Counter-Currents
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Imperium Press has recently produced a brief, must-watch documentary entitled Why Capital is Woke (see below). It offers four in-depth explanations for the sharp left-turns which leading corporations have been making in the past decade.
Many of these changes were unpopular, and business predictably suffered. In some cases, as with the infamous Gillette ad from 2019 — which was both anti-male and anti-white — corporate wokeness infuriated customers and caused a serious backlash. Yet, major corporations continue to insult their customers by peddling pernicious woke ideology and by pandering to Left-wing elites.
Why? If the customer is always right, then why are these major corporations effectively telling customers that they are wrong? Wouldn’t a decrease in profits be enough to discourage this sort of behavior?
Not really, according to Imperium Press, and here are their four fundamental reasons why.
1, The Libertarian Explanation
You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s Solzhenitsyn and the Right here.
This demonstrates how woke corporations can erect “barriers to entry” which will run smaller companies out of business, thereby reducing competition and allowing the former enough wiggle room for their woke follies. Why Capital is Woke uses the analogy of a major-league baseball team which operates under a league-wide affirmative action rule requiring that 10% of fielded players from any team must be drafted that season from the minor league. Assuming that, on average, the minor league players are not as good as major league players, this seems like it would result in an overall reduction in quality of play. However, wealthier teams can overcome this by offering higher salaries to the most talented minor league players — let’s call them ringers — and forcing the poorer teams to make do with the less talented remainder.
This ultimately results in the poorer teams not being able to compete with the wealthier ones.
The analogy should be clear. The minor league players are the less-qualified non-white workers that the worldwide woke agenda requires all businesses to hire. If a dozen or so woke corporations can corner the market on the best of these workers, the results would be disastrous for those companies that can’t.
2. The Managerial Explanation
This explanation draws directly from James Burnham and Sam Francis, as well as from Robert Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy. The “managerial class” in any large organization wishes to establish itself as an aristocracy, but lacks the genius, honesty, and discipline needed to found such an organization. In its constant state of hunger, it effectively feeds itself power through the invention of problems that only they themselves can solve. These problems must be:
- unrelated to a corporation’s stated function;
- not real; and
- impossible to solve.
Great examples include “white supremacy,” “unconscious bias,” and “systemic racism.” Ultimately, the managerial class comes to dominate an organization and wields unchecked power. This could be in government, the military, or, as we have seen recently, big business. It was Francis who pointed out the connection between the managerial class and woke ideology, since the latter fits so neatly with the voracious needs of the former.
Furthermore, woke ideology becomes the pretext for managerial types to mold the corporation’s customer base into a more pliable form. Thus these organizations, as our narrator tells us, “take on a didactic and evangelical character.” Profit becomes secondary to social change.
3. The Technical Explanation
We can thank YouTuber Keith Woods for this one. In his video “What Created the Great Awokening,” Woods promotes the idea that specific technological changes, more than anything else, sparked the explosion of woke capital in the mid-2010s. “Web 2.0,” as Woods describes it, fundamentally changed how media interacts with its audience. Our narrator explains:
So in the early 2010s, pretty much all the biggest media companies moved to a paywall/subscription model just to stay alive. And so now rather than revenue coming in from a broad audience, instead it’s coming from a very online, committed fanbase. And mass-appeal is just there to attract paywall subs. And who’s the most very online? Well, it’s progressive activists, naturally.
And so this change in income model drove the change in the New York Times user base. And this made it a lot more radical. And over a few years, every single media company adapted to become as hardcore as it new audience. The idea is that the woke ideology in the New York Times is essentially audience driven. These media are just responding to new incentives, driven ultimately by changes in technology.
While this alone does not seem to speak to woke capital, it certainly does when you realize that nearly all businesses rely on media for advertising, social media outreach, search engine optimization, and branding. So when the media requires a company to dance to a particular tune, the company dances to that particular tune. If not, it will be excoriated in print media, have its Facebook pages deleted, and find its name appearing on two-digit pages in Google search results. Is fighting for what’s right even worth it? Modern media makes it so the answer is no. Hence, we get woke capital.
