Social Entrepreneurship is a distraction
It was almost two years ago that the late Pamela Hartigan made this assertion, as Director of the Skoll Centre on Social Entrepreneurship, arguing that it’s mainstream capitalism that needs to change.
In her article Pamela made reference to the “social enterprise industrial complex”, sub-contractors to government and feeding into a dysfunctional system.
Here in the UK social enterpreneurship had become part of government policy under the leadership of Tony Blair and a neoliberal New Labour government. It wasn’t going to upset the applecart.
“The revolution will not be funded beyond the nonprofit industrial complex”, says Ruthie Gilmore of Incite! The proliferation of the nonprofit foundation has come hand in hand with the ascent of neoliberalism. The “new mean guys” as she puts it, whose foundations operate to protect their own interests.
Tony Blair for example, has taken foundation funding from oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, a man identified in our efforts to help children institutionalised as economic orphans in Ukraine. In ‘Death Camps, For Children’ our founder wrote:
“Excuses won’t work, particularly in light of a handful of oligarchs in Ukraine having been allowed to loot Ukraine’s economy for tens of billions of dollars. I point specifically to Akhmetov, Pinchuk, Poroshenko, and Kuchma, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list. These people can single-handedly finance 100% of all that will ever be needed to save Ukraine’s orphans. None of them evidently bother to think past their bank accounts, and seem to have at least tacit blessings at this point from the new regime to keep their loot while no one wants to consider Ukraine’s death camps, and the widespread poverty that produced them..”
Back in 1996, founder Terry Hallman pitched his concept of people-centered economics to US President Bill Clinton. It reasoned:
18. Modifying the output of capitalism is the only method available to resolving the problem of capitalism where numbers trumped people — at the hands of people trained toward profit represented only by numbers and currencies rather than human beings. Profit rules, people are expendable commodities represented by numbers. The solution, and only solution, is to modify that output, measuring profit in terms of real human beings instead of numbers.
19. We can choose to not reform capitalism, leave human beings to die from deprivation — where we are now — and understand that that puts people in self-defense mode.
20. When in self-defense mode, kill or be killed, there is no civilization at all. It is the law of the jungle, where we started eons ago. In that context, ‘terrorism’ will likely flourish because it is ‘terrorism’ only for the haves, not for the have-nots. The have-nots already live in terror, as their existence is threatened by deprivation, and they have the right to fight back any way they can.
21. ‘They’ will fight back, and do.
They were already fighting back in Ukraine. As we arrived in 2004, the Orange Revolution was just beginning.
With the help of Maidan and other grass roots organisation, the ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine was introduced to Ukraine’s government in February 2007. A major component was the Centre for Social Enterprise Development at Kharkiv National University. We took the radical step of publishing online, to protect the social mission from predators.
The following year, we made a direct appeal to USAID and the Senate Committee that funds them, to support this and for funding an anti-corruption network.
The British Council then came bounding in, to partner with USAID and the foundations run by the same oligarchs identified in ‘Death Camps, For Children’ in a very top down form of social innovation. We applied for partnership to eventually learn from Martin Davidson of The British Council that ‘partners were expected to make a financial contribution’.
This was certainly a revolution which would not be funded. In fact it was being betrayed , by economic hit men from the US. in Carnegie clothing.
It is something of a paradox that McKinsey offered the opportunity to describe our efforts to reform capitalism with the Long Term Capitalism Challenge. I shared our story — Re-imagining Capitalism, the New Bottom Line.
‘An inherent assumption about capitalism is that profit is defined only in terms of monetary gain. This assumption is virtually unquestioned in most of the world. However, it is not a valid assumption. Business enterprise, capitalism, must be measured in terms of monetary profit. That rule is not arguable. A business enterprise must make monetary profit, or it will merely cease to exist. That is an absolute requirement. But it does not follow that this must necessarily be the final bottom line and the sole aim of the enterprise. How this profit is used is another question. It is commonly assumed that profit will enrich enterprise owners and investors, which in turn gives them incentive to participate financially in the enterprise to start with.
That, however, is not the only possible outcome for use of profits. Profits can be directly applied to help resolve a broad range of social problems: poverty relief, improving childcare, seeding scientific research for nationwide economic advancement, improving communications infrastructure and accessibility, for examples — the target objectives of this particular project plan. The same financial discipline required of any conventional for-profit business can be applied to projects with the primary aim of improving socioeconomic conditions. Profitability provides money needed to be self-sustaining for the purpose of achieving social and economic objectives such as benefit of a nation’s poorest, neediest people. In which case, the enterprise is a social enterprise.’
One begins to understand how unwelcome this interpretation of social enterprise was when you consider what happened next in Ukraine. 7 years after the ‘Marshall Plan’ was delivered, violent conflict came to the streets of Kyiv.
At Davos the following year, it’s the same insanely greedy oligarch, Tony Blair and one of our own asset stripping oligarchs Richard Branson were lamenting the crisis in Ukraine while reading back the argument made in the ‘Marshall Plan’ for applying capitalism for social and economic returns.
If leaving children to die while building one’s own reputation is their interpretation of social , I don’t want to be part of it.
