Woke Capitalism: How Huge Corporations Demonstrate Status by Endorsing Political Radicalism

 

It’s a rather strange claim of the American far left that their interests are opposed to that of corporate America, because there’s virtually no evidence to support it. Quite the contrary: During the wave of Black Lives Matter rioting that took place during the early summer of 2020, American corporations marched in lockstep. Not only did they use social media to swear fealty to this political movement, but they also made massive internal changes in conformity with BLM propaganda.

It’s called “woke capitalism” and while it’s not necessarily new, it’s certainly more prevalent than it ever has been. The term itself was coined by conservative editorial writer Ross Douthat in 2018. He succinctly summed up what woke capitalism is: superficial nods toward cultural leftism that allow the company to do what it really exists to do – make money.

You might be confused or think that there’s something ironic or askew about major corporations backing supposed “rebel” ideologies. However, this stems from a very surface understanding of the topic. When we delve deeper into it, the motivation for large corporations siding with ostensibly “anti-capitalist” groups will come clearly into focus.

What is “Wokeness?”: Understanding “Critical Theory” and The Frankfurt School

Before going any further, we should spend some time defining what “wokeness” means.

Wokeness is a kind of shorthand for an area of the American political left that is obsessed with identity politics. This is, as the name would imply, the politics of identity. Thus, people are not rational actors, nor are they necessarily economic units. Rather, they are little more than a collection (or, in the parlance of this ideology, the intersections) of skin color and séxuality.

Socioeconomic class might enter into this, but if it does, it’s generally as an afterthought. While Marxism might play some influential role, the wokeists are far more likely to locate the revolutionary subject in, for example, trans-identified black men than it is the working class.

One can understand the hostility of the “woke” to the Bernie Sanders campaign in this context: it is much more revolutionary under the guidelines established by wokeism, to put more racial minorities with unusual séxual identities on the board of Lockheed-Martin and Goldman-Sachs than it is to provide for greater economic equality on behalf of their workers.

The bedrock of wokeness is not classical Marxist socialism, but something called “critical theory” and in particular its variant “critical race theory.” This has its roots in the Frankfurt School and an early 20th-century Italian philosopher and politician named Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s big idea was that cultural power preceded political power. Thus, to have a Marxist political revolution, one first needed a Marxist cultural revolution. This was to be accomplished by a “long march through the institutions.” What this means is that leftists were to infiltrate every institution of significance and gain power within them.

We can see the result of this idea today. While American leftists bear little, if any, resemblance to Marxists of old, they have penetrated our institutions and dominate culturally – in academia, in entertainment, and increasingly in the economic sphere as well. If one were to read the Communist Manifesto, there are a series of demands at the end, most of which have come to fruition such as universal public education, a progressive income tax, a national bank, and the industrialization of agriculture.

This isn’t to say that there is a massive Gramscian conspiracy with thousands of members. Such a thing would be completely impossible to prove or disprove. However, the kernel of the idea has taken root, in part thanks to bona fide promotion in academia, and in part because it simply seems to have largely been a successful operation.

Thus “critical theory” is effectively a sociological philosophy and method that involves constant ideological attacks on Western civilization. Its guiding principle is that Western civilization is based on subjugation, dominance, and tyranny. This takes many forms including “racism,” “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity” and “cisséxism” – all of which are predicated upon weaponized guilt.

Weaponized guilt is essentially taking those elements of Western and Anglo-Saxon culture, which prize even-handedness and “fair play,” and turning them against the culture itself. Indeed, the selection of the name “Black Lives Matter” is a masterstroke in weaponizing guilt: The only possible disagreement (or so say the advocates and allies of the movement) is that you don’t think black lives do actually matter. But, of course, except for extremely isolated, marginalized, and numerically insignificant pockets, virtually everyone agrees that all lives have the same value. Indeed, it is a cornerstone of Western civilization and Christian teaching that this is true. It is nearly axiomatic. The Declaration of Independence declares that the basic equality of men is “self-evident.” No one would even know where to begin “arguing” this, simply because it is so accepted as a fact.

It’s worth noting that wokeness largely entered the American political vernacular after the fall of the Occupy Movement. This is not an endorsement of either the Occupy Movement specifically, nor economic reductionism and confiscatory tax redistribution schemes more generally. However, it is worth noting that the corporate affinity for a seemingly “radical” form of politics requiring nothing in the way of actual financial sacrifice began after the death of a political movement demanding corporate accountability and economic redistribution starting at the very top.

