Notestein has pointed that, in England, the customary forms of company that helped determine England's breakthrough as a colonial superpower during the seventeenth century, date back to organizational forms for enterprises that had been developed in the bosom of medieval guilds, but that got gradually adapted to new needs, especially than meeting the needs of merchants active in overseas territories. From these precursors grew two types of companies, notably the regulated companies, and the joint stock companies.43

The prototype of the (English) regulated companies was the so-called Merchant Adventurers, a form of company recognized by the government as early as 1407 and being granted a charter in 1564.44 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the

42Compare also Utsa Patnaik's observations regarding the practices of the English East Indian Company in colonial India (Cf. Section <IP_ADDRESS>.2.).

43Notestein (1954), p. 250.

44Notestein (1954), p. 250.

Merchant Adventures had between 3000 and 4000 members, while exhibiting characteristics of both a guild structure and a modern corporation.45

In the joint-stock companies*,* the characteristics of the guild system would be even further abandoned. Here shares ownership—and hence the intent of proft maximization for the beneft of the company's shareholders—became even more central, making the joint-stock company the legal form used primarily for high-risk enterprises, with a need for special arrangements with distant countries. A frst, fedgling example of such a joint-stock company was the so-called Muscovy Company, established for trade with the Russian Tsar in 1553, with a total capital of £6000 that was represented by shares, having a nominal value of £25.46

Just like interest levying on credit and private money creation, the breakthrough of (these predecessors of) the modern capital company form would soon start to change the outlook of Western societies—and later in history, of global society—in a fundamental manner. In this, the new methods of conducting an enterprise in a company form helped to put an end to the earlier systems of socioeconomic organization, including (what remained of) feudalism and the guild system, even more quickly.

The basic idea of feudalism had been one of servitude in exchange for protection (albeit that this model had, in many cases, degenerated into appropriate forms of oppression, especially in the cases where the feudal lord who was supposed to protect his serfs turned out to be of ill will himself, which was all too often the case).

The basic idea of the guild system had been to establish professional associations of merchants and craftsmen, who worked for their common interests (including through obtaining privileges), without aiming at providing organized forms of cooperation between individual merchants and/or craftsmen. However, even this guild system would, over time, bring with it negative consequences, including the artifcial shielding of professional sectors (and therefore the markets in which they operated) from new entrants.

Gradually, these traditional forms of organization of trade and crafts would give way to the new form of organization offered by the (capital) company form, the latter especially by allowing for the establishment of larger-scale business empires, within which the pursuit of proft (for the sake of shareholders) was elevated to be the central objective. With the later breakthrough of stock exchanges—in modern terms: fnancial markets–, this characteristic of proft maximization would become even more prominent, to the proportions it assumes in contemporary societies.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Crystallization of the Capitalist, Socioeconomic Order**

It appears that in the eighteenth century, Europe had abandoned for good all attempts to establish an equitable socioeconomic system.

45Notestein (1954), p. 251.

46Notestein (1954), pp. 251–252.

Instead, the breakthrough of capitalism had a fundamental downside (which still constitutes the main downside of the capitalist, socioeconomic model in modernday societies as well), namely the fact that the increasingly large-scale commercial and artisanal, later industrial enterprises, all needed to rely on more and more (cheap) labor, as well as on more and more raw materials, to make their projects successful.

This implied that the new breed of merchants and artisans, later entrepreneurs, who increasingly organized themselves under the form of (capital) companies, had an ever-increasing need for personnel to (help) perform the actual, material work (as well as an ever-increasing need for raw materials to keep up with economic production; cf. already in Sect. 3.1).

As the feudal system itself began to wind down, in addressing the need for ever more work forces, it was possible to look to the great masses, where it soon became apparent that the modal man, who no longer found a place in society as a serf, did not seem predisposed to take on a role of entrepreneur himself, but rather looked for opportunities to rent out his labor to the newly emerging entrepreneurs (who, as mentioned above, increasingly organized themselves in the company/corporate form).

And it is here that the drama of capitalism started to unfold fully.

Let us frst take a brief look at the outlines of the crystallizing socioeconomic picture of the time:

It should come as no surprise that the system of socioeconomic organization thus newly formed provided the breeding ground for the already above, additional basic mechanism of capitalism, namely labor against (fxed) wages.

Conceptually, this called for people who themselves were not cut out for conducting an enterprises (in the broad sense of the word), to rent out their labor to those who were.

However, a fundamental *caveat* applied here, namely that the group of employers was at the same time increasingly inspired by one underlying societal goal, namely the pursuit of proft (rather than, for example, the goal of establishing just models of society—as, for example, based on traditional, Christian doctrine, which, in theory, still held).

This in turn implied that the wages entrepreneurs were willing to pay to those who rented out their labor, had to be kept as low as possible (at the risk of otherwise unduly eroding company/corporate profts).

Thus, a new basic principle of capitalism became exposed, which held that the wages of the labor-supplying classes should be kept as low as possible in order to maximize company/corporate profts. This basic principle of capitalism would later in history be referred to as the Iron Law of the Wages.47

Soon, this principle would gradually be considered a premise for entrepreneurship itself.48

And with this a new, essential characteristic of capitalist logic got gradually established: the intent of wealth-gathering that underlies the various mechanisms of socioeconomic order that broke through in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, essentially requires a willingness to exploit one's fellow human beings, especially those do not themselves engage in the use of said capitalist mechanisms, but who nevertheless look for a method of survival, in particular by making their labor available in exchange for a fxed remuneration.

Since then, this characteristic of capitalism has evolved into one of the most essential peculiarities of the new, socioeconomic thinking that began to take shape during this period.

Even further away from the ideals of Jesus Christ Himself, from whose ideas the Western world was, in this manner, increasingly evading, were certain mechanisms of exploitation that started to take shape shortly thereafter, including the reintroduction into Western societies of slavery, and the maintenance of feudalism as a method of (forced) employment in some (Eastern) European territories, in addition to an industrial organization of these new methods of exploitation of other people's labor, that would take shape during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.49

The logical outcome of this new method of organizing labor in the Western world itself, was the formation of a so-called 'proletariat', characterized by a large multitude of unskilled workers, who could be very cheaply enlisted in the economic production processes and who started to no longer being regarded as fully-fedged fellow human beings, but only as a cheap production factor.50

47Cf. Ricardo's Iron Law of the Wages. (On this, cf. Galbraith (1987), p. 84.)

48For the sake of completeness, it may be added that, where in modern times this capitalist principle still prevails, it has been moderated somewhat by the realization that (at least in the Western world) the laboring classes must be left with a suffcient wage for the purchase of the products produced by the capitalist machinery—with the proviso, however, that these wages must not enable the laboring classes to engage in wealth accumulation of their own, as this would allow them to evade enlistment (as workers) in the capitalist machinery itself. In contrast, in developing countries, the Iron Law of the Wages, regretfully, still applies to its fullest extent. (Cf., already, the fgures quoted in Sect. 3.3.)

49Kruithof (1986), p. 36.

50Kruithof (1986), pp. 36–37.

## *7.1.2 Economic Rationalization and Its Translation to the Policy Level*

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Genesis of Economic Theorizing**

#### <IP_ADDRESS>.1 General

As a result of the evolutions dealt with in Sect. 7.1.1, in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the appearance of the Western world was changed very profoundly.

At the socioeconomic level, feudalism had gradually been supplanted by an amalgam of organizational methods that together provided the building blocks for (mercantile) capitalism.

In the world of ideas, as already mentioned, an initial, if non-uniform validation of the newly emerging trading and fnancial practices started to occur in the Protestant thought good in the broad sense of the word.

Especially Calvinism began to demonstrate a very open attitude to wealth accumulation as a life goal, provided that the accumulated wealth was not accompanied by a wanton spending pattern. In addition, Calvin preached a pervasive work ethic, that continues to this day to resonate with the (labor) ethic of economic neoliberalism itself.51 (Cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>.6)

Shortly thereafter, certain American, Christian movements would even start to justify the practice of slavery.52

Nevertheless, in the realm of ideas, the torch of defense of the new socioeconomic system, that gradually emerged based on the aforementioned practices, would soon be taken over by the secular mental movement of rationalism that, among other things, tried to recognize, by means of scientifc methods, tendencies in human behavior, including at the level of the socioeconomic order.53

One of the most famous, early examples of this approach is, without a doubt, the work of the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith, frst through his book 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments' (1759), and later through his even more famous book 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' (1776)*.* With these works, Smith at the same time profled himself as one of the frontrunners of economics as an independent, academic discipline.

In addition to the works of Smith himself, during the second half of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, numerous other tracts devoted to the theme of the socioeconomic order would see the light of day, to grow together into

51Cf., for example, Brook and Watkins (2012), p. 77.

52Cf., for example, Noel Ray's research (Cf. Ray (2018).)

53Cf. Byttebier (2015a), p. 137.

the school of economic liberalism,54 in which this qualifcation as an 'economic school' was made only afterwards.55

Without wishing here to subject Adam Smith's writings to a full dissection—this has obviously already been undertaken in very voluminous literature–, the main point made here is that, in Smithian thought, wealth accumulation in general, and the conducting of an enterprise in particular, got strongly praised as building blocks of prosperous societies.

This even happened to the extent that one can speak of a true reversal of the value scale in relation to Christianity which, at least in the realm of ideas, had managed to dominate the subject matter for a millennium and a half before.56

## <IP_ADDRESS>.2 Roots of Two Basic Tenets of Economics: Trickle-Down Economics, and the Iron Law of the Wages

Let us illustrate the foregoing by reference to two of the most central ideals of the ideas of economic liberalism (which, incidentally, have, to a large extent, been resurrected in contemporary economic neoliberalism), notably the doctrine of trickledown economics, *in* addition to the Iron Law of the Wages, where the emphasis will lie on how these doctrinal systems have been able to rationalize the pursuit of wealth, *ergo* the pursuit of proft (of the ruling classes within societies), into the most noble method of soci(et)al organization (to the proportions that it has assumed to this day, with this approach becoming the *Leitmotif* of business).

The works of economic-liberal authors generally show great sympathy for entrepreneurs, with Smith even calling their individual pursuit of wealth one of the most important forces for social progress. In particular, it is because someone who undertakes something wants to do better (*ergo*: richer) for himself that that person will do his utmost best to market quality products or services.57

54For an overview, cf. Byttebier (2015a), pp. 137–156, and Byttebier (2017), pp. 146–173.

55This school of economic liberalism differs from the later school of economic neoliberalism, which itself, from its inception, relied much more on collaborations between economists.

56Cf. Fromm (1952), p. 83.

57Cf. in Book I, Chapter II, Paragraph 2 of Adam Smith's most famous work, The Wealth of Nations:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefy upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend on it entirely. The charity of well- disposed people, indeed, supplies him with all the necessaries of life which he has occasion for, it neither does nor can provide him with them as he has occasion for them. The greater part of his occasional wants are supplied in the same manner as those of other people, by treaty, by barter, and by purchase. With the money which one man gives him he purchases food. The old cloaths which another bestows upon him he exchanges for other old cloaths which suit him better, or for lodging, or for food, or for money, with which he can buy either food, cloaths, or lodging, as he has occasion. (Cf. Smith (1979), pp. 26–27.)

Although Smith did not himself promulgate the doctrine of trickle-down economics in such detail, his approach already included the idea, prevalent within contemporary global societies, that wealth accumulation by doing business is synonymous with socially valuable action.

A step further in this line of reasoning, it came to be said that society—ultimately through its systems of public organization—has every interest in facilitating and encouraging entrepreneurship as much as possible, which in present-day neoliberal societies has become the *Leitmotif* of practically all governmental action.

Soon the idea even started to take hold that (just about) all societal progress is due to the class of entrepreneurs, which justifes that these entrepreneurs should be bearing the fruit of their entrepreneurial projects the most, and that only a small part thereof may go to the rest of society.

The step in reasoning to arrive at the latter approach was provided through the rationalization of employing other people in enterprise projects (about which we have learned, in the previous sections, that from the ffteenth–sixteenth century onward, these had become an increasingly important method of employment; cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>.5).

