“This excellent book reveals the threat of ‘progressive’
corporations to humanity, democracy and the environment.
It offers a compelling and urgent call for us to wake
up to ‘woke capitalism’ before it is too late!”
Peter Bloom, University of Essex
“Woke Capitalism testifies that management and
organization scholars are abreast – or perhaps even
ahead – of the important changes in society, and ready
to share their knowledge with the interested public.”
Barbara Czarniawska, University of Gothenburg

WOKE CAPITALISM

WOKE CAPITALISM
How Corporate Morality Is
Sabotaging Democracy
Carl Rhodes

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by
Bristol University Press
University of Bristol
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All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The
University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury
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Cover design: Nicky Borowiec
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Printed in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow

Contents
About the Author
Acknowledgements
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

viii
ix

The Problem with Woke Capitalism
Corporate Populists
The Woke Reversal
Capitalism Goes Woke
Shareholder Primacy
A Wolf in Woke Clothing
All that Glitters Is Not Green
The CEO Activist
The Race to Wokeness
Racial Capitalism/Woke Capitalism
The Best a Woke Corporation Can Be
The Right Hand Gives
Getting Woke to Woke Capitalism

Notes and References
Index

1
17
29
42
57
71
84
98
111
124
138
151
167
177
221

vii

About the Author
Carl Rhodes is Professor of Organization Studies at the University
of Technology Sydney. His central focus is on how corporations
can and should be held to account for their actions by citizens and
by civil society. This work endeavours to critically question and
reformulate the role of business in society such that prosperity
can be shared by all. Carl regularly writes for the mainstream and
independent press on ethics, politics and the economy. His work
can be found publications such as Fast Company, Business Insider,
The Guardian, Common Dreams and The Conversation. Carl’s most
recent books are CEO Society: The Corporate Takeover of Everyday
Life (Zed Books, 2018, with Peter Bloom) and Disturbing Business
Ethics (Routledge, 2019). International in scope, his work has been
translated into Chinese, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Polish,
Spanish and Turkish.

viii

Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I respectfully acknowledge that I live and
work on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. The
Gadigal people have cared for their community, land and waters for
thousands of generations, based on their deep knowledge of their
country. I pay my respects to their Ancestors and their Elders and
acknowledge their ongoing status as the First Peoples of this land.
In writing this book, I have benefited greatly from the generosity
of friends and colleagues who have taken time and care to provide
feedback on draft versions of the manuscript. Specifically, I would
like to thank Daryl Adair, Michelle Baddeley, Peter Bloom,
Alan Bradshaw, Tom Calvard, Peter Fleming, Joel Hietanen, Wal
Jarvis, Kate Kenny, Celina McEwen, Dave Michayluk, Janet Page,
Alison Pullen, Robynne Quiggin, Gaby Ramia, Leona Tam and
Nareen Young.
Special thanks also go to Paul Stevens, senior editor at Bristol
University Press. As well as working with me through the
mechanics of the editorial process, Paul has been unwavering in
his encouragement, support and personal interest in this project.
Through the course of writing the book, I had the opportunity
to discuss the main ideas with Alan Bradshaw and Joel Hietanen
as part of their Quarantined Market Podcast. A version of that
discussion was published as a chapter in their book The Dictionary
of Coronavirus Culture (Repeater Books, 2020). I thank Alan
and Joel for this opportunity to develop my thinking about the
phenomenon of woke capitalism.
Another such opportunity arose in a conversation with Helen
Trinca, the managing editor of The Australian newspaper. Helen’s
curiosity and insightful questions provided an early opportunity to
articulate my central thesis. Thanks also to Helen for writing about

