Few business people "understand that the capitalist spirit is a revolutionary one," wrote Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's, at the start of the Reagan era in 1980. People on the left don't necessarily grasp this, either, despite Karl Marx's depiction of capitalism as the great dynamo of production that creates constant upheavals in culture, social relations and technology. Over the past few years, however, there has emerged a movement for "values-driven capitalism" that takes very seriously the power of the system, not only to create upheaval and innovation, but to uplift human beings around the globe.
Comprised partly of entrepreneurs, corporate managers and management gurus, partly of philosophers and activists, this new movement is like a preppy sibling to the more grassroots, anti-corporate social responsibility organizations of the left. Their shared lineage traces back to the 1970s, when the counter-culture gave rise to two broad branches, one political in orientation, the other focused on "human potential" disciplines and modes of spirituality. Given the strange inversions of political vocabulary over the past 20 years ("conservatives" now tend to be the radical social experimenters, willing to rudely shake such enduring institutions as public education and Social Security to see how many dollars will spill out, while "progressives" tend to be the preservationists, seeking to limit the impact of scientific innovation and business activity), it is probably beside-the-point to try to fit labels to this emergent new movement - but it is of interest to us to identify its strengths and its foibles from a Torah of Money perspective. To do so, we look at a representative gathering, the "International Conference on Business and Con-sciousness" (January 10-14 in Santa Fe), which one of us, Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, attended.
The conference brought together more than 400 participants. Sponsors included Co-op America, and a few presenters were radical in an old-fashioned way. Russell Means of the American Indian Movement, for example, offered a critique of corporate culture and U.S. foreign policy ("We have bombed 15 countries in the past 30 years - this is the role model we present to our youth") and described Indian reservations as the testing ground for the "dumbing down" of America, the loss of local control of schools, and the consignment of healthcare to HMOs. Other presenters were directly involved in poverty-relief activism: Bill Strickland, for example, an African-American ceramicist from Pittsburgh, spoke eloquently about the combination of artistic creativity and vocational partnership with which he has developed programs of education and employment for nearly 1,000 high-school kids and adults each year. (Strickland was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996.)
For some other key presenters, however, personal charisma, New Age spirituality and "systems-think" - stimulating hypotheses about the functioning of organizational systems and human society at large - were the stock in trade. "Putting the Soul Back into the Corporate Body" . . . "Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes" . . . "The Power Path: The Shaman's Rules of Power in Business and Life" . . . "Managing Your Sales Here and Now: How to Maximize Your Sales Potential by Being in the Moment" - these and other workshop titles evinced an overriding belief in personal transformation as a catalyst for socially responsible business management, and social responsibility as a catalyst for business, but little awareness of shareholder activism, consumer activism, legislation, and other sources of political pressure needed to hold corporate feet to the fire. There were no workshops, in other words, with titles such as "Preserving the Estate Tax, Preserving Meritocracy," "Ever Try Living on a Minimum Wage?" or "Labor Unions and Political Activism."
Shortcomings aside, the emphasis that this new movement places upon the transformation of economics through spiritual growth is not to be discounted. Harnessing the power of capitalism so that it sustains, rather than ravages, the planet and its inhabitants requires many harness-makers - and each, in turn, must have access to a moral understanding that enables him or her to be motivated by communitarian values and not simply by greed and competitiveness. Jewish thought makes this clear by offering no distinction between "the system" and the individual when it comes to fulfilling commandments - including the commandment of yishuv olam, "settling the world" (i.e., creating wealth, based on Genesis 2:15).
By Judaism's light, however, yishuv olam should yield (in Rabbi Milton Bonder's formulation in The Kabbalah of Money) "abundance [that] we create for a given human need, without generating the scarcity of another need." Judaism, in other words, favors economic sustainability, which we achieve by "remembering God," remembering the common cause of humanity, as we function in the marketplace, and by finding disciplines and systems that channel our natural yetzer hara, the lustful urge that fuels human civilization, in socially redemptive directions.
At the very core of the Jewish concept of sustainability is the covenantal metaphor, which posits a divine-human partnership in the many tasks of creating and recreating the world. This partnership is based on a contract that places limits upon human greed and upon capricious "Divine" power (of the kind displayed by the uncovenanted biblical YHWH of Noah's generation, Gen. 6:7). At Mt. Sinai, every slave-cum-"harness-maker" is called to participate in this contract, "each and every one in keeping with his or her particular capacity" (Exodus Rabbah). In our own age, when corporate power over resources, time, distance and life itself is exercised on a "god-like" scale unimaginable to our forebears, the covenantal idea has greatly renewed relevance. Without it, corporate power and greed consume lives, resources and the world; with it, the possibility and the promise of sustainability emerge.
There may be a good deal about the "values-driven capitalism" movement that smacks of the salve and the sop. (The New Age tendencies toward romanticizing non-Western spiritual traditions and abusing scientific rationalism are also alive and well here.) Nevertheless, the people drawn to this movement include many powerbrokers and powerhouses with an awakened "I-Thou" consciousness, who are sincerely seeking to turn the "revolutionary spirit of capitalism" to the advantage of humanity. Even the more self-interested aspects of their discussions, which identify corporate culture as the "new frontier" of competitive advantage and survival, could become for prodding corporate decisionmakers towards a "covenant" of social responsibility.
Lawrence Bush and Jeffrey Dekro are authors of 
