1

GREENWASHING
A Greener Potemkin Village?
Corporate Social Responsibility and the Limits of
Growth
Simon Enoch*
In the wake of corporate scandals such as Enron, WorldCom, and
Tyco, along with environmental incidents like Shells Brent Spar and the
destruction of the Ogoni peoples land in Nigeria, as well as revelations of
sweatshop abuses by major footwear and apparel manufacturers such as
Nike and The Gap, public trust in corporations has plummeted to record
lows. Recent opinion polls of the American public have found that chief
executive officers of large corporations rank second to last in
trustworthiness, beating out only car dealers.1 Only 28 percent of Americans
polled believe business strikes a fair balance between profit and the public
interest, down from a high of 70 percent thirty years ago.2 "This is a
challenging time for big corporations," notes John D. Hofmeister, who runs
the United States operations of Shell Oil Company. The modern feeling, he
said, is "big is bad."3 It is no surprise then that the business press has
overflowed with possible curatives to restore public confidence in big
business. The most prolific of these suggestions is the notion of Corporate
Social Responsibility (CSR), which entails the adoption of socially
responsible business practices in areas such as human rights, labor
standards and the environment. Indeed, the business world has witnessed a
virtual explosion of CSR inspired literature in the past five years.4 The
prevalence and the intensity with which the notion of CSR has been taken
up by the business community has caused some commentators to declare
that CSR is developing into a form of social movement activism in its own
right, albeit on the part of the economically powerful.5
The author would like to thank Stefan Kipfer, Liette Gilbert and the participants of
the 2005 International Political Economy and Ecology Summer School at York
University, all of whom indirectly contributed to the ideas in this paper.
1
Stevenson Swanson, Lack of Trust in Business Lingers, Chicago Tribune, April
16, 2003.
2
Pat Argenti, Corporate Communication (New York: McGraw Hill/Irwin, 2003), pp.
3-4.
3
Claudia Deutsch, New Surveys Show That Big Business Has a P.R. Problem, The
New York Times, December 9, 2005.
4
James Hamilton, Media Coverage of Corporate Social Responsibility, The Joan
Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy Working Paper Series, 2003,
p. 6.
5
Graham Knight & Josh Greenberg, Events, Issues, and Social Responsibility: The
Shifting Terrain of Corporate PR, paper presented at Global Media Conference, Spokane,
WA, July 2002, p. 4.
*

While CSR has inspired a mountain of commentary, both pro and con,
the phenomenon has scarcely been studied. And what studies have been
done fail to ask whether CSR is actually compatible with todays global
capitalism. Most of the theories and criticisms view CSR as something that
either has been adopted, or could be adopted by corporations if they acted
in good faith.6 Very few seem to question the ability of CSR to accomplish its
stated claims even if optimally implemented. Ironically, only the most
vociferous free-marketeers of the Milton Friedman variety entertain the
possibility that CSR may be fundamentally incompatible with the capitalist
system of production.7 Indeed, many commentators on CSR view its
eventual adoption as a simple matter of appealing to the ethics of corporate
management. It is as if, writes John Roberts, the injuries of the past were
the simple product of a misunderstanding, which is easily remedied once
managers have seen the light.8 To view the adoption of CSR as an
individual management choice is to lose sight of the system in which it is
meant to operate. To use an extreme analogy offered by Marjorie Kelly, Its
like talking ethics to an S.S. officer in Weimer [sic] Germany, while ignoring
the system in which he must function.9
In this paper I challenge the notion of CSR from a critical left
perspective, drawing on a body of argument put forward from an
ecosocialist standpoint. By focusing on the rationale of CSR to ameliorate
ecological degradation, (an integral claim of CSR), I argue that CSR,
irrespective of its implementation, cannot hope to overcome the inherent
contradictions within the capitalist system of production. Moreover, CSR
can be viewed as an ideological fix that attempts to overcome what James
OConnor has called the second contradiction of capitalism. It does so by
pre-empting democratic pressures for environmental regulation and
inculcating an individualized form of what Michael Goldman calls green
neoliberalism within the general public.10
I first illustrate the inability of CSR to address the fundamental
For a cross-section of these differing viewpoints see Tom Bateman, Thinking About
Corporate Social Responsibility, Integra Ventures, April 2003, available online at:
http://www.iintegra.infotech.sk; Eveline Lubbers, (ed.), Battling Big Business: Countering
Greenwash, Infiltration and Other Forms of Corporate Bullying (Monroe, ME: Common
Courage Press, 2002); and Jem Bendell, (ed.), Terms for Endearment: Business, NGOs and
Sustainable Development (Sheffield, U.K: Greenleaf Publishing, 2000).
7
For an example, see Steven Hayward, The New Corporate Balance Sheet: Black, Red and
Green, AEI Environmental Outlook, American Enterprise Institute, October 2002.
8
John Roberts, The Manufacture of Corporate Social Responsibility: Constructing
Corporate Sensibility, Organization, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2003, p. 250.
9
Marjorie Kelly, Building Economic Democracy, Business Ethics, August 15, 2002.
10
Michael Goldman, The World Bank and the Making of Green Neoliberalism, paper
presented at the Capitalism Nature Socialism Anniversary Conference, York University,
Toronto, July 23, 2005.
6