ix

WOKE CAPITALISM

this in an article titled ‘New challenges for “woke capitalism”’,
published in The Australian on 26 May 2020.
As work on the book progressed, I also had the opportunity
to publish five op-ed articles exploring the relevance of woke
capitalism to key political events. The first of these examined
how corporations responded to the Australian bushfire crisis of
early 2020 and how this reflected a change in public sentiment
towards climate change. The article, published by ABC News
on 18 January 2020, was titled ‘When corporations back woke
capitalism, it means climate change action has gone mainstream’.
The second article was ‘Where are the woke capitalists now?’,
published in Common Dreams on 1 April 2020, and explored how
corporations had – or more precisely, had not – responded to the
social consequences that arose in the early stage of the pandemic.
The third article was published in Independent Australia on
11 June 2020 and was called ‘The Morrison government’s antidemocratic response to COVID-19’. Here I look at how the
Australian government addressed the challenges of COVID-19
and why it reflected a dangerously elitist and authoritarian politics.
On 25 August 2020, I published the fourth article, ‘Don’t be
fooled by a wolf in woke clothing: how the world’s billionaires are
cashing in on COVID-19’, in Common Dreams. The article showed
how, despite their progressive rhetoric, the world’s billionaires were
cashing in on the pandemic while the economic wellbeing and
security of too many working people were being devastated.
Finally, ‘Pandemic profiteers go woke to grab political power’
was published in Independent Australia on 14 January 2021. In this
article, I reflect on how some of the world’s richest people made
massive philanthropic pledges during 2021, and how this apparent
generosity masks a move to claim political power.
I thank the editors of each of these outlets for publishing these
articles and allowing me to gain crucial feedback on the ideas that
inform the book.

x

1

The Problem with
Woke Capitalism
‘If you’re woke, you dig it’ was the headline of William Melvin
Kelley’s 1962 article in The New York Times.1 In the article, Kelley
notes that the language associated at the time with beatnik culture
had been appropriated from the lexicon of Black America, often
after its originators had stopped using it. Men were cats, women
were chicks, to be hip meant to be fashionable or informed, if
something was good it was cool, and if you dig something, it meant
that you liked or understood it.
Interestingly, while Kelley used the term ‘woke’ in the title of
his article, he did not explain it explicitly in the main text. Perhaps
as a criticism of the White appropriation of Black language, he
decided to keep the meaning of the eponymous word secret.
The secrecy was part of Kelley’s message. African Americans
had learned to create their own words prior to the abolition of
slavery to be able to speak without the master knowing what they
were saying.
If we fast forward to June 2017 the term ‘woke’ had become
so widespread in its usage in the US and across the world that it
was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Whereas the previous
dictionary entry simply listed woke as meaning to wake up, they
now added the more contemporary meaning. They noted that
‘participial use of woke in some African American varieties of
English has generated an adjectival meaning that has recently
become prominent in general American use’. Acknowledging
Kelley as the first person to cite the word, the dictionary’s definition
1

WOKE CAPITALISM

of woke was now part of the mainstream, referring to being ‘well
informed’ or ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’.2
In his 1962 article, Kelley also noted the fluid nature of African
American language use. The language can be modified, he wrote,
to ‘give a word, already in use, its opposite meaning. [For example]
at one time the connotations of “jive” were all good; now they
are bad, or at least questionable’.3 This change in meaning has
certainly happened to the word ‘woke’ today, although ironically it
was done by those of a politically reactionary persuasion. Today a
conventional use of the term ‘woke’ does not only mean being alert
to social injustice. Instead, it refers to a person who affects a false,
superficial and politically correct morality. Think, for example,
of mega-rich celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Katy Perry.
They fly by private jet to a climate summit at a luxury resort in
Sicily funded by Google. It is difficult not to be cynical about the
authenticity, or at least consistency, of their politics.4 Such cynicism
leads to the view that to be woke is merely an ethical fashion
statement that is in favour of apparently radical political causes as
they relate to, for example, movements against sexism, racism, and
other forms of discrimination and oppression. Other supposedly
woke causes are environmentalism, mental health awareness,
LGBTQI+ rights, and economic inequality.
Crucially, the negative use of the term ‘woke’ proposes that those
people who support progressive political causes are insincere as
well as ineffective in their politics. If someone disparages you as
a ‘woketard’ or a member of the ‘wokerati’ then you are accused
of being obsessed with appearing ethically right-on on issues
ranging from environmental protection to identity politics. You
are also being accused on taking on ‘wokeness’ because you think
it is a fashionable thing to do. There have even been reports of a
trend that cultural commentator Serena Smith calls ‘wokefishing’.5
Wokefishing involves people, usually men, deceptively presenting
themselves as woke to attract sexual partners. Wokefish fear that
their real political beliefs would be a turn-off. Smith explains that
to counter this they ‘first present themselves as a protest-attending,
sex-positive, anti-racist, intersectional feminist who drinks ethically
sourced oat milk and has read the back catalogue of Audre Lorde,
twice’.6 Deploying another neologism, these people adopt a
‘fauxgressive’ position that falsely uses progressive politics to pursue
2

