Corporation greed

DEAR President Ramaphosa,

Business leaders today say their companies care more about profit than loss, that they feel responsible to society as a whole, not just to their shareholders.

Corporate social responsibility is their new creed, a self- conscious corrective to earlier greed-inspired visions of the corporation.

Despite this shift, the corporation has not changed. It remains as it was at the time of its origins as a modern business institution in the middle of the 19th century a legally designated “person”, designed to valorise selfinterest and invalidate moral concern.

Most people would find its “personality” abhorrent, even psychopathic, in a human being, yet curiously, we accept it in today’s most powerful institution. Joel Bakan, The Corporation. The workers perishes if capital does not employ him. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour and in order to exploit it, it must buy it. John Naidoo Durban