Carl Rhodes on Woke Capitalism, Turning Virtue Into Profit and Endangering Democracy

 

In early 2020, bushfires raged across Australia. More than 3,000 homes were destroyed, reduced to ash and rubble by the unrelenting onslaught of flames. Tragically, 34 people died in the fires themselves, with an estimated 445 more dying as a result of smoke inhalation. More than 16m hectares of land burned, destroying wildlife and natural habitats. Nearly 3 billion animals were affected. So massive were the fires that the smoke was visible over Chile, 11,000km away. The record-breaking inferno that engulfed Australia was described as a “global catastrophe, and a global spectacle”. As reported in the New Statesman, Australia had come to symbolise “the extreme edge of a future awaiting us all” as a result of the climate crisis. The Australian government’s inquiry into the bushfires unequivocally reported that “it is clear that we should expect fire seasons like 2019–20, or potentially worse, to happen again”.
 
If we turn the clock back to less than a year earlier, 15 March 2019 marked the day that 1.4 million children turned out at locations around the world, on “strike” from school in support of action against the climate crisis. In Australia, the strikes were especially targeted at the government’s dismal record of inaction, with many politicians being climate-change deniers. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, was vocal in his criticism of the strikes. He wanted students to stay in school instead of engaging in democratic protest. His public statement said: “I want children growing up in Australia to feel positive about their future, and I think it is important we give them that confidence that they will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in, that they will also have an economy to live in as well. I don’t want our children to have anxieties about these issues.”
 
In Australia, coal is a primary export, peaking at A$69.6bn in 2019. Morrison is remembered by many for holding up a piece of coal in parliament in 2017 as a protest against those politicians campaigning for renewable energy. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal,” Morrison jibed as his tittering colleagues passed the black lump between them. But as the harsh smell of smoke filtered into houses and offices in Sydney during last year’s fires, no one was laughing. Many wondered what kinds of anxieties the youth of Australia must have been feeling as they watched the blaze’s devastating sweep across the country, leaving destruction and death in its wake.
 
At the time of the fires, the Australian government had long worked hard to downplay or even deny the climate crisis, and many corporations supported this. Gina Rinehart, the billionaire mining magnate and executive chairman of Hancock Prospecting, had not long earlier been revealed as a multimillion-dollar funder of the Institute of Public Affairs, a rightwing thinktank that denies the climate crisis has humanmade causes. But other organisations sensed the global mood had changed, and called on Australia to fight the climate crisis. Another Australian mining billionaire, Fortescue Metals’ Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, promised a donation of A$70m to bushfire relief. While not explicitly linking the fires to the climate crisis, he did say in a statement: “I would like to say, unequivocally, in my view climate change is real. I accept that the warming of our planet is a primary cause of the catastrophic events we have been experiencing.”
 
But this grand gesture was not all it seemed. Of the $70m, $10m went directly to bushfire victims, and the same amount was given to mobilising hundreds of specialist volunteers who would play a part in the recovery. The remaining $50m went to research in “fire mitigation”, to be led by Forrest’s own Minderoo Foundation, raising questions about whether the findings would need to align with their boss’s interests. All of a sudden, the donation looked more like an investment.
 
Since the late 2010s, there has been an increasingly observable trend of corporations, especially global ones, taking a progressive turn. The political causes that such corporations have backed include marriage equality, addressing domestic violence, combating sexual harassment, ensuring rights for LGBTQ+ people, promoting equality for people with disabilities, raising awareness about mental illness, and action against climate emergency. As demonstrations took place all over the US in support of Black Lives Matter, companies came out publicly in the fight against racism. A Pepsi ad featured the celebrity Kendall Jenner handing out cold cans of cola to police officers during a BLM protest. In June 2020, the Walmart CEO Doug McMillon pledged $100m of his company’s money to support racial equity.

 
Corporations have always interfered in politics, but what is different now is that they are publicly supporting “progressive” political causes. These apparently left-leaning businesses have been derided as “woke capitalists” by conservative media commentators who believe that businesses have capitulated under pressure from the left instead of staying steadfast to their mission of serving shareholders.
 
The criticism that corporations are either appealing to progressive customers, or responding to pressure from leftwing cultural warriors, is a spurious explanation of what is going on. It is true that at their most benign, corporate gestures in support of progressive causes are simply marketing initiatives to take advantage of changing public sentiments. At its most dangerous, however, we are witnessing corporations muscling in to take over political power that was once the exclusive domain of the state – not just by lobbying government and influencing policy, but by directly funding political initiatives and engaging with citizens on matters of public concern.
 
Corporations are not just trying to influence politics, they appear to be trying to take the place of politicians. Either way, the self-interest of the corporation remains paramount. They are unlikely to take a risk when supporting a progressive cause. When corporations do take a political position, they are generally the followers, not the leaders. It is real activists who do the long, often unrewarding hard work of opening public debate to important and controversial topics. Corporations follow, generally once public opinion has already made up its mind and they can ride its wave.
 
On 11 January 2020, the luxury jewellery company Tiffany & Co placed full-page advertisements in leading Australian newspapers. Suddenly Tiffany had started to behave like a climate activist. The ads demanded action from prime minister Scott Morrison on the climate crisis. The statement said:
 
''WE STAND WITH AUSTRALIA
 
Dear Prime Minister Morrison,
 
As the brave people of Australia continue to battle bushfires that are devastating communities and wildlife, now is the time for bold and decisive climate action. This disaster of climate change is too real, and the threat to our planet and to our children is too great.
 
TIFFANY AND CO.''
 
Tiffany’s gesture seems a prime example of corporate generosity going hand-in-hand with the pursuit of self-interest. Head of Tiffany & Co’s Australian operations, Glen Schlehuber, said: “I feel very proud to work for an organization willing to stand up and take action on climate change.”
 
It would appear that, to the Tiffany execs, redirecting the company’s advertising spend to a climate-related ad constituted positive action. It is easy to dismiss this ad as nothing more than a stunt designed to bolster the brand, and Tiffany received plenty of criticism for it. Rightwing Australian tabloid the Daily Telegraph ran the headline “Posh mineral retailer goes woke”. Elsewhere, the Australian media claimed that Tiffany and Co’s ad used “the pain and hardship of bushfire victims to sell itself to Australians”.
 
But there is more going on here. What is interesting is that Tiffany & Co appeared entirely comfortable, if not self-righteous, about weighing in on political debates unrelated to their commercial activity. The rhetoric that they used positioned them not as an interested party, but as representatives of the people. When well-resourced and self-interested corporations don the cloak of civic minded political disinterestedness, we have to ask whether the line between private and public interests has been crossed. At the same time, the engine of capitalism – the cause of the industrial processes whose results were creating such suffering – kept on turning. The fires kept on burning.
 
Australia burning was a result of gross political inadequacy. Lack of satisfactory action to combat climate change over decades had made Australia prone to more and bigger fires. When the fires did arrive, corporations stepped in. Major banks offered grants to customers who had lost their homes, supermarkets delivered water and food to evacuation centres, and phone companies took care of the mobile phone bills of firefighters.
 