contradictions within capitalism that drive ecological degradation. Next, I

address the economic and political dynamics that have allowed CSR to
become the preferred corporate legitimation strategy in a globalized
economy, and how in reality, CSR serves as a means to paper over the
second contradiction of capitalism. I conclude by examining the potential
this ideological fix has to preclude a collective ecological outlook within
the general public.
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD),
the foremost industry association promoting CSR, defines Corporate Social
Responsibility as follows:
We define CSR as business commitment to contribute to sustainable
economic development, working with employees, their families, the local
community, and society at large to improve their quality of life. We are
convinced that a coherent CSR strategy, based on integrity, sound values, and
a long term approach offers clear business benefits to companies and
contributes to the well-being of societyIndeed, so central is the CSR issue
that it has moved beyond the stage of being a WBCSD project and is now a
Cross-Cutting Theme. Today, the WBCSDs vision statement calls for
promoting the role of eco-efficiency, innovation, and corporate social
responsibility toward sustainable development.11

Specifically, CSR attempts to induce corporations to recognize that

their operations impose costs on society that are not normally factored into
business calculations. CSR attempts to recognize these negative
externalities of corporate operations and incorporate their impact on
communities into firm decision-making.12 For example, through CSR,
corporations would come to recognize the environmental impact of their
operations, such as pollution releases and/or resource depletion, and
attempt to diminish or eliminate the negative effects this might have on a
community. Beyond the negative impact that corporations have on a
community, CSR also emphasizes the positive externalities that can result
from corporate operations. CSR attempts to stress the possible positive
spillovers that corporations can produce, such as increases in education,
health outcomes, and community development, and thereby lead firms to
intentionally produce more of these positive outcomes.13 Thus a corporation
might build health clinics, provide educational materials, or assist in water
treatment in the communities in which they operate. Lastly, CSR
emphasizes positive relationships between corporations and their
stakeholders. Stakeholders are defined as any group or individual who can
affect or is affected by the achievement of an organizations purpose.14
These can include indigenous peoples, community groups, trade unions,
WBCSD Corporate Responsibility Overview, online at: http://www.wbcsd.ch.
Hamilton, 2003, op. cit., p. 3.
13
Ibid., p. 3.
14
Jem Bendell, Working with Stakeholder Pressure for Sustainable Development, in Jem
Bendell, 2000, op. cit., p. 16.
11