It is hereby argued that, through entrepreneurial projects, numerous other people fnd employment in exchange for appropriate remuneration. It was soon also considered entirely normal that the bulk of the profts generated by such entrepreneurial projects accrue to the entrepreneurial classes themselves (in various legal capacities, ranging from capital providers/shareholders to those of directors and managers), while those who are 'merely' employed in such enterprises should be content with a—low—fxed remuneration.

Incidentally, it is to this logic that the trickle-down economics theory owes its name, implying that the bulk of the entrepreneurial profts should accrue to the entrepreneurs themselves, while a small fraction of the added value thus generated, in the form of wages, trickle down to the class of employed people and, through mechanisms of taxation and the levying of social security contributions, to the rest of society as well.

However, the tragedy of this doctrinal system lies primarily in the far-reaching degree of rationalization of the entrepreneurs' pursuit of proft in accordance with this theorization, as a result of which, in order to keep their profts as high as possible, it was considered normal—not to say: elevated to an appropriate, basic economic principle—that the wages paid to those employed were to be kept as low as possible.

Here, the ethical views from earlier, historical periods, in the context of which models of justice (cf. with Aristotle), living together in friendship (cf. with Plato), or love for one's neighbor (cf. in Christianity) had been advocated, were resolutely abandoned in favor of a (supposedly) more rational approach that began to look at establishing the socio-economic order purely on the basis of numbers and fgures.

In this, it was quickly assumed that, in order to be suffciently proftable and competitive, enterprises had to be purely concerned with their numbers and proft margins, averse to any consideration of justice or equity.58 For this reason, it can rightly be said that the ideology of economic liberalism resulted into a sacrifce of all other (societal) values to the principle of the pursuit of proft (of the entrepreneurial class),59 which thus gained the status of the most central value of capitalist economies that, in this manner, gradually took shape, partly on the basis of this type of ideology.

It is hardly possible to overestimate the importance of these learning systems. Indeed, in the centuries that followed, their idea would become pre-eminent in the organization of the socioeconomic order, frst in several Western countries, but gradually throughout the world, leading to an economic system that came to be known as capitalism (even though contemporary adherents of it rather speak of the free market economy).

Thus, increasingly, an economic policy of allowing and facilitating entrepreneurs anything came into effect, an approach that under economic neoliberal policies from the 1980s onward, if possible, got even more accentuated.

## **<IP_ADDRESS> Political Conversion**

In the wake of the emergence of schools of economics, both in practice and in the realm of ideas, a political conversion of their ideas also started occurring.

Until deep into the second half of the eighteenth century, the design of government operations had still largely remained immune from the impact of ongoing socioeconomic developments.

The prevailing political system of that period was also known as the '*Ancien Régime'*, referring to a model of arrangement of state organization that had historical roots in medieval feudalism, but to which a number of contemporary shades had been conferred, including the increasing importance of central state authority and of the role of heads of state (who, in many European countries, had evolved into absolute monarchs who, at best, had internalized ideas of the Enlightenment that allowed their despotism to proceed somewhat within certain reasonable limits).

These absolute rulers were until deep in the eighteenth century supported in their position by two other leading classes, namely the nobility and the clergy, whereby the so-called third class—i.e., the class of merchants and artisans—did not (yet) saw ft to translate its increasing importance within the socioeconomic order, into a proportionate, political control.60

58 In Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, we fnd this vision of life refected in the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. In just about everything Scrooge proclaims and does in the frst pages of this book, we fnd a refection of the selfsh thinking on which the economic-liberal thinking of the time came to rely.

59Cf. already in Byttebier (2015a), p. 148, and Byttebier (2017), p. 159.

60Presumably, this translation of the socioeconomic power of the so-called third class to the political level had already succeeded best in England, where a model of parliamentary monarchy had already been established.

It is precisely the discontent of this emerging third class with its minor role on the political stage that would degenerate, at the end of the eighteenth century into in some cases, bloody—revolutions that started to occur throughout Europe, the frst and most famous of these having been the French Revolution of 1789.

Not coincidentally, the new regimes that came to power in the wake of these revolutions would themselves install political models of organizing society in which the interests of the third class (= those of merchants, bankers, and entrepreneurs) took center stage, because of which, in the course of the nineteenth century, throughout Europe, so-called bourgeois-liberal states took shape.

As a further result, within the legal domain, various forms of new legislation that mainly benefted the interests of this third class of merchants and entrepreneurs (including bankers) were issued.

The latter can be aptly illustrated by the example of France, where soon after the initial revolution of 1789, work was made on the creation of new legislation that jettisoned virtually all traces of the feudal society model in favor of supposedly liberal codifcations of legislation, including the famous *Code civil* of 1804 and the lesser-known *Code commercial* of 1807.

Limiting ourselves here to a few illustrations (on the ethics of socioeconomic order), it is, for example, very striking what signifcant importance the *Code civil* of 1804 attached to the so-called freedom of contract, that thus acquired the status of new, central societal ordering system. This, moreover, came to replace the—in principle lifelong—feudal bond that existed between a feudal lord and his feudal men).

Indeed, the system of feudalism had been based on an enduring (in principle, even lifelong) bond between a feudal lord and his feudal men. This feudal bond had involved, in a comprehensive manner, all socioeconomic relations and, in its original form, underpinned a model of highly localized and largely self-sustaining communities.

The model of society of the new times, on the other hand, came, to an everincreasing extent, to rely on contracting which, by defnition, was temporary in nature and included only well-defned aspects of societal life (such as renting a home, being employed, buying food…).61 This in addition implied that, other than

61 In several agricultural areas throughout Europe, including Flanders, traces of the feudal system would continue to reverberate well into the twentieth century. One example concerns the tenure system, under which a lord of a manor leased several farmsteads (and accompanying land) to farmer-tenants, with these leases being renewed from father to son. Like a feudal serf, such a farmer-tenant exploited the farm and land, however not based on giving up part of his harvest, but by paying an agreed upon rent, which immediately illustrates that also in this relationship the payment of a sum of money started to replace the earlier, feudal obligations to hand over part of a harvest in kind. To this phenomenon, by the way, we owe several masterpieces of Flemish literature, including the novel '*Boerenpsalm*' by Felix Timmermans, in addition to several works by Ernest Claes. Boerenpsalm recounts the revenge of farmer Wortel who leases his farm from a local castle lady. In the character of farmer Coene, created by Ernest Claes, we even experience a reversal of relations, in which, through hard work, farmer Coene succeeds in buying his farm with surrounding land from the impoverished lord of the castle, soon to even become his moneylender (with all the tensions this causes).

serfs, free men had to organize their societal functioning largely themselves, in stead of relying on an enduring, overall bond that linked them to another person, i.e., a feudal lord (and his descendants).

As a further result, living together (in feudal communities) was, increasingly, replaced by a societal model based on individualism, in which, through contracting, each person has to fend for themselves, while at the same time being supposed to act in competition with everyone else.62

Less well known is that the commercial law counterpart of the *Code civil*, specifcally the *Code commercial*, also contained numerous rules that have been as decisive for the organization of civil society in general, and for the representation of the interests of the class of merchants (later: entrepreneurs) in particular. For instance, this *Code commercial* contained a frst beginning of company law legislation of a strongly facilitative nature (e.g., leaving aside earlier obstacles to the smooth use of the company/corporate form, such as, for example, the requirement of prior, royal authorization).63

Thus, after the way for the emergence of capitalism had frst been paved in practice (as early as the ffteenth century), and then in the realm of ideas (with especially the emergence of the school of economic liberalism in the second half of the eighteenth century), at the dawn of the nineteenth century, in terms of the political organization of societies (including their legal system), a deliberate and even more resolute choice was made for the organization of capitalist societies and economies, a choice that to this very day determines the outlook of the socioeconomic order (and, by extension, the outlook of the world itself).

## *7.1.3 Implications on How Capitalist Enterprises Are Conducted*

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> General**

Already in our earlier work64 we have noted that, in the real world, the rise and breakthrough of capitalism has been anything but the story of roses that the adherents of certain ideologies (including, currently, especially economic neoliberalism) would have us believe.

Focusing on the theme of this chapter, specifcally the way in which enterprises are conducted, we shall attempt to show how the hell of capitalism makes itself felt

62Already in our earlier work, we have explained how the mechanism of free contracting has, however, failed to conceive truly just societies, in part because the mechanism of free contracting does not consider prevailing real inequalities (caused by various societal factors), to which the bourgeois-liberal state model of the nineteenth century itself did not want to remedy (rather the contrary). (Cf. Byttebier (2015b), pp. 49–55, and Byttebier (2018a), pp. 49–56.)

63Byttebier (1993), p. 813.

64Cf. especially Byttebier (2015b), and Byttebier (2018a).

for the working classes (cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>), but by extension also for the entrepreneurial class itself (cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>), and even for the entire economic system (cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>).65

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Capitalist Hell for the Working Man**

#### <IP_ADDRESS>.1 The Doom of Forced Employment for the Majority of Humanity

#### *<IP_ADDRESS>.1.1 The Choice Between Exploiting, or Being Exploited*

In what precedes, it has already been pointed out that capitalism relies essentially on what might be described as exploitation.66 (Cf. especially in Sect. 3.1.2.)

This fact derives from the basic characteristics of the capitalist model itself, whereby the average person who wants to earn a living, generally, has no choice but either to become an entrepreneur himself, or to be employed by an enterprise (or, alternatively, by a government, most of which themselves still exist primarily to enhance capitalism—or in modern terms: the free-market economy—in all its excesses).

The step into entrepreneurship is, obviously, not an obvious one.

Under capitalism, taking such a step requires above all a certain state of mind in particular, of being suffciently driven by the pursuit of ever-increasing wealth, in addition to a willingness to sacrifce all other values to it, including a suffcient willingness to exploit one's fellow human beings and, in many cases, to cause harm to the planet. It has even been argued that the main trait that distinguishes a successful entrepreneur from the rest of the population is psychopathy, rather than possessing unique skills or demonstrating excessive intelligence.67

As a result, one could argue that the choice of whether to start and conduct an enterprise comes down to the choice between wanting to exploit or resigning oneself to being exploited.

65Cf. the July 10, 1985, lecture by Indian philosopher and mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti, quoted earlier, which focuses on this theme. (Cf. Krishnamurti (1986), pp. 43–59.) In it, Krishnamurti focuses on the question of moral responsibility for the prevailing type of society:

Can we now, each one of us, realizing our responsibility for having brought into being this society in which we live, this monstrous, unimaginably immoral society – can each one of us live in this world, in this society, and be utterly free of disorder? (Cf. Krishnamurti (1986), p. 50.)

In his July 14, 1985, lecture (cf. Krishnamurti (1986), pp. 61–77), Krishnamurti expanded on this, pointing out that "(...) *we have built this society, this monstrous, evil, immoral world (...) in which we live*." (Cf. Krishnamurti (1986), p. 66.)

66Cf. already Marx and Engels (2021), p. 33: "*But whatever form it has taken, the exploitation of one part of society by another has been a component of it in all past centuries*."

67Cf. Schlesinger (2021). Compare Notestein (1954), p. 110, who lists as principal qualities of the emerging class of businessmen in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century: "*special knowledge and shrewdness*."

## *<IP_ADDRESS>.1.2 The Myth of Meritocracy Debunked*

## *Nepotism as a Means of Providing Unequal Access to Career Paths and Life Opportunities*

Before outlining what is fundamentally wrong with the capitalist methods of organizing an enterprise, we shall frst take a closer look at a central tenet of the economic schools that justify these methods. It concerns the myth of meritocracy, within the framework of which it is reserved that successful enterpreneurship, and thereby becoming rich, is mainly the result of personal merit and therefore equally available to all.

For the adherents of the ideologies and related political doctrines that adhere to capitalism, (successful) entrepreneurship is primarily the result of personal merit (and poverty the result of laziness and inertia)—in which it is, in most cases, conveniently overlooked that most of the accumulation of wealth on Earth is acquired through inheritance (with the underlying question of what is then the essential difference between contemporary capitalism and medieval feudalism).