The Australian tech entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of the software company Atlassian, criticised the government for climate inaction. He also slated those Australian businesses who argued that measures to address climate crisis would be “economy wrecking”. Australian mining company Rio Tinto divested itself of its coal-mining activities in 2019, and last year publicly pressurised industry association the Business Council of Australia to take a positive stand on climate change advocacy. Shareholders, while holding on to their interest in iron ore, aluminium and copper mines, were getting ahead of public opinion on climate.
 
On one hand, corporations stepping up to address the effects of climate disasters such as the Australian fires can appear as something to be welcomed, in the spirit of solidarity and charity bequeathed by corporations and billionaire business owners. On the other hand, we need to ask what are the long-term effects on our political system. There was a time when corporations were inextricably associated with rightwing conservatism, and focused narrowly on the bottom line. Now corporations are touting themselves as progressive and politically active, often with a billionaire CEO as the conspicuous spokesperson cum (political) action hero.
 
After the Australian fires, major corporations began bankrolling activities that many would have expected to be funded by the state. The situation we have arrived at is one where the failure of the state is enabling a corporate and managerial overclass to shift their power base to include not only the economic realm but also the political one. In one sense, we have come a long way from the old mantra that the true purpose of business is to pursue profits within the confines of the law. But that does not mean any fundamental change has taken place to the economic system. The corporate espousal of progressive causes is not a reversal of the self-interest that underpins capitalism, but a marked extension of it.
 
“Capitalism must be modified to do a better job of creating a healthier society, one that is more inclusive and creates more opportunity for more people,” said Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. In order to protect capitalism, was the message, we must change.

 
On 17 February 2020, Jeff Bezos, founder and then CEO of Amazon, announced on Instagram the launch of the Bezos Earth Fund. He made a staggering US$10bn commitment to the fund, with the stated aim of working “alongside others to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share”. Riding the wave of public opinion, Bezos’s multibillion-dollar gesture came just after what had been described by German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle as the “year of climate consciousness”. Making an investment to influence the climate change agenda is a smart decision, and in the interests of a business such as Amazon that relies on transport, and unceasing consumerism, for its success.
 
While the fires were still burning in Australia, on 21 January 2020 the world’s elite gathered in the Swiss Alpine resort town of Davos. Politicians from around the globe mingled with business moguls and high-minded celebrities. Their stated goal was to “shape the global, regional and industry agenda”. So, what shape were they promoting? They spruiked the importance of “stakeholders for a cohesive and sustainable world”. According to the New York Times, “Woke capitalism […] was the dominant motif at Davos 2020”.
 
The talk at Davos was all about the way big business should step up to address the grand challenges facing the world today, whether that be climate change, inequality, populism or the abuse of big data. Davos is the kind of forum where it is abundantly clear that big business and their billionaire owners think they have the right to define the world’s moral and political agenda, and to address the world’s problems. William Burke-White from US thinktank the Brookings Institution summed it up when he said: “Since governments seem unwilling or unable to address the challenges we face without corporate leadership, power and wealth must be united to drive the changes on which our collective future depends.”
 
Little did we know, at the time of the Davos meeting, of the global disaster that was on its way with the outbreak of Covid-19. What the bushfires showed in Australia was magnified to monstrous proportions by the pandemic. The world mourned as millions of people lost their lives to the virus, and it became clear that the idea that humanity can dominate and control nature was delusional. Davos acolytes and enthusiasts had told us that corporations would back progressive political causes out of genuine concern for others. They would take over where governments left off in the provision of public goods, we were promised. So where were these corporations when Covid-19 hit? Were they eager to step up to meet their promised dedication to their stakeholders? With the devastation brought on by Covid-19, the promises made at Davos about a “better capitalism” appeared laughable.
 

Take the multinational investment company BlackRock. During the first outbreak of Covid-19, BlackRock’s contribution was to fork out $50m of relief for those affected. Whoever benefitted from that would be undoubtedly grateful. Still, it was a financial drop in the ocean for the multitrillion-dollar firm and its billionaire boss, CEO Larry Fink. By mid-2020 BlackRock’s stock price was up 14% from the beginning of the year, as a result mainly of multibillion-dollar government injections into the US securities market. Already a billionaire, his annual remuneration rose to $25.3m.
 
In the lead-up to Davos 2020, rightwing commentators had been decrying what they perceived as corporate capitulation to the left. “Woke capitalism is our enemy,” ran a headline in The American Conservative. The conservative media vilified corporations for practising what Fox News condemned as “corporate socialism”. The view was that business people should stay focused on the direct pursuit of commercial goals. Conspiracy theorists asserted that an “agenda of the left” had hijacked the corporate world. Others said that corporations had been “succumbing to progressive ideologies”.
 
If it wasn’t clear before, 2020 showed that the reactionary pundits had nothing to fear. Feelgood corporate self-righteousness did nothing to make any real changes to the heart of capitalism’s agenda; if anything, it strengthened it. The agenda remained corralling wealth in the direction of the owners of capital.
 
The role of politics in sport has long been a source of public debate, and the part played by big business even more so. Nike courted controversy in 2018 when it released an ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, the American football player effectively excluded by the professional league for protesting against police killings of African Americans by taking the knee. The ad had an important impact in stimulating public debate about racism and police brutality in the US and around the world. It also bolstered Nike’s brand and presaged a $6bn increase in the company’s market value.
 
By comparison, Nike’s contribution of $25m in response to Covid-19 in 2020 was pathetic. The list of other global corporate giants making token contributions was long. Amazon committed £3.2m in the UK in March 2020. As the pandemic took hold, the Gates Foundation and Netflix pledged $100m each. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, threw in $25m to develop treatments for the virus. Such amounts are chump change in the vastness of corporate wealth. Nike shares soared in price during the pandemic, increasing its market capitalisation by 37% to $215.5bn by the end of 2020. From the beginning of the pandemic to the end of 2020, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth had increased by $25bn.
 
In any case, corporate contributions were tiny compared to what was needed to address the health and economic effects of Covid-19. Early analysis estimated that the bill would be at least $5tn in the US alone. There is more to it than that. As equality activist Luke Hildyard said at the time, the types of donations that were being made could also serve to overestimate the generosity of the givers: “Very generous individual grants can obscure the fact that on the whole, wealthy people’s charitable giving is pretty minimal. Indeed, studies show that poor people donate more than rich, as a proportion of their income.”

 
Covid-19 turned out to be a boon for the billionaire class. While workers suffered job losses, employment insecurity and wage stagnation, the wealthiest increased their wealth. Naomi Klein has defined it as “disaster capitalism”, while Oxfam calls it “pandemic profiteering”. In a July 2020 report, the charity said: “As we face our deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, a subset of companies is experiencing dramatic, windfall profits. […] Covid-19 presents us with a choice as a society: Do we want to continue distributing our economic resources to the already wealthy and well connected, or shall we choose to redeploy this money into the once-in-a-century fight against Covid-19 and the inequalities it brings in its wake?”
 
The US’s billionaires increased their wealth by $2.1tn during the pandemic. That’s up by about 70% to a staggering $5tn. Internationally the number of billionaires in the world increased by 660 to 2,755, as their collective wealth rose from $8tn to $13.1tn. Meanwhile, across the world inequality widened as working people took on more and more debt.
 
