Stakeholder Capitalism and the End of History

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 109

In 1844, Karl Marx explained that Communism, “as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement” is “the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. In 2016, 172 years later, Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum put forth a bold future-casting video proclaiming that by the year 2030 “you will own nothing, and you will be happy.” These, of course, are the same assertion. Flashing back, in 1964, in the book One-dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse explained that to move forward with the Marxist project, socialism had to figure out how to become productive without abandoning its core values and capitalism had to be reined in to curb its inherent unsustainability. That is, Marcuse reframed the riddle of history and pointed in the direction of a way to solve it. This year, in 2023, just weeks ago in an interview resulting from the Davos meeting, Klaus Schwab articulated his vision for this solution: state capitalism on the one hand and shareholder capitalism on the other have to be reconsidered into a new model he calls “stakeholder capitalism” that incorporates certain aspects of “social responsibility.” Yet again, these are the same assertion. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay explains these ideas in unprecedented depth, reading through and building off an essay he wrote for New Discourses on this very subject last October: “The Riddle of History, Solved.” Join him to understand what “stakeholder capitalism” really is in terms of “productive socialism” and capitalism reframed in terms of the “sustainability” agenda.

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