CAPITALISM FOR SOCIAL

CAPITALISM FOR SOCIAL GOOD? THE COMPLEXITIES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP CULTURE

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would have noticed the recent trend celebrating entrepreneurs and startups. From the infamous Elon Musk, to the establishment of the MQU Incubator, entrepreneurship culture is all around. If the popularity of the Barefoot Investor can tell us anything, it’s that the general public have a burgeoning love for entrepreneurs.

When most of us think of entrepreneurs, we probably think of someone like Elon Musk – a creative, somewhat unconventional workaholic with a deep passion for their business idea. Research shows that despite this ‘hero image’ of entrepreneurs, there’s no evidence to indicate that entrepreneurs succeed based on the merit of their personality traits. In fact, a large part of their success is due to following “processes and patterns of developing and testing ideas, building support networks and developing certain communication and business skills.” This is quite a contrast to the depiction of entrepreneurs as savvy saviours of humanity, as seen in the common media depiction of Virgin founder Richard Branson.

Converse to the myth of the underdog entrepreneur, in their 2014 research into entrepreneurship, Logue and Boersma found that the majority of entrepreneurs had a solid financial background, a successful career in their own industry and access to a highly developed professional network. While the entrepreneurs in the study were “determined, resilient and passionate” and “open to risk,” the success of their business idea was largely based on their ability to acquire and develop new skills relating to the market. In other words, entrepreneurs aren’t born, but created through particular social and economic circumstances.

Even people within the movement point out the difficulty in defining what it means to be an entrepreneur. After the failure of his startup, Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley software engineer, published a book in which he argued that the industry was full of “myth-making.” In The Lean Startup, Ries writes: “The grim reality is that most startups fail. Most new products are not successful. Most new ventures do not live up to their potential.” Contrary to the mainstream emphasis on “quirky maverick personalities and entrepreneurial charisma,” Ries argues that entrepreneurship is about management, discipline and acquiring vital business skills. This point is an important step in uncovering the way in which entrepreneurship is depicted in the media.

Working for a cause

Recently, new kinds of entrepreneurship have emerged. Social entrepreneurship uses commercial processes in solving contemporary issues. Social entrepreneurs therefore start businesses with the intent of producing social good. These are different from Not-for-Profits because social entrepreneurs turn a profit in the process of addressing social problems. In Sydney alone, a number of social entrepreneurship initiatives have sprung up. Digital matching platform Digital Talent is one such example. It was founded by Nirary Dacho, who, after arriving on a humanitarian visa, struggled to find meaningful employment despite his extensive education and experience. The platform assists refugees to find jobs, thereby helping them to circumnavigate the systemic and cultural bias endemic within Australian hiring and work cultures. The trend of refugee entrepreneurship programs is not limited to Australia, with similar initiatives and programs having sprung up in Europe and other parts of the world.

There’s also such a thing as cultural entrepreneurship, which brings together the concepts of entrepreneurship and the arts and creative services. This type of entrepreneurship links the previously unrelated spheres of business and art in an attempt to bridge two very different and contradictory realms, for profit, of course. There seems to be a glaring ambiguity around what exactly constitutes cultural entrepreneurship. Some researchers link the term to those who work towards social change using public art forms, a.k.a. social activism. Other researchers employ the term as a label for any business working with arts and creative services. This ambiguity reveals a vague and undeveloped sector struggling to reconcile the polar worlds of art and business. After reading a number of articles published on this topic, it’s clear that cultural entrepreneurship, much like its predecessor, garden variety entrepreneurship, suffers from the “myth-making” Ries described in his book.

How young is too young?

Kidpreneurs is a book that encourages “a child’s desire to get involved in business early by fueling their curiosity in simple, engaging, creative, and safe ways.” Written by brothers and passionate entrepreneurs Matthew and Adam Torrens, the book introduces children to the “basic principles and infinite rewards” of entrepreneurship. The Kidpreneurs website is littered with brazen promotions (“Get 30% off the book!”) and an overwhelming number of attempts to spruik the book, with the ‘About’ section boldly claiming “it’s never too early” to become an entrepreneur.