12

development agencies, or non-governmental organizationsessentially, any

individual or group that has a stake in the operations of the corporation.
The goal is to build a sense of shared values with key stakeholders in
order to gain credibility and legitimacy for corporate operations in local
communities, and indeed, in the eyes of the wider public. Consequently,
CSR attempts to transcend the predominant focus on shareholder value to
include broader sections of society that are affected by a corporations
actions. CSR holds that corporations need to be judged on how they
respond to their wider responsibilities to the environment, local
communities and to society as a whole, and not merely on economic
performance.
The specific strategies deployed as CSR initiatives to counter
ecological degradation include measures such as full cost pricing, energyefficiency, depletion allowances, emission credits, green consumerism, and
other sustainable development strategies. We need not take up each of
these individually to challenge the logic and efficacy of CSR to forestall
ecological crisis. We need only ask the question at a more abstract level,
whether, as stated above, corporations can successfully internalize the
negative effects of their practices within a system premised on profit
maximization, and what consequences such a system would entail.
As Paul Ekins has written, environmental goods (i.e., clean air, pure
water), which at a lower level of economic activity were effectively free,
would, through the internalization of negative externalities, come to have an
economic cost, thus resulting in increasing inflationary pressure, especially
as these resources become more and more scarce.15 This would in effect
drive up the costs of production, putting greater strain on profits.
Moreover, even if it were possible to pass these expanded costs on to
consumers, this would invariably price greater numbers of consumers out
of the market for these environmental goods, (water privatization in
Bolivia is a contemporary manifestation of this), which are also, materially,
the means of life, means of survival for the rest of us.16 Such initiatives,
deemed to protect the natural commons for us all, would in reality have the
effect of excluding greater numbers of people from the necessary means of
survival.
John Bellamy Foster demolishes even the bleak notion that such a
system could still work and be profitable by relying on an ever shrinking
Paul Ekins, cited in Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, 3rd edition (London:
Routledge, 2001), p. 75.
16
Martin OConnor deems this the ecological phase of capitalism, where nature is
rendered internal to capital and subordinated to the rational calculus of production and
exchange. See Martin OConnor, On the Misadventures of Capitalist Nature, in Martin
OConnor (ed.), Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology
(New York: Guilford Press, 1994), pp. 126-131.
15

pool of affluent consumers while internalizing negative externalities. As

Foster argues:
The difficulty of internalizing all external costs becomes obvious when one
considers what it would take to internalize the costs to society and the planet
of the automobile-petroleum complex alone, which is degrading our cities,
the planetary atmosphere, and human life itself. Indeed, as the great
ecological economist K. William Kapp once remarked, Capitalism must be
regarded as an economy of unpaid costs. The full internalization of social
and environmental costs within the structure of the private market is
unthinkable.17

Indeed, even if one could internalize all the potential environmental

costs and still make a profit, this would not alter capitalisms ecological
destructiveness (though it may postpone it). This is because capitalism
requires never ending growth to survive, that it must accumulate or die,
in Marxs words.18 As James OConnor notes, a capitalist economy based on
what Marx called simple reproduction and what many greens call
maintenance is a flat impossibility.19 Thus even with CSR-inspired
countermeasures in place to ameliorate the worst ecological excesses of
capitalist production, the incessant need for expansion must eventually
collide with the natural limits to growth imposed upon us by both the
finite nature of resources (taps) and the ability of ecosystems to absorb the
resulting waste (sinks).20 The notion that there exist prescribed limits to
economic growth remains contested in certain fields of inquiry. However,
this argument is typically premised on the belief that some future nearperfect substitution of technology for nature will come to the rescue.21
While it is impossible to accurately predict potential future
developments, computer models designed by the Club of Rome to calculate
the impact of human production on the environment predicted a reaching of
the limits of growth even with a doubling of existing resources and a series
of technological strategies to reduce the level of pollution to one-quarter of
its pre-1970 level factored into the calculation.22 The researchers concluded
John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism. (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2002), p. 37.
18
Ibid., p. 80.
19
James OConnor, Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible? in Martin OConnor, 1994, op. cit.,
p. 153.
20
Those who would seek assurance in recycling as a panacea would be wise to
consider Herman Dalys argument that for those products that can be recycled, the
process not only uses up irreplaceable energy, but that recycling can also never be
100 percent complete. Some fraction will always escape the process. See Toby
Smith, The Myth of Green Marketing: Tending our Goats at the Edge of Apocalypse
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 77-78.
21
William E. Rees, An Ecological Economics Perspective on Sustainability and
Prospects for Ending Poverty, Population and Environment, Vol. 24, No. 1,
September 2002, p. 17.
22
D. Meadows, et al, Beyond the Limits: Global Collapse or a Sustainable Future
17

that:
The application of technological solutions alone has prolonged the period of
population and industrial growth, but it has not removed the ultimate limits
to that growthThis is a society that is using its increased technical capacity
to maintain growth, while the growth eventually undermines the effects of
these technologies.23

