted with dreary predictability by the Davos crowd but also by the Business Roundtable, an organization that should know better. Making matters even worse, the businesspeople pushing the stakeholder agenda include not only corporate managers (increasingly indifferent to the obligation they owe the shareholders of the companies for which they work), but investment managers, who once believed that it was their duty to grow the money entrusted to them.

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Profit without Honor

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The socially responsible investing (SRI) bandwagon rolls on.

CNBC:

Longtime hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones on Wednesday critiqued the long-held belief that companies should exist for the sole purpose of generating profits.

Jones, whose remarks came during a JUST Capital event with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, said [that it’s] a philosophy that allows corporate boards to neglect issues of equity in the workplace and ultimately undermine the stability of broader U.S. society.

“When you just look and say that the only thing that a company has to worry about is making a profit, it gives that company a pass not to pay attention to pay equity, not to pay attention to gender equity, not to pay attention to racial equality. Not to pay attention to a whole host of social factors that at the end of the day are the basis and the foundation of a strong, vibrant society,” Jones said.

But these are matters best hashed out in public debate and where necessary, legislatures, not boardrooms.

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How Advocates of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ Distort Shareholder Power

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Many years ago, Milton Friedman explained something that should never have needed explaining, when, writing for the New York Times Magazine, he reminded his readers what —and whom — a company is meant to be for:

In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to [the] basic rules of . . . society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. . . .

What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a “social responsibility” in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers.

The executives who retool a company’s mission to suit a particular conception of “social responsibility” are spending shareholders’ money on a moral agenda unrelated to company objectives, an affront that’s only made worse if their crusade depresses returns, share price, or both.

Friedman was writing in 1971. Since then, like so many bad ideas, corporate social responsibility has become institutionalized. To take a recent example, in 2017 JP Morgan Chase gave $500,000 to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that, sadly, has strayed far from its original ideals. Had they learned of it, this gift would probably have irritated a good many shareholders. The employee who had to justify it was — you guessed it — the bank’s “head of corporate responsibility,” a title that signifies how deep the rot has gone.

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