(BTW thanks for Ian for his persistently shrewed and thought provoking clippings. All the more helpful because he is posting from the west coast of the USA and has already caught the early editions ready for us in London, and for later risers.)
The question in this article is close to the question of whether bourgeois right can exist as an atomised right, separate from the social context, for private ownership of the means of production.
The prediction at the end that it will require more lawyers, is probably true in the short term. But it will mean that finance capitalist companies will have to build in various risk management policies to guard pre-emptively against such a catastrophe. They will have to have a system of quality control, amber, and red warning alerts. This is pretty similar to how finance capitalism has to work anyway.
An enlightened and canny finance capitalist company will report an annual audit, of its ethical and environmental profile as well as its compliance with a number of pre-emptive financial control systems in order to retain blue chip status.
Government will then have no difficulty in tweaking the guidelines and the consensus.
Large finance capitalist companies will be better able to do this than small speculative or adventure companies. This move will accelerate the trend towards monopoly finance capitalism, with links with the state.
It is a recognition that in order to continue to accumulate surplus value, companies will have to accept some qualification of their bourgeois right to treat their ownership of the means of production as absolute and socially unaccountable. A slippery slope.
Chris Burford
London
At 08/01/03 20:51 -0800, you wrote:
washingtonpost.com Lawyers as Stool Pigeons? SEC May Force Attorneys to Blow Whistle on Corporate ClientsBy Kathleen Day Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 9, 2003; Page E01