In a truly frightening moment, our narrator tells us that “it’s of critical importance to at least pay lip service to the social justice ideology. And this tends to become less lip service and more committed belief over time.”
4. The Absolutist Explanation
While the technical explanation offers a bottom-to-top theory of woke capital domination — that of material conditions making such domination possible — the Absolutist Explanation provides a top-down approach, with the United Nations taking the lead. It began in 2006 when United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan took part in the Principles for Responsible Investment Convention. This convention created what’s now known as the ESG rating system, which is applied to nearly all business. ESG stands for Environmental, Social, Governance. A company scores well in this system if they adhere to woke agenda items such as hiring underrepresented social groups and having gender pay equity.
Today, ESG encompasses 22 social justice-related metrics and conforms to the Davos Manifesto 2020, which has the Orwellian subtitle: “The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Put simply, companies with high ESG scores (known as “leaders”) receive less regulatory pressure from governments than companies with low ESG scores (known as “laggers”). Such a system flips the “go woke, go broke” notion on its head through the sheer will of our global elites. As our narrator puts it, “Being woke does nothing to help you deliver a product or a service, but it does ward off the eye of Sauron.”
Woke capital can be described as a triumph — perhaps the greatest triumph — of progressivism. Progressives now wield the kind of coercive power that aristocracies, lords, popes, and kings once wielded over European peoples. But what exactly is progress? I believe that the answer to this basic question will help get to the bottom of why capital is so woke today, and will play surprisingly well into the four excellent reasons offered by this documentary.
Progress is a lot of things, some of it unquestioningly good. For example, it was progress that did away with child labor, which could see children as young as six working 14-hour days in factories. But the best definition of progress is the historical process by which the mediocre overtake the excellent. I will wager that if you look throughout the past 150 years, you will not find a better and more consistent answer than that.
And capital is woke today because the mediocre have overtaken the excellent, and they have done so without having to earn it. In the Libertarian Explanation, this happens in two cases:
- The less-qualified non-whites (i.e., “ringers”) replacing qualified whites in the woke corporations.
- The woke corporations imposing wokeness on the public with its modus operandi, which puts quality second, after they clear the field of honest competition.
The Managerial Explanation embodies this sweeping definition of progress, since the managers don’t create anything of inherent value and instead ascribe power to themselves through their endless holy grail quests which only they can undertake. Such goals are largely beyond the stated purpose of an enterprise, and are attractive to the mediocre because they require less talent, preparation, and work to accomplish.
Consider a female mathematician who mostly writes papers on how hard it is to be a female mathematician, and why we need more of them. A person who appreciates excellence in any field would not dignify such gossipy busywork with a moment of his time. Why Capital is Woke also offers the excellent example of how Greg Glassman, the founder of a company called CrossFit , was ousted by his own managerial staff in 2020 because of his justified skepticism of the George Floyd riots and the COVID lockdowns. This is indeed the mediocre overtaking the excellent in action.
The Technical Explanation reveals how, through technological change, the driving customer force behind major media companies has become a class of extremists who cannot tolerate challenges to their Left-wing dogma. These are not open-minded, clear-thinking individuals. They are essentially an online mob that thinks nothing of bullying others and ruining lives if they feel threatened. They are, in sum, mediocrities, and they are now modern media’s customer base.
If there is a flaw in Why Capital is Woke, it would be that the difference between the Managerial and Absolutist explanations might not be great enough to warrant two separate categories. It seems to me that they are really one explanation, differentiated only by scale. The elites who came up with the ESG metric at the UN and Davos are essentially the managerial class acting on the world stage and in the halls of government rather than in a stuffy boardroom at corporate headquarters. Other than this, they share a common purpose (gaining power), method (enforcing conformity), and ideology.
You can buy Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence from Imperium Press here.
