Law as capitalist technique

This article analyses how one of the aspects of law (little discussed in the literature) is as a series of techniques in practice which facilitate the activities of the current model of capitalism. Commonalities are drawn between traditional trusts law and offshore trusts law enabling tax avoidance; company law and the extraction of value from businesses (as with BHS); how corporate governance failures in UK company law enable the avoidance of personal liability (as with Carillion and Enron), and their comparison with the regulation of banks; and how the concept of ‘industrial democracy’ set out in the 1970s enables a different way of modelling these legal techniques. This article prefaces in a little more detail the work of the Corporate Governance Policy Review which I am leading for the British Labour Party in 2018.