The Problem with Woke Capitalism

a set of goals, in this case predatory sexual conquest, that is entirely
inconsistent with that politics.
Criticisms of fauxgressiveness are not limited to falsely pretended
sexual relationships. Indeed, such complaints reach something of
a crescendo when those advocating for particular political causes
do so from a position of privilege and where they have no real
personal stake in the political issue they champion and certainly
are not in any danger of harm or discrimination. You might even
compete in the ‘Woke Olympics’, a game that writer Maya Binyam
insightfully mocks in terms of the politics of White anti-racism in
the US. As Binyam writes:
The Woke Olympics – broadcast live on twitter,
promoted by the likes of Woke Clothing – is the multiround tournament to which these games belong. It’s
players, almost all of whom are white, are disciples of
the refrain ‘stay woke’, a reminder to name racism when
it appears, or, rather, to name fellow white folk who
are lagging behind. […] The best players are those who
accumulate the names of people who ‘are’ racist or of
things that ‘have’ racism in them.7
The point that Binyam makes is that the purpose of this game is less
about addressing pressing political issues such as racial discrimination
and inequality, and more about establishing the politically correct
moral credentials of the players. To be woke is cast as a form
of insincere self-righteousness. Those chastised are said to be
hypocritical and unbefitting of the high moral ground from which
they profess. They engage in ‘virtue signalling’ whereby they wear
their righteousness on their sleeves for the whole world to see. Critics
rebuke the woke for being self-obsessed and shallow on account of
their inauthentic self-branding and impression management.
The labelling of people as woke is part of a culture war fought
largely between liberal progressives and reactionary conservatives.
In recent years, progressive causes have dominated the public
imagination through, for example, highly publicized debates
over racism, same-sex marriage, climate change, animal rights
and gender equality. These are serious responses to entrenched
social, political and environmental causes. Those who don’t believe
3

WOKE CAPITALISM

in them, however, have responded not just by making reasoned
counter-arguments but by trying to undermine the sincerity of
the people who make the original arguments. While it may be
the case that some people take on political positions because they
appear fashionable, that does not mean that all people who support
those causes are inauthentic, or that the causes themselves are not
worthwhile. Disparaging people as woke to discredit the political
position they advocate is a prime example of an ad hominem
argument. Rather than engaging in an honest discussion of the
issues, the credibility of the person raising it is brought into
question. Ad hominem arguments are, however, well known to
be a false and underhanded way to get one’s point across without
actually dealing with the substantive matters at hand.
An example might best illustrate this newly pejorative application
of the term ‘woke’. The media has long accused the Duke and
Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle,
of being woke. Harry was dubbed the ‘Prince of Woke’, whose
formerly fun-loving ways had drastically changed since he married.
As the UK tabloid headline announced: ‘Prince Harry has since
swapped partying for posturing on a range of “woke” issues with
his wife Meghan Markle’.8 Things heated up even more in early
2020 when the royal couple made a bold announcement. On
8 January, Markle sent out a message on Instagram. Beneath the
smiling faces of her and her husband, it read:
After many months of reflection and internal discussions,
we have chosen to make a transition this year in
starting to carve out a progressive new role within this
institution. We intend to step back as ‘senior’ members
of the Royal Family [… this will provide] our family
with the space to focus on the next chapter, including
the launch of our new charitable entity.
The press went wild! As much as the announcement was a shock,
not the least of the media’s energy was directed as a personal attack
against Markle. Markle had always been controversial. A divorced
American woman of mixed African American and European
American parentage, when she started dating Harry in 2016,
she immediately attracted the ire of the worst kinds of bigoted
4