Further, the managerial class found in the Absolutist Explanation could be seen as working in tandem with Burnham and Francis’ managerial class by devising laws and governmental regulations which make it easier for corporate managers in the private sphere to force their organizations to go woke. These are two sides of the same coin, and both represent how we’ve reached our current state of wokeness, because the mediocre have indeed overtaken the excellent.
Why Capital is Woke is a first-rate production. It unfortunately lacks writing, casting, and production credits (aside from the all-too-general “Imperium Press”), so we don’t know who specifically to credit for it, but that credit should be enormous. From the creepy synth-guitar-effects soundtrack to the clever animation to the judicious use of text and found footage, high production standards make Why Capital is Woke easy to watch and easy to enjoy. Its tight script and clean narration make it thought-provoking on another level. Considering the source, we’d have to conclude that it is boxing above its weight class in terms of budget, which is the most eloquent testimony to the talent and dedication that went into the writing, directing, and editing of this marvelous documentary.
The mediocre may be overtaking the excellent everywhere else, but not here, thankfully. Not with Imperium Press and Why Capital is Woke.
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17 comments
I ran into an interesting example of “small business” woke capital yesterday and I would like to ask for thoughts on how this fits into these 4 explanations. I’ll offer my own thoughts.
Yesterday my son asked me about those ping pong ball sized spiked seed-pods that you find in landscaped yards and parks sometimes. They are green in the summer and turn brown by fall. I honestly always just called them “gum balls” thinking the name was a reference to their candy size with a bit of irony to boot, but it turns out that they are the seeds of the “sweet gum tree” and of course the gum refers to the useful tree resin that once was harvested for various reasons.
anyhoo, I Googled this for a more thorough definition to offer my son and found a page that actually sold them as some kind of mollusk aquarium food or some such. Also they have arts and crafts uses..,Ornamental wreaths etc.
In the advertisement for the product they proudly proclaimed that the gum balls were
”proudly harvested by hand with tools and techniques that are non-intrusive and non-destructive to the environment and associated wildlife from which they were harvested” (non-verbatim)
So in other words they were either collected by a bunch of Mexicans working for practical slave wages or they were collected by some childless female blue haired vegan boomer in a commune in California and hand-bagged from the back of her 1965 VW Bus. (Take your pick)
Now this is a mild form of wokeness to be sure. Nothing wrong with environmentally friendly business practices (even the slave labor kind). But why would anyone think this matters to a person who just wants some gum balls for a wreath they are making? Surely there aren’t a ton of gum ball harvesters out there, and cutting the competition by being the most virtuous doesn’t make sense.
Thoughts?
I think much of this is simply driven by a society that offers very little meaning to most people, so they look for meaning in the most mundane and trivial of things. This is true of consumers as well as producers. Just as many white nationalists make special efforts to find small companies that are friendly to our ideas to do business with, and just as this makes us feel that we are doing something positive and good and fighting against something bad, so do many leftists (both consumers and producers).
ALSO, I don’t discount the power of trends. This will kind of align with Keith Woods observation. Social media has created these niche trends, and leftists in particular love to follow trends. Heck, monkey see, monkey do is an extremely troublesome human trait. Just yesterday I saw a white guy wearing a pair of Nike sandals with white socks. For the last 6-7 years this has been something I thought was almost exclusively a black fashion thing, but now it’s getting more common with white people. Sandals with socks. Can anything be more offputting? But here we are.
Hi Connor,
I suspect that if a measure taken by a company to sell its product works in the marketplace without coercion, then it is not woke. Woke implies pushing a political agenda that is contrary to the stated interests of the company doing the pushing. For example, male grooming companies accusing men of ‘toxic masculinity’ or fitness magazines running spreads of obese models. If you oppose either, you are bigoted in some way or another. So there is a social engineering dimension here.
Your example, like cage-free eggs, asks customers to pay a little more to help the company afford to make moral decisions when developing their product. The morality here may be suspect or not, but it does not necessarily work against the stated aims of the company, nor does it insult the customer.