Indeed, the already before mentioned merger of certain elements of Calvinist ideas with the tenets of economic liberalism, has in the context of contemporary, economic neoliberalism culminated in the myth of meritocracy, through which supporters of capitalism seek to offer an alternative explanation for the fact that fortune acquisition is primarily the result of being born into a wealthy family, and of the concomitant (greater) life chances.68

Meritocratic doctrine, in contrast, holds that since the bourgeois-liberal societies that have taken shape since the early nineteenth century are based on freedom and equality, everyone within such societies enjoys equal opportunities for development, which implies that whether or not soci(et)al success—often perceived as synonymous with the accumulation of wealth—is achieved, is purely because of one's own merit. The argument sounds that those who work hard will be successful in life, and thus also earn a lot of money.69

Among certain fgureheads of economic-neoliberal thinking, the view even prevails that poverty is the result of laziness, ignorance or even a state of character disorder.70

This approach fnds a far-reaching application in, for example, the Western model of education and helps explain the extreme degree of competition on which this education is based. It also explains why everyone, from childhood, is encouraged to study hard to 'achieve something' later in life.71

68Even luck is said provide a much more important factor for success as an entrepreneur than intelligence or hard work, a proposition that has even been demonstrated mathematically. (Cf. Solman (2018), with further references.)

69Thus, contemporary, capitalist societies perfectly refect Plato's doom picture outlined in Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>.2.

70Cf. Hightower (2017).

71Moreover, it is telling that the country that has one of the best education systems—if not the best—in the world, namely Finland, has itself resolutely abandoned this model of competition, and

In a more general sense, the myth of meritocracy explains why those who prove unsuccessful (which often translates into poverty) are looked down upon, the explanation being that it must be due to incompetence, laziness, and passivity. Ayn Rand's publications, in addition to the high degree of acclaim they continue to enjoy in various parts of we world—including not least the United States of America—speak volumes in that regard.72

Nevertheless, this manner of thinking is, increasingly, contested, with various research showing that hard studying or working hardly determines societal success, the latter to a much greater extent being determined by one's origins (within a rich or poor family), *ergo* by the social class into which one is born, without personal efforts being able to do much to change this.73

Focused on entrepreneurship, it turns out that, although the (medieval) guild system has been formally abolished, capitalist societies do not excel in vertical, social mobility, implying that it is much more obvious to start a business for those who already belong to the entrepreneurial class, or another upper class, than for those who belong to a lower social class (as the latter would have to start a new business from scratch).

Specifc handicaps experienced by members of the lower, social classes (with regard to starting a business) include, among others: not having suffcient start-up

As the authors of the study put it:

The empirical results lend support to our argument that cognitive ability plateaus at high levels of occupational success. Precisely in the part of the wage distribution where cognitive ability can make the biggest difference, its right tail, cognitive ability ceases to play any role. Cognitive ability plateaus around €60,000 at under a standard deviation above the mean. And furthermore:

Recent years have seen much academic and public discussion of rising inequality (…). In debates about interventions against large wage discrepancies, a common defence of top earners is the superior merit inferred from their job-market success using human capital arguments (…). However, along an important dimension of merit—cognitive ability—we fnd no evidence that those with top jobs that pay extraordinary wages are more deserving than those who earn only half those wages. The main takeaway of our analysis is thus the identifcation, both theoretically and empirically, of two regimes of stratifcation in the labour market. The bulk of citizens earn normal salaries that are clearly responsive to individual cognitive capabilities. Above a threshold level of wage, cognitive-ability levels are above average but play no role in differentiating wages. (Cf. Keuschnigg et al. (2023).)

that in countries where this competition is most central, the education sector is facing numerous fundamental problems.

72Concerning the Calvinist origins of this frame of thought, cf. Kruithof (1986), p. 49.

73After this book went to press, an interesting academic study regarding Sweden was published showing that while cognitive ability is strongly linked to higher earnings, this is only the case until the very top of the income ladder. According to this research, intelligence among the top 5% of earners within society plateaus, and even decreases slightly. These fndings confrm that, regarding the top 5%, other factors than intelligence (and hence personal merit) drive extreme success, including luck, family resources (such as being born in a wealthy family and/or relying on a huge family network), personal ambition, and emotional intelligence. This also implies that the highest earners in society are by no means more intelligent, or deserving, than others. (Cf. Keuschnigg et al. (2023); Pomeroy (2023).)

capital of their own74; an insuffcient access to appropriate (pre)education (e.g., expensive MBA studies); not having a suffcient social network75; not being able to rely on role models within one's family or circle of friends; inequality of opportunities from early childhood, that prevents access to certain methods of selfdevelopment,76 …, all factors that cause members of the lower social classes, even after obtaining a university or other higher degree, to hit a glass ceiling very quickly in comparison to members of higher social classes.

The meritocratic view of life, as adopted mainly by members of the established upper classes, has itself already been refuted in our books 'De onvrije markt' and 'The Unfree Market and the Law', to which we therefore refer further.77

For those who prefer this truth from another source, reference can be made to the work 'De Onmisbaren' (to be translated as 'The Indispensables') by Ron Meyer, who has written about it as follows:78

'Das war einmal,' many of my academic friends think. That was in the past, they say. They believe passionately in the fable of meritocracy: everyone has equal opportunities and those who work hard enough can climb up the so-called social ladder. Morking is a choice, so is touching the clouds. From my 8th grade class, only one person went to VWO. In wealthy neighborhoods, for some schools, that was true for a third to sometimes almost half the class. Not because children in more expensive neighborhoods are born with more intelligence, no, because where you grow up is still decisive for the future you face. (…)

74Cf. the well-known example of Amazon. A 1997 SEC fling shows that Jackie and Mike Bezos, the parents of Jeff Bezos, invested USD 245,573 in Amazon in 1995. (Cf. Meija (2018)). For a family belonging to the lower class, such an investment would have been virtually impossible.

75According to Bill Gates himself, his success is due in large part to his parents' network. His late mother, Mary Gates, is said to have played a crucial role in the deal that secured Microsoft's rise to the top. Mary Gates herself was, at the time, a respected businesswoman, with many connections, including her membership on the board of the nonproft organization 'United Way of King County'. It was there that she met the late John Opel, then chairman of IBM, and himself also a member of the United Way board. In 1980, Microsoft itself was a small, fve-year-old company, with no signifcant success whatsoever, but Mary Gates saw an opportunity to help her son's fedgling company by agreeing a major deal with John Opel. Specifcally, IBM wanted to hire an outside software maker to develop an operating system for its personal computer(s). Although Microsoft had already expressed interest in the project, IBM was considering many other software companies as well, including, for example, 'Digital Research', one of Microsoft's main competitors. Thanks to the connection of Bill Gates' mother, Mary Gates, IBM hired Microsoft for the job. When Microsoft got the job, it however had no operating system of its own. So, in 1981, Microsoft had to buy QDOS, an operating system developed by hardware company Seattle Computer Products, and with it developed MS-DOS, the Microsoft Disk Operating System. Microsoft licensed its MS-DOS to IBM to use as the operating system for its personal computer(s). Because the MS-DOS system was not reserved exclusively for IBM, it became one of Microsoft's most proftable products ever. The operating system was not only used in all IBM computers of the time, but soon after became the go-to operating system for almost every personal computer on the market. (Cf. Locke (2020).) And the rest is history…

76Errol Musk, Elon Musk's father, became the owner of a half-share in a Zambian emerald mine in the 1980s, which he used to fnance a lavish lifestyle for his family of yachts, ski vacations and expensive computers. (Cf. de Wet (2018).)

77Byttebier (2015b), p. 54. Cf. also Byttebier (2018a), pp. 54–56.

78Meyer (2021), pp. 53–55.

Opportunities in life are much less a matter of merit, of individual achievement, than of economic, social, and societal conditions. Of your parents. And of political choices. Worsening social security, raising rents, abolishing school swimming, or introducing a deductible comes – indirectly – on the plate of the children growing up in the poorest neighborhoods. In dozens of neighborhoods, children are disadvantaged even before they are born. (…) Education alone is not enough. Every time the studied class says that education is the solution to everything, it is also saying that current problems are entirely and solely your own fault. Inequality is not a systemic failure, but a consequence of your failure. And so, you don't deserve better*.*

That's what meritocracy does: it gives people a moral justifcation for not having to look at the causes of inequality.—(Own free translation.)

In the same regard, reference can also be made, for example, to an opinion piece by political scientist (and senior advisor to the Netherlands Council for Public Health and Society) Tim 'S Jongers, with as title 'Wie hard werkt komt er niet'.79 In it, 'S Jongers articulates the issue, aptly, as follows:

The reason I have so much trouble with the metaphor of the social ladder – the climb to the sky, to pick the stars of success – is my own starting position. Because if the ground on which that social ladder stands is quicksand, you can climb it as hard as you want, you don't rise*.*

Poverty, a broken family situation, an inadequate network, no fair chance at a healthy life, and I could go on and on. My life began with a 10-0 disadvantage. You then have to deal with a complex inequality from which there is no easy escape.

And those who like it more literary can turn, for example, to French author Édouard Louis (whose name used to be Eddy Bellegueule), who has explored this theme, in an autobiographical manner, throughout his oeuvre, or, closer to home, to Flemish author Dimitri Verhulst.

#### *Nepo Babies as a Modern-Day Illustration*

While since our own book of 2015, until recently, little debate on (also) this characteristic of neoliberal societies seemed possible, this seems to have changed in very recent times. In particular, at the end of 2022, the dishonesty of nepotism occurring especially in the professional context of global societies began to dominate more

79 'S Jongers (2022).

This author adds,

When one denies that one's starting position partly determines one's own success, one's understanding of another's starting position will diminish. Whether one then starts life with or without disadvantage no longer matters. Whereas disadvantage determines how hard you have to work to be "successful". The danger then is that collective efforts for equal starting positions crumble. Everything then becomes personal responsibility and 'you just have to work a little harder. Poverty then quickly becomes a consequence of own choices, not being able to handle money, or not being able to work hard. As a tunnelcrawler, you are just a bit more modest about it. Because you know what it is to start life at a great disadvantage. Just as you know that much of what you can do is not based on your own choices. The ability to work hard, the IQ you possess, the fact that you have two feet and hands and good health are not choices. But they do determine how far you can get in life. ('S Jongers (2022).) (Own free translation.)

and more the social media, leading to a certain interest from the specialized press in December 2022 under the form of pertinent opinion pieces.

The attention on social media focused on the children of celebrities, so-called 'nepo babies', who because of their descent are given far more life opportunities than children belonging to families of the low classes. This exposed the deeper, underlying problem of nepotism.

After various expressions of dissatisfaction with the phenomenon on social media, the debate was then broached via a contribution that appeared in the online magazine 'Vulture', under the telling title: 'How a Nepo Baby Is Born. Hollywood has always loved the children of famous people. In 2022, the internet reduced them to two little words.'80

This contribution in Vulture started with the following introduction81:

Hollywood was run on an invisible network of family ties — and everybody was in on it! Everyone is someone's kid, but it was as if everybody were somebody's kid. (…) Aghast, content creators got to work. An unwieldy phrase — "the child of a celebrity" — was reduced to a catchy buzzword: nepo baby. TikTokers produced multipart series about nepo babies who resembled their famous parents, exposés on people you didn't know were nepo babies (everyone knew), and PSAs urging celebrity parents to roast their nepo babies "to keep them humble."

The contribution then turns to numerous examples that clearly demonstrate that nepotism has traditionally been rife in the entertainment industry, with numerous examples of flm and TV stars, photographic models, among many others, who all owe(d) their successful careers primarily to the network or professional activities within the industry of their parents or other family members, and this since generations already.82

By way of response to this contribution, the topic subsequently enjoyed considerable interest in the press, including from writers of opinion pieces.