Moreover, as Joel Kovel notes, technological innovation under capitalism

has been the sine qua non of growth, because it cheapens the cost of labor,
indispensable to surplus value extraction; the more technology, roughly
speaking, the more growth under a capitalist regime.24 Thus those
technological fixes designed to ameliorate the environmental
destructiveness of capitalism ultimately provide the impetus for further
growth, and therefore further destruction.
This question of growth is central to understanding how CSR-inspired
reforms cannot resolve the contradictions within capitalism, because they
do not fundamentally alter the social organization of production that
requires growth to survive. As Elmar Altvater notes, the process of
capitalist growth and spatial expansion has no inherent borders.25 As Kovel
explains, capital represents that regime in which exchange-value
predominates over use-value in the production of commodities, and the
problem with capital is that, once installed, this process becomes selfperpetuating and expanding.26 The reason for this is that exchange-value
represents a commoditys exchangeability, an abstraction that can only be
expressed in quantitative terms, such as money. Unlike its material
substrate, which is bound by the laws of nature, money can effortlessly
expand, creating great pools of capital that provide the benchmark for
growth, and as they gather, press yet for further expansion.27 Hence,
because the accumulation of money is in principle infinite, capital (money in
motion) can seek out more and more opportunities for investment and
profit, thereby driving expansion, or what OConnor calls money in search
of more of itself.28
Moreover, this growth is exponential, in that the pressure for
capitalist growth becomes proportional to the total magnitude of the
(London: Earthscan, 1992), p. 168.
23
Meadows, cited in Dobson, 2001, op. cit., pp. 64-65.
24
Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
(London: Zed Books, 2002), p. 157.
25
Elmar Altvater, Ecological and Economic Modalities of Time and Space, in
OConnor, 1994, op. cit., p. 88.
26
Kovel, 2002, op. cit., p. 39.
27
Ibid., p. 43.
28
James OConnor, On Capitalist Accumulation and Economic and Ecological
Crisis, in James OConnor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New
York: Guilford Press, 1998), p. 180.

accumulated capital pressing for discharge.29 This exponential nature of

growth is illustrated by future projections of industrial growth. The current
rate of growth in industrial production, if extrapolated into the future,
would witness a doubling in the size of industry every 25 years, that is, a
sixteen-fold growth every century, and expansion by 250 times in the next
two centuries.30 Given that the tendency of current production is to expand
the throughput of raw materials and energy in order to realize profits, the
result can only be a rapid depletion of energy sources and other natural
resources with higher amounts of waste. This puts strains on both the
planetary taps and sinks. If this is the case, then Foster argues that;
[I]t is unlikely therefore that the world could sustain many more doublings of
industrial output under the present system without experiencing a complete
ecological catastrophe. Indeed we are already over-shooting certain critical
ecological thresholds.31

It follows, then, that all CSR-inspired initiatives can hope to achieve is

the postponement of ecological collapse, as long as we continue to adhere
to an economic system premised on growth, something no advocate of CSR
has yet to question. Yet even CSR apostle, Paul Hawken, recognizes the
negligible effect current environmentally inspired business practices will
have, noting that;
[Even] if every company on the planet were to adopt the best environmental
practices of the leading companiessay, Ben & Jerrys, Patagonia, or 3-M
the world would still be moving toward sure [environmental] degradation and
collapse.32

While Hawken still believes in the reformability of capitalism, it is, to

paraphrase Kovel, the imperative of growth that is the main culprit in the
destruction of the environment, and unless we deal with this reality, any
hope of reversing ecological degradation will be fruitless. As Ariel Salleh
argues, [capitalisms] operational imperatives bear no relation to human
needs; its exponential growth trajectory kills off its own future options as
it goes.33 Thus, expansionism and sustainability are contradictory
objectives that cannot be realized under a capitalist system of production.
If these goals are entirely contradictory under the capitalist system of
production, we might ask what the ultimate purpose of the CSR movement
is, given that it is premised on the maintenance of the current system of
Kovel, 2002, op. cit., p. 43.
Bellamy Foster, 2002, op. cit., p. 45.
31
Ibid., p. 46.
32
John Stauber & Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lies
and the Public Relations Industry (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995), p.
75.
33
Ariel Salleh, Nature, Woman, Labor, Capital: Living the Deepest Contradictions,
in OConnor (ed.), 1994, op. cit., p. 120.
29
30