Your point about trends, by the way, is well taken. Thanks.
Sandals with socks. Can anything be more offputting? But here we are.
You certainly didn’t observe homo polonicus before, Mr. McDowell. I have had a luxury to watch those magnificent specimens for 2 decades now. Every summer season brings them out on the streets both in my homeland and various European tourist traps. Sometimes the purity of form is violated by other sock color however, this wonderfully disgusting marriage of two pieces of wardrobe never ceases to astonish me.
“The mediocre may be overtaking the excellent everywhere else, but not here, thankfully.”
And not at Counter Currents with its excellent regular contributors like Spencer J. Quinn. Thank you for the video link. I will watch this documentary later.
Thank you for the kind words, Desert Flower. I really appreciate it.
I worked for years with these types of people (highly credentialed mediocrities). Their behavior was…baffling. And frustrating. And alarming because they were the ones in charge.
Then I discovered the Dissident arena and now I know it’s not just me.
The simplest explanation for why capital is woke is that the owners of capital are sincerely woke, and that there are more important things to them than making money. White Nationalists should be able to relate to this; if you owned a billion-dollar corporation, you would use that power and influence to help the cause of the White race, even if it came at a cost to profits. Zuckerberg and Bezos are the same way. Yes, they want to keep getting richer, but they also have sincere ideological convictions for which they are willing to sacrifice some money. Money is not an end. It is a means. It is power. It is meant to be spent on something, and sometimes that thing is a political goal. This explanation is entirely satisfactory to me.
Which raises the question, where do the “elites” get their ideology from? The university, of course. And where do the professors get their ideology from? From the professors that came before them. And so it goes on and on in one long chain. But what happens when some of those professors have an ideological, ethnic, or paraphilic agenda that runs contrary to the pursuit of scientific truth unbeknownst to their naive and trusting students? After all, these are supposed to be the “experts,” the smartest people in our societies.
The importance of academia in shaping the beliefs of both the masses and the “elites” can not be emphasized enough. Yet, how many people know the names or ethnicities of more than a few Ivy League professors, if any at all?
Why Colleges are Becoming Cults by Dr Lyell Asher https://youtu.be/0hybqg81n-M
Blew me away from the research he presents, which he’s worked on for 30yrs.
Didn’t go to college or grew up here but having lived in the U.S. for 30yrs 28 of which in N.Y. saw it taking over and knew colleges were whence it came from but not why by who, how and when it started. Culprits are the Colleges of Ed., the administrators offices that grew 10 fold whole attendance shrunk, and the Equality of Outcome replacing one of Opportunity.
Prof Sandel of Harvard with his ‘Tyranny of Meritocracy’ which should be titled Tyranny of MeriDIocracy’ .. Sandel unspeak claims that the Elite doesn’t deserve is Status but doesn’t realize he’s part of that same Elite.
Attacking meritocracy and promoting equality of outcome ensures the dumbing down of America.
I agree. This is the simplest and best explanation. The core of these people believe woke ideas and are willing to spend money propagating them. Then opportunists recognize that parroting woke ideas will help them financially, and they jump on board. As wokeness becomes increasingly widespread and sacrosanct, careerists will denounce their rivals for being insufficiently woke. Mentally ill and obnoxious people will use it as a weapon against others and as a way of sanctifying themselves. (“He may be a child rapist, but at least he’s not racist.”) Eventually, when wokeness completely saturates the culture, National Review will run an article called, “The Conservative Case for Wokeness,” demonstrating that wokeness is completely consistent with the things they really care about, such as oligarchy and Jewish supremacism. And, when you look at the genealogy of these ideas, that turns out to be true.
The most simplistic explanation for Capital being woke is because Capital is inextricably bound to Judaism, which well-informed minds will know is the source of all cultural Marxism, indeed Marxism itself, and wokeness by extension. Certain gentile Marxists knew this and fought against it. Look no further than the famous Rote Armee Fraktion from Germany, who fought against capitalism and professed to see within it nothing but a hostile Jewish hand that always undermined the common people for its own profit and purposes. Founder Horst Mahler went on to become a vocal “far-right” anti-Semite who emphatically declared his core Socialist beliefs to be unchanged: “Der Feind ist der Gleiche” (The enemy is the same).
“The Technical Explanation” is by far the weakest in my opinion. The idea that paywalls and tumblrinas turned the media woke doesn’t really pass the smell test.
First of all, I highly doubt the extremely online Left are the type to pay a subscription to any legacy media outlet, these are the people starting gofundme’s for their transition surgeries. They’re content with Reddit and Twitter. In fact, in the case of Reddit specifically, it was the legacy media that turned it “woke”. I distinctly remember Reddit began censoring their website after being attacked by CNN. On the other hand, Reddit brushed off and even punished Gawker (a woke outlet) for doxxing one of its controversial users.
The type of people who subscribe to The New York Times today are the same who have always subscribed, the self-important “do you have any Grey Poupon?” types. A New York Times subscription is a status marker among these idiots and there’s not that many of them. They switched to online subscriptions out of convenience after the smartphone became ubiquitous, this is also around the time that iPad was introduced, which, owning one was seen also as a status marker among these types.
It’s obvious that the people with pronouns in their bios take their marching orders from the people who run the media, not the other way around. See the Summer of Floyd for more details.
This is great stuff, thanks Spencer.
“In its constant state of hunger, it effectively feeds itself power through the invention of problems that only they themselves can solve. These problems must be:
unrelated to a corporation’s stated function;
not real; and
impossible to solve.
Great examples include “white supremacy,” “unconscious bias,” and “systemic racism.” Ultimately, the managerial class comes to dominate an organization and wields unchecked power.”
That’s it. The whole “transgender rights”, satanic trap/nightmare, is another type of control.
Only by constantly reflecting back the truth, 2+2=4, not what anyone, or group wants it to be, is the only answer even though the powers that be, will always try to convince the masses that 2+2 equals what ‘they’ tell you it equals… or else!
Capitalism is not the problem, but rather the immorality of certain people and groups which use it to their exclusive benefit. It has always been thus. There are sentences in the Torah that say Jewish people are to deal with one another honestly, but they have no obligation to treat ‘others’ so. Do some research on this. Start with reading the definition of “Usury”. I think that charging high interest on loans on farms which had been in families for two or three centuries, which caused them to lose the farms prior to WWII will shed light on the problems that escalated in Germany and elsewhere. Moneylending, which is central to capitalism, is only a problem in the hands (and hearts) of immoral people.
It’s been a while since I watched this video, and I wasn’t super focused on the details. At the time I think I interpreted barriers to entry to mean administrative, regulatory ones; creating a rigged game of confusing and burdensome red tape that huge corporations can easily cope with but that smaller players can’t.
But I agree there are lots of reasons.
I’ve often thought if you take out the rhetoric about diversity and inclusivity what you are left with are corporations reorganizing themselves for a brown future unfortunately.
They see the demographic shifts and capitalism goes where it goes. If that means selling iPhones to millions of imported Third World brown people fine. This is why capitalism and all its arguments about jobs, opportunities and free markets can never be the ultimate value.
Another reason is the moral shield argument which goes with the change after Occupy. Big capital wants to define what’s moral and what’s immoral in way that excludes its own sins.
Don’t think about the wealth gap between us vs the average person. Don’t think about globalization and immigration and outsourcing. Don’t think about our exploitation of the workforce. Don’t think about our environmental destruction. Don’t think about our buying laws we want and so on.
Instead they want to tell you gay pride matters. Black lives matter. Trannies matter. Worry about these things bigot and don’t tell us we don’t care.
It’s a strange kind of gaslighting and a weird abusive relationship they have entered into with the customer to protect themselves.
Then there’s the ethnic reasons, to make sure things are safe for Jews. Jewish BlockRock executives appear to use capital as a deliberate ethnic weapon.
And then also the dwindling ownership of capital and business. A few huge players who control an enormous number of assets and brands naturally have enormous power.
And finally you have a ‘mass formation’, an institutional hysteria that’s grabbed everything. Everyone is afraid of being left out of this new moral vocabulary. So even businesses that weren’t necessarily under this pressure directly now feel obliged to go along with it. They don’t want to be isolated as that ‘Nazi brand’.
But this hysteria is also intertwined with a wider hysteria about blacks and other Third Worlders. There is a powerful delusional component to how people treat blacks in particular. They want to believe that the more awards and concessions that are given to blacks the less dysfunctional, less resentful, less violent and more human they will become.
Systemic racism isn’t solely a Jewish proxy warfare on whites (although it is), but also a kind of awkwardness. A forbidden deeply inner noticing about blacks where the truth is just too difficult to express openly and so it’s easier to maintain and expand these massive inverted myths about blacks, which also happen to form these unsolvable and extremely lucrative managerial problems.
The situation is a mess. I really don’t see it ending well.
This is an important topic to see from many angles, thanks. None of these clever but obtuse reasonings seem to suit Occam’s Razor. Big companies are not non-profits. They answer to shareholders and aren’t doing anything of consequence contrary to their interests. And it’s well established that the private sector is substantially more to the right than academia or career government employees. I’m amused at the clever Libertarian hypothesis… cute but likely horseshit. I doubt the execs are thinking about this that deeply. It’s a little akin to what is speculated about diversity in the declassified Pentagon report Steve Sailer discusses in “Unicultural Edge”. A clever economist ought to be able to prove/disprove this.
I work in a large very liberal entity and don’t see any of these at play nearly as much as virtue signaling and fear of protests, company humiliation and the competition. Twitter protests and deplatforming carries a lot of stigma. I have seen a couple of outspoken right-wingers put into exile once there were protests that their views were full of ‘hate’. The controversy then dealt with via a ‘new program initiative’ completely satisfying the protestors.
If your reputation is dinged on one issue, all the competition starts advertising how woke and accepting of diversity they are. Remember BPA in plastic and how quickly a variety of competitors announced that their product are BPA-free? An unrecognized role of the CEOs and Chairpersons is figuring out where to stuff the mediocre diversity hires in the organization so they won’t cause damage, yet still be able to claim their key roles for photo ops and statistics.
Look at recent coronavirus vaccines. No doubt Moderna and Pfizer led the pack by the efforts of many, many team members. Yet some Biden appointee touted some grad student or post grad person of color as a key diverse member that made vaccines possible, a harmless exaggeration that satisfied the ‘optics’. For some orgs CEOs and chairs also sometimes get graded on what they did for diversity during their past term. It probably relates more to entities that have large government contracts.
Consider school rankings, including pre-college elementary and high schools. Some sites rank schools on diversity, and average that number with the all the other metrics (math scores, verbal scores, college scholarships, etc). So an amazing school with great results suddenly drops in the rankings because their diversity score brought them down. Then they start hiring a diversity officer (see many Heather MacDonald articles) and giving scholarships to diverse candidates, leading to tuition increases. Yes, savvy parents, students and employers should be able to factor out the ‘diversity’ score of a school, but in reality everyone’s time is limited in figuring out these details.
Another angle is LGBT diversity. Its not just about the above, or wanting to fly some rainbow flags on a brochure. The LGBT group is less likely to have kids, and more likely to be okay with living in semi-run down city that they will gentrify. If you are nice to them they will be okay with lower pay and living in Detroit or Stockton. Parents with kids living in the suburbs are not going to want to drive too far especially for lower pay. So the childless LGBT group is attractive to urban corporations in the way that low paid Mexican labor is attractive to Koch brothers industries or Tyson chicken.
I didn’t watch the video because the music was too loud, distracting and annoying.
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