One such opinion was expressed by Scottie Andrew of CNN who, in an opinion piece of the same date (namely December 22, 2022), defned the problem as follows: "*One of the surest roads to success in showbiz is to be the child of an already famous and successful person*." Andrew thereby gave the following defnition of the term 'nepo baby':

"Nepo baby" refers to the kid of successful adults who's benefted from nepotism in industries like entertainment or adjacent felds (fashion and media are two of the other big ones). Unlike bootstrappers and naturally talented "nobodies," nepo babies start off with an advantage – their parents' connections – although many of them later claim their parentage is a burden when it comes to carving out their own names.83

80 Jones (2022).

81 Jones (2022).

82 Jones (2022).

83Andrew (2022).

Citing a quote from Nate Jones, Andrew then aptly summed up the issue of nepo babies as follows: "*A nepo baby is physical proof that meritocracy is a lie*."84

In an opinion piece of December 22, 2022, Australian writer Rebecca Shaw tried to broaden the debate by referring to the results of more scientifc research on the matter. Shaw pointed out that from such research regarding the United Kingdom, the results of which were made public in the second half of December 2022, it had appeared that there had been a huge decline in the number of artists (i.e., actors, musicians and writers) who stem from a working-class background. According to Shaw, still about 16% of arts workers who were born in the 1950s had a workingclass background (which already implied a low fgure), but this percentage had fallen to a mere 7.9% in December 2022. In contrast, it also appeared from this research that people who grew up in professional families had been four times more likely to end up doing such creative work.85

Among the most striking forms of modern-day nepotism, Shaw mentions that the children from richer families enjoy much more life opportunities, have access to more connections, and have and more doors opened when pursuing a career. For Shaw, these elements are however not restricted to the very rich or famous but apply to all levels of societies where parents—or other relatives—have a good job in a specialized sector and are as a result able to provide their children better access to such a professional sector than people belonging to the lower classes.86 For Shaw, the resulting huge differences in access to professional career paths and life opportunities for those belonging to the lower classes goes far too unacknowledged, the result being that there are too many talented people, "*with wonderful creative brains and ideas*", that are never heard of because they are simply too busy surviving in neoliberal societies that deprive them from life chances. The conclusion for Shaw is clear (and similar to the one we had already reached in our book 'De onvrije markt' of 2015): "*Obsessing over nepo babies while not addressing the structural and generational inequalities that produce poverty and privilege is just a good-looking (and fun!) distraction from the real problem*": having access to more and more professional sectors in which nepotism thrives "*is becoming less and less viable for a large proportion of society*".87

By way of rebuttal, some of the privileged descendants of previous generations of celebrities responded that the criticism was unjustifed and that they owe their

84Andrew (2022).

85Shaw (2022).

86Shaw gives the following example:

To become a successful professional musician or artist or writer or actor you have to have time to spend making your art and hustling to make industry connections. This is extremely diffcult if you don't come from a stable background. I can only imagine that the process of discovering your creativity, of deciding to follow your dreams and talent, of knowing it's even a possibility, is made much easier if you have the awareness, even unconsciously, that you will ultimately be OK if it doesn't work out. That sort of freedom allows you to try things, to take big swings and to have extra brain space and time dedicated to getting good at the thing you love. (Shaw (2022).)

87Shaw (2022).

success solely or mainly to their own hard work, amounting to a variant of the meritocracy attitude.88

However, it is clear that the phenomenon is far too widespread to be the result of mere coincidence, making it clear that nepotism, therefore birth in a wealthy or successful family, is the main condition for professional success within the industry, and that things like talent and hard work are mainly side issues: this implies that the latter elements, while they should be present to some degree, are by no means decisive for a successful career. As a result, those who exhibit these characteristics without descending from such a wealthy or successful family have far fewer chances for a glittering career than the nepo babies themselves, even in cases where the latter appear to be less talented or industrious.

And unfortunately, as we ourselves already wrote in 2015, the issue is by no means limited to the entertainment sector, but is present in almost all sectors of soci(et)al life, a phenomenon that we ourselves, since the beginning of our careers, have experienced almost daily within the Belgian legal and academic professional sectors as well.89

#### *<IP_ADDRESS>.1.3 The Maintenance of a Class Society*

The aforementioned characteristics of capitalism—in theory, on the basis of a theoretical equality of opportunity; in practice, on the basis of a model of class inequality and nepotism—force people to choose between doing business themselves, or being employed by someone else's enterprise, implying that for the bulk of the population of capitalist countries or societies, there are few alternatives, socioeconomically speaking, other than the so-called renting out of their labor for a fxed fee.

As explained earlier, this peculiarity of capitalism determines the fundamental dichotomy that characterizes capitalist societies. (Cf. Sect. 2.3.1)

In systems of unbridled capitalism,90—particularly, (1) the capitalist system that prevailed in the Western world until the end of World War II, (2) the capitalist system that, since then, has remained in place in large parts of the rest of the world, especially in developing countries, and (3) the capitalist system that in parts of the Western world is restored because of the implementation of economic neoliberalism, often referred to as the free market economy–, this dichotomy occurred most sharply.91

88Cf. the overview provided by Jones (2022).

89Cf. also the research of Clauset, Arbesman and Larremore, *fnding "that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that refects profound social inequality."* (Cf. Clauset et al. (2015).)

90Cf. Byttebier (2018b).

91 It has appeared that in countries that have continued to practice uncorrected capitalism (and/or that have fallen back on it, to a great extent, under the impetus of economic neoliberalism), the Iron Law of the Wages keeps resorting its full effect, as a result of which employing enterprises keep striving for the lowest possible wages and the persons to be employed generally do not have much choice but to agree to this. Again, this observation affects members of the lower classes of the

The response from the political (neo)liberal establishment that even people who hire out their labor to enterprises remain in control of their own destiny through the voluntary association model, has moreover proven to be a bolt from the blue, especially because of the unequal contracting position between the enterprises that employ people, and people looking for suitable employment.

Accordingly, the model of welfare states established in various Western countries after World War II (cf. Sect. 1.3) attempted to remedy this in other ways, for example, through labor protection legislation, in addition to replacement income systems.

Although such measures brought great comfort by ensuring that, throughout the Western world, a large part of the population was brought to a level of prosperity that at least helped ensure a dignifed existence—abstracting from the fact that this has required the working classes to be meekly enlisted in the capitalist exploitation model itself, as well as the fact that the relative prosperity enjoyed by a large part of the population of the Western world has come at the expense of blatant exploitation of the developing world92–, from the 1980s onwards, the welfare state model became strongly contested by the adherents of economic neoliberalism, often under a double argument, notably that the established social security protection systems and public services are too costly (read: that they constitute too heavy a burden on corporate profts), and that such systems reward laziness and punish industriousness.93

This helps explain why neoliberal governments, beginning in the 1980s, worldwide, started to push for the dismantling of several of the systems that made welfare states possible (cf. already in Sect. 1.5), an evolution that is most advanced in countries such as the United States of America and the United Kingdom, as a result of which, in those countries, social safety nets have already to a large extent been removed and, consequently, capitalist employment mechanisms themselves, have once again become dominant in shaping the socioeconomic order (with as measurable effects: an ever-increasing polarization between rich and poor, accompanied by a disappearance of the middle classes).

## *<IP_ADDRESS>.1.4 Conclusions*

It is clear from the foregoing that the capitalist principles and working methods, create a fundamental dichotomy between rich and poor and that this dichotomy, largely, overlaps with the class division between entrepreneurs and the working layers of the population.

Although the welfare state model has (temporarily) remedied this in the Western world, it appears that, as economic neoliberalism succeeds in its aim to dismantle

population to a greater extent than members of the middle or upper classes. (For an extreme illustration regarding a Belgo-Irish airline that has been often in the news in this regard, cf. Ooghe (2022). For a comparable, recent illustration regarding the United States of America, cf. Sanaito (2022).)

92This insight is strongly present in the works of Jaap Kruithof.

93This is one of the main themes in the works of Ayn Rand.

welfare states, the aforementioned dichotomies within capitalist societies are again rising increasingly to the fore.

In today's neoliberal societies, only the wealthy to very wealthy classes still escape the acrimonious realities of capitalism, on the understanding that the doctrines of economic neoliberalism have simultaneously—and paradoxically94—succeeded in convincing much of the rest of the population that the perpetual maintenance of such a (neo)liberal socioeconomic system is a necessary condition for maintaining free and democratic societies.

Furthermore, it is even so that the average Western man, at least under validation of capitalism itself, can still count himself among the more fortunate on Earth, to the extent that in numerous other parts of the world, a large part of humanity leads a life of (extreme) poverty and often, for a pittance, has to work much harder than the average man in the West, in order for the rich and extremely rich of the planet to become ever richer.95

In summary, for the labor-supplying man, capitalism implies a condemnation to lifelong labor, not to become happier himself, nor even to contribute to a better society, but mainly to help ensure that the wealth of the ruling classes of entrepreneurs and bankers continues to grow.

In all this, under the continuing impetus of economic neoliberalism, capitalism becomes more and more unbridled, because of which the present living world has become one in which Plato's previously quoted prediction that only people with money are still valued, admired and included in government, and that those who are not rich no longer count (cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>.2), has become abundantly true.

#### <IP_ADDRESS>.2 Affrmation in the Works of Fromm, Marcuse, and Kruithof

## *<IP_ADDRESS>.2.1 General*

During the twentieth century, a multitude of authors have aptly identifed the problems of the capitalist employment model (and the dichotomy within capitalist society into a class of entrepreneurs—including bankers—and the class of employed that has been created by this employment model, in addition to various other working methods of capitalism).

We shall situate three of these, notably: (1) Erich Fromm; (2) Herbert Marcuse, and, closer to home, (3) Jaap Kruithof.96

94Cf., furthermore, in Byttebier (2018a).

95 In this approach—and this even amounts to a form of rebuttal that often echoes from the mouths of neoliberals when confronted with the devastating soci(et)al impact of implementing their doctrine–, even the poor in the Western world are expected to consider themselves fortunate, to the extent that poverty in various other regions of the world often implies even greater misery.

96Similar insights may also be found with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2022). (Cf., for example, Bourdieu (1979); Bourdieu (1993); Bourdieu (2000), and Bourdieu (2017).)

#### *<IP_ADDRESS>.2.2 Erich Fromm*

One of Erich Fromm's central themes is that, in general terms, exposure to capitalism has led to an increasing degree of dehumanization of the labor-supplying strata of the population of capitalist countries.

Fromm has situated his approach against the backdrop of the caesura that resulted from the new scale of values that became widespread in the Western world from the eighteenth century (= the period of rise of industrial capitalism). According to Fromm, in the medieval world of ideas, wealth was not perceived as an end, but only as a means. The end was life itself, or, as the Catholic Church of the time maintained, the salvation of man's soul. Economic activity, while necessary, was perceived as part of external life activities—opposed to the inner search for God—that only had meaning and value insofar as they promoted life and its goals (especially human salvation).97 The great revolution brought about by the thinking of philosophers such as Adam Smith was that the pursuit and achievement of economic success, especially in the form of proft and material wealth, became objectives in themselves, and even more so, became the main objectives within the (capitalist) societies that got shaped based on these ideas. With the rise of capitalism, the new life objective became the pursuit of material wealth, rather than the pursuit for salvation of one's soul.

According to Fromm, within capital societies, (modal) man was also given a totally new task, namely, only to contribute to the growth of the economic system. Man was no longer supposed to strive for his own salvation or happiness, but to put his life at the service of the economic system. Hence, man was reduced to a cog in the service of the capitalist machinery.98

The (at the time new) hierarchy brought along by capitalist societies was one in which capital (and its objectives) was placed above labor (i.e., human beings) hence the name 'capitalism'–, a hierarchy scale which has since then, worldwide, come to defne interpersonal relations between people, and in which two scales of values constantly clash, particularly that of the world of fortune versus that of life

97Erich Fromm has even observed that perceiving economic activity and proft as goals in themselves would have been as incongruous for the medieval thinker as the lack of such perception is for the contemporary (neo)liberal thinker.

