Late-stage capitalism

I looked at Marx's foil "capitalism" and Rand's attempt to make something good of the term, almost four years ago. As Hudson has made clear, perhaps clearer than Marx himself: capitalism supports capital, and capital is just numbers-on-ledger. Let's look tonight at how capitalism works against... businesses.

A privately-owned company can be heroic; for good or ill (some might mention Musk; this is not the post to discuss Musk). A publicly-traded company must answer to a board. Some of the guys on the board might care; Boeing used to care. Other board members might be ideologues more interested in the Climate or in Equity. Those guys can, perhaps, get sued for not doing their duty. But what is a company's duty?

A critique lately being mooted is the Jerry Maguire critique. Yes, a company's ledger must balance first - but not last. A company is about representing athletes' interest, or about making aeroplanes - or about search engines. At some point a Jack Welch might get into the C-suite. Engineers no longer run Boeing; or, in Google's case, a bad engineer (but diverse!) gets into management, and promoted. I'm actually a little worried about Brave these days, putting ads on the new-page dashboard, or subtle DEI nudges (I swapped that out for blankpage: brave://settings/getStarted).

"Late-stage capitalism" gets misused. It begs at least one question, about whether this stage is a late-stage, or if we have further stages. Cloud Atlas' corpocracy might actually present itself as a cure to Finance / MBA overreach. But some questions I don't think the "LSC" meme begs, is the question about whether capitalism even exists, and that about whether it is good. It does exist, and I'm not seeing the good.