Stakeholding in the Global Casino: A Reply to David Campbell
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00046 |
| Date | 01 June 1997 |
| Author | Paddy Ireland |
| Published date | 01 June 1997 |
We are like a big fish that has been pulled from the water and is flopping wildly to find
its way back in. In such a condition the fish never asks where the next flip or flop will
bring it. It senses only that its present position is intolerable and that something else
must be tried.1
In the spring issue of the
Journal of Law and Society, David Campbell
responded to my pessimistic assessment of the potential of the stakeholding
company as a vehicle for progressive social(ist) change.2To the limited extent
that he engaged with me rather than with a curious straw marxist of his
own, his principal objection – and one which deserves to be taken seriously
– was what he considered to be my exaggeration of the constraints on
corporate behaviour. In this reply, I return briefly to this issue.3
THE END OF ECONOMIC DOMINATION?
It is not true, David Campbell argues, that corporations are severely
constrained by the disciplines imposed by markets (pp. 66, 69). On the
contrary, ‘there is no growing dominance . . . of the capitalist market and
it is one virtue of stakeholding that it makes us confront this, the central
feature of the world capitalist economy today’ (p. 66). The basis for these
claims is to be found in the view Campbell takes of capitalist development
and his belief that there was towards the end of the nineteenth century an
historic transition from ‘laissez faire’ to ‘advanced capitalism’. In Campbell’s
account, which is elaborated in his stimulating and provocative book, The
Failure of Marxism,4the late nineteenth century saw – in the form of the
chronic over-production and ruinously fierce price competition of the ‘Great
Depression’ of 1873–96 – a crisis which threatened capitalism’s very survival.
The crisis, Campbell argues, was resolved only by the ‘abolition of the price
mechanism’ and by the replacement of competitive markets as the principle
regulators of production. In a flood of cartelizations and mergers, a
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
* Kent Law School, Eliot College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent
CT2 7NS, England
276
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 24, NUMBER 2, JUNE 1997
ISSN: 0263–323X, pp. 276–84
Stakeholding in the Global Casino:
A Reply to David Campbell
PADDY IRELAND*
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