98Erich Fromm has, furthermore, rightly argued that the subordination (one could safely say degradation) of (personal) life as a means to economic ends touches the foundations of capitalist production, in which the accumulation of capital has become the main, not to say only, task and goal of economic activity. In this approach, the laboring man enlisted in the capitalist production processes works for the sake of (other people's) proft, but also, for proft that is not intended to be spent, but to be useful as new capital investment. Within classical capitalism, increased capital should in turn, still through the employment of other people's labor, generate new profts, which in turn must be reinvested, and this circular progression should continue indefnitely (given the underlying aspiration that the economy itself should continually grow). (Cf. Fromm (1952), p. 87.)

In recent times there has been a certain reversal in this, to the extent that the current (super)rich of the planet, increasingly, spend the profts from their enterprises, on the one hand, on all kinds of luxury expenses and, on the other, park them in tax havens (instead of reinvesting them in new enterprises). (On this so-called plutonomy, cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>.)

(and its intrinsic value) itself. As a further principle of capitalism, all unpleasant work is thereby imposed on the lower classes of society, whose ranks have to be replenished again and again (if necessary, by importing cheap labor from poorer countries, or by shifting production to such poorer countries).99

While acknowledging that capitalism has contributed to a certain degree of material progress for a part of humanity (but not for all people in the world), Fromm holds that this has come at the cost of a fundamental dehumanization of the (working) human being who, reduced to being a slave to the self-conceived capitalist machinery, lives only for impersonal and extra-personal purposes and, in the process, has become flled with feelings of nullity and meaninglessness. The term labor market alone, according to Fromm, refects the entire tragedy of the fate that has befallen humanity since capitalism started to break through: just as an enterprise buys raw materials, it buys other people's labor power in order to employ it in its economic production processes (= labor as commodity). This is expressed in economic science itself through the designation of labor, *ergo* of most of humanity, as a so-called factor of production.100

The capitalist ideologies—including, initially, economic liberalism and, currently, economic neoliberalism—have, moreover, succeeded in convincing almost every human being who participates in these processes—i.e., as good as anyone that this is only normal and that the (average) human being exists only to provide labor, which has been accompanied by a secularization (deliberately orchestrated by liberals,101 and later by communists and socialists) of capitalist societies. Virtually all interaction between people has hereby been reduced—not to say degraded—to purely mechanically taking place economic relations (in exchange for money), the result of which can only be a large degree of alienation, in a society where everything can be bought and sold, including other people's, respectively one's own labor. The result of this dehumanization has been that man is reduced to a hunted and bewildered being.102

Meanwhile, contemporary Western societies are increasingly confronted with various negative consequences of modern-day capitalism, as evidenced by the

99Domestically, this can be well observed in road work, where it is notable that it relies heavily on men of immigrant background. With that, Galbraith's observation remains valid how much reliance is placed on certain population groups for this kind of hard and unpleasant work. Equally striking—and all feminism notwithstanding—is the absence of women in this kind of hard and unpleasant work, which may help to put feminism's complaint about the poor treatment of women into perspective. Of course, the latter does not exclude the fact that women belonging to the low, social classes are also employed in various forms of hard and unpleasant work (for example, in the textile sector, in cleaning companies, in the care sectors…).

100For a contemporary rebuttal of this traditional approach, cf. Reich (2022).

101The term is used here in its historical meaning of adherents of the tenets of political and economic liberalism, and not in the (rather pejorative) meaning given to it in American society, where the term is used to denote adherents of more progressive ideas than those of mainstream conservative or neoliberal thought.

102Cf. already the discussion in Byttebier (2015a), pp. 165–166, with further references to Fromm's works.

growing number of depressions, burn-outs, and similar illnesses. This helps explain why, according to recent research the results of which were published in 2022, the use of antidepressants and similar drugs in Belgium has risen by a quarter over the past decade, with the growing numbers of young users resorting to such medication being of particular concern.103 Moreover, in terms of antidepressant use, Belgium has long ranked among the top European countries. According to this same study, in 2020, there were no less than 1.22 million people taking antidepressants in Belgium, an increase of 7% compared to 10 years before. The same decade also saw an increase in use per individual user, with the number of daily doses increasing by a quarter over this period.104

More generally, mental disorders are among the major public health challenges in the World Health Organization's (WHO) European region and, measured over the course of a lifetime, affect about 25% of the population. In this regard, some studies have noted an upward trend in the use of antidepressants, with such antidepressant use found to be particularly alarming among women and the elderly.105

#### *<IP_ADDRESS>.2.3 Herbert Marcuse*

Next to Erich Fromm, a similar line of thought can be discerned in the works of Herbert Marcuse, who vaunts the real negation of life brought along by capitalism, in which the extreme risk of starvation on the part of the dispossessed has become the main driver of their socioeconomic actions.106

Herbert Marcuse has, furthermore, pointed to the faxt that, under validation of capitalism, the average human being in the Western world has gradually evolved into a one-dimensional107 being who exists only in the socioeconomic dimension, and in which everything else that makes life interesting and pleasant has been systematically pushed into oblivion.

Building on this line of thought, we ourselves have pointed out in our earlier work that, after four to fve decades of neoliberal policies, such a 'one-dimensional human being' still performs only the following soci(et)al functions:108

– The function of working from morning to night, without having much time to do anything other than work, and doing so until (spurred on by neoliberal pension reforms) as late as possible in a person's life.109

103Martin and Van Garderen (2021).

104Martin and Van Garderen (2021).

105Cf. Chen et al. (2022).

106Marcuse (1968), p. 105.

107The phrase was introduced by Herbert Marcuse. (Cf. Marcuse (1974).)

108Cf. Byttebier (2022a), pp. 492–493. Cf., beforehand, Byttebier (2015b), p. 167, and Byttebier (2018a), p. 205.

109For a poignant illustration of this, cf. the passus above regarding parental leave (or its virtual absence in numerous countries). (Cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>.)

## *<IP_ADDRESS>.2.4 Jaap Kruithof*

Domestically, the moral philosopher Jaap Kruithof, including in his well-known work 'Arbeid en lust' (in English, 'Labor and lust') devoted a similar, historical analysis to labor and labor relations.

The development of Jaap Kruithof's own vision on this subject must be situated in the period when the welfare states in the Western world were still playing a prominent role. Although Kruithof himself was already warning of the disastrous consequences that the implementation of economic neoliberalism would bring about, in the 1980s, the deterioration of the welfare state model, especially then in Europe, was still only in preparation. This helps explaining why Kruithof focused his attention primarily on the class conficts that characterized the North-South relationship during that period.

According to Jacques de Visscher who has devoted a remarkable study to the ideological and moral agitation of Jaap Kruithof, Kruithof mainly denounced the fact that, in the period when economic neoliberalism began its advance, Western labor movements and left-wing political parties, that had traditionally mainly been concerned with the demands and rights of the proletariat, had sharply narrowed their politics. Instead of 'communists' or 'socialists', they became 'social democrats', pursuing class reconciliation rather than class struggle.111 Added to this was

110The waves of infation that, due to rising prices in food and energy, started to occur throughout the Western world as of 2021, is a clear illustration of this insight.

111Because of this, in most Western countries, neoliberal rhetoric has managed to convince large parts of the population that there is no such things as a division in classes, but that within Western

the fact that the Western working class owed their increased standard of living and prosperity, made possible by the welfare state model, mainly to a relentless economic expansion that took place at the expense of the Third World. Thus, in the West, the welfare state model relied on a calculated solidarity between the bourgeoisie and the working class, which was however extremely detrimental for the interests of the developing countries. For Kruithof, this was completely at odds with the ethical compassion of socialism and, above all, represented a caesura with the international solidarity that had previously characterized socialism (and communism). In this way, an alliance was established between the Western bourgeoisie and the Western working class (who together built the model of the welfare state), on the one hand, and the feudal, bourgeois forces of the South, on the other, against the great masses of poor and oppressed of the Third World (i.e., approximately 85% of the global population).112

To this must be added that this relative participation in the growth of economic welfare by the low classes in the West has since, under the impetus of neoliberal economics, increasingly, come to an end from the 1980s onwards, while the misery in which many developing countries fnd themselves remained largely the same. In this process, starting in the 1980s, the social democratic parties of European countries themselves collaborated heavily in the implementation of the E.U.'s neoliberal agenda, often directly against the interests of their electoral constituencies.

All this shows that, as capitalism is being made 'unbridled' again under the impetus of economic neoliberalism,113 its basic characteristic of being a system of exploitation of the working classes is reasserting itself more and more sharply.

#### <IP_ADDRESS>.3 Empirical Data

#### *<IP_ADDRESS>.3.1 Gallup*

All the foregoing is, unfortunately, more than mere theory (from the mouths of largely ignored—humane scientists) but fnds poignant confrmation in the results of surveys systematically conducted since the beginning of the millennium by, amongst others, the American, professional survey company Gallup.

Indeed, since 2000, Gallup has systematically surveyed millions of workers from nearly 200 countries around the world about their level of satisfaction with their jobs.114

In 2013, Forbes magazine reported on these polls as follows: "*Work is more often a source of frustration than satisfaction for nearly 90 percent of the world's workers*."115

democracies, everyone equally enjoys the fruits of economic prosperity.

112Cf. de Visscher (1990).

113Cf. Byttebier (2018b).

114Burrows (2017).

115Burrows (2017).

In 2017, worldwide, the number of workers described by Gallup as "*emotionally disconnected from their workplace*" was 85%, slightly better than 4 years prior when the number was 87%. This percentage was also slightly better in some countries during that period—such as the United States of America, where 'only' 70% of people had stated they dislike their jobs—and worse in others.116

However, with respect to 2017, a whopping 94% of workers in China and Japan were uncommitted. The highest percentages of respondents indicating hatred for their jobs were in the Middle East and North Africa.117

Gallup moreover found that, in 2017, globally, only 15% of workers felt engaged in their jobs. According to a further explanation given by Forbes, engaged means having a sense of passion for and "*deep connection*" to one's work, in other words spending one's working days through driving innovation and advancing the employing companies/corporations (and therefore, at least if we were to believe neoliberal rhetoric, society as a whole). Forbes' analyses described 62% of employees as "*not engaged*," meaning that they are unhappy, but not necessarily drastically so. These are workers who are more likely to sleepwalk through their days and want to put little energy into their work. And 23% were what Gallup calls "*actively uninvolved*," meaning that the employees involved really hate their jobs. Such workers behave aloofy and may even undermine their colleagues.118

## *<IP_ADDRESS>.3.2 The (Radical) Vision of Tessa Schlesinger*

Tessa Schlesinger has commented on the aforementioned fgures by arguing that, since the numbers of people who, worldwide, are dissatisfed with their jobs are so high, it is no longer valid to pretend that this results from a problem of attitude, laziness, stupidity, or a lack of appropriate skills on the part of the workers (which is one of the starting premises on which economic-neoliberal policies rest).119

This implies that the problem is more likely to be on the side of the class of business owners, and more precisely stems from such things as: (1) their attitude; (2) their lack of ethics; (3) their harassment of their employees; (4) underpayment; (5) a lack of fairness in granting rest (including sick leave, vacation leave, emergency leave), and (6) their basic inhumanity to their employees.120

In support of her (far-reaching) views, Schlesinger cites research showing that skills and intelligence are rarely the decisive criteria for successful entrepreneurship, since these traits are also present among members of the working classes, but that the one trait that is dominant among business owners (CEOs), and not dominant among the working class, is psychopathy. According to Schlesinger, as many as

116Burrows (2017).

117Burrows (2017).

118Burrows (2017).

119Schlesinger (2021).

120Schlesinger (2021).