What the rightwing press called “woke capitalists” are not the socialists in disguise that reactionary conservatives accuse them of being. Instead, they represent a very real and dangerous side of contemporary capitalism. Making a gesture towards progressive causes has become a substitute for action. As their wealth increases in a world beset by inequality and income insecurity, the CEO billionaires stand proud as they profess caring, progressive values. Central to the devastation of Covid-19 was the sudden unemployment that affected so many working people the world over. How did the big corporations address the financial catastrophe that so many people experienced? Where were they in building new forms of employment to put people back to work? Nowhere. Much easier to issue feelgood platitudes and make a few tokenistic donations.
 
That large corporations and their billionaire owners and CEOs achieve massive financial gain from their endeavours while espousing a social justice agenda might seem incongruous. But look a little deeper and there is no contradiction.
 
Populist capitalism appeals to people’s anxieties – in this case, the anxiety that selfish and greedy corporate elites will hoard the world’s wealth, pillaging a burning planet along the way. The irony is that this appeal is actually helping them get away with it. Talk of inclusion and shared values are a distraction from inequality and injustice.
 
In 2019, the Business Roundtable (the US club for big-time CEOs) felt it reasonable to proclaim that the purpose of business had fundamentally changed. No longer beholden to shareholder primacy, CEOs were now dedicated radically to all “stakeholders”, which they defined as “customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders”. OK, but when Covid hit the world economy in 2020, corporations the world over were expecting taxpayer-funded government bailouts (even though, when it came to corporate regulation, they had been lobbying hard for small government).
 
What 2020 demonstrated was that so-called “woke capitalism” is a trend that poses a threat to democracy. We need to ask what the real effects are of businesses and billionaires asserting that they should direct the moral and political life of citizens. It is possible that we are being asked to trade the democratic right to self-governance in return for handouts from the fickle hand of corporate benevolence, and the price is too high.
 
In the midst of the crisis, we saw the return of elected governments in setting the conditions for the future welfare of citizens. The lesson from Covid-19 is that we need to get back to building a future that restores a socially driven democracy. In the dark heart of the pandemic, there arose a need to restore hope in mutuality and shared prosperity.
 
This is an edited extract from Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy by Carl Rhodes, published by Bristol University Press on 9 November. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
 
 This article was amended on 2 November 2021 to clarify that the Minderoo Foundation will be leading the research into fire mitigation, not carrying it out by itself as an earlier version suggested.
 
 Why progressive gestures from big business aren’t just useless – they’re dangerous. By Carl Rhodes. The Guardian, October 28, 2021.

Woke capitalism has becomes a catchphrase for reactionary pundits who want to condemn businesses who are increasingly taking a stand on political causes and toying with a new form of ‘elevated economics’.

 
Whether it be Nike’s support for Colin Kaepernick’s Black Lives Matter anti-racist politics or Gillette’s engagement with the toxic masculinity debate that emerged from the #MeToo movement, corporations have been pilloried for buying into traditionally progressive political issues.
 
The main reproach has been that corporations have no business meddling in social issues and should instead ‘stick to their knitting’ of running effective profit making enterprises. Advocates for the purity of the free market see woke capitalism as ‘communism in disguise’.
 
But what does this all mean for business education? Should business schools hold on to the tradition of pursuing a vanilla curriculum focussed on functional business skills and the moral imperative of profit maximisation? Or should we take seriously the recent turn to shareholder capitalism and corporate purpose?
 
Mainstreaming the Reactionary Right?
 
While initiatives such as the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education have effectively sought for business schools to educate their students for responsible leadership, popular opinion has nurtured a much less sanguine view of how universities engage with matters of moral responsibility.
 
Universities are shouldering a good deal of the blame for the spread of ‘wokeism’. Detractors say that it is all down to the irresponsible, if not illiberal, actions of “esoteric academics” and “left-leaning Americans” nurtured by “humanities departments of universities (elite ones in particular)”. This over-generalised condemnation of the “the new social-justice mindset”  isn’t coming from the trumped up populist extreme right – it is from the pages of The Economist.
 
The view that corporations are victims of the cultural indoctrination spawned by leftist intellectuals has also entered the mainstream. According to entrepreneur turned author Vivek Ramaswamy, wokeness is an ‘invisible force’ that leads corporations to rob you of your money and for politicians to “rob you of your vote in our democracy”.
 
Even business schools, long thought to be fervent cheerleaders of shareholder primacy are now being accused of being part and parcel of the tyranny of woke capitalism. Amidst the hand-wringing we are led to believe that there is a new woke business school emerging that is hell bent on a curriculum derived from the unholy marriage of  political correctness and conscious capitalism.
 
More than Two Sides
 
The received wisdom from the arm waving critics of woke capitalism is that there are two side to choose from. Such is the divisive and unimaginative political polarization of our times.
 
On the woke side you can be co-opted into the politically correct and illiberal world of identity politics, and liberally expound right-on platitudes about everything from climate change to inequality. On the anti-woke side you champion the virtues of freedom, capitalism and meritocracy. Even better, the enterprising spirit of free markets will contribute to drive the economic progress we have enjoyed since the industrial age.
 
This not just a false dichotomy, it is also a fatal distraction from the very real problems facing the world today. To apply such a logic to business education would suggest that business schools have a simple choice. They continue on the track of preparing students for successful careers in business by teaching them the functional skills and conservative political ideologies deemed required for those careers. Alternatively, they embrace a woke agenda and fill the curriculum with pre-digestated politically correct content based on a fundamentally illiberal agenda – ignorantly labelled by some as ‘communism in disguise.’
 
Educating the Professional Managerial Class
 
This idea that of there being two opposed positions is simplistic, if not feeble-minded. Even worse, it is a form of dangerous rabble rousing that fails to account for the significant developments and new possibilities that are emerging in business school education.
 
Against accusations of pro-market intellectual fraudism, there is a growing movement in business school education that favours a re-engagement with the public and democratic function of the University. This function is one where business education would develop students’ ability to understand the broader position of business in society, and to make informed and responsible choices.
 
By and large, business schools are responsible for educating the ‘professional managerial class’ – that social group, as Catherine Liu explains, has been taught to identify with the values of the prevailing neoliberal order while at the same time positing themselves as liberal and progressive.
 
We have failed if business education ends up supporting ‘virtue hoarding’ that engages in feel-good political positions that do little to shift the status quo.
 
A belief in democratic education in business schools does not mean waving the woke flag. It means educating citizens to be the leaders and professionals who can not only perform the functions of business, but also that have a broader social and political understanding of the role of business and management in creating a better and more equal society on a global level.
 
A polarizing politics that divides the world into two camps – woke warriors vs. capitalist exploiters – is no route to progress. What we need is an enhanced capacity to understand, debate and practice in a world beset by fundamental problems of inequality, climate disaster and populism.
 
A New Type of Business School
 
Out of the wreckage of dumbed down debates about woke capitalism emerges the need for a new kind of business school that embraces a leadership role in shaping the future for the public good. There is a growing movement that wants to do just that.
 
