The Molotov Milkshake: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Market

This article investigates links between the final scene—the milkshake scene—of P. T. Anderson’s film, ‘There Will Be Blood’, and a commercial advertisement for the sale of oil, which relies on a milkshake drinking analogy. The comparison probes a tension between the aspiration for capitalist economic growth and the self-regulation of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Business figures committed to the practice of CSR struggle with the possibility that deeper, systemic forms of violence inherent in market competition supersede their attempts at installing more responsible cycles of economic exchange. A risk remains, all the while, that social and environmental concern of the kind expressed in CSR is only able to acquire ‘value’ in the market, a relational or ‘dialectical’ system of exchange, where it meets contrasting cycles or events in the market: the value of alternatives (e.g. ‘going green’) is predicated on pre-existing products or earlier cycles of marketisation. The article discusses difficulties that CSR creates in terms of making interventions and raising conflict with corporate actors, and a tendency for the system to leave inert, exposed or abandoned, those that try. The capacity of CSR to eradicate the more vicious shadow of capitalist markets is challenged in the article. There is no release, the author argues, in a concept that is so essentially dependent on market mechanisms and on competitively motivated (ex)change.