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Ross Douthat has coined the term “woke capitalism” to describe the new interest of big companies in the discourse associated with the Left and social justice movement.1 It seems that the corporations have found a way to distort the ideals, which would be dangerous for them if people pursued them until their logical end.
One may wonder why Karl Marx is still referred to in political debates considering that his sociological analysis was formulated in a very different set of conditions than we have now. I believe that Marxism can be interpretated through the lens of corporate interests. In contrast to Marxism’s interpretations that do not reflect the complexity of the current system, Shoshana Zuboff pointed to new forms of exploitation that reflect the current corporate business models.2
Beyond this exception, the ideological discourse inspired by Marxism helps corporations to exploit society. For example, Amazon would earn marginally less if they were required to provide for the social and healthcare costs associated with human workers – but, they are not required to do so beyond the bare minimum. Rather than protecting the workers, social benefits make them available to this extractive company. I am using this example to illustrate where the power is rather than to argue against welfare measures. I am not making the popular right-wing argument that under-privileged people would live on the taxpayers’ money but that the Leftist measures are de facto supporting Jeff Bezos living at the expense of society because his company and his workers receive public subsidies. At the same time, he is avoiding paying taxes.
When one promotes a vision of the society being split by such divides as between workers and capital, between races, or between genders, one supports the corporations in maintaining their power. In contrast, people lose power because of all the divides they happen to believe in. It is in the corporations’ interest that people see the interests of the capital as homogeneous because such understanding does not differentiate between small enterprises, freelancers, or small owners, which hides the true power of corporations.
The book The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello illustrates the way corporations consolidated their power through a constant adaptation to the cultural context and appropriating “revolutions” and “resistance” for their own interests. These adaptive moves obstruct the protests of the exploited and their allies. The authors describe how firms have appropriated the 1968 cultural revolution’s discourse and framed work as a fulfillment of the desires expressed during this cultural transformation. This example poses an interesting question about the times we are in. We can observe the emancipation of sexual and ethnic minorities. Their voice is finally heard. It is worth considering how corporations may profit from the discourse related to this crucial social transformation.
Woke Cover Up
We are being sold the illusion that we are free, but at the visceral level, we may subconsciously internalize the assessment that it is impossible to win with corporations. Our survival mechanisms may censor our thoughts. In a more overtly oppressive system, people would calculate what to say or not to say in a conscious way. Freedom as the trope of popular discourse is combined with subliminal signals of control by the powerful actors. This may cause an inner dissonance that protects people from even discussing or considering any interpretations involving big corporations. The corporations have become our means of survival. Therefore, our survival instinct may have spawned self-censorship in the overarching interest of self-preservation.
The tropes of social justice have been used in advertising corporate products despite the deplorable working conditions the corporations benefit from. Nike has scored a boost in sales thanks to its woke advertisements. It has found a niche in the market to which the markers of Leftist identity speak convincingly. Political messaging in its campaigns is calibrated to distract from the working conditions in its factories.3 In 2020, Nike, Apple, and Coca-Cola lobbied against the restrictions on importing goods made with forced labor from persecuted Muslim minorities in China. Nike’s spokesperson claimed that they had “constructive discussions.”4 Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive has issued a statement in support of Black Lives Matter.5 It seems that the working conditions in Apple’s iPhone manufacturing plant in Zhengzhou, which is notorious for workers committing suicide, do not evoke outrage in this company.6 Disney started to air a 30-second video supporting the Black Lives Matter in June 2020.7 This may contrast with the scandal revealing the poor working conditions and low profit to the workers in factories delivering dolls to Disney’s commercial operation.8
In her 2019 book Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff demonstrates a business model instigated by the social media giants such as Facebook or interactive digital home devices such as Alexa.9 The business model relies on data collection, however, this data collection happens without our full awareness and the overall goal of company research is to influence the choices we, their research subjects, make. In 2015, same-sex marriage became a Constitutional right, which has been accompanied by adding the possibility to use rainbow profile filters on Facebook profiles. It has turned out that it was not just about the company catering to the need of self-expression for its users. They used this occasion to conduct a research project.10 We can suspect that wokeness is used to improve their manipulation tools. Data on woke behaviors make it so much easier to target them according to their sensibilities. Advertisers will have an opportunity to convince people that buying a particular product is a form of resistance and stating their values.