The Business Side of Things

A “conspiracy,” or however we wish to define it, is not the only reason that Wall Street loves wokeness. Beyond the misdirection, there is also a lot of money to be made catering to the woke. This has nothing to do with what “most people” in America want or need. Rather, it has to do with catering to those on the coasts and within bigger cities in the interior of our nation.

Almost all of the income growth in America over the last ten years has been concentrated in cities in Southern California, Silicon Valley, and the Pacific Northwest, hotbeds of leftism in general and wokeism in particular. However, even places outside of these regions that have seen income growth tend to be far left-leaning. Examples include Austin, TX, Denver, CO, and Nashville, TN.

What this means is that the larger companies in America, including the big banks in New York, the tech companies in Silicon Valley, the entertainment industry in southern California, and the cable news companies that cover the goings-on in Washington DC, are all interested in chasing after the dollar of urban wokes. Increased wealth concentration, including the massive transfer of wealth that happened under the COVID-19 panic and subsequent lockdown, have made big companies increasingly the only game in town, with smaller, more responsive Main Street America businesses becoming more and more marginalized where they continue to exist at all.

It’s not that big companies think they’re too good for your money – they just know that you don’t have anywhere else to go.

The Colin Kaepernick sneaker incident is an excellent example of woke capitalism in action. In times past, companies generally avoided wading into controversial social issues. After all, in the words of Michael Jordan, “Republicans buy shoes too.” But in an attempt to appeal to Generation Z (also known as “Zoomers”), many companies are deciding that it’s worth alienating rural and exurban flyover people in favor of courting the woke dollar.

For Nike and many other companies, this commitment to “social justice” doesn’t run much deeper than marketing. Nike knows it has a disproportionately black customer base. But only 8 percent of their vice presidents are black. What’s more, the company is notorious for using sweatshop labor in the third world to produce its expensive sneakers.

Some other quick notes on the purchasing power of the woke left: While there is certainly no direct overlap between a college education and being a radical wokeist, the woke are certainly clustered around America’s college campuses and the cities that they move to after graduation. (The average college graduate is going to earn over $1 million more than their less-educated counterpart over the course of their life.)

There is also the spectre of the unmarried and the childless: these people will also have significantly greater disposable income than married couples with children living in smaller flyover cities.

All of this adds up to a very lucrative market, both for catering to the woke and pillorying the unwoke. There is no shortage of examples of either on your television during commercials.

Wokeism’s Radical Evangelism: Diversity Training Seminars

One of the most disturbing elements of wokeism is its evangelistic quality. As we saw during the riots of 2020, it was not enough simply to not be racist. One was now required to be an active “anti-racist” under the definition and terms established by the woke. Those who failed to comply were often attacked in a way that went far beyond simply being hassled online. People’s jobs and livelihoods were attacked in a manner befitting a Communist dictatorship.

The very notion of dialogue and civil debate isn’t just missing. There’s a deep hostility to the notion that there is any point of view other than the most woke possible. There is a line in the sand: On one side, there are the people who believe that America is a profoundly racist country and that this colors every aspect of our history. On the other side, there’s anyone who is even mildly skeptical of this – and the people on this side are “white supremacists.” By the logic of wokeism, these people deserve anything that happens to them (including being “canceled”).

What this means is that wokeism does not simply operate in the background of the rest of society. You cannot simply ignore the cringe-inducing woke commercials on your television and not click the frankly hateful and racist articles of the woke online. Your compliance is a required aspect of wokeism. Think back to the social media phenomenon of large companies denouncing alleged “white supremacy” with a black square. Compliance with this was required, as if one were painting blood over their threshold to avoid the plague of the firstborn in ancient Egypt.

Corporations have begun echoing this rhetoric on social media, but there is a far more insidious element of wokeism’s radical evangelism: the “diversity training seminars” that are now de rigueur in the workplace. While often positioned as some kind of politically neutral gathering to increase workplace cohesion, these are in fact little more than Maoist struggle sessions – for all employees. We categorically reject the assumption that these are any more comfortable for non-white employees than they are for the white ones.

So what goes on at these seminars? There was a taxpayer-funded seminar in Seattle that acts as an excellent exemplar of such.

It was called “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.” This has nothing to do with eliminating racism as is commonly understood. If we’re being frank, we can probably agree that individual racism has largely been eradicated in America, especially among educated people. This seminar and others like it are about pillorying whites and eroding workplace solidarity – and also about cushy little gigs for those giving the seminars, which aren’t cheap.

The seminar includes instruction in qualities that allegedly represent “white supremacy.” These include objectivity, perfectionism, and comfort. They also ascribe some rather insidious qualities to whites in toto: arrogance, violence, and anti-blackness. These are the exact words used by the seminar.

