February 19, 2025

laborday 2016

Building the Future, Success Together

Ethics or exploitation unpacking sustainable capitalism

Ethics or exploitation unpacking sustainable capitalism

About the books

False profits of ethical capital

False profits of ethical capital is a timely study of an important political economic phenomenon: ESG investing and stakeholder capitalism. Moving beyond observations of the inadequacies of responsible business as a vehicle for social change, this book argues that ESG investing and related corporate responsibility practices facilitate profit through speculation on ethics. 

Ethical capital is framed as a process through which political challenges to capital accumulation on social and environmental grounds are transformed into opportunities for profit. A speculative moral economy prevails in which it is assumed that business can do well and do good at the same time, belying conflicts between different ‘stakeholders’. The practices of stakeholder capitalism aim to neutralise ethical dilemmas presented by overlapping social, ecological and economic crises and, in the process, alienate ethics from the human being and transform them, via financial calculus, into metrics that inform value relations. These processes manifest in ESG investing, sustainability reporting and corporate branding exercises. 

False profits of ethical capital exposes the contradictions that are concealed by sustainability politics, and suggests an alternative frame for thinking through the strategic challenges of contesting ethical capital.

Undermining Resistance 

Why do multinational mining corporations use participation to undermine resistance? Why and how do people affected by mining embrace or resist mining? Do the struggles of local communities, activists and NGOs matter on a global scale? Why are there so many different global standards in mining?

This book develops a new critical political economy approach to studying extractive accumulation which places company-community conflict in the context of shifting global crises in the governance of mining. The author draws on three detailed Indonesian cases to explain how participatory mechanisms continuously reshape and are reshaped by community-corporate conflict. Findings highlight feedback between local social relations, transnational activism, crises of legitimacy and global governance.

Corporate social responsibility, community development, ‘gender-mainstreaming’ and environmental monitoring are neither simple outcomes of corporate ethics nor mere greenwashing strategies. Rather, participation is a mechanism to undermine resistance and create social relations amenable to extractive accumulation. 

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