Divide and Rule
Framing racism as the reason for social injustice may cover up the injustice induced by the corporations. The fact that ethnic minorities cannot enter decent employment cannot be explained by racism but by the labor market structure. If corporations stopped or were forced to stop monopolizing the production system, we could create a living and production mode, enabling everyone to do their share. This implies that the production system would be decentralized, and less extractive production methods would be applied. However, giving people autonomy is the last thing corporations want.
BLM helps Jeff Bezos not only ideologically but also physically. While this tactic of “divide and rule” is endorsed by billionaires, the provocation for violence sweeps his competitors away because brick-and-mortar shops are literally destroyed, or people are afraid to go downtown to shop. In consequence, they get more and more accustomed to buy on Amazon. Amazon backed up BLM by putting a supportive banner on its website despite making a profit from a face recognition software that misidentifies non-White people more than the White ones.11
Not only have billionaires managed to create physical walls protecting them from the popular unrest but woke culture is used to immunize them from being the targets of criticism. Woke culture tropes have been instrumentalized to create an image of a hero oppressed by his opponents for being Jewish. Criticism is automatically de-legitimized with a hint that it has something to do with the ethnic origin of the subject. Unraveling corruption or collusion is shut down with woke interpretation. Rhetorical trick to link conspiracy with anti-Semitism disqualifies revelations about corruption, nepotism, or collusion. Interestingly, it is usually applied when unelected, powerful billionaires are in the spotlight. By positioning themselves as martyrs experiencing ethnic injustice, they render themselves protected and untouchable.
We can observe a phenomenon of transclassism, which may serve as elite’s interpretative maneuver to derail anger and mobilization against them. They pretend that they are not the ruling class. For example, Michelle Obama complained in an interview that she was afraid that her daughters may experience racism. Another form of transclassism is media’s framing of discontent with the illegitimate power exercise by billionaires as an expression of anti-Semitism.
The interpretation of the word “globalist” is a good example of tinkering with the meaning of words, which may be a way to derail any criticism of the elites. The Jewish Chronicle published an article stating that it is a synonym of Jews in alt-right circles.12 Mainstream media such as The New York Times try to give an anti-Semitic connotation to the word without providing any evidence. Donald Trump’s calling non-Jewish people globalists is just one piece of a counter-evidence.13 The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines globalism as “a national policy of treating the whole world as a proper sphere for political influence.” By impeding people from engaging with the criticism of such an approach, the elites may achieve a goal of de-legitimizing other options because of the threat of being called an anti-Semite.
Identity politics distract public opinion and the purest of Leftists from the economic issues. Identity politics obliterates economic realities and derails combative solidarity. It is easy to demonstrate that the empirical evidence does not buttress generalizations made by some right-wing populists. It is relatively easy to give numbers and other measurable indicators to debunk the prejudices on the Right. It is easy to see that this discourse can serve to derail combative solidarity. Instead of mobilizing against the real oppressors such as monopolists, their frustration is channeled into xenophobia. What if we reversed this perspective and looked at the Leftists as being skillfully distracted from economic issues? In this case, this mechanism works more insidiously because the Leftists are not prone to identifying an enemy in a group of people. Instead of making overt generalizations about an easily identifiable group of people, they instead talk about the system of oppression and culture. And at the same time, it is difficult to identify and name, but paradoxically everything is a case of it.
The flip side of this general structural framing of the problem is that it can be identified in small gestures, inadequate wording, or other subtle signs. Calling out may appear more rational than xenophobia targeted at an anonymous migrant because they provide ideological reasoning. However, behind these gestures or wrong words are people who commit them. So, in the end, individual people have become the target of the frustration. Meanwhile, those who are responsible for the economic distress stay untouched.