Employees are urged to engage in “self-talk” that “affirms complicity in racism.”

As is often the case, there is not really a “right” answer for whites taking the seminar. Talk too much at one of these events and you’re imposing yourself and dominating the conversation. Talk too little and “silence is violence.”

The Seattle seminar was only for white employees. So to be clear, the City of Seattle used taxpayer dollars to propagandize at and pillory white employees in a segregated forum. While investigating the seminar using public records requests, City Journal editor Christopher F. Rufo was unable to find any information about who ran the seminar or how much it cost the taxpayers.

While the seminar might sound extreme, it’s not. In fact, these are happening all across the country in America’s workplaces and on our college campuses – and many times even in elementary schools. They are totalitarian in nature but are increasingly a requirement of continued employment. Employees who push back against them can expect disciplinary measures up to and including termination of their employment. There is also the specter of “racism” hanging above anyone with even the slightest opposition or skepticism: they must be secret racists or else they’d be as gung ho as everyone else.

Many have noted the religious aspects of wokeism that go beyond its evangelical zeal. This includes a concept of “original sin” (whiteness), holds blacks and (to a lesser degree) indigenous peoples as a sort of “holy” race, and has a process for confession. However, one aspect of religious thought is missing – there is no process for redemption in the world of the woke. One may “do the work” as the saying goes, but there is no way to complete it and be redeemed. The fallen are simply fallen and constantly repaying their debt in a sort of state of karmic bankruptcy.

Continue reading Woke Capitalism: How Huge Corporations Demonstrate Status by Endorsing Political Radicalism at Ammo.com.

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  1. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Conquest’s Second Law: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

    • #1
  2. carcat74 Member
    carcat74
    @carcat74

    Or as the revered rush says, “it’s hard to be a conservative, but easy to be a liberal. You have to work constantly to remain a conservative.”

    • #2
  3. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    What I find interesting is companies whose target audience is outside of the woke urban areas in at least some significant way that opt to virtue signal instead to not simply their urban customers, but to the angry Twitter mob of SJWs who will not buy their product, but are simply there to complain and force their beliefs onto others. I think that’s especially true in sports venues — the people who can afford luxury boxes may be at least woke-sympathetic (or pretend to be), but leagues need huge TV ratings to justify future network contracts, and the networks need the ad rates they charge for live sports, because it’s one of the only players viewers cannot fast-forward through the ads.

    Chasing off half your viewers seems to be a self-destructive business model, especially at a time where, due to the COVID shutdowns that have really hit the big media companies, they don’t have the spare cash to indulge their partners in virtue signaling at the expense of ratings (i.e. — where major book publishers in the past would throw millions at high profile Democratic politicians as book advances for tomes they know will never earn their costs back, but simply seem to be a way to thanks those pols for their all-around wonderfulness, companies like Disney are hemorrhaging cash right now, and if it doesn’t stop soon, will be hard-pressed to justify wildly overpaying for live sports contracts for ESPN, especially the NBA, with it’s major ratings drops since the last contract with signed in 2014).

    • #3
  4. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Jon1979 (View Comment):
    Chasing off half your viewers seems to be a self-destructive business model

    They’re trying not to lose the suburban women. 🙄

    • #4
  5. Gossamer Cat Coolidge
    Gossamer Cat
    @GossamerCat

    Ammo.com: If we’re being frank, we can probably agree that individual racism has largely been eradicated in America, especially among educated people.

    Actually, I find left-leaning educated people to be the most racist.  They see only color and not the individual. To use a detestable word of the woke, they deny POC “agency”.  Which, as I understand means they aren’t responsible for their actions.  How racist and insufferably patronizing is that?

    • #5
  6. Old Bathos Member
    Old Bathos
    @OldBathos

    The woke corporation is evidence of a kind of market failure, the absence of a competing outlet for symbolic gestures and good will with a price tag.

    American corporations are intensely bureaucratic.  HR has enormous power because of the litigation and regulatory risk to the firm from violating any of our country’s increasingly byzantine workplace laws.  Those departments are also the most likely to be populated with SJWs which magnifies the problem.

    Still, going full commie and embracing BLM and all the PoMo ideological evils it brings is near-suicidal for the simple reason that nothing will ever be enough and customers will begin to notice and care.  Buying off greenies with a check and a few solar panels on a factory, sponsoring some women’s empowerment panels and/or a nod and a check to LGBTQ groups seems like the cost of doing business and customers don’t really care.  But BLM and its Antifa SS goon squads are (a) more insatiable by nature (b) openly malignant and therefore (c)  more likely to affect customer perceptions the bottom line.