The Torrens’ expedition into the world of child entrepreneurship poses serious questions about the pervasiveness of pro-capitalist ideology. Should children really be pressured by their parents into becoming entrepreneurs? There are also ethical issues with targeting children. Firstly, as entrepreneur Eric Ries acknowledges himself, most startups result in failure. Of course, fear of failing should not prevent people from pursuing their dreams, but it should be acknowledged that entrepreneurship requires an extensive professional network, management and networking skills, and a financial safety net that most adults don’t have. Again, this is an instance of the industry’s “myth-making,” where entrepreneurs are depicted as underdog heroes emerging from the ashes to shake up the industry. In fact, as research demonstrates, most people become entrepreneurs later in life when they have skills, knowledge and The second ethical issue refers to the fact that selling pro-entrepreneurship propaganda to children and parents is a weird kind of ‘Inception’-style, intra or meta-exploitation of entrepreneurship culture. It reveals an insidious side to the entrepreneurship sector, which increasingly seems to be rife with entrepreneurs whose sole business is just to sell the idea of entrepreneurship. This strikes me as being a bit like a pyramid scheme, with industry members seeing that the most profitable move for them is to recruit others and profit from aspiring entrepreneurs.

Similarly, Ries’ critique of the industry, which evidently resonated with many trying to make it in the industry, gave him the success and recognition he was working towards in the first place. His book on “myth-making” in the sector soon became a “global movement”, and he was even offered a position as an ‘entrepreneur in residence’ at Harvard Business School, whatever that means. Ries’ ability to profit from writing about entrepreneurship culture, which itself exploits the inequalities produced under the capitalist system, reveals an ugly truth about the true purpose of the industry.

Examining the cult of entrepreneurship holds a mirror to the ugly face of our economic and social system. Looking at the “myth-making” around entrepreneurs points to an agenda whereby the responsibility of the state to fund social programs is transferred to individual social entrepreneurs and small businesses, placing additional strain on an economic system that’s already struggling to stay afloat. The idea of cultural entrepreneurship poses important questions about the relation between art and economics, and whether immaterial and symbolic forms of creativity should be tied to a profit-making agenda.

Multifaceted issues such as poverty, wealth inequality and discrimination are too big for one individual or business to tackle. While social entrepreneurship provides helpful short term solutions, promoting this business-centric culture deflects meaningful discussions about systemic inequalities and long term solutions. If we want a happier and healthier society, we need to start by critiquing the current system, and working towards a future where our wellbeing does not revolve around profit making, whether it be someone else’s or our own.

by Shinae Taylor

WHY DICK SMITH MATTERS

There are many reasons we should be talking about Dick Smith. For any true Australian he is an icon, a warm, nationally unifying, vigorously Aussie now 76-year-old entrepreneur whose many ventures – including founding Australian Geographic – embody the best possible qualities of patriotism, intelligence, and philanthropic service.

Though it might sound futile, the memory of having Dick Smith branding stuck on food products in your fridge is instructive. If you remember, not too long ago Aldi, supported by low overseas labour costs, pushed Dick Smith Foods under, and the iconic entrepreneur waxed emotional over the victory of a corporate logo hatched in Germany.

His “OzEmite,” an alternative to the then foreign-owned Vegemite sold to us with false Australiana, seemed irrelevant after Vegemite was bought by Bega Cheese in 2017. There were those who dismissed him as a ‘one trick pony’ blaming competitors and customers for his own failures even as Australian companies returned to the market, and yet their optimism didn’t age too well. In order to compete with foreign companies, Australian ones had to imitate them. This, Dick Smith said, leads to abandonment of product diversity, staff and the old Australian culture of profit sharing – the idea that once any “young Australian could begin their working lives stacking shelves.”

