1. You're setting up a false binary. Of course people with similar backgrounds can come to different conclusions. That doesn’t invalidate material analysis any more than two siblings choosing different religions invalidates the role of upbringing. A materialist lens doesn’t pretend to explain everything, but it does offer a framework for understanding why certain worldviews dominate and others get marginalized. That’s not a replacement for other kinds of analysis; it’s a corrective to the idea that ideas float freely, unshaped by power or interests.
2. I don’t pretend to be a corporate lawyer. My point wasn’t about your legal credentials, it was about worldview. You’re describing the boundaries of what is legally permissible under current corporate structures, while I’m trying to talk about what might be politically possible if we shift the framework. I’m not surprised that Delaware law doesn’t enshrine shareholder supremacy in literal terms. But I don’t think you’d deny that, in practice, maximizing shareholder value is still the north star of most major corporations. That’s the issue I’m raising: how economic norms, not just legal texts, shape behavior.
Also, no one said worker co-ops are going to build semiconductor plants overnight. That’s a straw man. The real question is whether we can diversify ownership models and democratize economic decision-making in some sectors, especially where there’s already a public role, like energy, healthcare, or housing.
3. The point isn’t that media gatekeeping caused the financial crisis. It’s that elite institutions, media included, lost legitimacy after a series of historic failures, from Iraq to Wall Street deregulation to growing inequality. People don’t turn to figures like catturd because they’re just anti-gay or racist. Many turn to them because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that official channels stopped telling the truth or representing their interests.
4. Of course countries don’t call the IMF for fun. But that doesn’t mean the medicine they’re given is neutral or technocratic. It reflects a certain ideology: austerity, liberalization, and market primacy. You say they’re called when everything else fails, but what’s been ruled out before that? Land reform? Capital controls? Public investment? The IMF prescribes a very specific treatment plan, and it has a long track record of worsening conditions in the name of “stability.”
1. I don't want to set up a false binary. We've in the past come to an agreement that a) people tend to have their worldview shaped by their own experience and interests and b) tends is the key word there, as it's oversimplified with respect to a lot of people. I'd say it's a bit odd to be relying too heavily on material analysis in today's politics, which is characterized by a) college educated liberals voting against their own economic interests out of concerns about justice, fairness and social liberties vs b) a working class voting against its own interests because of concerns about wokeism. But anyway, we all know that people sometimes vote on the economy and sometimes not.
So if we can agree on that, maybe we can paint with a narrower brush? It's not just me who takes offense at the "neoliberal elites ruined everything" narrative. There are plenty of folks on this board who would -- who will, one supposes -- benefit greatly from Trump's tax cuts (even if they would benefit more if they weren't lawyers), and yet who consistently vote Democratic.
2. Land reform is frequently the reason that countries require IMF assistance, so yes it gets tried. Public investment too. The reason that Argentina went broke is that they went all-in on the public investment approach, but the public corporations were horribly inefficient. So eventually the government, not getting enough revenues to cover its generous pension programs, had to start selling off the public investments. That gave them enough income to see things through . . . until they were out of investments to sell. Then the shit hit the fan. Were those assets auctioned at firesale prices in corrupt bidding processes? Sometimes they were. And that's a challenge for any leftist political program that requires state involvement. Governments are too often corrupt.
3. Most states now have established a relatively new form of public-minded incorporation: the "benefit corporation" or "b-corp." It's been in the news because OpenAI was trying to reincorporate as a for-profit b-corp (can't remember if it went through with it officially), but most b-corps are small businesses. For instance, the Park Slope food coop -- a famous worker-coop with a long pedigree -- is being sold. If it was a b-corp (don't know if it is or not), the new buyer would have to respect certain principles on which the company was founded, such as the market has to remain a coop for all eternity.
The uptake on b-corps surprised me; I didn't think they offered enough to make it worth the trouble, but perhaps I was wrong about that. Anyway, there is a corporate form available for these small businesses.
There are no industrial b-corps, though. Not that I know of. You cannot run a steel mill with inflexible fairness principles. Well, you can and there's a name for it: bankrupt steel mill. THIS isn't a worldview. This is empirical reality. It's not a fun reality, but that's the way the world works. The evidence is staggering. I can't rule out the possibility that there is some ideal form of organization that is workable and just, if only we reorganized society in that manner. But there's also no evidence in favor of that view. It's just hopium and anecdote. I don't think it's a good idea to overturn the whole apple cart in order to chase a dream that might or might not be real.
In other words: there are no alternatives to shareholder primacy that I can see. The irony here is that shareholder primacy works according to your materialist analysis. I'm sure you've thought about that, so it's not news to you. I'm confirming and explaining it. The law favors the board. But the law also allows the board to be compensated with stock, which makes the board into shareholders, and thus their interests are aligned with shareholders, so shareholder primacy becomes the same thing as managerial primacy. The whole system depends on managers always pursuing their own interests. It's economic self-interest all the way down.
But the alternative is a dual-mandate system that has the distinct disadvantage of relying on people to balance those dual mandates. Is that a decision you want to entrust to Jamie Dimon? It will be even worse, because if they are pursuing their own interests, they can shape the dual mandate however they want, in the way that advantages them most. This is one reason I brought up Marty Lipton. In the real world, the dual mandate model creates monstrosities like the management of whatever company Gordon Gekko took over. Did Gordon Gekko improve matters? In one way, yes. In another, more comprehensive sense, no.
4. If you want an example of a company that doesn't give a fuck about its investors, I would offer you: Tesla. It doesn't give a fuck about them for an odd reason: the shareholders of Tesla are Musk fanboys in a stable configuration of investment wealth that has surprised everyone with its longevity. But anyway, Elon does what Elon wants, right? And one of the things he wanted to do was invest billions of dollars in something called a Cybertruck.
That was a common story in corporate law. In fact, one reason that debt-financing became the norm in the merger world is that the interest payments were seen as a feature, not bug: because the profits had to be paid out as interest payments, those profits couldn't be wasted on pet projects like the Cybertruck. To the extent that shareholders are, these days, organized enough to demand dividend payments, it functions the same.
The point is that shareholder primacy rules because it works the best. Is it possible that we could have a benevolent AI emerge that has no material interests of its own, and thus could be trusted to make allocation decisions for companies without agency costs. If so, we don't need shareholder primacy. If not, then shareholder primacy works better than everything else.