    In the past, if a company decided not to pay off Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson when under an accusation of racism, there was always the option of a check to the NAACP or the United Negro College Fund to produce a grip-and-grin photo with your CEO and a minority organization leader which photo could be presented as evidence of non-racist corporate goodness. But for some reason, BLM suddenly seems to have a monopoly on what used to be a more diverse and competitive racial blackmail market.

    CEOs would love to have a recognized, less polarizing alternative. While we understand the suffering and frustration that has given rise to BLM, we cannot in good conscience support an overtly Marxist agenda clearly not in the interests of African-Americans and which agenda seeks to divide rather than bring us together.  That is why we stand with ___________ to bring healing, responsible local governance and law enforcement, the promotion and development of  skills and habits for personal advancement for those most in need, and a new dawn for race relations in America and so we are proud to present this check…

    I think there is an entrepreneurial opportunity here that is not being seized.

    • #6
  7. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Jon1979 (View Comment):
    Chasing off half your viewers seems to be a self-destructive business model

    They’re trying not to lose the suburban women. 🙄

    This is why I’m against the 19th amendment. 

    • #7
  8. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Gossamer Cat (View Comment):

    Ammo.com: If we’re being frank, we can probably agree that individual racism has largely been eradicated in America, especially among educated people.

    Actually, I find left-leaning educated people to be the most racist. They see only color and not the individual. To use a detestable word of the woke, they deny POC “agency”. Which, as I understand means they aren’t responsible for their actions. How racist and insufferably patronizing is that?

    Very. But so far that insufferable patronizing isn’t getting through to mainstream black America. Not sure how long that will continue…

    • #8
  9. MISTER BITCOIN Inactive
    MISTER BITCOIN
    @MISTERBITCOIN

    http://walterewilliams.com/diversity,-equity-and-inclusion-nonsense/

     

    • #9
  10. Ammo.com Member
    Ammo.com
    @ammodotcom

    Gossamer Cat (View Comment):

    Ammo.com: If we’re being frank, we can probably agree that individual racism has largely been eradicated in America, especially among educated people.

    Actually, I find left-leaning educated people to be the most racist. They see only color and not the individual. To use a detestable word of the woke, they deny POC “agency”. Which, as I understand means they aren’t responsible for their actions. How racist and insufferably patronizing is that?

    I get exactly what you’re saying. I was raised to suppose nothing about a person based on the color of their skin. For any position other than that to be considered acceptable is beyond me.

    • #10
  11. MISTER BITCOIN Inactive
    MISTER BITCOIN
    @MISTERBITCOIN

    Ammo.com (View Comment):

    Gossamer Cat (View Comment):

    Ammo.com: If we’re being frank, we can probably agree that individual racism has largely been eradicated in America, especially among educated people.

    Actually, I find left-leaning educated people to be the most racist. They see only color and not the individual. To use a detestable word of the woke, they deny POC “agency”. Which, as I understand means they aren’t responsible for their actions. How racist and insufferably patronizing is that?

    I get exactly what you’re saying. I was raised to suppose nothing about a person based on the color of their skin. For any position other than that to be considered acceptable is beyond me.

    People are creating conflict for no reason or looking for reasons to be divisive. It’s sheer insanity.

     

    • #11
  12. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    MISTER BITCOIN (View Comment):
    People are creating conflict for no reason or looking for reasons to be divisive. It’s sheer insanity.

    Also, typical human nature.

    • #12
  13. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Arahant (View Comment):

    MISTER BITCOIN (View Comment):
    People are creating conflict for no reason or looking for reasons to be divisive. It’s sheer insanity.

    Also, typical human nature.

    No. It’s much worse than that. (I think that should be catchphrase) Usually when humans generate conflict, they think they can get something out of it Viking and Sioux raids make sense from a Darwinian perspective. This conflict is more like Cain where it is violence without benefit done out of nihilistic despair.

    Remember that Cain didn’t get money or women or power from killing his brother.

    • #13
  14. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    Remember that Cain didn’t get money or women or power from killing his brother.

    Revenge and jealousy are also part of human nature. Although it may appear there is no reward, there was great triumph there. At least for a bit.

    • #14
  15. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    Remember that Cain didn’t get money or women or power from killing his brother.

    Revenge and jealousy are also part of human nature. Although it may appear there is no reward, there was great triumph there. At least for a bit.

    You ever wish that humans didn’t have souls so we didn’t have to deal with this darkness?

    • #15
  16. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    You ever wish that humans didn’t have souls so we didn’t have to deal with this darkness?

    It is not the dark, but the light that makes us human. The other animals can be every bit as mean.

    • #16
  17. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    You ever wish that humans didn’t have souls so we didn’t have to deal with this darkness?

