Social institutions evolve, or are created, to maintain a particular balance between cooperation and competition. In 1688, England abandoned the feudal system and instituted a constitutional monarchy guaranteeing property rights and religious freedom. The Glorious Revolution was far from complete, and many feudal institutions remained important.

At the end of the eighteenth century and into the first two decades of the nineteenth, Smith, Ricardo and Malthus railed at these residual impediments to economic efficiency, and triggered fifty years of deregulatory reform. By mid-century, Marx had identified the extraordinary dynamism of the resulting capitalist system and had recognised that, far from

Malthusian starvation, crises were caused by overproduction: starvation might persist, but it would be starvation in the midst of plenty.

At the end of the nineteenth century, William Morris, in his News from Nowhere, proposed a society where people would be satisfied with an adequacy of physical goods, labouring no harder than necessary to produce them, and using the resulting leisure in a range of cultural and athletic pursuits. While Morris’s idyll was nowhere realised, it was parodied in the USSR of the 1960s and 1970s, where the economy stagnated and too many Soviet workers spent their leisure time, and much of their working time as well, in an alcoholic haze.

The USSR is gone, and Morris largely forgotten. The dominant theoretical model of the world is the orthodox economic one, where mysteriously defined ‘consumers’ benefit from the slavery producers impose upon themselves by relentless competition. The dominant practical model is the economy of the USA, being extended to the rest of the world by globalisation. While the ideology of the USA is based on relentless competition, the practice is that of oligopoly: mergers and acquisitions until a handful of dominant players control every market.

Existing capitalism relies on the cooperative majority in two ways: employees within a firm must cooperate to further the firm’s objectives, suppressing any competitive urges of their own; and people must agree to become customers of particular firms, trusting that the long-term benefits of a customer relationship will outweigh the short-term advantages of shopping around for the lowest price. The competitive minority can satisfy their ambitions within a capitalist firm, securing promotion by their diligent pursuit of their superiors’ interests; or as entrepreneurs, founding new firms and new divisions of existing firms; or as union leaders, competing against the capitalist for their members’ share of the profits of enterprise. A few of the competitive minority find roles as consumer advocates, or even as authors of irreverent histories of capitalist icons.

McQueen is aware of the gulf between the orthodox economic model of a capitalist economy and its practice, but he does not reject the orthodox economic model decisively.

Schumpeter wrote: ‘Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary.’ The abiding defect of contemporary orthodox economics, pitilessly exposed in Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences (reviewed in this issue), is its interpretation of a market economy as a system in equilibrium, a state from which change is neither desirable nor possible. Existing capitalism may or may not be better than any possible alternative, but it is certainly better than that.

Firms in a capitalist economy must secure the cooperation of their workforces to produce attractive products and to build and keep a customer base to purchase these products, or go out of business. How they go about these tasks is an important issue and one that has provided McQueen with much of his most interesting and, in places, most disturbing material.

The late nineteenth-century inventor of Coca-Cola, Dr Pemberton, built the loyalty of his customer base in the most direct way possible, selling them a ‘tonic’ containing not one but two addictive ingredients. Engaging black labourers in a southern city where an ‘uppity’ black man would be lucky to escape with a mere savage beating secured the cooperation of its workforce. The addictive cocaine and kola were removed from the formula in the first decade of the twentieth century; discriminatory and oppressive labour practices persisted almost until the end of it.

McQueen’s account of the development of Coca-Cola’s distribution practices is of equal interest to his account of its marketing and labour-management practices. Given the communications and management systems available at the start of last century, the creation and management of a global consumer products company was far beyond the possibilities open to the Coca-Cola Company. The solution was a complex system of a Trust, which produced and shipped the syrup, the Parent Bottlers, whose nominal role was to supervise distribution but which became a classic rent-earning intermediary (thanks to some lax contract negotiating) and the Actual Bottlers, who mixed the syrup with soda water, bottled it, and distributed it in their locality.

The management problems presented by these complicated arrangements, as they evolved over nearly a century, and their resolution are interesting in themselves and illustrative of many of the more general problems facing globalising companies.

McQueen describes the evolution of Coca-Cola’s marketing practices and an account of their less savoury aspects in some detail. It would be unfortunate if this account of the distasteful and unethical marketing and management practices that the Coca-Cola Company, and others, have used at times gave readers the impression that all enterprises in a modern capitalist economy behave, or wish to behave, unethically.

Fair employment and honest marketing practices carry a short-term cost, but firms that sustain these practices in spite of the demands of the finance sector for short-term profits have historically outperformed their rivals dramatically. This book fulfils the valuable service of exposing certain unfair and immoral practices to public scrutiny, itself a powerful sanction given today’s consumer activism and the ubiquity of the Web.

Unless or until Morris’s or some other post-capitalist vision is realised, it is important, in both economic and human terms, to make capitalist practice as fair and morally constrained as possible. This book is a positive contribution to that end.