The Problem with Woke Capitalism

conservatism. While women who married into the royal family had
long suffered press harassment, Markle received an exceptional level
of abuse on account of her multiracial heritage. In one of the most
hateful and immature expressions of racism possible, when Markle’s
son Archie was born in 2019, a BBC radio broadcaster turned to
Twitter to post a picture of a couple holding a chimpanzee as if it
was a child. He captioned it ‘Royal baby leaves hospital’.9
As Michelle Ruiz reported in Vanity Fair, Markle was subjected
to ‘outright racism of the overwhelmingly White press corps
during her pregnancy – including unsubtle nods to the “angry
black woman” stereotype, and a certain discomfort with a woman
of color finding a fairy-tale romance’.10 Things were so bad back
in 2016 that on 8 November of that year Harry released a formal
statement on the royal family’s website. In the statement, he
condemned the press coverage of his then girlfriend based on ‘the
racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and
racism of social media trolls and web article comments’.11
With the announcement of their stepping back from official
royal duties the attacks on Markle took on a new type of venom.
Radio host Eamonn Holmes called her ‘woke, weak, manipulative,
spoilt’.12 TV host Piers Morgan lambasted the royal couple. He
stated that:
[T]hey want to be super-woke celebrities (with all
the outrageous ‘Do as we say not as we do’ hectoring
hypocrisy they’ve already brought to that status) who
get to keep all the trappings of royal life without any of
the hard, boring bits and the right to cash in on their
status however they choose.13
Those who might defend the duke and duchess are not spared the
woke whip either. The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, retorted
with ‘we are sick […] of woke morons crying racism over Press
criticism of Meghan and Harry’.14
Crucially, what this example illustrates is the perceived insincerity
of progressive left-wing political positions, especially when they
disrupt what is perceived to be the natural order of a particular
conservative political order. On the one hand, the duke and
duchess, as members of the royal family, are at the very apex
5

WOKE CAPITALISM

of the British class system. On the other hand, they were well
known for supporting political causes such as women’s rights,
racial equality, HIV/AIDS activism and clean water activism.15
But they also embody a level of power and wealth that is virtually
incomprehensible to the rest of us. As members of the royal
family, they symbolize a class system that has long perpetuated the
structural inequalities that still dominate British society. Indeed,
this was another reason that Markle was deemed suspicious; as a
middle-class kid made good, she represented the very class mobility
that threatens the establishment. Nevertheless, that royalty might
espouse political positions that disavow the very privilege that they
enjoy, while at the same time not impeding that privilege in any
way, resulted in severe levels of derision. Precisely because of this
they were condemned as woke.
That those who benefit most from inequality might position
themselves as progressive and align themselves with left-leaning
political causes epitomizes what conservative pundits diagnose
as the very heart of the woke problem. Another dimension of
the pejorative use of the term ‘woke’ concerns the perceived lack
of effectiveness of woke politics. Complaining that people are
woke implies that they fail to engage in politics that lead to any
real changes. This line of argument was epitomized in 2019 in
statements by none other than former US president Barack Obama.
When addressing the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago,
Obama opined on contemporary US politics:
This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and
you’re always politically woke, and all that stuff – you
should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There
are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have
flaws. People who you are fighting with may love
their kids and share certain things with you […] I do
get a sense among certain young people, and this is
accelerated by social media, that the way of me making
change is to be as judgmental as possible about other
people and that’s enough. Like if I tweet or hashtag
about how you didn’t do something right, or used the
wrong verb, then I consider that I can feel pretty good
about myself because, ‘man did you see how woke I
6

