Stakeholder capitalism, not missionary capitalism

This is an unusual book. I struggle to place it politically, since it both strongly advocates both reasserting the voice of the working class in politics and society, alongside quite conservative positions on issues like immigration. According to Wikipedia Michael Lind is a former neoconservative and an advocate of 'democratic nationalism', which doesn't immediately appeal to me.

It's more of a polemic than an analysis. But there are bits of it that I feel hit the target, even if that might just be because the caricatures are resonant more than anything else. For example:

Many of today's so-called community organisations are not so much grass roots as AstroTurf (an artificial grass. A contemporary "community activist" is likely to be a university graduate and likely as well to be rich or supported by affluent overclass parents, because of the reliance of non-profits on unpaid interns and staffers with low salaries. Success in the non-profit sector frequently depends not on mobilising ordinary citizens but on getting grants from the program officers of a small number of billionaire-endowed foundations in a few big cities, many of them named for old or new business tycoons, like Ford, Rockefeller, Gates, and Bloomberg. Such "community activists" have more in common with nineteenth-century missionaries sent out to save the "natives" from themselves than with the members of local communities who headed local chapters of national volunteer federations of the past.

I think there is a lot of truth in this, and the point applies more widely (Angus Deaton made a similar point).

This reminds me of things I see in my corner of the world in relation to the way employment issues are dealt with by investors. This is still very much approached in a 'top-down' and instrumental way. Employee engagement is now seen as A Good Thing, but because it can be instrumental to creating value for investors. Further, employee engagement is something done *to* workers *by* managers. And, therefore, engagement over employment issues is something that 'responsible' investors do with senior executives that may, or may not, benefit workers.

I think this is in part why many investors struggle with unions, and have seen labour issues as more 'political' than others (there are other reasons too - some investors literally just hate unions and are explicit that they want to keep labour costs down). Effective unions are about the empowerment of workers through self-organisation, not getting someone else to act on workers' behalf. A category error a lot of people in my field make is to understand the 'union' as the full-time officers rather than the actual union of workers. Unions are not NGOs working on behalf of workers, they are they workers themselves.

Where investors often get twitchy is when workers start making demands, because this is seen as a challenge to management. It gets particularly sharp in the corporate governance discussion where it's pretty obvious most investors don't want employee representation on boards (though they've got a bit more subtle about how they position themselves on this issue).

It's ultimately a question about power. Do we want workers to exercise it themselves, and therefore think about ways to accommodate this within the firm/corporate governance/engagement etc, or are we content with corporate and investors having it, with the hope that some missionaries amongst them will intervene on behalf of the workforce?