As Martin Kitchener and Rick Delbridge have recently argued, business schools have a unique opportunity to redirect their work towards an explicit mission of delivering on the ‘public good’ out of a “moral commitment to human betterment”. Our institutions have, to date, largely failed in this by wilfully avoiding the significant political, economic and environmental challenges faced by society.
 
The prevailing economic and political system, that of which business schools are a part, has failed us. At worst, as Harvard Business School graduate Sam Long has elaborated, business schools have fuelled a system “dominated by financiers and their squires, presiding over a disordered economy gutted of both its productive energy and the ability to generate mass prosperity”.
 
It is time to change, and to imagine a new type of business school dedicated to education and research to shared prosperity and public value. Suggesting that the choices for business, and business education, are simply between hard-nosed business and fashionable wokeness is misleading and dangerous.
 
Business schools have the opportunity to embrace their democratic responsibility to provide education and research that leads business to provide better outcomes for the whole of society – to support public rather than private interests. The seeds of this change are sprouting, and it is now time for business school leaders to ensure that they flourish.
 
The woke business school. By Carl Rhodes. The PRME Blog, October 1, 2021. 

For a previous generation it would be unimaginable. The chief executives of America's largest corporations are being publicly vilified for their politics. This time it's not anti-globalisation protestors or Occupy Wall Streeters of the past who've got beef.
 
The captains of industry are being condemned for being part of a "neo-Marxist consensus." They are embroiled in "corporate-run communism," active and willing to "do the bidding of the far left."
 
Those who fear this C-suite red peril are taking decisive action! Citizens of the North Carolina's Surry County were so affronted by the Coca-Cola company's political position on voting laws that local government officials banned Coke vending machines in their offices.
 
Surely that will teach those carbonated commie rabble rousers. No wonder Coke's logo is red!
 
A Victory for the Left!
 
The far-left's takeover of the corporate world has been dubbed 'woke capitalism.' Exported from the United States to the liberal democratic world, riled-up reactionaries from Australia, France, and Britain are bemoaning the leftist turn by corporations.
 
 
Namby-pamby CEOs are accused of surrendering to "to hard-left wokeness." Just last month U.S. advocacy group Consumers' Research led the charge. They launched a "name and shame campaign" against corporations who "put woke politics over consumer interests."
 
The group coughed up at least a million dollars on a series of ads targeting American Airlines, Coca-Cola and Nike and their CEOs. They accused these companies of trying to "curry favor with woke politicians" at the expense of their customers.
 
A little more than a week later the same debate was aired all the way up in the U.S. Senate. The heads of six of the Unites States' biggest businesses were hauled over the coals. Republican Senator Pat Toomey accused them of "wokeism" and "attacks on capitalism" for speaking up against voting laws.
 
"Woke capitalism is running amok" claimed Republican Senator Tim Scott. Others worried that this left lunacy might get so out of hand that the banks would stop financing the natural gas and fossil fuel industries in order to protect their credentials.
 
The Left's Evil Magic
 
The conservatives at the National Center for Public Policy Research brand them as "far-left CEOs." The Free Enterprise Project damn the whole shebang as "the left […] rapidly working its evil magic" on all spheres of life.
 
Even the most casual knowledge of socialism would alert would-be conspiracy theorists that one of its critical features is the social ownership of the means of production. Most socialists do not go quite that far today, settling instead for a program of wealth distribution that reverse the hardships caused by inequality—hardships that divide the world across class, gender, racial and geo-political lines.
 
So where are the better-red-that-dead CEOs when it comes to economic justice and wealth redistribution? Despite the devastation that COVID-19 brought to economies around the world, in 2020 America's top bosses took home an average of $13.7 million. That's up almost a million dollars from the year before.
 
For billionaires, COVID was even more lucrative. According to Forbes there were 2,755 billionaires in 2021, 660 more than the previous year. Collectively they are worth $13.1 trillion. That's a mind-boggling $6.1 trillion increase since 2020.
 
What Has Woke Capitalism Achieved?
 
If we agree that economic justice is a defining issue for socialism, then complaining that CEOs and business owners have made an abrupt left-turn is patently ludicrous. No amount of arguing over identity politics is going to change that.
 
If woke capitalism has achieved anything it has been to break the yoke between the social and economic politics that have traditionally united the right. This means that corporations can support social justice without having to worry about its inexorable relation to economic justice.
 
If CEOs want to embrace progressive politics, they need to also start campaigning to increase the minimum wage, implement universal basic income, redistribute income by higher taxes on the rich, and ensure workers' rights through trade unionism.
 
The worst part is that when woke CEOs are condemned for being left-wing nut jobs, CEO political activism effectively draws attention away from the core political issue of economic inequality; the very inequality that too many CEOs represent.
 
Are Crazed Commies Running American Corporations? By Carl Rhodes. Commons Dreams, June 10, 2021. 

It was a remarkable day in politics when assistant attorney general Amanda Stoker, personally intervened to have ‘anti-racism’ removed from an Australian Human Rights Commission tender.  She worried the term was associated with Critical Race Theory.

 
Stoker had no beef with the idea that racism is something Australians should be against.  So why oppose a theory that seeks to understand and address racism at a systemic level? The problem appeared to be that this theory is beholden to the bogeyman of the ‘woke revolution’.
 
This incident reflects a growing political engagement in a ‘war on woke’ in Australia.  The call to arms is issued from the bastions of right-wing conservatism.  Sky News leads the way in claiming that every progressive cause, from climate action to anti-racism to feminism, signals a capitulation to woke ‘lefty lunacy’.
 
Scott Morrison was not far behind when he attacked identity politics. All of this malarkey about gender, race and sexuality undermines morality, freedom and the Australian way, he proselytized.
 
Both Stoker and Morrison expound the conventional conservative position that wokeness has infiltrated Australian culture, and we are worse off for it. The wokerati are caricatured, even by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, as out-of-touch elites who waste their time in “the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities”.
 
Andrew Bolt, never one to shy away from reactionary fear-mongering, cautions that “we have evidence that woke politics is making the West desperately weak”.  One might expect that such tirades against ‘political correctness gone mad’ are aimed at some group of revolutionary leftist agitators determined to destroy the country with the wave of a red flag. Not so.
 
In a bizarre twist, it is large business corporations who are pilloried as being at the vanguard of wokeness. As Mark Latham recently lamented, Australian corporations should back off from woke politics. If they would keep their noses out of politics, then “the shareholders are better off, the customers are better off, the nation is better off”, he said.
 
It is corporations, the woke-bashers argue, that have given a public platform to the worst excesses of the left. The problem, as Peta Credlin sees it, is “that CEOs blindly follow these trends like a mob of sheep”, having lost their way from their  true mission to “deliver market value to their shareholders.”
 
This is where the radical right has entirely got it wrong.  Corporate wokeness is not a capitulation to the left at the expense of commercial objectives.  It is an adoption of progressive politics precisely because that political position enhances the ability of corporations to achieve those goals.
 
When Qantas boss Alan Jones campaigned for marriage equality, he did not do it at the expense of his corporate interests. Quite the contrary, he was explicit that his politics was justified by a ‘business case’ that would yield commercial benefits for Qantas.
 
