Woke corporations are chipping away at Western capitalism
Research conducted by Professor Matt Goodwin, of Kent University, on behalf of Policy Exchange, has revealed growing public hostility towards “woke” corporations. Polling showed that only 16 per cent of respondents believed companies should be able to demand that their employees declare gender pronouns, with 58 per cent opposed. Only 20 per cent of voters think companies should be allowed to refuse to do business with customers who hold beliefs with which they disagree.
Most significantly, only 12 per cent agreed that companies should be permitted to dismiss employees for sharing controversial, but legal, opinions on social media outside working hours. This is an area of contention that has already provoked court cases and employment tribunal hearings: it is a situation that allows powerful corporations to withdraw the livelihoods of otherwise dutiful and satisfactory employees, for holding the “wrong” opinions.
It is outrageous that, after 12 years of supposedly Conservative government, there is not a law on the statute book protecting employees from such arbitrary persecution. The issue of leftist political enforcement in the workplace is one of the points where wokeness collides with the human rights of people holding views that, as recently as five years ago, were near-universal, grounded in science and regarded as expressions of objective truth.
Corporations that pander to this right-on thinking are among the most ridiculous and damaging phenomena to emerge from the current wave of ultra-leftist aggression terrorising all institutions, private and public. It might be thought counter-intuitive for a major capitalist organisation to adopt and identify with the attitudes of the latest incarnation of Marxism, but this situation is not without precedent.
One need only recall the lifelong love affair of Armand Hammer, “Lenin’s chosen capitalist”, owner of Occidental Petroleum, with the Soviet Union and its mass-murdering masters, or the fact that it was a Wall Street millionaire who funded Trotsky’s return to Russia following the Revolution. Finance capitalism has never been afraid to speak untruth to power, if it suited its interests.
More germane to the present situation is the bifurcation of thinking among Marxists that emerged in the mid-20th century. While the bureaucracy in Moscow was content to struggle forward in leaden boots, striving ineffectually to forge prosperity out of a sclerotic command economy, an alternative line was taken by those Marxists who gravitated to the so-called Frankfurt School. While classical Marxism had always focused on such economic theories as nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange, the Frankfurt School saw the essential target as the culture.
Transform the culture, claimed this school of Marxism cross-fertilised with Freudian notions, and that would embed the revolution more ineradicably in society than the hazards of economic experimentation. If the command economy ever delivered the material improvement that dialectical materialism promised, that would be icing on the cake; but the more fundamental methodology for transforming society would be the radical displacement of the traditional, organic culture with a synthetic alternative, devised to promote social engineering.
This line of thought is most commonly attributed to Antonio Gramsci, since his doctrine that cultural hegemony must be wrested from capitalist society and remoulded, prior to the revolution, contradicted Lenin’s theory that culture was secondary to political struggle in achieving revolution. Gramsci’s emphasis on what today is termed “lived experience” also anticipated woke dogma. But, as early as 1919, cultural terrorism was already being practised by György Lukács, culture commissar in the murderous Communist government of Béla Kun in Hungary and later an inspiration to the Frankfurt School.
The fact that most of the useful idiots sitting in Western boardrooms today have never heard of Gramsci, Lukács or the Frankfurt School does not alter the fact that they are the easily manipulated pawns of a Weltanschauung that was already committed to the destruction of Western capitalist society before they were born (“Who will save us from Western civilisation?” was Lukács’ demented cry.)
It was notable, when commentators first began tracing the roots of “woke” agitation to the Frankfurt School, that leftists reacted with hysterical denunciation of a so-called right-wing “conspiracy theory”. In the light of the demonstrably identical methodologies being employed by activists (e.g. critical race theory), those protests seemed pathetic and absurd. By the time the Frankfurt “critics” fled from Nazi Germany to America, where they irretrievably poisoned academe, they had effectively abandoned classical Marxism.
In the turmoil of the 1960s, the teachings of men such as Horkheimer, Adorno and – especially – Herbert Marcuse captured the minds of individuals whose children are now in control of major corporations. They in turn are dominated by a new generation of children: the 22-year-olds running HR departments that, like cuckoos in the nest, are bizarrely dominating massive corporations, at the expense of the formerly primary departments concerned with generating profits.
These are the priests of the new religion of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) issues, before which cowardly CEOs genuflect. Of the three elements, only governance is a legitimate concern of corporations. “Diversity”, “inclusion”, “equality” – the sanctimonious buzz words are endless and expanding – are the irrelevant social-engineering obsessions hobbling corporate activity and, eventually, profitability.