The Problem with Woke Capitalism

was, I called you out’ […] That is not activism, that is
not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting
stones, you are probably not going to get that far.16
Obama’s statement reflects on some fundamental elements about
what the term ‘woke’ means when people use it to criticize political
activity. By this account, when people go woke, it is not only
all talk and no action, but it is also a form of superficial selfaggrandisement that serves little or no benefit other than to shore
up the sense of righteousness of the woke person. This wokeness,
for Obama, is not a way of addressing serious political issues in a
meaningful way or making lasting positive change.
Beneath simplistic criticisms of wokeness, however, lie much more
complex power relationships as they relate to progressive politics.
Writing in the Black Agenda Report, political analyst Danny
Haiphong criticizes Obama as reflecting a cynicism about youth
activism and the emergence of a new politically aware generation.
If anything, Haiphong argues, the mainstreaming of wokeness has
been a means through which the political establishment has tried to
neuter political activism. Haiphong pulls no punches:
‘Call out culture’ commodified movement culture and
channeled activists into profitable modes of expression
that promoted individual recognition, academic
prestige, and careerism rather than the plight of the
poor, especially the Black poor. […] ‘Wokeness’ and
‘purity’ must be shot down by Obama because it
threatens the legitimacy of political class actors like him
who expect to be praised for their intelligent leadership
over the great race to the bottom.17
Undermining serious political causes by calling them woke is a
way of diluting resistance to the political status quo. Such woke
name calling serves a definitively conservative function: it shields
existing power structures from criticism so that they do not face
any real challenge.
This recasting of wokeness as shallow, self-serving, moralistic
and insincere reaches one of its peaks when it comes to business
and capitalism, the central topic of this book. Indeed, with its
7

WOKE CAPITALISM

growing use in English vocabulary from the mid-2010s, it did not
take long for the term ‘woke’ to be applied to corporations who
publicly supported socially progressive causes. This was far from
positive, with reactionary critics shaming such corporations. Such
critics use woke capitalism as a descriptor for the increasing number
of corporations, especially multinationals, who align themselves
with social movements while using that alignment in widespread
publicity and advertising. These mega-corporations are charged
with ‘woke washing’: a marketing and public relations exercise
whereby companies hope that by being associated with right-on
political causes they will gain customer support and ultimately
commercial gain.
There are many examples. Gillette was accused of everything
from ‘perpetuating a war against men to donning a cloak of
wokeness to cash in on the progressive air of our current cultural
climate’ for its ad campaign addressing toxic masculinity.18 When
Ben and Jerry’s introduced the Pecan Resist ice cream flavour
to ‘peacefully resist the Trump administration’s regressive and
discriminatory policies’,19 Fox News reported ‘Ben & Jerry’s has
a new ice cream flavor, dedicated to the resistance. And like the
resistance, it contains nuts.’ They went on to dismiss this as ‘another
example of how the left injects politics into everything’.20
When clothing retailer Zara released a collection of ‘ungendered
clothing’ they were decried, with one critic suggesting that these
clothes were a way for Zara to say ‘“Look, we’re woke!” into a
giant, megaphone, expecting a cookie’.21 When Adidas campaigned
to remove Native American mascots from school sports teams’
names and uniforms, they were accused of ‘sanctimoniously virtuesignaling about others’ behavior’.22 In 2021, the US state of Georgia
was embroiled in controversy for changing its voting laws in a
way that would suppress Black people from voting. In protest, US
Major League Baseball decided to move its annual all-star game
away from Georgia’s capital of Atlanta, to Denver, Colorado.
Writing in the conservative magazine the National Review, Philip
Klein described the league’s move as a ‘seminal moment in the
development of woke capitalism’. Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines
similarly condemned the law. Klein decried their move as the very
exemplification of how ‘major corporations have grown into the
central cultural enforcer of the Left’.23
8

The Problem with Woke Capitalism

To the extent that woke corporations may be pilloried for being
weak, opportunistic and hypocritical, what has also dominated
much public discussion of ‘woke capitalism’ to date is the
criticism that it is bad for capitalism itself. Distracted by causes
that do not support the proper function of business to maximize
profits for shareholders, woke capitalism is a threat to prosperity
and economic growth, the critics argue. According to these
conservative detractors, corporations are increasingly enthralled
by politically correct social issues in a way that goes beyond simple
woke washing. The conservative fear is that executives are serious
about their wokeness. Even worse, this seriousness might lead them
to pursue woke causes at the expense of what should be the true
purpose of their business. Progressive politics and conservative
economics simply are incompatible, and, for the sake of capitalism,
should not be mixed.
Writing in The American Conservative, a magazine published by
the libertarian-conservative American Ideas Institute, political
commentator Rod Dreher announces that ‘woke capitalism is our
enemy’. Why so? This is what he had to say:
The familiar left vs. right categories no longer serve as
reliable guides to our cultural reality. The cultural left
has captured the bureaucracies at American corporations
[…] I have seen personally how companies will do
politically correct things that actually hurt their business
model, but that win its management pats on the back
among their social cohort. [They assert] that the total
politicization of the company’s culture is critical to its
business success … [This is] a recipe for creating intense
anxiety and suspicion within the company. It’s as clear
as day. You cannot imagine why any sensible company
would embrace these principles and techniques, which
can only hurt its ability to compete.24
Those, like Dreher, who condemn woke capitalism do so because
they believe that it is an affront to capitalism’s true virtues.
Commonly trotted out as a defence is Nobel Prize-winning
US economist Milton Friedman’s 1970 maxim that ‘the social
responsibility of business is to increase its profits’. As Friedman
9