It is the same thing when Australian businesses back climate change action, as we saw, for example, in the wake of last year’s bush fires. When Tiffany and Co used its advertising budget to reprimand Scott Morrison for not taking ‘bold and decisive climate action’ one doesn’t have to be a hardened cynic to smell public relations opportunism.
 
The simple fact is that when a corporation backs political causes, their brand image and commercial viability is always front of mind.
 
All of this reveals that the so-called ‘war on woke’ is not much of a war at all, at least not when it comes down to any contestation over the more fundamental political issues of social and economic inequality.
 
In this ‘war’, we have the right-wing fundamentalists on one side who claim that left-wing ideas are destroying the fabric of our society at the hands of urban elites.  On the other hand, we have CEOs and corporations who are increasingly adopting woke politics.
 
The problem is that whoever ‘wins’ this pseudo-war, the real losers are the socially and economically disadvantaged.  If the right fundamentalists are the victors, then we retain a system based on the reproduction of a dominant white elite – the kind of politics that Pauline Hanson has been parading for decades.
 
If the woke corporations triumph, then corporate agendas, at least the economic agendas, remain largely intact. Again, the result is a preservation of the economic status quo.
 
When it comes down to it, the ‘war on woke’ is a distraction from the real social and political problems that Australia needs to grapple with.  These issues concern how inequalities divided along gender, race and class lines are becoming more deeply entrenched.
 
Enhancing shareholder value through corporate alignment with progressive social causes will not solve this.  Neither will desperately hanging on to a hackneyed political ideology that unimaginatively dismisses calls for equality as woke.
 
Whoever wins the war on woke, the possibilities of the resurgence of a democracy based on ideals of equality and shared prosperity will lose. It is towards that democratic promise that our political attention needs to turn if true progress is to be pursued.
 
The ‘war on woke’ pits corporate elites against conservatives. So who will win? By Carl Rhodes. The New Daily, May 9, 2021. 

Prince Harry has copped a pasting in the British media for his new job as “chief impact officer” with Silicon Valley startup BetterUp.
 
His role, and the company’s business model, has been called the “latest expression of woke capitalism” in venerable conservative magazine The Spectator. Other critics have chimed in, deriding the “Prince of Woke Capital” for “surfing a wave of wokery towards an economic abyss”.
 
Ridiculing people and corporations for being “woke” is, of course, a relatively easy sport for pundits on the right of the political spectrum. Harry’s critics have a point that woke capitalism involves vapid political correctness, even if they are missing its more serious ramifications for social and economic inequality.
 
The origin of woke
 
First, let’s recap the meaning of “woke” and “woke capitalism”. The use of the term “woke” by African Americans has been traced back at least to the 1920s, though Oxford English Dictionary researchers say its meaning as being alert to systemic issues of injustice and discrimination emerged from the American civil rights movement in the 1960s.
 
It became more widely known with the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 (following the acquittal of Florida man George Zimmerman for shooting dead African-American teen Trayvon Martin).
 
As academics Elaine Richardson and Alice Ragland explain in a 2018 article, BLM activists used the hashtag #staywoke to urge fellow African Americans “to remain aware of what is going on around you and in society, more specifically, to remain politically aware or conscious”.
 
It didn’t take long for “woke” to enter mainstream culture. In 2016 the American Dialect Society declared it the slang word of the year. They defined “woke” as being “conscious, aware or enlightened, especially with regards to matters of social justice and racial inequity”.
 
Capitalising woke
 
In entering the mainstream, though, the meaning of “woke” was soon distorted. Those on the right of politics co-opted it as a term of derision – akin to “social justice warrior” – for people (especially white people) who bragged about their self-righteous positions on political issues.
 
What started as a serious call to political consciousness was manipulated to become a way of dismissing anyone who professed vaguely progressive views.
 
This wasn’t limited to individuals. Corporations too could be chastised for being woke.
 
In 2018, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote about the trend of corporations and chief executives aligning themselves to progressive social concerns, such as immigration and gay and transgender rights, while they continued to push their own economic “self-interest on tax policy and corporate stinginess in paychecks”.
 
The term “woke capitalism” soon came to express the approach of companies who claim a “social licence to operate” through their public advocacy on social issues, without affecting the economic status quo.
 
Harry gets appy
 
What has all of this got to do with Prince Harry and BetterUp?
 
Let’s clarify what BetterUp is.
 
Media reports have described the San Francisco-based company as a startup “that provides employee coaching and mental health assistance”.
 
The company itself describes its business as being about “changing the world by bringing the power of transformation to each and every person”. Announcing the prince’s appointment, chief executive Alexi Robichaux declared:
 
“Prince Harry will expand on the work he’s been doing for years, as he educates and inspires our community and champions the importance of focusing on preventative mental fitness and human potential worldwide.”
 
The title of chief impact officer – or “chimpo” – comes from the not-profit sector. There’s no one accepted job decription, but such roles generally involve working to ensure an organisation is actually achieving its stated vision and mission.
 
How does this apply to BetterUp? That’s unclear.
 
Remove all the marketing babble and this is a company that exists to make a profit. Its core business appears to be an app selling professional coaching services. Its promise is to make people more “positive, engaged, and connected to every part of their lives”, both personal and professional.
 
In reality, the chief impact the prince is likely to have is attracting publicity for the app – helping BetterUp’s bottom line, and Harry’s bank balance.
 
Everyone’s a winner?
 
The way in which BetterUp has wrapped its reality in the language of social concern and human progress bears all the worst hallmarks of “woke capitalism”.
 
Its business model is all about individual empowerment. This shows no apparent awareness of the need to address systemic social and economic inequities. It would also have us believe we can all “make it” in that world, if we just get the right mental attitude.
 
Yet the connection between entrenched economic inequalities and myriad social problems including mental illness are well-documented. As the World Health Organization concludes, mental disorders are shaped by social and economic factors, with inequality being chief among them.
 
Over the past 30 years, according to the United Nations World Social Report for 2020, income inequality has become worse in most developed countries.
 
The irony is that Harry epitomises this inequality, and the limitations of meritocracy. He is the very embodiment of unearned wealth and privilege. Would he have gotten this job except for the family he was born into? Unlikely. How much is he being paid to push the idea that anyone can achieve success? BetterUp isn’t saying. Nor is he.
 
So while it easy to agree with criticisms of Prince Harry’s new “job” as an expression of woke capitalism, this cannot simply be dismissed as misplaced political correctness.
 
Inequality is the problem. Woke capitalism is not the solution.
 
Prince Harry’s critics have a point: woke capitalism is no solution. By Carl Rhodes. The Conversation, March 31, 2021. 

 

The Bristol University Press

Facebook’s rebranding as Meta has been seen by many as the company’s latest attempt at corporate crisis control. The social media giant has been publicly attacked for creating an environment that fosters far-right extremism and violating individuals’ data privacy.

 
Yet it also represents an attempt to rebrand the growing power of tech monopolies to shape all areas of our lives through social expansion. It points to a troubling new era of “metacapitalism” – or “capitalism on steroids” as Forbes called it in 2000. It reflects a disturbing trend of massively expanding tech conglomerates and the dangerous privatisation of technological knowledge.
 
Rebranding tech monopolies
 
Technology is rapidly transforming our world – from instantaneous digital communication to AI decision-making to virtual and augmented reality. The driving force behind these changes has been private technology firms, whether global start-ups or famous Silicon Valley conglomerates. But this combination of massive corporate profits and exciting technological innovation is the biggest myth of 21st-century progress.
 
The truth is much more complicated. Huge technology firms such as Google and Facebook are increasingly criticised for unethical data collection and the use of algorithms which encourage hateful beliefs and viral misinformation.
 
Their technology has also encouraged unjust labour practices including hi-tech digital surveillance to monitor workers, as happened in Amazon warehouses, and facilitated digital platforms such as Uber, which refuse to provide basic worker rights.
 
Longer term, the mining of rare earth metals and the massive amounts of energy required for data processing are major contributors to climate change.
 
These problems point to the threat of capitalist tech monopolies where, according to theorist Neil Postman, the culture “seeks its authorisation in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology”. Microsoft and Google have already been accused of monopolistic practices.
 
These “bit tyrants” are troubling “technopolies” which actually use their power and influence to stifle innovation and competition using – ironically – traditional practices of the old economy.
 
Perhaps even more troubling is how these companies channel innovation away from its potential for social good. Beneath the myth of Silicon Valley prosperity are big tech’s seeming attempts to promote corporate oligarchies and even authoritarian regimes to extend their economic reach and political power.
 
The highly publicised renaming of these conglomerates is part of a wider rebranding of this technopoly. As one commentator recently observed, “Facebook’s new name is ‘Meta’, and its new mission is to invent a ‘metaverse’ that will make us all forget what it’s done to our existing reality.” It may be a different name, but it is the same economic, political and social corporate threat.
 
The spread of metacapitalism
 
In his video announcement, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed this dawning of the metaverse as signalling a new technological age, providing viewers with a glimpse of it in a virtual world where people could use avatars to live out their wildest imagination in real-time with others around the world.
 
The backlash has ranged from moral outrage over Facebook itself, to ridiculing Zuckerberg’s new vision for technology. What is overlooked is how this represents the desire to create metacapitalism – which uses technology to shape, exploit and profit from human interaction. It is a completely marketised virtual reality world fuelled by the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, unjust global working conditions and the constant invasion of users’ data privacy for private financial gain.
 
Corporate and social rebranding are fundamental to the spread of metacapitalism. Google’s 2015 name change to “Alphabet” reflected its desire to be more than just a search engine and expand into other areas such as driverless cars, medical devices, smart home appliances and drone delivery. Introducing the metaverse, Zuckerberg said:
 
  “Think about how many physical things you have today that could just be holograms in the future. Your TV, your perfect work set-up with multiple monitors, your board games and more – instead of physical things assembled in factories, they’ll be holograms designed by creators around the world.”
 
He insisted, once again, that “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services”.
 
These moves play into a broader strategy to socially rebrand metacapitalism positively. The introduction of the metaverse is part of a new trend of what business ethics academic Carl Rhodes has referred to it as “woke capitalism”, noting in a recent article that “progressive gestures from big business aren’t just useless – they’re dangerous”.
 
Whether it is the Gates Foundation initially opposing the spread of global vaccines in order to protect patent rights, or Elon Musk promising to create an “multi-planet civilisation” – while avoiding paying much-needed taxes here on Earth – corporations are now increasingly using philanthropy and utopian visions to hide their present day misdeeds.
 
A force for good
 
The irony is that technology could actually become a real force for radical social and economic transformation if it was freed from the narrow limits imposed on it by metacapitalism.
 
Digital platforms are already enabling greater cooperative ownership and direct democratic participation. Big data could be deployed to allow for efficient energy use through better tracking of energy consumption. It also allows for the community ownership of our information and the economy generally. 3D printers have the potential to revolutionise manufacturing so that we can easily and sustainably produce all that we require.
 
Crucially, open-source technologies which allow for their information to be freely available to use, modify and redistribute, could foster international collaboration and innovation on a scale previously unimaginable. They point to a realistic and utopian “post-capitalist” future that could transcend the need for exploitation based on principles of shared development and collective prosperity.
 
The rebranding of technology companies is not merely cosmetic, it represents a dangerous attempt to monopolise all forms of technology development linked to a metaverse and the spread of metacapitalism. What is needed instead is a real discussion about fostering open-source culture, data rights and ownership, and the use of technology for positive social transformation – not simply selling more products.
 
Metaverse: how Facebook rebrand reflects a dangerous trend in growing power of tech monopolies. By Peter Boom. The Conversation, November 4, 2021. 

On the morning of 7 April this year, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of  JPMorgan Chase, published his annual letter to shareholders. The head of America’s largest bank reflected on “the brutal murder of George Floyd and the racial unrest that followed” (the week after Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Dimon was among the first CEOs publicly to take the knee, while visiting a branch in New York) and described how the bank was “fully engaged in trying to solve some of the world’s biggest issues – climate change, poverty, economic development and racial inequality”.
 
Later that day, Dimon and the board of JPMorgan Chase published another document, their proxy statement to the bank’s annual shareholder meeting. In it, Dimon and his board recommended voting against proposals aimed at helping make the changes he had claimed to support. One called for the bank to undertake a racial equity audit; another asked that it review its practices on political lobbying. Neither proposal was passed. The statement also revealed that Dimon – whose letter had opined, a few hours earlier, that the “fault line” in his fractured country “is inequality” – is paid 758 times the median American income.
 
For a company to say one thing and do another is hardly new. But in the past year, the contrast between the virtues espoused by businesses and the real activity from which they make their money has become so stark that it has reached a kind of breaking point.
 
The workplace has become politicised as never before. On the work-focused social network LinkedIn, 188,000 people describe their job as “activist”. There are more activists than there are midwives, historians, orthodontists or scriptwriters. In the past year employees at Apple, the world’s most profitable company, have broken their strict code of silence with letters that demanded the sacking of an employee who had written a novel they considered sexist, requesting a public statement in support of the people of Palestine, and protesting a policy asking that they return to office working. Google – a company founded with the motto “Don’t be evil” – is now engaged in a legal battle with workers who say they were sacked for protesting against its work with US border control.
 
To ask for ethics from a corporation is like expecting a scalpel to have a sense of humour: it is a mindless tool, the design of which is wholly at odds with such expectations. But it would not be fair to say that the workers of Apple or Google were naive. People have not suddenly become more sensitive or more gullible. But they have, for decades, been told by the managerial class that the companies to which they give their time, their energy, their ideas and their money exist for a higher purpose than simply making a profit.
 
In many organisations, this is affirmed at board level by a chief impact officer or “impact partner” (Harry, the Duke of Sussex, holds both titles, for the coaching company BetterUp and the asset manager Ethic). Such moral agency must also be communicated to consumers; the PR company Edelman identifies “cause marketing” – taking a position on an issue wholly unrelated to your business – as one of the more effective ways to shift units.
 