20% of business owners and CEOs are psychopaths and, although not measured, much of the rest among them are close to psychopathy.121

This implies, still according to Schlesinger, that CEOs and business owners are not more intelligent than others, but that, in their personal pursuit of success and wealth, they are more ruthless, they are willing to bend the rules exclusively in their favor, and that these are the main reasons why they make a lot of money.122 And that, according to Schlesinger, is why 75% to 95% of working people hate their jobs, and, by extension, what is wrong with capitalism itself.123

Schlesinger continues her argument by explaining the ins and outs of the typical, American company,124 in which an executive sales manager himself wants to take home USD 250,000 a year. To achieve that goal, such a manager provides his staff with a minimum wage plus commission (related to realized sales). In the process, the manager will systematically increase the targets of his staff so that only he and his company beneft from the increased sales, while the rest of the sales staff responsible for these increased sales will be treated "*like shit*" (and will, as a general rule, be deprived of a rightful share in the increased margins).125

The typical offce politics prevalent in such companies, according to the same author, is a further part of the capitalist nightmare. According to Schlesinger, the latter is moreover determined, in large measure, by women who proclaim scandal and gossip about others, in doing so often undermine those they consider competitors, and generally do as they did back in high school.126

Schlesinger, however, is not the only one who has pointed out the problematic nature of workplace gossip culture. Even the Forbes website warns against it:

People love gossip. Fire and Fury, of course, is celebrity gossip (a big industry), but just as in the West Wing, gossip in your own organization - in which we share damaging information about the people we work with on the down low - is incredibly divisive and damaging. We all know it's bad but - tell the truth - we've all done it. Sometimes, we do it to be funny or shocking. Sometimes, we want to seem in the know. Sometimes, we're just being mean. This is the defnition of gossip (in case you've never looked it up): "Casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confrmed as being true." In other words, it's a kissing cousin to lying. (Cf. Henley (2018).)

For an academic analysis of the phenomenon of gossip, cf. Avci (2021). One of the few retrievable academic contributions in which Schlesinger's (bold) statement fnds a certain confrmation is by Laura Crothers, John Lipinski and M. Minutolo, psychologists affliated with Duquesne University

121Schlesinger (2021).

122Compare Byttebier (2015a), p. 175. Compare also with Jaap Kruithof's previously cited observations regarding the characteristics of Calvinism. (Cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>.6.)

123Schlesinger (2021).

124By extension, this description also applies to the average, European company, in addition to those of many other countries of the world in which the Western model of business management has been copied.

125Schlesinger (2021).

126Schlesinger (2021). As the author, herself a woman, has put it,

Offce politics is another nightmare. This happens particularly between women. They will scandal and gossip about others, often undermining those whom they consider competition - generally acting as if it's high school all over again. Who isn't familiar with the offce gossip? And I'm being kind. (Cf. Schlesinger (2021).)

Another aspect that characterizes this model of conducting an enterprise relies on what this author labels "*theft of work*." Indeed, it is common within (capitalist) enterprises that, pursuant to clauses in employment contracts and/or personnel regulations, creative personnel must hand over the results of their work to the enterprise. (Cf. already in Sect. 2.6.) As a result, such creative employees rarely, if ever, receive the fnancial fruits of the product they have designed or invented. On the contrary, these accrue to the employing frm, based on an underlying rationale that the innovator receives a fxed wage for his skills, and that this justifes that everything they produce belongs to the frm. According to Schlesinger, the major problem with this is that the innovator, often a member of a lower, social class, usually does not have the resources of their own to invest in their ideas, forcing them to work for someone else. According to the author, a fair solution could be to apply distribution systems in equal halves (specifcally, each 50% of the fnancial fruits). However, within the capitalist economy, it is the enterprises (and entrepreneurs) that hold all the power and are not interested in fair arrangements, but merely in being as proftable (for the beneft of the shareholders) as possible.127

## *<IP_ADDRESS>.3.3 Contemporary Expressions of Discontent*

The foregoing may help explain why in the span of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous people in the United States of America resigned from their jobs. According to Time, as many as 3.9 million Americans resigned in June 2021. In July 2021, there were another 3.9 million, and in August 2021, another 4.3 million. The numbers were even more remarkable for young workers: in September 2021, nearly a quarter of people aged 20 to 34 were not considered part of the U.S. labor force, i.e.,

(= Crothers) and Robert Morris University (= Lipinski and Minutolo), respectively, who in their article have treated "*workplace bullying*" in general and, what they describe as "*a specifc type of bullying primarily used by women, relational aggression"* in particular, *in* more detail. (Cf. Crothers et al. (2009).) These authors have pointed out that research over the last decade has indeed shown that women often do not openly aggress against co-workers but use their social intelligence to manipulate relationships or damage the reputation of others. Relational aggression can include behaviors that occur in female power struggles and involve a range of emotionally abusive behaviors. This includes socially aggressive behaviors such as gossiping, social exclusion, social isolation, social alienation, talking (in negative terms) about someone, and stealing from friends or romantic partners. Direct relational aggressive behavior also falls under the construct of relational aggression and is defned as using confrontational strategies to cause interpersonal harm, including not talking to or interacting with someone, deliberately ignoring someone, threatening to withdraw emotional support or friendship, and excluding someone from a group by telling them they are not welcome. (Cf. Crothers et al. (2009), p. 102.) Furthermore, the authors pointed out that although bullying appears to occur equally among men and women, women appear to use relational aggression more often as their weapon of choice to bully others. Although, according to the authors of the study, there are likely several reasons to explain women's use of relational aggression, one plausible explanation is that such a form of aggression is not considered inconsistent with a female gender role. (Cf. Crothers et al. (2009), p. 103.)

127Schlesinger (2021).

some 14 million Americans who, in other words, were neither working nor looking for work.128

A similar example, with an even more extreme character, concerns the phenomenon presumed to have started in Japan—and, afterwards having spread to various other countries as well—known as 'hikikomori', in the context of which (mostly) young people who have completely had it with the ruthless exploitation that characterizes the post-World War II Japanese capitalist machinery simply refuse to leave their rooms, in order to completely withdraw from heartless society.129

Other illustrations of the fact that the younger generations of certain Western countries in particular are increasingly disliking the exploitative model of capitalism concern practices such as "*quiet quitting*" (i.e., the practice whereby a worker does the minimum of what is expected of them, anticipating leaving the employing enterprise without having suffered as little damage as possible as a result of capitalist exploitative practices in the meantime)130; the pursuit of getting rich as quickly as possible through (risky) investments, in order to retire as early in life as possible, etc.

On September 6, 2022, Gallup announced the results of a prior survey of the American population on this issue. According to the results of this survey, quiet quitters constituted at least 50% of the U.S. workforce—and probably even more. Gallup noted a decline in engagement and employer satisfaction among Gen Z and younger millennials—*ergo* the population group under the age of 35. According to Gallup, this implied a signifcant change from the years before the COVID-19

There are several core features of hikikomori. This includes the affected person being physically isolated in their home for at least six months, cut off from meaningful social relationships, with signifcant distress and functional impairment – such as avoiding tasks where they might have to interact with someone, or deal with basic self-care needs. Alongside physical isolation, hikikomori people show an extreme psychological detachment from the social world. Places where active social interaction is expected – such as a school or work – becomes impossible for the person. They remain socially disconnected from those around them whether they are outside their house or not. While some hikikomori people, called soto-komori, can manage some activities outside, they will rarely interact with people. Some may use the internet as a window on the world, but they often won't interact with others. (Rooksby et al. (2022).)

130Cf. an opinion piece published in the Financial Times on September 13, 2022: "*According to Gallup, about half of Americans are "quiet quitters," which it defnes as people who are "not going above and beyond at work and just meeting their job description*. "(Cf. O'Connor (2022).)

In another representation of this reality, it is called that today's younger generations (rightly) place more importance on a better work-life balance than the generations of their predecessors.

128Bruner (2021).

129According to Rooksby, MacLeod, and Furuhashi,

the term hikikomori (derived from the verb *hiki* "to withdraw" and *komori* "to be inside") was coined in 1998 by Japanese psychiatrist Professor Tamaki Saito. Saito chose the term to describe the many young people he saw who didn't ft criteria for mental health diagnosis, but were nonetheless in a state of extreme, distressing withdrawal.

Rooksby, MacLeod, and Furuhashi pointed out that "*hikikomori is currently viewed as a sociocultural mental health phenomenon, rather than a distinct mental illness*". According to these researchers, by October 2022, at least 1.2% of the population (around a million people) were affected, making hikikomori a signifcant social and health problem. As these researchers, furthermore, pointed out:

pandemic. Since the pandemic, younger workers have felt much less engaged and perceived to be taking fewer opportunities for advancement, especially from their manager.131

According to Gallup132:

Empirical research additionally shows that these negative effects of capitalist employment policies, increasingly, radiate on children. For example, from the already mentioned UNICEF report dated May 23, 2022, and titled 'Innocenti Report Card 16. Worlds of Infuence. Understanding What Shapes Child Well-being in Rich Countries',133 it appears that capitalist employment policies directly impact child well-being in the (41 rich OECD and EU) countries examined in that report.134 Overall, the report shows that many of the richest countries are failing to align their socioeconomic conditions with consistently high child well-being outcomes. There even appear to be disturbing signs of decline in aspects such as immunization, learning and mental health.135

## **<IP_ADDRESS> Capitalist Hell for the Entrepreneur and Banker**

## <IP_ADDRESS>.1 General

Although, as aforementioned in the previous Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>, various literature has pointed out the high degree of dehumanization to which capitalism has doomed members of the working classes, the high degree of dehumanization to which members of the entrepreneurial and banking classes themselves have also been doomed generally remains underexposed.

131Harter (2022).

132Harter (2022).

133UNICEF (2022).

134UNICEF (2022), p. 4.

In fve rich countries, parental leave amounted to less than 10 weeks (measured in full equivalent). Leave for fathers constituted, on average, only a tenth of all parental leave. Across the group of rich countries, expectations to prioritize work led to long working hours and stress, reducing the time and energy parents can devote to their children. On average, two out of fve workers in Europe found it diffcult to take up their family/parental responsibilities at least several times a month. (Cf. UNICEF (2022), p. 4.)

135UNICEF (2022), p. 5.

Capitalist entrepreneurs should more precisely be prepared to adopt all capitalist working methods as much as possible, even more so than their average fellow human beings, to the extent that the success as an entrepreneur is dependent on a suffciently high degree of willingness to do so.

This implies that entrepreneurs should be willing to demonstrate a far-reaching degree of inhumanity, both to the Earth, and to their (exploited) fellow human beings.

In addition, entrepreneurs should be willing to demonstrate, at any cost, the most intense competitive behavior possible.

Both aspects of how capitalism requires members of the entrepreneurial classes to, in a proverbial sense, sell their souls to the devil, will be addressed in the Sects. <IP_ADDRESS>.2 and <IP_ADDRESS>.3 below.

#### <IP_ADDRESS>.2 Willingness to Exploit

As already mentioned before, participating in capitalism requires the members of the ruling, socioeconomic classes, frst of all, to harden themselves into beings acting as selfshly and greedily as possible, who must unambiguously devote themselves to one objective, namely, to generate as much proft as possible, as a rule at the sacrifce of all other values that can give meaning to a human life.

This requires from the members of the entrepreneurial classes a far-reaching willingness to sacrifce the following: (1) the fnancial, health and mental interests of their employed fellow human beings, as well as (2) the interests of the Earth (with the observation that the bulk of the environmental problems facing the Earth have been caused by (large) enterprises).

With this, within capitalist societies, the relationship between people has become utterly utilitarian, making capitalist society the furthest thing imaginable from the society models envisioned, for example, by Plato (based on mutual friendship), or by Jesus Christ (based on love for one's neighbor).

## <IP_ADDRESS>.3 Willingness to Compete

#### *<IP_ADDRESS>.3.1 General*

Second, within capitalist societies, members of the ruling classes should be prepared to demonstrate extremely competitive behavior, both within the enterprises they conduct (cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>.3.2), and in relation to another's enterprise(s) (cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>.3.3).

#### *<IP_ADDRESS>.3.2 Within Enterprises*

Within a given enterprise, the competitive struggle assumed by capitalism manifests itself in several ways.

For example, when we consider family enterprises, it is striking how numerous wealthy entrepreneurial families are plagued by all manner of family squabbles and feuds, many of which are aimed at gaining as much power and control as possible within their enterprise (and, through this, at monopolizing the wealth accumulation that the enterprise makes possible for themselves).

This appears to be even more prevalent as generations of family members succeed one another in such family enterprises.

