Here's a little something based on my
one-off treatment for a "more realistic" take on Richard Sobel's
For Want of a Nail. The ideology in question is Sobel's, but I developed it more than he did in his book and gave it a much better name.
Social Capitalism
By all accounts we are living in the Age of Social Capitalism, but it is worth looking at how an ideology considered the impotent fringe for a century could suddenly come roaring back onto the world stage, and the best way to look on the works and opposing viewpoints of Bernard Kramer and Erich Neiderhoffer.
The former, of course, is infamous as the founder and first president of Kramer Associates, which went from a California mining and manufacturing trust to the most powerful corporation in the United States of Mexico in the space of five years. In order to better encyst itself within the Mexican state and to gain an edge against competitors President Kramer would institute policies focused on monitoring technological development from nations with greater freedom of inquiry, reasoning that being willing to adopt new techniques and devices before anyone else would give the mining and engineering giant the edge against more wary competitors. This early adopter attitude, coupled with hostile takeovers enabled by the government would be credited with allowing Kramer Associates to adapt and diversify far faster than would have been possible if the company had relied exclusively on the scientific work-product of the USM.
With this meteoric rise came the spread of the Kramer corporatist business model, where economic activity was concentrated into large firms that worked in tandem with the national government to guide policy. It would be the spread of this model, and the resulting worker misery, that would motivate Neiderhoffer to develop his economic theories in the mid-1870's. Under orthodox Social Capitalism, the best way forward for the struggling working class is to pool their resources, using their combined purchasing power to buy control of the companies they work for. Ideally they would be able to buy them outright and manage them collectively, but the brief French experiment with Neiderhofferist economics tried to expand worker access to stock in publicly traded companies.
Though this experiment would not survive the 1880s it would provoke something of a panic in the Kramer Associates board of directors, which began looking for ways to boost the loyalty of the workforce without giving them any real say in the company. As the company had diversified and spread internationally it had already taken steps to solidify its company identity by rotating middle and upper management between branches and paying its skilled workers enough to become consumers of the company's products, but the end of slavery in Mexico during the 1920s would force another change.
Although the company had realized the need to faze out the institution, and had in fact pushed for its abolition as an inefficient way to conduct business, there now came the issue of how to maintain control of the new mass of lower wage workers used to fill the bottom rungs of the company. The solution proposed by KA president Benedict would be relatively simple: the creation of a patchwork of "loyal unions" within all the Kramer shops with a so-called "advisory capacity". It allowed the great unwashed the illusion of workplace participation while preventing outside labor interests from worming their way into the Kramer workforce, while simultaneously preventing all the Kramer workers from coordinating with one another. And there the matter rested, at least until the Global War.
KA had long considered the Pacific its best opportunity for growth, ingratiating itself with Taiwan and the Philippines especially, with additional significant holdings in Japan and Australia. Naturally it saw Mexican belligerance in the Pacific as a threat to the company's interests, and the growing divide between the company and the state finally shattered, with Kramer Associates notifying Japan and Australia of Mexican war plans and transferring personnel and assets to Taiwan just ahead of USM plans to nationalize Kramer holdings in the country.
And here we come to the return of Social Capitalism: although the anti-Mexican pact had succeeded and Kramer had gotten sweetheart deals to rebuild Australia and Japan in the aftermath, the company was far more fragile than their entrenchment in the Pacific would suggest, given the complete severing of relations with Mexico that had benefitted and defined the company since its founding and the resultant drop in stock price given the new instability. It was in this weakened state that the various measures taken over the years to generate a spirit of corporate over national loyalty would backfire, with the disgruntled middle management class beginning to embrace Neiderhofferism as another tool of advancement and the frequent shuffling of personnel creating a vector for that tendency to spread throughout the company.
Kramer Associates had long relied on a byzantine corporate structure to prevent its assets from being nationalized, and this opaque tangle of entities gave the newly politicized Kramer shop unions and middle management the opening they needed to discretely buy up falling Kramer stock through an equally opaque web of shell companies. And with that Kramer fell victim to its own game through the so-called Day-Trader Revolt, which would see the unions collaborating to use a series of short squeezes to increase their share of the company coupled with the threat of mass work stoppages to guarantee their new seat at the table.
Newly secure in their position, the workers would push to make the most of their new leverage. The melange of shop unions were consolidated into Social Capitalist political parties in the nations with the highest levels of KA influence, and the anti-Mexican alliance would be formalized into the Pacific Pact between Taiwan, Japan and Westralia (having seceded when Australia elected to remain in the Commonwealth), witth Kramer Associates retaining observer status and all three nations locked into favorable deals with the corporation and under the sway of SoCap parties. Although research among the great powers had been ongoing for a decade it would be the Pacific Pact that would successfully detonate an atomic bomb in 1962, claiming the device as a deterrent to potentially hostile action as the Kramer-backed Social Capitalists are growing in prominence around the world.