The first consequences of corporate wokeness have been seen internally, in firms impertinently demanding that employees wear “pronoun” badges and sign emails with pronoun formulas. In this way, normal people are humiliated, in the interests of a faction of gender-confused activists almost too small to be quantified. The physical conditions of Victorian sweatshops would not be tolerated today, but the more insidious impositions whereby employees are obliged to suppress their intelligence and consciousness of objective truth have replaced them.
So, the first victims of woke corporations are their own staff; but they will soon be followed by more powerful and potentially reactive victims, in the shape of shareholders. Mostly, so far, the inanity of investment decisions dictated by woke agendas has been concealed by the complicity of large institutional investors who share the virtue-signalling preoccupations of boards. But it cannot be long before the perversity of certain investment decisions, particularly in the field of energy, now hastily being recalibrated in response to energy security concerns, results in the chickens coming home to roost.
Former Goldman Sachs intern Vivek Ramaswamy, in his book “Woke Inc.”, has denounced “Wokenomics” as a fraud whereby virtue-signalling companies influence legislation, manipulate consumers and silence dissent. They have gone beyond selling a product to telling Americans (in this instance) how to think and live. He sees these corporations as insincere, while using visual alignment to promote woke causes and leveraging money in support of woke organisations and political candidates, with the ulterior purpose of maximising profit.
That diagnosis, though originally accurate, is beginning to seem out of date. No doubt that was how corporate wokeness originated, but the situation is changing with bewildering rapidity. The Young Turks in the HR departments that are now at least as powerful as company boards are not hypocrites: more terrifyingly, they really believe all the garbage they spout. They have been trained in exclusive schools and universities, just like the children of Chinese Communist Party cadres, in the neo-Marxism that is now the ideological vernacular of Western elites.
Any sensible people who might, until recently, have lingered in the HR departments of companies captured by woke activists are no longer there. Quota systems for “diversity and inclusion” are beginning to take their toll of some board memberships. There is universal agreement that today’s markets are probably the most ruthlessly competitive ever experienced in the history of capitalism: in that feral environment, a board whose members have been selected to satisfy quotas for sex, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, etc rather than undiluted experience and competence will not fare well for long.
It is still too early to witness the long-term consequences of trying to run capitalism according to the precepts of neo-Marxism, but anyone with common sense can see that this will not end well. Many people in America, the natural home of capitalism, which is further along the road of corporate degeneracy than we are in Britain, are already acutely alarmed and fighting back. The United States’ federal constitution has facilitated resistance.
The Republicans were always the party of business: no more. US House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy once dismissed the U.S Chamber of Commerce with the derisory comment: “I didn’t even know it was around anymore.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis has described ESG as “financial fraud” and retaliated against the Disney corporation for opposing a law designed to assert parental rights and protect children from “gender identity” indoctrination by depriving Disney of extravagant privileges more appropriate to a sovereign state.
US states have drafted laws to sever state banking contracts with woke companies, as already passed in West Virginia. Retaliation is being implemented against financial institutions that discriminate against hydrocarbon energy companies. In many cases, the woke corporations have proved to be their own worst enemy: the Disney brand is irretrievably tarnished by its attempts to indoctrinate young children with homosexual and gender propaganda.
There are a few early signs that, here and there, as they find themselves staring into the abyss, some executives are beginning to grasp the reality that alienating the majority of the population is not a clever marketing ploy. But it will take a long time to turn this tanker around and it may sink first.
At the root of this phenomenon is a Faustian bargain between corporations and governments, whereby they cooperate in a globalist aspiration to rule the world together. Governments will embrace business in return for business promoting the neo-Marxist globalist agenda. There are just two flies in the ointment: the voters, who will expel the government from office (emphatically, in Britain, within two years), and the markets, shareholders and customers who will punish the offending corporations.
Despite this law of unintended consequences, the woke phenomenon has the potential to do incredible damage to society – simply because our anti-Conservative government allows it to do so. The priceless pearl of free speech is being lost, as the Government neuters the legislation supposed to restore it in universities. Wokeness first invaded the Humanities, but now science is under attack, not only from gender mythology, but the latest demand that terms such as “male” and “female” should be eliminated from scientific discourse – a forum in which precision is essential.
“Equality”, “diversity” and “inclusion” constitute an agenda that demands the reduction of every area of life to the lowest common denominator: society must be hobbled to the pace of the lowest-achieving in every field. In that sense, wokeness could be the crippling factor that condemns the West, already heavily challenged, to fall behind other, more morally virile, societies sprinting towards material and economic hegemony. As for using this neo-Marxist dogma as a blueprint for corporate capitalism – good luck with that.
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