Indeed, where in some such family businesses there has historically been a founding father—sometimes even a pair of such founding fathers, for example two siblings working together—it is a fact that, in many cases, diffculties begin to emerge strongly as a result of situations of succession,136 for example when a second or subsequent generation of descendants of the founding father(s), take over the torch of the business. In some cases, such family disputes assume such extreme proportions that no solution can be found other than to remove several family members from the enterprise (for example, by inducing—or even legally obliging—them to transfer their shareholdings).

However, even in enterprises where (at the level of shareholdership and/or top management), family ties do not (or no longer) play such a central role, climbing to the highest ranks of management and/or shareholdership is often not a bed of roses either. For example, in cases where such a non-family enterprise has a tradition, or the possibility, of flling the highest management positions through a system of internal promotions, the road to the top often passes over corpses (at least in the metaphorical, if not literal, sense of the term).

It is telling in this regard that the legal systems of several capitalist countries have even elaborated appropriate, legal procedures of battle delivery on the control of companies/corporations (such as, e.g., proxy fghts and tender offers137), in addition to, for small and medium-sized companies, so-called litigation arrangements.

## *<IP_ADDRESS>.3.3 Between Enterprises*

Obviously, running a capitalist enterprise requires not only a willingness to be extremely competitive in the bosom of enterprises themselves, but also in the relationship with other enterprises.

Within the (neo)liberal free-market model, there is even an expectation that enterprises engage in ferce competition among themselves, with the goal of maximizing their own market share and, hence, profts.

In many cases, even the survival of enterprises may depend on this, because enterprises that do not behave aggressively enough risk being squeezed out of the market by a market player that is willing to go to extremes in its own unbridled pursuit of proft.

136As mentioned, inheritance law constitutes one of the most central methods of wealth accumulation. (Cf. Sect. 2.7.)

137On this, cf. Byttebier (1993).

One of the capitalist methods of maximizing profts consists in acquiring the largest possible market share. This method often prevails in case of the production of goods or services that are easily reproducible and/or that can count on a large (potential) buyer audience (with IT as a typical example). It is therefore no coincidence that the players in such markets established the largest enterprises in the world and that competition in these sectors is extremely ferce.

But also the many (seemingly harmless in themselves, or even entertaining to the general public) quarrels between pop stars and royalty, to give just any example, express in their own way the same capitalist principle of eliminating, or otherwise tormenting one's competition as much as possible in order to maximize one's own profts.

In this constant struggle between enterprises—which, in the real world, amounts to a struggle between the people who are the stakeholders of these enterprises—to get the largest possible piece of the economic cake, it hardly comes down to improving the well-being of others, for instance by (at least) providing quality goods or services;138 on the contrary, the only goal is the pursuit of one's own proft, which is nevertheless, under the doctrines of economic liberalism and neoliberalism, referred to as the main mechanism that brings soci(et)al welfare and lifts humanity to a higher level of civilization.

In recent times, even people who had opted in the past to develop socioeconomic activities in what used to be considered soft sectors, such as the health care and education sectors, no longer escape the extreme competitive behavior that participation in capitalism requires. One of the main reasons for this is that, under the impetus of economic neoliberalism, these formerly soft sectors have also, increasingly, been subjected to the free market logic, for example through privatization or marketization operations.139 As a result, the enterprises (and other entities) operating in such softer sectors of economic life have also themselves become subject to ever more forms of competition.140

In the meantime, even public services and/or wholly publicly funded service providers, such as (certain) educational institutions, no longer escape this dance. In the EU, for example, the famous Bologna Declaration on higher and university education, has forced European universities and colleges, increasingly, into a model of mutual competition, with as main purpose to establish the distribution of the operating funds that governments make available to this sector.

138 Indeed, according to Adam Smith, leaving the organization of the economy, in an unregulated manner, to free initiative would automatically result in the best possible provision of services and production of goods, to the beneft of society as a whole. (Cf. footnote 11 of Chap. 1.) Anno 2022, one can only question this optimistic premise, which has since nevertheless become one of the central tenets of (neo)liberal economic thought.

139For further siting, cf. already above, Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>.3.

140On this underlying design of the Bologna Declaration, cf. Bieber (2011).

## **<IP_ADDRESS> Conclusion: A Hellish Economic System**

Especially for those who by their nature do not want to behave selfshly and greedily, participation in capitalism is not an obvious choice (and this even more so as economic neoliberalism rages on).

Indeed, it should be clear from the foregoing that participating in capitalism requires several traits that are diffcult to reconcile with an altruistic disposition, the most prominent being:

– …

It is probably no coincidence that the question of conscience involved in the willingness to participate in such an economic system has already been exposed in the distant past by prominent (and already cited earlier in this book) philosophers and religious leaders.

Among the many examples, we limit ourselves below to citing how Jesus Christ aptly articulated this issue of conscience in His famous Sermon on the Mount:141

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.—(Mt. 6: 24 – KJV)

This then raises the question of how long humanity wishes to cling to this capitalist model of society in which all values must perpetually give way to the short-term monetary interests of a few, while all other societal values are constantly at risk.

As has already been raised in our previous work, the ensuing policy question then becomes what still to do about this, with two main approaches open: (1) Either to do as economic neoliberalism teaches, namely to simply make all of this worse and worse for the sake of the economic processes themselves (an attitude echoed in the well-known saying, "*It's the economy, stupid*!"), (2) Or to look for alternatives for the models imposed by capitalism.

It is based on this second approach that a(n) (feeble) attempt was made in the period 1945–1975 to build the model of the welfare state, which is, under the impetus of economic neoliberalism itself, back in decline. (Cf. already the overview in Sect. 1.5.) The extreme consequences of the latter thinking—up to and including the

141Cf. Chaps. 5–8, in Matthew's Gospel.

severe crises of recent years, including climate change—have been a major inspiration for our own work since 2014.

Section 7.1.4 below will frst briefy recall how past attempts have been made to remedy certain negative outgrowths of capitalism, followed by Sect. 7.1.5 which will indicate how economic neoliberalism has responded to these. Following that, Sect. 7.2 will then elaborate on possible alternatives to the capitalist models for conducting an enterprise.

## *7.1.4 Limited Scope of Twentieth Century Correction Methods*

It has already been explained a couple of times above: The realization that unbridled capitalism has degenerated into a system that is pernicious for (1) both humanity, (2) and the well-being of the Earth itself, has been strongly demonstrated earlier in history.

Awareness of the pernicious impact of capitalism on especially the working classes was evident in the post-World War II period, with the result that, as already explained in Chap. 1, at least in the West, work was undertaken in that period to implement methods of correction to unbridled capitalism that together provided the ingredients for the welfare state model.

It is very striking that said methods of correction have focused primarily on one of the two, most negative aspects of capitalism, specifcally on correcting the farreaching exploitation of the working classes that results from the mechanisms of capitalism, at least in the West. Attention to the environment—or, put another way, to the damage that capitalism, on an ongoing basis, inficts on the Earth and on other living beings—has taken much longer, essentially until the 1970s (albeit before that, there have been those who have warned of the highly polluting effects of the capitalist, economic growth model). In addition, the corrective model of the welfare state was limited to the Western world, with the relative prosperity achieved there for a large part of the population being accomplished at the expense of the Southern half of the planet (particularly the so-called developing countries).

As already described above (cf. Sect. 1.3), the welfare state model rests on two main pillars that help to counteract, at least to some extent, the exploitation of the working classes by the class of entrepreneurs and bankers, namely: (1) the establishment of public services, and (2) the establishment of a social security system.

Public service refers to certain services furnished by the government, based on its own fnancial resources (generally extracted from the systems of general taxation), which are made free—or at a symbolic fee that does not cover the actual cost of furnishing them—and which are equally accessible to all members of the population.

The philosophy behind this is that the services in question are considered so essential that their organization cannot be left to the (free) market, since in such a case, due to the inherent dichotomy between rich and poor that capitalism creates within societies, too large a part of the population would be denied access to these

services. Instead, public services are set up, or at least funded, by the government so that universal access to the services in question can be guaranteed. Typical examples of such public services are, as mentioned earlier, education, (health) care, and public transportation.

Social security systems—generally through the creation of replacement income systems–, aim to provide a safety net for those who are temporarily or permanently unable to earn their own income from labor, generally because of an unfortunate life circumstance, such as, for example, illness, disability, unemployment, or old age. The fnancing of this is generally borne by the government, either from generic taxation or through special levy systems affecting groups of the population (e.g., categories such as employers, employees, and professional self-employed persons). (Cf. already in Sect. 1.3.)

The underlying philosophy is one of solidarity (enforced through state authority) among the members of a population, so that those who, affected by an unfortunate life circumstance, are no longer able to gain an income from their labor on their own, still come to have the fnancial means to support themselves—and their families.

In the period after World War II until the 1970s, such systems of public service and social security were established throughout the Western world, because of which the model of the (Western) welfare state took shape. It was said that, as a result, capitalism took on a more humane face because these systems ensured a slightly better distribution of wealth than that which results from the operation of the mechanisms of capitalism—or, in modern-day terms: from free market mechanisms—themselves, and even more so for the lower classes of the population.

Thanks to this welfare state model, the exploitation model of capitalism itself was somewhat contained, at least in the West (but not in the bulk of developing countries).142

However, labor against (a fxed) remuneration remained central even within that welfare state model. This implies that even within the welfare state model, the exploitative nature of the working population has remained an essential feature of the socioeconomic order.

Moreover, the interests of the environment received much less attention during this same period—resulting in fewer corrections to capitalism in pursuit of these interests–, partly as a result of which capitalism was able to assert its devastating impact on the Earth (including other life forms) for a long time, virtually uncorrected.

142To some extent, one could even conceive of the model of the modern welfare state as a (moderate) attempt to reconcile the capitalist economic system with the idea of an ideal society that seeks to enable everyone, not just the rich, to lead a dignifed existence. The establishment of the model of the modern welfare state (in the period 1950 to say 1975; cf. Kruithof (1986), p. 171) could even be considered, from a historical perspective, as one of the frst attempts in the (known) history of mankind to introduce a socioeconomic order in which at least part of the wealth generated by the economic system is redistributed among the broad population in a fairer way than happens under the operation of a system in which everything is left to free market forces themselves.

With this, capitalism has essentially always been a socioeconomic model in which the wealthy classes of entrepreneurs have been able to do as they please, regardless of whatever consequences their behaviors had on the environment (be it deforestation, excavation of ores, pollution of rivers, oceans, or soil, dumping of waste products, to even nuclear waste, or killing the climate, …).143

A possible further explanation for this is that, since the Earth and other living things cannot themselves stand up for their rights, their interests have been rather marginally defended all along, albeit that a few international NGOs have emerged over the years that worked hard to advocate environmental protection, including organizations such as Greenpeace and the W.W.F. (or, in full, the World Wide Fund for Nature). Nevertheless, it has taken the well-being of the human species itself to be threatened before the issue, especially than in the last decade, started to be taken somewhat seriously and certain governments, including, for example, the EU, were fnally found willing to take action, with the open question, however, of whether these efforts will achieve much until there is a global plan of action in which all the countries of the world, if not at least the most polluting ones, will be suffciently willing to participate.

## *7.1.5 Assessment in View of the Goals of Economic Neoliberalism*

Unfortunately for humanity and the Earth (with all that that implies), four to fve additional decades since the 1970s—i.e., the period in history during which pleas for more equitable socioeconomic systems and for better systems of environmental protection strongly emerged among the broader population—have been lost to work for a more equitable socioeconomic for all people and for the creation of an economic system that does pay adequate attention to the livability of the Earth.

These lost four decades obviously correspond to the past—and, unfortunately, still ongoing—era of implementation of the ideology of economic neoliberalism that itself prioritizes opposing goals than the creation of a just living world and the survival of the Earth.144

143 In current times, even space (around Earth) has not escaped the polluting effect of capitalist economies. Indeed, according to reports by NASA from 2021, more than 27,000 debris in space, were tracked by the sensors of the U.S. Department of Defense's global Space Surveillance Network (SSN). In fact, there is much more space debris in near-Earth space, though too small to detect, but large enough to pose a threat to manned space fights and robotic missions. Furthermore, NASA's website mentions that the increasing amount of space debris poses a risk to spacefight itself. (Cf. NASA (2021).)