profit maximization and capitalist relations of production. It is my

contention that CSR is ultimately a legitimation tactic designed to prevent
the public from full recognition of the ecological dangers we face, an
awakening that would lead to calls for more binding regulations and
constraints on corporate power. In this regard CSR, despite its progressive
window-dressing, can be considered an essentially conservative
phenomenon seeking to maintain the status quo while placating public fears
about the state of the ecological crisis.
Before elucidating this claim, we need to outline the economic and
political drivers that have facilitated the rise of CSR as the preferred
legitimation strategy for corporate capital in the present conjuncture.
Under the regime of globalization with its reduction or elimination of
tariffs and non-tariff barriers, coupled with the power of multilateral trade
agreements, governments are increasingly reticent to impose costs on
multinational corporations through taxation or stringent regulatory
frameworks for fear of discouraging investment.34 This has resulted in the
withdrawal of the state from key areas of responsibility, such as social
welfare provisions and regulatory restrictions; these have been replaced
with privatization and deregulation. The result has been, in Tom Batemans
term, a public policy vacuum, especially in the coordination of economic
growth as capital becomes increasingly mobile, while national regulatory
powers are increasingly relaxed.35 This policy vacuum has had a twofold
effect.
First, it has diminished the legitimation function of the national state,
especially vis--vis its domestic corporations. As Cheryl Rodgers notes,
traditional forms of legitimation for corporate behavior have been derived
from the state machineries of regulation, legislation and the governments
role as representative of public opinion.36 As the legitimation function of
the state is diminished, public attention becomes increasingly fixated on the
responsibility of the corporation itself to address its societal impact. In
effect, corporations have lost their legitimizing intermediary with the
retreat of the nation state from areas of regulatory policy. Second,
corporations have increasingly moved to fill this policy vacuum through the
creation of codes of conduct and other forms of voluntary initiatives as a
substitute for national or international regulation. These projects run the
gamut of ethical business concerns, from the environmental to labor
standards. Examples include the Chemical Industry Responsible Care
Program, the Apparel Industry Partnership, ISO 14000, the Forestry and
Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996), pp. 160-162.
35
Bateman, 2003, op. cit., pp. 5-6.
36
Cheryl Rodgers, Making it Legit: New Ways of Generating Corporate Legitimacy
in a Globalizing World, in Bendell (ed.), 2002, op. cit., p. 43.
34

Marine Stewardship Councils and the Ethical Trading Initiative.37 The size
and the societal impact of these corporate-led initiatives have compelled
them to assume an almost quasi-governmental function in the absence of
any state-led system of regulation.
However, corporations, as we have seen, no longer enjoy a high
degree of confidence from the public at large. The setting of voluntary
standards and codes of conduct inevitably raises suspicions of self-serving
behavior. Therefore, it is increasingly necessary for corporations to
legitimize the usurpation of responsibilities traditionally associated with the
nation state. Without the legitimacy formerly provided by government
regulation, corporations are forced to seek legitimacy through extra-state
actors and agencies. The emphasis on stakeholder relationships in CSR
allows corporations to generate the needed legitimacy for what Cutler, et al.
deem these new regimes of private authority.38 CSR, through strategic
stakeholder partnerships, is seen as an efficacious way of creating
legitimacy for both corporate activities in general and these new forms of
corporate-led regulation in particular.
NGOs play a particularly important role in this process. Simon Zadek
notes that NGOs have built a wealth of trust with the public by projecting a
sense of non-financial purpose and a commitment to representing the best
interests of the wider community.39 Accordingly, CSR seeks to build
partnerships between corporations and NGOs as a way of gaining lent
trust. Essentially, CSR advocates the use of strategic partnerships with
NGOs as a way of transferring the legitimacy of the NGO onto the
corporation. Thus, a timber company in partnership with a well-trusted
environmental NGO would be seen to be less of a danger to the
sustainability of forests. Similarly, NGO participation in corporate-led
regulation, is seen to confer a legitimacy and an impartiality that simply
could not be generated by corporations alone.
A useful example of how this partnership operates to legitimize
corporate operations can be seen in the case of the World Wildlife Fund
(WWF) and Chevron Oil. Chevron sought a partnership with the WWF after
the discovery of oil in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea. Andy
Rowell argues that due to the environmentally sensitive nature of the
rainforests in this area, Chevron negotiated a partnership with the WWF to,
as described by internal Chevron documents, act as a buffer for the [oil
Chris Marsden, The New Corporate Citizenship of Big Business: Part of the
Solution to Sustainability? Business and Society Review, Vol. 105, No. 1, 2000, p.
10.
38
Clare Cutler, Virginia Haufler, and Tony Porter, Private Authority and
International Affairs (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 3-5.
39
Simon Zadek, The Civil Corporation: The New Economy of Corporate Citizenship.
(London: Earthscan Publishing, 2001), p. 47.
37