The case for activism against fatphobia is particularly revealing in the context of derailing anger. Halo Top ice cream advertisement shows an overweight woman (I am trembling writing these words anticipating a cancel shot) who has fat hanging around her waist. Fat is a prominent symptom of poor health. Medical research points to a high body-mass as being associated with other comorbidities. After the woman reached for the ice cream at the end of the advertisement, we see the message “Stop shoulding yourself.” Junk food constitutes an act of rebellion against oppressive societal norms. Notably, the woman is seen by her thin old neighbor, which can be depicted as old culture to break down. Yes, be against the traditions that were helping you maintain good health. Other people’s opinions are the problem, not your nutritional choices. And who is gaining from this? Of course, the pharmacological and fast-food industries. They are the ones who eagerly await you on the path to liberation.
Jordan Peterson’s opinions go against the grain of grievance studies, woke capitalism, and fat pride. Left-wingers may criticize his comments on self-responsibility. From the perspective of trauma research, one could argue that it is incorrect to assume that underprivileged people can decide about their addictions, which are often a coping mechanism to deal with post-traumatic symptoms. However, there are also examples of post-traumatic growth, which demonstrate that one can develop positive qualities to respond to distress. Indeed, research exploring how to foster growth despite adversity could bring us to a more complex perspective. Left-wingers could oppose any self-help book because the very nature of self-help literature is to connect people to their capacity to rise from stagnation and self-sabotage by encouraging them to take responsibility. It is part of the genre.
Failing to see that corporations are the enemy may result from cognitive dissonance. They manage to make people addicted to their products and services. Therefore, people need to find other targets to live out the frustration caused by the damages corporations have induced on our lives. Cancel culture is their unpaid public relations agency doing the job of dividing the society and pointing to scapegoats to blame for the damages caused by the immunized power holders.
Feel-Good Ideology and Comfort
A male employee at Google has been fired for perpetuating gender stereotypes. James Demore meant it well when he wrote a proposal considering why there are not many women in the technological department of Google. He pointed to the factors that may deter women from these professions. In his view, structuring work more collaboratively, providing opportunities for part-time work, and a less stressful environment would remedy low participation among women. The assumptions he was making evoked a backlash. He has received threats from co-workers. His assumption that women may be connected to their needs, which deters them from working at Google, challenges the company’s work model. It would be undermined if employees discovered that they have different needs. I have interviewed a former Google software engineer who happens to be male. He was glad to leave the working environment where he could not find balance and fulfillment. Maybe under the accusations of sexual stereotyping is hidden the real reason of spelling out that Google’s working conditions are not compatible with human thriving. Suggesting that someone may not want such a lopsided life equates to an ideological crime. Reinforcing a taboo around questions of needs and aspirations effaces the voices calling for critical re-thinking.
Canceling with wokeness can serve corporations as an excuse to marginalize anti-corporate criticism. It is difficult to give a piece of evidence that someone is not a racist or a phobe because, according to woke critical theory, the system is inherently riddled with discrimination and racism. Therefore, anyone acting in this system may consciously or not engage in acts that can be interpreted as oppressive. This gives leeway to accuse people of acts that the system may be responsible for as much as or even more than themselves.
Criticizing Israeli politics is often defensively labeled as a sign of anti-Semitism. This was the fate of a writer, Achille Mbembe, who has disapproved of the occupation of the West Bank. More than 700 African intellectuals condemned this accusation made by German politicians.14
In November 2020, the boycott movement against Israeli politics towards Palestine was targeted by Mike Pompeo. He ordered to identify organizations that engage in, or otherwise support, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) Global Campaign in order to withdraw any state funding from the movement. He defined “discriminatory labeling and the publication of databases of companies that operate in Israel or Israeli-controlled areas” as a form of anti-Semitism and claimed that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”15 What is interesting about this case is not the BDS movement being criticized. There may be some members within a movement who may say something anti-Semitic. However, Pompeo indicated that the method of withdrawing one’s money from companies that may benefit from the oppression equals hate speech.16
If the banning of boycotts spreads more, it will be impossible to oppose the practices of modern slavery. For example, an investigation by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has uncovered that Amazon, Apple, Nike, and other enterprises are possibly benefiting from the labor of Uyghurs in closed camps, which are called re-education camps in China.17 If we enlarged the woke hunting to this case, boycotting producers who benefit from Uyghur’s slavery could also be considered anti-Chinese or discriminatory of the ethnic group to which these companies’ owners belong. With the woke propaganda strategy, one can ensure immunity to any criticism targeted at a company. Imagine that an Israeli company would develop software specifically targeting non-Israelis in a preemptive crime detection scheme. Such software could not be opposed or protested because it is anti-Semitic to criticize an Israeli company.