Another recent illustration offers a recent observation that there is virtually no unpolluted rain anywhere on Earth. (Cf. Frost (2022).)

144Cf. Monbiot (2022).

The crucial role of the doctrine of economic neoliberalism in the restoration of *pur sang* capitalism (which itself, spurred by this doctrine, is usually referred to in contemporary terms as the free market economy) has already been pointed out a few times above.

It should, moreover, come as no surprise that as free market forces go extended under the banner of economic neoliberalism, the proft-seeking of the entrepreneurial sector (and the wealthy classes behind it) itself also returned to the fore as the one leading societal principle neoliberalized economies.

Perhaps even worse, the proft motive is no longer limited to be the leading behavioral guideline for capitalist enterprises themselves but has increasingly asserted its impact in many other spheres of soci(et)al life. For example, in the context of public services and non-proft sectors, the proft motive translates mainly into far-driven rules and regulations of cost control, where we have already pointed out in one of our previous books, 'Covid-19 and capitalism', the pernicious impact this has asserted in the sector of hospitals and nursing homes.145

With this, humanity has ended up in a society in which although everything can be bought for money, nothing can still be obtained without the payment of such a suffcient sum of money.

It is obvious that this reinforces the dichotomy within societies between rich and poor caused by the forces of capitalism, whereby an increasing number of services (and products) can only be acquired by those who are rich enough to pay the price for them, while the poor(er) are increasingly left out in the cold. To the extent that this principle begins to apply to vital services and goods, such as medical care, energy and, in recent years, even food and water (cf. already in Sect. 3.3), the situation becomes more and more catastrophic, in this manner increasing the urge to start seriously considering alternatives for (the working methods of) capitalism (which we ourselves, in our own work of the past decade, are trying to do to the fullest).

## *7.1.6 Conclusions*

## **<IP_ADDRESS> Problematic Nature of the Capitalist Model of Conducting an Enterprise in General**

From the foregoing, it is clear that the way in which the proft-seeking of the entrepreneurial system determines capitalism, particularly with regard to the capitalist model of employment within enterprises, has, from time immemorial, been beset by two very fundamental problems, namely: (1) It concerns a wholly unjust model, and (2) It concerns a model with which the majority of humanity is unhappy.

145Cf. Byttebier (2022a), especially Chap. 6.

It can in addition be added to this that (3) the model is no longer attuned to the needs of contemporary societies, evidenced by the great dissatisfaction it generates on the part of the younger generations.

## **<IP_ADDRESS> Injustice of the Capitalist Model of Conducting an Enterprise in Particular**

In what precedes, it has been made equally clear that the capitalist pursuit of proft that drives the entrepreneurial sector—and its glorifcation by neoliberal government teams around the world—is among the many reasons why the capitalist economy can be referred to as an economy of the top 1% (or, at best, of the top 10 or 15%), by which is meant an economic system that benefts only the interests of the richest 1% of humanity, or—somewhat more optimistically estimated—of the richest top 10% or top 15% of humanity.

Capitalism is, hence, intrinsically unjust, to the extent that its mechanisms and methods of operation determine that the bulk of the economic prosperity resulting from the collective efforts of man and nature accrues to a small group of few only, rather than being equitably and justly distributed to all mankind.146

This intrinsic injustice is evident both at the micro level of individual (capitalist) enterprises, and at the macro level of entire popular households.

In the context of individual enterprises, the capitalist business model, in its various facets, is designed to employ personnel as cheaply as possible. In doing so, the personnel employed by such an enterprise obtains the lowest possible fxed remuneration, at best with a bonus on top to compensate for exceptional performance.147

Related to this is the observation that the legal systems of most capitalist countries have been designed to make this capitalist business model function as adequately as possible (with as important legal building blocks: commercial/enterprise law, company/corporate law, labor (contract) law, and generic contract law).

Also on a macro scale, the mechanisms of capitalism contribute to this intrinsic injustice of the capitalist system.

As already explained above, a classic justifcation for this model is the wellknown trickle-down economics doctrine (cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>) which, for several centuries now, continues to provide the theoretical justifcation for a policy of political economy that does everything in its power to please the class of entrepreneurs and

146As already mentioned above (cf. Sect. 1.2.3), the Aristotelian concept of justice is central to this estimation.

147Such bonuses are common when a company/corporation wants to encourage certain categories of staff to perform above average—for example, with a view to bringing in new customers—but, as a rule, represent only a pittance of the corporate profts realized through the efforts of the individual receiving the bonus. In contrast, the bulk of the profts realized by a company/corporation go to a few individuals only (generally the CEO and shareholders).

their enterprises, which manifests itself, among other things, in the form of a fscal policy that is as business-friendly as possible.

The same applies to the policy that aims to make the organization of the labor market ever more fexible in the interests of enterprises (which is tantamount to systematically dismantling previously created labor protective mechanisms).

In the area of infuencing public opinion, the impact of neoliberal ideas and policies is also extraordinarily strong, for example through an approach that may be described as 'meritocratic' and that maintains that successful entrepreneurship is purely the result of the individual merits of entrepreneurs. This helps explain why neoliberal governments do not want to put anything in the way of the entrepreneurial class, under the guise that entrepreneurs are the only ones who make societies prosper, while everyone else is free to become successful entrepreneurs themselves.148

However, this mindset is averse to any realism about the conditions necessary to become a successful entrepreneur (which amount to a combination of a suffciently selfsh personality and the right pedigree), and incidentally constitutes one of the reasons why Stiglitz once wrote about economic neoliberalism that it relies on a mythical worldview.

All this explains why the small class of entrepreneurs continues to succeed, globally, in taking the largest share of the economic pie, but also why the collective efforts of all those who do not belong to the class of entrepreneurs (including bankers) are incorrectly remunerated, both at the micro and macro level:

These characteristics of capitalist enterprise make it valid to qualify it as a model of privatization of benefts/profts and socialization of costs/losses.

All this explains why the model is utterly unjust, even in the classical Aristotelian sense of the word, since the capitalist business model implies that what good results

148The extent to which this thinking was leading in the UK government formed by Liz Truss in September 2022 speaks volumes in that regard. (Cf. Sect. 1.6.2.)

from it falls disproportionately on the shoulders of one (small) group of people, especially the class of entrepreneurs, while its ill effects, also disproportionately large, rest on the shoulders of another (larger) group of people.

All this implies that for over four centuries now, humanity has stuck to a totally unjust system of socioeconomic organization that, for most of humanity, does not even contribute to what is the ultimate goal of human beings, namely being happy.

Given this observation, the question arises as to how it can be at all rational, as the supporters of economic neoliberalism like to suggest, to stick to such a model, other than to not want to touch the interests of the ruling, wealthy classes.

It could even be argued that the continued unwillingness to change this testifes to the failure of democracy unless a suffcient political will would still be mobilized in the near future to make fundamental changes to this system.

In the Sect. 7.2, we ourselves shall elaborate on what such alternative business models might look like.

## **7.2 Exploration of Some Conceivable Alternatives to the Capitalist Methods and Models of Conducting an Enterprise**

## *7.2.1 On Whether Alternatives to the Capitalist Methods of Conducting an Enterprise Are Still Conceivable, and How These Are Addressed in the Public Debate*

It is generally noted by the defenders of capitalism, including in the recent period mainly the adherents of the ideology of economic neoliberalism itself, that there are no alternatives to capitalism in general and to the capitalist model of conducting and legally organizing an enterprise more specifcally.

To further support this viewpoint, reference is often made here to the failure of the attempts by the former Soviet Union and its vassal states to stage a so-called communist system (based on the ideas of, among others, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin).149

The latter attitude itself assumes, in a very simplistic way, the view that only two economic systems are conceivable, specifcally, capitalism (or the free market system) on the one hand and communism on the other (whatever the latter means, to the extent that the experiments of the Soviet Union and its vassal states had little to do with the implementation of Karl Marx's own ideas).

In more general terms, this argument boils down to a so-called 'There is no alternative' (abbreviated, TINA) argument.

149Among others, jointly in the famous Communist Manifesto. (Cf. Marx and Engels (2021).)

Throughout this TINA argument echoes the distant origins of the emergence of the ideas of the predecessor of economic neoliberalism, specifcally economic liberalism, as it began to take shape from the second half of the eighteenth century in the context of rationalism, which, as aforementioned, counts as a movement in philosophy which attempted to recognize natural laws in human behavior (including socioeconomic behavior), but which in reality sought to provide a rationalization for the scale of values on which the behavior of the bourgeois classes, from the ffteenth–sixteenth centuries on, increasingly, was supported.

However, we have already pointed out above (cf. Sect. <IP_ADDRESS>) that, during the same period of rise of the school of economic liberalism, there was a similar, second school on the rise which, also based on rationalist methodology, studied socioeconomic processes, namely the (French) social school. In doing so, the latter social school arrived at completely opposite insights and views to those of economic liberalism itself. In the approach of this social school, it was assumed that society is best served by relying on systems of far-reaching solidarity, which should, as far as possible, counteract inequalities that may result from economic processes (such as trade and industry).

This fact alone shows that the mind-sets of liberal and neoliberal thought do not express economic laws so much as value choices, so that alternatives to the ideas of economic liberalism and neoliberalism are indeed conceivable.

Furthermore, before the rise of capitalism, humanity managed to function for thousands of years based on appropriate socioeconomic systems that did not, in such an extreme way as economic liberalism and neoliberalism themselves, glorifed selfshness and greed in general, and the selfsh behaviors of the class of entrepreneurs (including bankers) in particular.

It even seems that, as history progressed, wealth accumulation and the associated polarization between rich and poor within societies continued to occur in everincreasing proportions, especially as capitalism began to take hold from the sixteenth century onward.

Finally, in a more distant past, numerous economists, and policy makers, have looked for alternatives to, at least corrections to, capitalism.

One of the main reasons why such alternatives still barely resonate in modern times is presumably the extreme degree of brainwashing to which the advocates of capitalism—with in recent times, especially the adherents of economic neoliberalism—have resorted, and in which, in a very systematic way, those still expressing dissenting methods, through all sorts of methods, were pushed into the corner.150

On a global scale, the latter even took the form of veritable boycotts by capitalist countries, in addition to (neoliberal-driven) international trade and fnancial institutions, of countries trying alternative methods. In a more distant past, such treatment fell to the Soviet Union and its vassal states, and in the current context to countries such as Cuba and Venezuela.

150Cf. already Marcuse (1974), pp. 25–26.

In the 1950s, this approach even led to an unprecedented demonization of communist and socialist thought in, among others, the United States of America, in which the working methods of the adherents of capitalist thought (including then U.S. Republican Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy) barely differed from the methods applied earlier in history by the Catholic Inquisition. Incidentally, this socalled McCarthyism, within American society, left great traces to this day. Reference can, for instance, be made to the fact that all forms of alternative thinking in the socioeconomic sphere are still very quickly labeled 'socialist' or 'communist', so that, as a rule, no attention should be paid to them (certainly not by American politicians who do not want to burn themselves to be labeled socialist or communist).151

Up to this very day, it remains striking how much the adherents of economic neoliberalism continue to silence any criticism of their ideology, be it in the academic or political-policy context.

As for the academic context, this can be aptly illustrated with reference to the works of Paul Krugman (Nobel laureate in economics in 2008). For example, Paul Krugman's quantitative analyses have long shown that economic, neoliberal policies from the 1980s onwards have not worked for anyone except the super-rich. In doing so, Krugman himself provided an answer to why right-wing policy ideas, such as low taxes for the rich or the ever-increasing marketing and privatization of health care in the broad sense of the word, continue to fnd such a following and application. Krugman has addressed this question in his book 'Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better America', which contains more than 400 pages of essays in which Krugman subverts right-wing and neoliberal economic talk—which he refers to as 'zombie ideas'.152