But despite being a multimillionaire, 1986 Australian of the Year, legendary aviator and popular choice for Australian President during the 1995 referendum debate, Dick Smith’s more recent political activism – centred around sustainability – has left him in a quite lonely corner. He seemed perhaps too important to attack directly, so the media and political class sort of politely ignored him, after a rare and brief population debate in the Gillard years.

The tragedy of Dick Smith Foods is part of a familiar story known as globalisation. In the 1980s, “extreme capitalism,” as Dick Smith calls it, expanded over the world, fuelled by deregulation, debt, the rush for low prices and lower labor costs, and most importantly, the intensive plundering of the planet.

This could not have happened at a worse time, because at some point in the 1970s, humanity exceeded its share of natural capital. In other words, we reached ecological overshoot, as our demand for Earth’s assets, like forests and fisheries (called

ecological footprint), outstripped the supply that could be renewed in a year (called biocapacity). Since 2006, Global Overshoot Day has commemorated the bankruptcy of a civilisation that runs an ecological deficit of around 60% – we would need 1.75 earths to sustainably meet our demands. Frighteningly, the overshoot calculation vastly underestimates our real damage on planet earth, as it doesn’t even address the way in which we satisfy those incredible ecological demands, like degrading soil and overusing water.

This is why the neoliberal expansion of the 1980s was arguably the worst thing ever to occur. It was the decade of Ronald Reagan and Wall Street’s ‘Greed is good’ ethos. As environmental writer Bill McKibben says, because of Reagan’s worldview, “we repudiated the idea of limits altogether; we laughed at the idea that there are limits to growth.”

It’s not like we weren’t warned either. The Limits to Growth report by the Club of Rome of 1972 found that at then current levels of growth, humanity would likely reach the limits of growth in the 2020s and therefore collapse within 100 years. It was not an obscure report; in fact it sold 30 million copies, inspired China’s one child policy, and led to energy conservation efforts in the US.

This raises a profound question. Can humans – once given the magic of fossil fuel energy – resist the temptation to use up the Earth? Or are we too greedy? Was the 1980s a real-life Garden of Eden? This is where Dick Smith comes in. His message of a stabilised population, growth in quality of life and a more sustainable, Australian-based industry is undoubtedly a popular, albeit rarely articulated, sentiment. But we might also ponder the fact that Dick Smith Foods went under ultimately because 99% of Australians chose cheaper, foreign brands. We aren’t doing much to stop small Australian businesses from collapsing, with retailers going down by one a month in 2019 due to foreign competition, while the dairy industry has shrunk and struggled as imported products dominate the shelves.

On the other hand, even those advocating ‘buy Australian’ probably don’t want to think about the impact of tariffs; for example, trade means our clothes are 14% cheaper. This is why any return to the local and the small requires a rethinking of our whole economic system. To do this, we might, following Dick Smith, distinguish ‘growth’ from ‘capitalism.’ The religion of growth is not unique to capitalism, holding as much sway over 20th century communist regimes. Today’s socialists, too, seem to ignore the ecological perils of population and resource use growth, believing that material abundance is the bedrock of a socialist society. “It’s the obvious but forbidden truth: on a finite and already swollen planet, we can’t expand indefinitely,” Dick Smith wrote in The Age in 2011.

The growth mania is a near-hermetic wall of silence; in 2010, Smith published the $1 million ‘Wilberforce Award’ for any young Australian who gained media attention for advocating against endless growth. The lucrative prize, destined for a modern ‘Gandhi,’ was never picked up. The media, with its hegemonic power over public discourse, hardly lets these heresies seep in.

At bottom, Dick Smith’s limits-to-growth message is about repudiating the greed driving our suicidal growth and caring about all life, human and otherwise. While he advocates lowering our immigration take, he also wants a larger and more humanitarian refugee settlement program. There’s a quality about Dick Smith that is admittedly old-fashioned yet undeniably anodyne. Not just his unique, iconic self-branding, but even more the desire to see Australia as a family again, a small, stable, diverse and cohesive community in which human quality of life and love of nature take hold and rebuff the empty consumerist promises of a planet-plundering growth-based capitalism.

by Joel Karanikas