Stakeholder capitalism and the tyranny of experts

Stephen Andrew on Stakeholder Capitalism:

“Stakeholder capitalism” is not a phrase I had ever heard of before 2020 but now seem to hear everywhere I go. The best way to understand what it means, is to think of a company as it was once understood, where the CEO and company managers are regarded as answerable to their “shareholders”, the actual owners of the company. They held a ‘fiduciary duty’, as managers, to always act in the best interests of their shareholders and if they failed to do so, the shareholders could boot them out and appoint someone who did.

Well, not anymore. That was the ‘old normal’. Under the ‘new normal’, the meaning of ‘fiduciary duty’ has undergone a radical shift. Now, a CEO or manager’s ‘fiduciary duty’ is to the company’s ‘stakeholders’, not its shareholders – and these stakeholders could be anyone from the local school, local community action group, or international environment lobby or regulator to your government.

Far from being a technical legal point, therefore, this shift in meaning changes everything. It is what has been driving the wholesale transfer of ‘power’ away from those who ‘own’ something, to those who can claim a ‘stake’ in it, and will end up changing the very nature of government in Australia.

Anyone who doubts this, need only read last month’s High Court decision, where the Commonwealth government was found ‘guilty’ for having ‘breached its fiduciary duty’ by approving a new coal mine in the country. The case was brought by a group of teenagers, who argued that as ‘stakeholders’ with a ‘vested interest’ in the state of the planet, the Commonwealth Government had a ‘fiduciary duty’ to act in their interests by not approving the mine. And they won! In the High Court!

The implications of this decision, and other similar ones we have seen in the courts recently, further shift ‘power’ away from ‘the people’ and into the hands of vested interest groups and those who really run government – the bureaucrat, the public official, the technician, the scientist, the systems analyst – the ‘managerial’ class known as “The Experts”.

Stakeholder capitalism is ‘technocracy’

That’s why the other name for “stakeholder capitalism” is ‘Technocracy’. A system of government that merges state and corporate power, all governed by a small cabal of elite technocratic experts, who know what’s best for society and everyone in it. It’s why we are seeing so many elites in politics and business, calling for more and more ‘public-private’ partnerships. They want a system where the only people they will be accountable or answerable to, will be each other.

In the old days, such partnerships were known by another name – back then, we called it ‘corruption at the top’. Either way, this new system will be the very antithesis of democracy.

Please help stop this by signing these very important two petitions and sharing as widely as you can. Here are the links: