For the most part dialectics is just a mind-numbingly boring attempt to manipulate people.
I can't imagine how awful Marxist dialectics must have been when talking with Marx, or Lenin or any of the true believer crowd.
But sometimes, as Hegel well knew, it is the quickest way to clarify an idea.
REVIEW ESSAY
The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business
by Stephen R. Soukup
Encounter, 2021, 196 pages
In 1654, Peter Stuyvesant, director general of New Amsterdam (later
New York) barred Jews from entering the colony. Then all progressive
hell broke loose. Under pressure from shareholders, the Dutch West India
Company reversed Stuyvesant’s decision and gradually “cancelled” him.1 It was an early example of political activism in business.
Stephen R. Soukup argues in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital
that the Left today has harnessed the power of business to advance its
political ends. Yet “woke capitalism”—meaning capitalism that puts
political goals ahead of profit, and where business forever worries
about antagonizing public opinion—is nothing new. As the Stuyvesant
story suggests, “woke capital” has been around for centuries. Only the
ideology behind wokeness has changed.
On some level, Soukup recognizes this. He traces “socially
responsible” investing as far back as John Wesley, the
eighteenth-century English cleric who founded Methodism, and who told
investors to steer clear of businesses that violated God’s law. Even as
late as the twentieth century, some conservative investors avoided
companies that made alcohol and tobacco. The difference between then and
now lies in the nature of today’s wokeness—and its totality. Most major
American corporations have joined with academia, elite media, and
government bureaucracies to push a progressive cultural agenda.
Soukup’s book reads like an indictment, suggesting a conspiracy at
work, almost forgetting that all trades have their seamy side. It brings
to mind tracts written in the 1970s that accused the Rockefellers, the
Trilateral Commission, and the big banks of trying to take over the
world. Yet this is the wrong approach. With so many average Americans
today as woke as their corporate leaders, one senses an inexorable
“woke” force moving through society, carrying America’s corporate
leaders along with it. In fact, that force is capitalism itself.
The Dialectics of Woke Capital
Karl Marx has much to say about capitalism, but Soukup overlooks him,
tracing wokeness, instead, back to Marx’s missteps. The absence of any
revolution in the West along the lines Marx had predicted led to
Gramsci’s view that a cultural revolution within institutions needed to
precede the economic revolution. This led to Lukács’s position that all
of society must first undergo a cultural revolution, which in turn led
to Marcuse’s call for a sexual revolution and, later, censorship. The
result, says Soukup, is “Cultural Marxism,” which, combined with
identity politics, is the ideology of today’s woke. Yet if Soukup had
paid more attention to Marx, he might have found a better way to explain
“woke capital”—and to fight it. In a supreme irony, those seeking to
advance a center-right agenda today could benefit from reading Marx.
Marx thought dialectically. What does this mean? Take a certain
social phenomenon: it develops to its utmost limits, makes use of all
its potentialities, creates the highest thing it can, and stops. This is
called the thesis. Then comes the antithesis, a hostile force. It also
unfolds to the very end, and stops. Born out of these two hostile
phenomena is a third force, the synthesis, making use of the result
achieved by both, and reconciling them. And society moves forward again,
always forward, toward the new.
A rough dialectical history of the United States since the end of the
Civil War might be said to unfold as follows, with woke capitalism the
most recent entry. In 1870, most Americans worked as independent small
farmers. Most business firms were also small, with one or two employees
besides the owner.2
A culture of individualism and a religious ethos that gently repressed
greed complemented this economy. The country prospered, yet the
economy’s small scale limited how much it could produce. This was the
thesis.
Hostile forces emerged in the form of robber barons who built large
corporations, sometimes through deceit and manipulation. A culture of
social Darwinism that equated worldly success with spiritual superiority
replaced the older, more innocent religious ethos. Many Americans found
themselves subject to both the vicissitudes of the market and business
chicanery, as large companies undercut their ability to make a living as
independent operators. Indeed, one of the most important changes in the
U.S. economy during the second half of the nineteenth century was the
dramatic increase in the size of the average enterprise, along with a
reduction in the number of firms in each sector.3
The new system produced more wealth than before through improved
economies of scale, yet its roisterous atmosphere created uncertainty,
and it soon reached its productive limits. This was the antithesis.
Corporate America and welfare-state liberalism were the synthesis. In
the first half of the twentieth century, the robber barons’ large
enterprises became the tamed corporations that promised stable salaried
employment, while the robber baron himself morphed into the harmless
corporate manager, indeed a business bureaucrat. The old religion that
had gently repressed greed returned in a slightly new form called the
“social ethic,” which promoted the ideal of company teamwork and
repressed outward displays of ambition. Meanwhile, government added
another layer of stability in the form of FDIC and Social Security and,
later, in the form of welfare payments, Medicare, and Medicaid.
After the Second World War, the American economy found itself
launched on a great boom, yet this synthesis soon reached its productive
limits. By the 1970s, large corporations promising stability had grown
less flexible and innovative. Meanwhile, government spending had
increased to one-third of GDP. High tax rates sustained the expanded
welfare state, yet they also discouraged investment, while government
intervention to increase people’s purchasing power contributed to
inflation.
A dialectical analysis explains what happened. From 1950 to 1970,
welfare and entitlement programs grew from 9 percent of GDP to 15
percent4
(while military spending trended lower but ticked up during the Vietnam
War). Capitalism needed a “floor” to avoid the risk posed by a
demoralized and disgruntled workforce. In the form of expanded Social
Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, federally assisted welfare
programs, agricultural subsidies, and a minimum wage, government became
an active force for personal income security. A stable political
climate—a necessity for business investment—could not exist without this
floor, yet the new government spending led to inflation, which
discouraged business investment. It was a contradiction.
Inflation had already climbed to 4 percent on average during the late
1960s, and to 6 percent in the early 1970s, before the “oil shocks” in
1973.5
The origins of this inflation ran deeper: the synthesis was unraveling
through contradiction. A century before, a spike in oil prices would
have more likely caused a depression rather than inflation, as
industries would have curtailed their operations and consumers cut back
on their spending. A culture that prized “standing on one’s own two
feet,” spurned handouts, and one that believed “what goes up must come
down” would have discouraged any artificial increase in business or
consumer purchasing power through government spending. The synthesis
that prevailed during the 1970s, however, encouraged such spending. Its
culture embraced entitlements and believed “What goes up today is likely
to go up tomorrow,” leading to the kind of behavior that accelerated
inflation and hastened the demise of the old synthesis.
Hostile forces—the antithesis—soon emerged in the form of upstart
companies such as Microsoft, Sprint, and Apple, which spearheaded
innovation. In the case of Microsoft, for example, IBM paid Bill Gates
to develop an operating system for PCs almost as an afterthought,
overlooking software’s potential, and allowed Gates to retain the
intellectual property rights, which would fuel the rise of Microsoft.
One hostile force even carried the word “hostile” in its name. A new
merger wave broke out in the 1980s that dwarfed all earlier periods of
corporate consolidation, with the “hostile takeover,” once a rarity,
increasingly the dominant form.6
The result was another contradiction of capitalism. High interest rates
needed to fight inflation depressed the price of corporate shares,
while the deregulation needed to boost the economy allowed corporate
raiders to buy out these undervalued corporations and sell off their
valuable assets. The mergers created new wealth, but also displaced
millions of workers and middle managers. Those who kept their jobs often
lost the economic security they had enjoyed with the traditional large
companies. IRAs and 401(k)s gradually replaced the old company-based
defined-benefit pension plans. When U.S. corporations threatened to move
production overseas, labor’s influence weakened and private sector
union membership began its long decline.
During this period, which spans the Reagan years, a new
entrepreneurial culture replaced the old Social Ethic. The notion that
“greed is good” justified the new economy, much as the Social Ethic had
justified mid-twentieth-century corporate America and social Darwinism
had justified the robber barons. Yet the entrepreneurial culture’s
belief in the “primacy of economic man” ignored emerging tears in the
social fabric, ranging from African Americans marooned in crime-ridden
cities to families stressed by the new demand that both spouses work. In
the latter case, capitalism not only encouraged women to enter the
workforce, but also demanded it, and benefited from it. With businesses
paying relatively less to any individual worker, both spouses now had to
work to maintain the middle-class lifestyle that a single wage earner
could once provide—a point that both social conservatives and economic
progressives, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, would later focus on.7 These social strains, along with economic uncertainty, limited how much this economic organization could produce.
What has been called “progressive neoliberalism” emerged as the new
synthesis, drawing from the two previous historical stages. It reached
its high point during the Clinton administration. Capitalism’s rules
continued to guide the economy in accordance with the “primacy of
economic man.” Under President Clinton, for example, shareholders
prospered through lower capital gains taxes and more free trade
agreements. Clinton also tried to control the deficit while restricting
welfare payments.
Meanwhile, in the culture, specific identity groups were targeted for
support to manage tears in the social fabric. It was a variation on the
old Social Ethic that had tried to help people “adjust” by attending to
their feelings. Women got set-asides, while African Americans got
easier access to subprime mortgages. Yet more important was the
rhetorical support given to these specific groups, which didn’t hang
very heavy on the corporate balance sheet. African Americans, women,
Hispanics, and Native Americans gained more attention and
recognition—for example, in the form of “hate crime” legislation,
postage stamps bearing the face of a marginalized group’s leader, or
holidays named after the same—with little financial cost. These were
“cultural entitlements” rather than economic entitlements, directed
toward helping people feel better about themselves independent of their
material condition. George H. W. Bush’s “kinder, gentler conservatism”
and George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” operated within this
tradition, as these mottos supported capitalism, while also trying to
compensate people psychologically—and they did, in some nebulous way.
Yet this neoliberalism soon reached its productive limits, which is
where “woke capital” comes in. The neoliberal synthesis accelerated the
offshoring of manufacturing, while many of the new tech companies
employed fewer people than the old large companies did. Wealth
increased, but was concentrated in fewer hands, while the bottom half of
the population faced increasing pressures on living standards. After
2000, weaker growth brought lower interest rates, which contributed to
real estate and financial bubbles.....