Both equating boycott with sin against wokeness and grievances agenda lay groundwork for a psychological maneuver that is in line with corporations’ interests. They want us to stop taking responsibility for our consumer choices. Critical consumers are more difficult to please. They may even withdraw from consumption altogether. Having a taboo against boycotting companies also serves our comfort because we are conditioned as consumers to buy without considering the consequences for other people. Wokeness is a low-cost ruse to allow consumers to continue buying while feeling morally superior because they patronize companies that know what’s up. In this way, the impact of purchasing decisions, which would be the main thing to consider to achieve more justice, does not need to play out in life choices. Companies use woke-washing and symbolic gestures demonstrating their social justice engagement, yet they continue pursuing unethical practices in the production process. They are helping consumers to legitimize their comfortable – yet immoral – consumer choices. Woke capitalism is a performance of denial on both sides.
The recent trend of politicizing consumer choices by choosing brands according to their signaling on political issues can give an illusion of civic engagement. Consumers are outsourcing their civic duty to perform activism to companies, who are all too happy to take up the mantel. By incorporating political sensibilities through symbolic actions, corporations make sure that people do not mobilize and bring about changes. Since thinking through the causes of injustice in a society would bring one to a clear conclusion that it has something to do with corporations’ disproportionate power, having people pursue any activism may undermine their domination. Fortunately for them, they have the means to preempt deeper reflection by offering a civic sham.
The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, wrote in his book Propaganda that we submit to an invisible government. It exercises its power with marketing tricks. It determines our choices, tastes, and opinions. He has mastered the art of convincing people to vote for specific politicians or change their consumer habits using human psychology knowledge to create new associations regarding the advertised item. Bernays has discovered that appealing to social justice discourse can be a selling point. He convinced women to smoke by creating a link between smoking and female emancipation. He used the little trick to call cigarettes the “torches of freedom” and paying women for smoking while walking in a parade in 1929.
The Operation Warp Speed initiative used arguments about social justice when giving reasons for prioritizing the prison population and other groups that tend to be more populated by the people of color as the first recipients of hardly tested Covid vaccines. Latino and the Black populations were also represented in the trials. However, some members of the community suspected a murky agenda in trying to diversify the sample. A person acting as a bridge between the Moderna trial’s operators and the Black community in Cincinnati spoke out, “They feel the government has never cared about us before, so now they’re just trying to rush through a vaccine to kill us. (…) There are a lot of doubts in the community.”18 An incident of using Black population for advancing the research on syphilis in the 1930s, known as the Tuskegee Experiment, has been indicated as the reason for the mistrust about the trials after presidents of Dillard University and Xavier University encouraged the Black community to participate in vaccine trials.19 Many people in the US troops, especially young members, refused to take vaccines, which were voluntary for this occupational group.20 Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb reported that “for the first time since 2001, law enforcement officers and DHS officials are set not to be prioritized for early vaccination.” They have detected that the Palantir-developed software tool, Tiberius, will access health and demographic data to identify the prioritized population to get the vaccine first. It is worrisome in light of the potential side effects that have been discovered in vaccine trials. Public authorities advocating for privileging the Black population mentioned in the same document that: “It is also possible that certain adverse effects may occur more frequently in certain population subgroups, which may not be apparent until millions are vaccinated.”21 Again, we can see how woke discourse dresses up another agenda.
