ABSTRACT
Business elites are facing criticism. There is increasingly frequent talk of social injustice in society and of business elites failing to fulfi ll their social responsibilities. The mood was expressed by Rolf Hochhuth in a recent drama, McKinsey Is Coming (Hochhuth 2003), where he points to Josef Ackermann-Chief Executive Offi cer of the Deutsche Bank-as a prime example of the moral erosion brought to the business community by globalization driven by profi t maximization, shareholder value obligations, and the profi t interests of anonymous shareholders. Hochhuth’s indignation applies in particular to the high-and rising-salaries of top executives who make thousands redundant in order to bring their companies back to profi tability. He considers this a sign of a dehumanization of business that is refl ected in the breaking of social ties and in the collapse of human solidarities; it encourages a sort of “rogue capitalism” that will dispose of the bourgeois world together with its values. German Vice-Chancellor Franz Müntefering (SPD) took the same line as Hochhuth when he criticized the growing power of capital and the total economization of life, which in his eyes aids and abets shortsighted profi t mentalities and loses sight of people on account of its quarterly success reports. He specifi cally attacked those individuals on the international fi nancial markets who do not appear to be bound by any rules, setting upon companies like swarms of locusts before moving on. Complaining about the lack of morals of individual businessmen and criticizing their false concepts of freedom, Müntefering also promised a broad-based battle against this new form of capitalism.