For some, this is as a corruption of capitalism’s true purpose. When Dimon and other Wall Street CEOs were called before the Senate Banking Committee in May, the Republican Tim Scott complained that banks were taking political positions on issues such as Georgia’s new voting laws, opponents of which say restrict the voting rights of people of colour. “Woke capitalism,” Scott said, “seems to be running amok throughout the financial institutions of our country.” In the same week, the group Consumers’ Research launched a seven-figure advertising campaign that targeted the CEOs of Coca-Cola, Nike and American Airlines for “putting woke politics over consumer interests”.
 
But arguing that capitalism should be unfettered and amoral is itself a political position. No business is without its ideals in the new “emoticonomy”. This is not a circumstance created accidentally by political parties, activists or workers, but deliberately, by businesses. It has been going on for some time.
 
After the end of the Second World War, companies in the US and Europe made use of low interest rates to launch a long period of acquisition, using cheap debt to make offers other companies’ shareholders couldn’t refuse. This allowed some companies, especially in the US, to grow rapidly into large conglomerates. But because antitrust legislation prevented such businesses from buying up their competitors, these conglomerates were strange, many-tentacled beasts; the telecommunications company ITT bought hundreds of companies in the 1960s, diversifying into hotels, schools, houses, timber, bread and make-up.
 
The apparently rapid growth of these new corporate giants was attributed to the genius of the captains of industry who oversaw them, men such as James Ling and Harold Geenen. But this scale was bought with bonds and debentures – with debt – and this debt demanded efficiency. The great conglomerates faced the problem of persuading tens of thousands of people to be loyal, hard-working employees of a giant, faceless holding corporation.
 
  
The solution was found in work that had begun in the 1920s at Harvard’s School of Human Relations. As Gillian Tett explains in her recent book Anthro Vision, companies such as Western Electric had begun employing anthropologists to listen to their employees and understand their working culture and social relations. Building on the theory of “scientific management” developed before the war by the engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor and the growing field of industrial-organisational psychology, corporations realised there was money to be made in understanding how their employees felt.
 
In 1953, the American economist Howard R Bowen published Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, in which he introduced the idea of corporate social responsibility – the need not only to respect the rights of those inside the business, but also to avoid causing harm in the wider world. This idea was controversial at first – to Bowen’s colleagues at the University of Illinois, it reeked of socialism, and he was forced to resign in 1950 – but it proved useful to the new corporate titans. Employees of huge conglomerates could now be united by popular values, such as patriotism and a sense of contributing to wider socio-economic progress.

 These ideas were spread by the growing class of professional managers. From a handful of students at the Wharton School in Pennsylvania in 1908, the “Master of Business Administration” (MBA) programme spread across American, European and Asian universities in the second half of the 20th century, until by 2008 more than 100,000 MBA graduates were entering the workplace each year.
 
At the same time that moral managerialism was taking over the world, the political parties to which people had once looked for moral guidance were gradually running out of credibility. In the 1960s, half of British voters knew immediately which side they’d take in a general election. By 2018, just 9 per cent of the electorate identified as strong supporters of any political party, according to a report published by King’s College London’s Policy Institute. But people had not become uninterested in politics itself: issues, causes and projects were now their focus.
 
In his short film Oh Dearism, the film- maker Adam Curtis traces the rise of issue-based politics back to the 1967-1970 Biafran War and the charitable appeals that followed. TV news and events such as Live Aid, he argues, simplified complex crises such as famines and civil wars, removing their political context and presenting them as little more than natural disasters. But while political parties vacillated, unable to respond in equally simple terms, businesses began to claim the moral high ground. No sector was more committed to this transfer than the rapidly growing companies of Silicon Valley.

 
In 1983, John Sculley gave up his job as the youngest ever president of Pepsi when a 28-year-old Steve Jobs asked him: “Do you want to sell sugar-water the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?” When Sculley repeated this anecdote to me, 30 years later – he has repeated it many times – the excitement in his voice was still audible.
 
What Jobs had offered Sculley was something no benefits package or equity share could ever match: a sense of purpose. In the decades since, Apple has hired thousands of the world’s most talented workers with some version of this promise.
 
In September 2009, the British advertising executive Simon Sinek spoke at an event in a ballroom in a suburb of Seattle. He began by asking the audience why Apple was so successful, how Martin Luther King came to lead the civil rights movement and why the Wright brothers were first into the air (as if these were all comparable achievements, made by similar people).
 
“I made a discovery,” Sinek said. “There’s a pattern. All the great, inspiring leaders and organisations in the world, whether it’s Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act and communicate the exact same way.” On a flip chart, Sinek then drew a circle – “the golden circle” – and in the middle he wrote the word “Why”. The secret to success was not efficiency or inventiveness but vision: “What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief?”
 
Sinek’s talk has been watched more than 50 million times. The reason for its popularity is not that it’s true – it is the magical bullshit of the professional speaking industry – but because it tells the managerial class that it can (like Steve Jobs!) summon the vision necessary to propel companies to greatness. It will be that vision, not the people in the factory, on the sales floor or in the delivery vans, that is the difference between failure and glory.
 
This idea is fundamental to Apple, Google, Facebook and the other companies of Silicon Valley, which are built on the idea that “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation”, as the 20th-century sociologist Max Weber put it. Such companies see social, environmental and political issues, from climate change to racial inequality, as equations to be solved by the genius of a gifted few. Google’s “moonshot division”, Google X, says it aims to use technologies such as machine learning and robotics “to solve some of the world’s hardest problems” and “improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people”. (It also happens to generate thousands of valuable patents per year.)
 
The billionaire CEOs of these companies are presented as saviours of the human race. Mark Zuckerberg wants to “cure all disease”; Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates want to address the climate crisis; Elon Musk wants to establish human colonies on Mars in case Jeff and Bill’s plan doesn’t work. The former CEO of WeWork, Adam Neumann, claimed that the purpose of WeWork was not to sublet office space, but to end world hunger, to “elevate the world’s consciousness” and to give all 150 million of the world’s orphans a family.
 
These people are not scientists, doctors or aid workers. They are MBA graduates,  selling targeted advertising, web hosting  and office space. But as Sinek made clear, there was no longer any need for a business’s real activities to have any connection to  its mission.
 
This mindset allowed Andrew Bosworth, a vice-president at Facebook and creator of the social network’s News Feed, to tell the “ugly truth” about his company to his colleagues in a 2016 memo. “All the work we do in growth is justified… the subtle language that helps people stay searchable… the work we will likely have to do in China,” he wrote. “Anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”
 
As Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang described in their book on Facebook, An Ugly Truth, this view allowed senior Facebook employees to ignore the crises their company was creating. The managers of Silicon Valley do not need to think about what their companies are doing now; to do so would be a distraction from their real business of changing the world. Any technological (and financial) advancement is to them inherently right because it represents progress.
 
The Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has expanded this position over several books, including Compassionate Capitalism (2004), The Business of Changing the World (2006) and Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change (2019). He has campaigned against discriminatory legislation in Indiana and Georgia, and for greater support for homeless people in San Francisco. At the same time, Benioff has amassed a personal wealth more than 80,000 times the American median, and Salesforce has used legal measures to minimise its tax payments: over the last three years, the company has made $4.1bn in the US and paid no US federal tax whatsoever.
 
Executive megalomania extends, in subtler forms, across the whole managerial class. People who once saw themselves as selling trainers, beer or IT services now consider themselves the leaders of “mission-driven” companies, solving the world’s problems.
 