Gaslight and Rule
I intuit that the elites do not care about woke issues at all. However, they may be fiercely interested in having these issues consolidate the norms of censorship, de-platforming, or prohibiting to reason publicly. It would be probably to their liking to see how academia engages in deliberation and analytical exchange. Rebecca Tuvel, a scholar born in 1985, published a philosophical essay in 2017. She set out to examine the idea of transracialism as logically derived from the public acceptance for transgenderism. The reaction of 800 public intellectuals requesting the retraction of the article from academic journal Hypatia fits well to the agenda of legitimizing the removal of a content one may disagree with. Destabilizing people with illogical punishments may discourage analytical thinking. The open letter that reacted to the call to retract her article unravels the new rules of the academic debate: “It is difficult for us to draw any conclusion other than that Tuvel — however inadvertently — has shown the hollowness of such ideas and that those who expound them can proffer no credible defense. The letter and the demand for retraction show nothing as much as a thorough inability to logically rebut Tuvel’s argument.”22
Woke paradigm has enabled relativism to sneak in and become a behavioral norm. The contradictions in the interpretation of its rules paves the way to no rules at all. The fuzziness of rules benefits those in power because they have the resources to tinker with public discourse. This fuzziness can help elites to enforce their will because people are not protected by norms and a clear legal framework. Shoshana Zuboff illustrated how the lack of regulation in regard to privacy had given opportunities to develop lucrative businesses because of the absence of laws in this domain.23
The arbitrariness in normative interpretations gives elites leeway to bend the culture to their needs. The lack of logic and coherence introduces a conceptual chaos, which will allow whatever silly rule may serve the people holding power. The recent wave of arbitrary canceling may create an atmosphere of fear and self-censorship. These are inexpensive tools of control.
It should be easy to see through the ruses of woke capitalism. However, its success shows that its discourse can work on the public psyche. In the next chapter, I will explore how the mixture of woke capitalism and cancel culture may imprint our individual and social reality.
1Ross Douthat (2018): The Rise of Woke Capital.” The New York Times, February 28.
2Shoshana Zuboff (2019): The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile.
3Shoshana Eilon (2020): How Nike got woke. ThoughtLeaders, December 1.
4Ana Swanson (2020): Nike and Coca-Cola Lobby Against Xinjiang Forced Labor Bill . The New York Times, November 29.
5Tim Cook (no date): Speaking up on racism. Apple.com
6Kieren McCarthy (2015): Another death in Apple’s ‘Mordor’ – its Foxconn Chinese assembly plant. theregister.com, August 7.
7Kelly Coffey (2020): Disney Airs Empowering Commercial to Support Black Lives Matter. Insidethemagic.net, June 5.
8Kieran Guilbert (2018): Disney doll factory in China investigated over treatment of workers. Reuters, December 6.
9Shoshana Zuboff (2019): The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile.
10J. Nathan Matias (2015): Were All Those Rainbow Profile Photos Another Facebook Study? The Atlantic, June 28.
11Kari Paul (2020): Amazon says ‘Black Lives Matter’. But the company has deep ties to policing. The Guardian, June 9.
12Gordon Haber (2018): Why we need to worry when people talk about ‘globalists.’ The Jewish Chronicle, March 21.
13Juliana Kaplan (2018): Trump Slaps Anti-Semitic ‘Globalist’ Dog Whistle On Non-Jewish Koch Brothers. Forward.com, July 31.
14Denijal Jegic (2020): Colonial discourses are stifling free speech in Germany. Al Jazeera, June 19.
15Michael R. Pompeo, Secretary of State (2020): Identifying Organizations Engaged in Anti-Semitic BDS Activities. US Department of State, Press Statement, November 19.
16No auhor (no date): Boycotting Goods Produced by Slaves. quakersintheworld.org
17Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, Danielle Cave, Dr James Leibold, Kelsey Munro, Nathan Ruser (2020): Uyghurs for sale. Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
18Jon Cohen (2020): On the road with Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. COVID-19 vaccine effort. Sciencemag.org, September 29.
19Dakin Andone (2020): 2 HBCU presidents joined Covid-19 vaccine trials to encourage participation, but past racist experiments haunt such efforts. CNNHealth, September 18.
20Paul D. Shinkman (2021): Pentagon Touts Vaccine Administration Rate Amid Concerns of Widespread Refusal. usnews.co, February 11.
21Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb (2020): The Johns Hopkins, CDC Plan to Mask Medical Experimentation on Minorities as “Racial Justice.” unlimitedhangout.com, November 25.
22Julian Vigo and Lorna Garano (2017): An open letter on the Hypatia controversy. FeministCurrent.com, May 25.
23Shoshana Zuboff (2019): The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile.