Roxana Kreimer
Translation: Gerardo Primero
The update of the "business ethics" (a kind of "wooden iron", originated in the decade of the ´70s in the United States and rejuvenated by neoliberal academics of the ´90s) is a good occasion to reconsider the legacy of Marx, one hundred and fifty years after the publication of his Communist Manifesto. If in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, long before than Foucault, made an analogy between factories and military quarters, today the "ethical" request of neoliberalism proposes to redefine the company as a "cultural" institution, in which the manager and the wage-earner share values and work in a common project and in a creative and harmonious way. If in the birth certificate of the modern labor movement the concepts of domination, explotation, economic fight and political fight came together in the interpretation of history as fight of classes, the spokesmen of the "business ethics" affirm, on the opposite, that history no longer must be analyzed in those terms, simply because they pretend social classes have disappeared.
As well as spanish colonists had to demonstrate that the so called "indians" were in fact human beings, the "business ethics" proposes to demonstrate to the manager (horizon of this philosophical crusade) that his employee is a person who, like him, has the right to be creative, innovating, enterprising and even healthful. The worker unfavored by the market appears as master and creator of his own misfortune, and he is advised that, as the "well-being" does not have to be put in danger in "heroic enterprises", he must recover his self-esteem by transforming the aims of the company in his own "project of life".
The self-called "business ethics" provides us with another example of how, in words of the Communist Manifesto, the predominant moral of capitalism is presented like a mere disguise of the interests of the bourgeoisie. Protected in the bibliography labeled with the heading "business ethics" (a fast ride through the history of ethics, where there are not absent Plato, Aristotle nor even Kant himself), it operates as the top of the spear of this initiative that tries to amalgamate the virtue to the richness, two spheres that good part of the history of thought maintained separated. The attempt to unite them is not new and was boarded in modernity every time the liberal theoretician wanted to put himself safe from the unfulfilled promises of the utilitarism, which foretold an ethics that would bring happiness to the greater possible number of people.
If it is true that the great facts of history appear the first time like tragedy and second like farce, in this last one it would be necessary to register a second consideration of the capital, no longer (as Marx indicated) as a social relation that generates iniquity but (as the "business ethics" teaches us) as "capital-affection", "an affective communion with the consumers that makes them prefer a company and not another one".
As if it discovered for the first time the famous metaphor of the invisible hand (but without mentioning the metaphor nor its author), the "business ethics" maintains that those who object their proposals in fact do not notice that by searching the individual well-being we help to the general well-being. Great discovery! The market is rational! Disciples of Adam Smith, who (we suspect) have not read or perhaps have forgotten their teacher, but that, nevertheless, honor his memory with obsecuent veneration.
When arguments of "business ethics" have practically exhausted his only affirmation originated within the field of ethics (the one of civil responsibility for manufactured goods or for services rendered to community), when it has been recommended that company prioritizes satisfaction of social necessities over the obtention of economic benefits (advice that will gain the pious smile of the student-manager), it makes use of a last posit that (it is presumed) will be irrebatible to the ears of the general manager: "The ethics is profitable ". It is silenced by this way that, in contrast with capitalism in general and with the commercial company in particular, which are based on quantitative values, the ethical concepts about "the good and the bad, the human and the inhuman" are qualitative values that are not reducible to the sphere of rentability and masification of benefits.
As Marx and Engels indicated in the Communist Manifesto, the business ethics shows that explotation no longer appears hidden by political illusions: it is "an overt explotation, cruel, brutal", an explotation that "reduces the personal dignity to a simple value of change" and shows that never like today the capital had managed to exert such an absolute power, impossing its rules, its ethics and its policy, not only to the entire planet but also to the whole of the human interests. The capital had never before managed to posit simply, with a horrifying cynicism that moves to consternation: "The ethics is profitable".
If Marx evidenced a detailed investigation about the specific conditions of the alienated work, the neoliberal doctrine presents an abstract model of the company, according to which all work necessarily can and must embrace creativity. The ignorance of the particularities of the labor field prevents it to solve, for example, how it could become "creative" the work in mines (that until a few years ago caused one dead per month and one injured worker per day), or how could become "creative" countless works within the sphere of the construction (whose budgets include the compensation for death in accidents) or, to mention a single example in the area of services, the work of the employee who receives the complains in a central telephone office. The "business ethics" does not explain either why the worker would necessarily wish to negotiate his wage in exchange for his so many times invoked "creativity". The discourse that tries to turn presentable the victorious neoliberalism results by this way as abstract as the standard family of the manuals of first degree school whose famous phrase, "mummy kneads the dough" ("mamá amasa la masa"), we used to repeat with so little creativity as the one that still supposes the work in any manufacturing assembly line.
The inheritance of Marx has a crucial importance for the analysis of "politically correct" discourses, like the one of the "business ethics": in the Communist Manifesto it is criticized the reforming policy that instead of advocating the abolition of the bourgeois relations of production is contented with mere administrative changes that do not disturb the bonds between the capital and the wage-earning work. The same criticism is applicable with surprising effectiveness to the reformist aspiration of Adela Cortina, theoretician of the "business ethics" and inspirator of its vernacular branchs. Although today the Communist Manifesto is debatable by its unconditional praise of the technical development of the bourgeoisie, its legacy is absolutely actual when, in the dawn of 21th century, the "scandalous inequality in the distribution of the wealth" to which Marx and Engels referred one hundred and fifty years ago, still continues demanding us an answer.