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project] against environmentally damaging activities in the region, and

against international environmental criticism.40 This partnership, coupled
with an environmentally disastrous eco-forestry partnership with a timber
company in the same area, has severely damaged the WWFs legitimacy as
an independent entity within the NGO community.41 Whatever the WWFs
intentions, in the end, they basically legitimized a dubious company at
best, to introduce an insidious industrial operation into what was a
wonderful wilderness.42
In this case, Chevrons partnership with the WWF acted as a Trojan
horse in which the corporation used the legitimacy of an environmental
NGO to gain access to ecologically sensitive areas, while presenting itself as
a responsible steward of nature.43 As Kovel notes, capital is more than
happy to enlist the mainstream [environmental] movement as a partner in
the management of nature.
According to Kovel, environmental groups offer capital a
threefold convenience:
As legitimation, reminding the world that the system works; as control over
popular dissent, a kind of sponge that sucks up and contains ecological
anxiety in the general population; and as rationalization, a useful governor to
introduce some control and protect the system from its own worst
tendencies, while ensuring the orderly flow of profits.44

In this sense we can view CSR as an ideological fix in a futile effort

to overcome what James OConnor has termed the second contradiction of
capitalism. According to OConnor, capitalisms second contradiction, or
cost-side crisis can originate in two ways. The first is when individual
capitals defend or restore profits by strategies that degrade or fail to
maintain over time the material conditions of their own production, as by
neglecting infrastructure, degrading soils, poisoning water bodies, etc.45
The secondwhich concerns us hereis when social movements demand
that capital provide for the maintenance and restoration of the abovementioned conditions of life/production. As OConnor states:
Here we are talking about the potentially damaging economic effects to
capitalist interests of labor movements, womens movements, environmental
Andy Rowell, The Spread of Greenwash, in Lubbers, 2002, op. cit., p. 23.
Ibid., p. 25.
42
Ibid., pp. 23-24.
43
This is not to indict all corporations of the same malign intent as Chevron.
However, given the irreconcilability of capitalism and sustainable development, the
effect of these partnerships will be to legitimate destructive corporate actions in the
eyes of the public, irrespective of intentions of good faith on the part of the
participants.
44
Kovel, 2002, op. cit., p. 154.
45
J. OConnor, 1994, op. cit., p. 162.
40
41

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movements, and urban movements. This problem of extra costsand their

threat to profitabilityobsesses mainstream economists and capitalist
ideologists.46