    It is not the dark, but the light that makes us human. The other animals can be every bit as mean.

    I disagree with that entirely. When praying mantises eat their mate, they aren’t doing so out of maliciousness, they are just absorbing protein to make babies. Animals may eat you are deposit eggs in you or what have you. But they aren’t malicious. Cain killing Able is super interesting to me because it’s not animalistic. Animals, don’t kill things that they don’t compete with or eat. They kill thing to get mates or territory or food for themselves, their pack or their colony. Human wars are pretty much the same thing. Usually.

    But sometimes you get the Holocaust which made no sense from a materialist evolutionary perspective. German Jews had fight with bravery in WWI and they had never posed a threat to gentile Germans. When Jews in the camps said, “They won’t kill us. They need us to work in their factories.” They assumed that the Nazis had a least an animalistic sense. But while humans can be better than animals, we can be much much worse.

    Mostly humans are apes that are deeply focused on helping their own gene pool (tribally racist) and rapey and territorial like other apes* are. But as we can do evil in a way no shark or black widow could ever hope to.

    *While I lament that I have to add this addendum, you don’t need to believe in evolution in order to observe that humans have many animal like behaviors and many behaviors that aren’t like animals at all.

    • #17
  18. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    Animals may eat you are deposit eggs in you or what have you. But they aren’t malicious.

    Never had a pet cat, have you?

    • #18
  19. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    Animals may eat you are deposit eggs in you or what have you. But they aren’t malicious.

    Never had a pet cat, have you?

    • #19
  20. Miffed White Male Member
    Miffed White Male
    @MiffedWhiteMale

    Arahant (View Comment):
    Animals, don’t kill things that they don’t compete with or eat. They kill thing to get mates or territory or food for themselves, their pack or their colony.

    Never had a pet cat, have you?

    Beat me to it.

    • #20
  21. MISTER BITCOIN Inactive
    MISTER BITCOIN
    @MISTERBITCOIN

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    Animals may eat you are deposit eggs in you or what have you. But they aren’t malicious.

    Never had a pet cat, have you?

    This is one reason why I am scared of cats

     

    • #21
  22. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    MISTER BITCOIN (View Comment):
    This is one reason why I am scared of cats

    They’re wonderful creatures when you understand them.

    My two are typically on either side of me as I work (or attempt to work when they’re awake).

    • #22
  23. GrannyDude Member
    GrannyDude
    @GrannyDude

    I should think that the end result of Woke Capitalism will more closely resemble “capitalism” under Naziism.

    With a Woke-friendly, Woke-compliant or Woke-ist President and legislature, companies and service providers who prove insufficiently woke-compliant will be “redistributed” or shut down, the way Jews were pushed out of the professions and academia, and  Jewish-owned department stores and other firms were “Aryanized” under the Nazis.  Nazi-friendly businesses received  lucrative government contracts.  As for the “animal” self-interest of the Nazis, it did eventually kick in: when the labor shortage became acute during the war, (some) Jews were indeed permitted to survive, and put to work as slave labor, not only on government projects like building the Autobahn or the V-1 flying bomb, but also rented out to I.G. Farben, Bayer, BMW etc. This is how Primo Levi (a chemist) and other Jews survived long enough to bear witness after the war. 

    If the end result is a Woke totalitarianism, it is perhaps of small comfort that such systems don’t seem to do all that well in the long run. 

     

    • #23
  24. MISTER BITCOIN Inactive
    MISTER BITCOIN
    @MISTERBITCOIN

    GrannyDude (View Comment):

    I should think that the end result of Woke Capitalism will more closely resemble “capitalism” under Naziism.

    With a Woke-friendly, Woke-compliant or Woke-ist President and legislature, companies and service providers who prove insufficiently woke-compliant will be “redistributed” or shut down, the way Jews were pushed out of the professions and academia, and Jewish-owned department stores and other firms were “Aryanized” under the Nazis. Nazi-friendly businesses received lucrative government contracts. As for the “animal” self-interest of the Nazis, it did eventually kick in: when the labor shortage became acute during the war, (some) Jews were indeed permitted to survive, and put to work as slave labor, not only on government projects like building the Autobahn or the V-1 flying bomb, but also rented out to I.G. Farben, Bayer, BMW etc. This is how Primo Levi (a chemist) and other Jews survived long enough to bear witness after the war.

    If the end result is a Woke totalitarianism, it is perhaps of small comfort that such systems don’t seem to do all that well in the long run.

     

    Primo Levi’s book The Periodic Table is excellent.

    I think he was burdened with survivor’s guilt.

     

    • #24
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