In recent years the idea has spread that moral authority can be assumed not only by a company or its C-suite, but by capital itself. This idea was codified in a letter sent to hundreds of business leaders by Larry Fink, the co-founder and CEO of the US  investment firm BlackRock, in 2018.
 
BlackRock invests more than $9tn of other people’s money, and its risk-management platform, Aladdin, is used to manage a further $25tn. It is the largest shareholder in many of the world’s companies. After reminding the CEOs that BlackRock’s clients “are the true owners of your company”, Fink explained in his letter that governments were “failing to prepare for the future”, and that “society increasingly is turning to the private sector and asking that companies respond to broader societal challenges”.
 
Carl Rhodes, a professor of organisational studies and author of Woke Capitalism (due to be published in November), says Fink’s letter was a turning point: “He’s not talking about their core business activities. He’s saying this is an additional responsibility, which exists above and beyond that.” Fink, arguably the world’s most powerful CEO, was instructing companies that the sense of purpose essential to modern managerialism had now spread to capital markets. Securities would be priced against virtue.
 
But the growth of investments rated against environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria does not actually entail the “real commitment to green growth” Rishi Sunak said was needed in his Budget speech in March, any more than buying a Tesla will propel humanity to other worlds. Governments, for all their talk about a “green industrial revolution” (Sunak again), have left it to banks to make rules on what counts as ESG.
 
The result is, to pick one product, the $244m GIF Global Lower Carbon Equity fund, which states its mission as “reducing carbon exposure” but invests, according to its most recent filings, in coal mines and coal-fired power stations (through AGL Energy and Origin Energy), oil and gas drilling services (through Maersk), and mining (Barrick Gold, Rio Tinto). Its biggest holdings include Microsoft, Amazon and Google, all of which are decarbonising their own companies while supplying billions of dollars’ worth of cloud computing and machine learning services to the oil and gas industry, helping companies such as ExxonMobil and Shell increase production and unlock new deposits.
 
Many other ESG funds contain investments in BP, which in 2018 claimed to be drilling the Arctic “to support the global energy transition” (it has since sold its Alaskan assets), and Altria (owner of Philip Morris), a “tobacco harm reduction company” that sells more than 200 billion cigarettes per year.
 
Again, this is about progress. Just as  Silicon Valley’s sense of mission persuaded the world that mass surveillance, limitless consumerism and the monetisation of private space were progressive innovations, the moral capital flowing into oil and tobacco companies allows them to argue (with straight faces!) that they are the ones best placed to fix the crises they created.
 
In the last ten years, Google searches for the term “imposter syndrome” have soared as millennials have ascended to the managerial class and exchanged work that has directly observable results for administration and strategy. In the US and UK, managerial and administrative jobs have grown faster than other areas of the economy. As the late anthropologist David Graeber wrote in his 2013 tirade against the make-work of the modern economy, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, “it’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”.
 
This sense of corporate uselessness is pervasive. In 2019, a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that almost a quarter of the UK workforce thought their job made no useful contribution to society. Seven million people in this country see no point in going to work, other than to make money.
 
At the same time, the cost of entering the white-collar workplace has risen precipitously. In 15 years the average level of student debt (at the point of repayment) has more than quadrupled, from under £10,000 to over £40,000. Apprentices, too, pay heavily for their training: the minimum wage for an apprentice is £4.30 an hour. Entry-level workers must contend with much higher costs of living, stagnant wages and competition from others who can afford unpaid internships.
 
Despite these challenges, Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, says it is not the case that an angry new cohort of woke youngsters has arrived to disrupt the workplace. Duffy says there is “not massive evidence that social purpose is a particularly strong, or new, driver for current younger generations… in terms of what they want from employers. There’s interest in social purpose from all generations.”
 
What has changed, says Duffy, is the  attention paid by businesses to social issues, and with it, the emergence of an “industry of lots of consultants and trainers who focus on micro-differences between generations, devoted to pretending that major generational divisions exist in the workplace”. It  is not so much that younger generations  demand more from the workplace, but that the visionaries of the managerial class must be seen to understand the future. In the absence of unions, which now represent less than 14 per cent of private-sector workers, it has become much easier for a company to make disputes appear the fault of restive young snowflakes.
 
“You don’t see corporations arguing for an increase in the minimum wage,” says Carl Rhodes. “You don’t see corporations arguing for an increase in corporate taxation, so that society can provide better schools and hospitals.” There may be limited demand for wokery from employees, but for companies, says Rhodes: “It shifts attention away from economic differences… and works to sever the connection between the political and economic.”
 
What does woke capitalism want? Beyond the brand value generated by what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the “passionate performance of virtue”, there is a greater prize at stake.
 
Last month, five of America’s largest financial institutions, including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, announced plans to use a new questionnaire when buying municipal bonds – the securities issued by states and local governments to raise money for public hospitals, policing, libraries and transport infrastructure. The questionnaire asks whether elected representatives are “willing… to engage with investors on issues regarding racial equity… on an ongoing basis”, and requests data on police officers’ behaviour.
 
This programme is still being developed, but it could lead to a situation in which financial institutions decide which cities or states can raise money for public works based on their politics. Executives will decide if a population is morally deserving of new school buildings and water systems. 
 
For such power to be handed over, something essential needs to change, and there is evidence that this is happening. Every year since 2000, Edelman has released its “Trust Barometer”, a global report on attitudes to government, business, NGOs, charities and the media. The 2021 report, which surveyed more than 33,000 people in 28 countries, found that in a year in which governments have raised trillions to fight a global pandemic, it is businesses that have gained credibility. Respondents were more likely to believe a statement from their employer than their government, and when asked which group they trusted “to do what is right”, respondents chose CEOs over journalists, religious leaders or those in government. Business is the “only institution seen as both competent and ethical”, the report states, and the “only trusted institution”.

 
The final section of Jamie Dimon’s letter to his shareholders is a 19-page section on “public policy” – not the specific policy that regulates the banking sector, but the whole of government. It is a presidential address, Dimon’s vision for his country – a country that has for too long been run by politicians. “Frankly, we punted too much of the responsibility to our government,” he writes. “Few of our institutions are blameless.”
 
The embarrassing mismanagement of the world around us – the Brexit shambles, the Trump years, the failure to act upon the climate crisis – presents a moment for business to take on the moral agency of government itself: and the power that comes with it. For companies that already straddle the globe, this is where further expansion lies, because they are still, for the moment, much smaller than the states they inhabit.
 
When Jeff Bezos, then the world’s richest man, took the first commercial passenger flight beyond the Kármán line and into space this year, he did so in safety and luxury, to widespread disdain. Six decades earlier, Alan Shepard made the same trip, in discomfort and the knowledge that his rocket stood a good chance of exploding; he returned a national hero. That 60-year gap, and the risk Shepard was prepared to take, is the difference between the state and private enterprise, between being transacted with as a company and being loved as a nation. And that is the real objective of woke capitalism: faith, and the authority it confers.
 
 
The goodness business: how woke capitalism turned virtue into profit. By Will Dunn.  The New Statesman, October 20, 2021.