Thus in order to forestall the potential for these movements to impose

increased costs and restraints on corporate power, capital needs to
convince both governments and publics that it is making a sufficient
attempt to ameliorate the ecological destructiveness of its own operations.
CSR thereby acts as a means to present a green faade that, conceals
and reassures, while accelerated breakdown takes place behind its walls.47
Timothy Luke has argued that current initiatives to supposedly ameliorate
ecological destruction should be more rightly deemed a system of
sustainable degradation, as what is really being sustained is the ability of
capital to continue with business-as-usual.48
Ralph Hamann and Nicola Acutt add that the discourse of CSR
operates to legitimize the status quo, reinforcing the perception of private
corporations as given and immutable economic agents upon whose
enlightened self-interest our well being depends.49 It accomplishes this by
putting the onus for social change on the transformation of attitudes of
individuals in positions of power rather than on the fundamental
transformation of the system of production. Under the logic of CSR,
engagement by the public in matters of ecological concern is unnecessary;
we merely need to put our faith in the beneficence of corporate capital to
solve the problem for us. In this regard, CSR acts as an individualizing
tactic. It encourages fatalism towards political action by framing
substantive social change as the sole province of managers and other elites.
Concomitantly, CSR induces the public to channel political sentiment into
individualized, yet ostensibly system-serving efforts, such as green
consumption and ethical investing. As Joel Kovel argues, this form of
environmental voluntarism, precludes collective action towards the
ecological crisis; it is rather an action taken towards an individual
manifestation of the crisis.50 Similarly, Ewa Charkiewicz argues that CSR
embodies a neoliberal rationality in that it responds to demands for
addressing the social and environmental effects of capitalist production
through the individualized mechanism of the market, thereby reframing and
reorganizing social actors as stakeholders positioned within the corporate
Ibid., p. 162.
Kovel, 2002, op. cit., p. 24.
48
Timothy Luke, The System of Sustainable Degradation, paper presented at the
Capitalism Nature Socialism Anniversary Conference, York University, Toronto, July
24, 2005.
49
Ralph Hamann and Nicola Acutt, How Should Civil Society (and the government)
Respond to Corporate Social Responsibility? A Critique of Business Motivations and
the Potential for Partnerships, Development Southern Africa, Vol. 20, No. 2, June
2003, p. 259.
50
Kovel, 2002., 154.
46
47

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orbit.51 We can view CSR, then, as inculcating a form of green

neoliberalism within the populace by encouraging voluntaristic,
individualized strategies as a sufficient means to respond to ecological crisis
while eschewing more collective and more radical means of political
engagement.
To conclude, CSR can be viewed as the maintenance of the hegemonic
project of productivism through its uncritical faith in industry, technology,
and science as the means of moving humanity towards a more abundant
quality of life. Indeed, the hegemony of productivism incorporates many
central tenets of Western society that are now considered common sense:
economic theories of accumulation, primacy of individual property and the
unlimited right to its disposal, belief in progress and scientific rationality,
etc. Suffice it to say, there is quite a lot at stake in the maintenance of this
discourse as hegemonic, for to reject it would be to reject ideas central to
advanced industrial capitalism, if not Western ontological and
epistemological assumptions altogether. At the same time, evidence
continually emerges to contradict the hegemonic belief in phenomena such
as global warming, toxicity of food, air and water, and deforestation; and
alongside these manifestations of ecosytemic breakdown arise the
predictions of generalized ecological crisis and the competing counterhegemonic claims of the environmental movements.
As environmental instability increases, dystopian aspects of
productivism and industrialism, previously marginalized or trivialized, now
threaten to subvert radically the science/technology/rationalistic paradigm
we have lived with since at least the Enlightenment.52 CSR thereby acts as
what Ernesto Laclau calls a hegemonic suture, in that it repairs a rupture,
or a vulnerability within the hegemony of productivism, by offering solutions
that continue to serve the system while pretending to offer an alternative to
it.53 Furthermore, because CSR draws upon existing hegemonic beliefs as
the solution, (faith in science, development, and technocratic elites) it can
foreclose alternative beliefs, such as entertaining a new economic system,
as outside the realm of possibility. Hence radical ecological critique has to
fight 250 years of productivist discourse to even enter the imagination of
the populace as a viable alternative to capital as the means of organizing
society. CSR thereby placates public anxiety over the extent of the
ecological crisis by offering solutions that do not fundamentally challenge
the capitalist mode of production. If the predictions of the ecological critics
hold true, CSR is operating to preclude the impetus for revolutionary
systemic change at a time when it is of the utmost necessity.
Ewa Charkiewicz, Corporations, the UN and Neoliberal Bio-politics,
Development, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2005., p. 80.
52
Smith, 1998, op. cit., p. 6.
53
Ibid., p. 6.
51