In 1970, Milton Friedman declared that the one and only social responsibility of business is to maximise profit for shareholders. Today, it’s almost trite to contest the point. As evidence of the social and environmental damage that extractive practices are doing to the planet has grown, so too has the obligation for corporations to report on and mitigate harm.

Yet regenerative logics have not displaced the primary organising principle of profit maximisation. And as such, debate remains over the trade-offs between the financial value and health cost of ultra-processed foods. Between the necessity of fossil fuels and their impact on climate. Between labour efficiency and worker dignity. And many more inconvertible comparisons.

To understand why, it is worth exploring what underpins the neoliberal perspective and how it supercharges the metabolic rift between society and nature.

The fallacy of the democratic market

At its core, the maxim of profit maximisation boils down to belief in the market as a democratic mode of distribution. Thus, when businesses engage in activities beyond facilitating an efficient producer-consumer relationship, they introduce additional cost. That cost functions as a form of private taxation, used to advance what managers believe to be in the public good, but free from the scrutiny of democratic governance. The argument follows, therefore, that the only way to avoid disrupting democracy is to rely on the price-setting mechanism of the market and the collective bundles of preferences expressed by consumers.

Of course, reality is rarely that simple. The price-setting mechanism of the free market relies on perfect information, minds free from the demand-generating effect of branding, and a biosphere that doesn’t respond to externalised costs. But beyond that well-worn critique, there is another driving force that structurally incentivises harm. Survival.

Profit requires revenue to outpace inflation. Should a business not grow revenue or value at an adequate rate, it will fail and die. But is it not strange that the death of a business is considered a failure? After all, death is a natural, inevitable part of life, not a failure to persist. Perhaps, we might speculate that the roots of such a contradiction can be found in a Cartesian philosophy of domination over nature. Through human ingenuity, technological and social advancement, death has been reinterpreted not as an equaliser, but the Darwinian fate of the unsuccessful.

Corporations, untethered from social obligation, human values and the expectation of a finite lifespan, yet empowered by legal status and limited liability, exist as immortal engines of profit, until they do not. And when the warning signs begin to flash, a range of Machiavellian tactics are often deployed to extract the final drops of financial value. Opportunistic pivots bump share prices for a brief moment before collapse, asset stripping protects ownership and responsibility for the fallout is externalised.

Prefigurative business

Does this sound like the way regenerative enterprise should behave? Of course not. Yet without addressing both the profit and self-preservation incentive, it is a fate that even the most well-meaning business can fall prey to. This is the double-burden of prefiguration: to exist within the systems of the present whilst adhering to self-imposed constraints that model a different future.

It is a worthwhile pursuit. Embedding new rules of organisation into the practices of doing business reaches across planes of social being, affecting the intra-subjectivity of individuals involved and their outward interactions with others. Working within a solitary business which recognises a purpose-driven, finite existence is, in essence, both a rehearsal for a future where such structures are the norm and helps to bring that future into being.

Institutionalising death

But perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. How can regenerative enterprise institutionalise death in the first place? One method is to extend the grammar of the corporate charter: the foundational document that defines the basic structure of an organisation. In many jurisdictions, non-profits must already state a purpose which restricts the way in which assets can be used and include a dissolution clause that mandates how assets may be distributed if the organisation closes.

That’s a good start. But to truly reckon with death requires expanding this clause beyond what happens in the event of closure, defining also the conditions of closure. Drawing inspiration from the macro perspective of Doughnut Economics, I propose clauses should be based around a ceiling and a floor. The ceiling represents the fulfilment of a purpose. The business has achieved what it has set out to and, rather than contort itself into something unrecognisable, reaches a natural conclusion. Its labour force released back to society, sharing in one final dividend. At the opposite end, the floor represents a threshold beyond which its stated purpose cannot be fulfilled or is actively contradicted. In this case, the firm is wound up before greater harm occurs.

Importantly, regardless of which threshold is crossed supporting rituals can bring a sense of closure, replicating the social and ecological functions that death performs in living systems. Such rituals might include the open-sourcing of intellectual property, the creation of transition funds for workers and communities or the transfer of remaining financial capital to mission-aligned entities. So closure represents one final expression of purpose rather than collapse.

But what happens next? Like nature, the nutrients that fed a regenerative business have been returned to society, space has been cleared, and what once existed becomes the fertile soil for new life to emerge.