WOKE CAPITALISM

elaborated, ‘that responsibility is to conduct the business in
accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as
much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the
society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical
custom’.25 What is unstated is the assumption that the prevailing
‘ethical custom’ does not contradict the idea that businesses should
pursue shareholder financial interests with scant concern for anyone
else. Friedman’s position encases a normative position that entirely
disregards the possibility that the societies where capitalism operates
might develop an irresolvable tension between the ethical custom
of a community and the financial interests of the owners of capital.
What is missing is an acknowledgement that ethics might just be
more than a limiting condition setting out what businesses should
not do in pursuing profits. Ethics can also question the very system
that capitalism is built on.
Friedman’s basic position, that businesses should be directed
primarily by shareholder financial interest, remains dominant in
much criticism of woke capitalism. Jon Pritchett and Ed Tiryakian,
writing for the libertarian think tank Foundation for Economic
Education, epitomized this when they announced: ‘Milton
Friedman was right on corporate guidance, and “woke” CEOs
ignore him at shareholder peril’. The peril they fear is that it is a
form of ‘corporate groupthink’ that is ‘hostile to capitalism’ because
it is a distraction from what is seen as the principal purpose of
business.26 Debates about wokeness in business tend to imagine that
the political choice is limited to two opposite options. On one side,
we have the woke position that corporations should be actively
involved in progressive political causes for the benefit of society.
On the other side, we have a politically conservative position that
corporations should keep their noses out of politics and stay focused
on ensuring commercial success for the benefit of their shareholders.
The problem with this simplistic rendering of progressive politics
is that it is a somewhat flimsy – although effective – set-up by those
on the right side of politics to cement the value of the economic
status quo that they believe in. This status quo, established over
at least the past 40 years, resulted in a process of massive growth
in corporate power,27 coupled with vast expansion in inequality28
on a global scale. From this perspective, woke capitalism receives
criticism because, in detracting business from its true economic
10

The Problem with Woke Capitalism

mission, it has become a dilution of capitalism itself. If we accept
this woke vs. conservative arrangement, we are left with little
space to move if we wish to maintain a commitment to progressive
democratic politics while at the same time bringing into question
the injustice of a corporate capitalist system that appears to see no
end in the production of inequality for its own benefit.
Is it possible that the corporate adoption of wokeness does
the very opposite of what conservative critics condemn it for?
Rather than being the death knell of capitalism, might business
becoming woke serve to extend the power and reach of capitalism
in deeply problematic ways? If so, and this is the central idea that
informs this book, then woke capitalism needs to be opposed and
resisted on democratic grounds because it allows for public political
interests to become increasingly dominated by the private interests
of global capital. If we follow this line of thought, problems for
democracy arise as the considerable weight of corporate resources
gets mobilized to capitalize on public morality. Corporate selfinterest is never far behind as our morality itself becomes captured
and exploited as a corporate resource.
Cloaked in the apparent moral glow of self-righteous and often
facile political positions, civic debate and democratic dissent are
replaced with the self-congratulatory slickness of marketing and
public relations campaigning. This is often done in line with what
Helen Lewis calls the ‘“iron law of woke capitalism”: ‘Brands will
gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for
genuine reform’. Meanwhile, as Lewis goes on to explain, ‘Those
at the top – who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy,
and highly educated – are not being asked to give up anything
themselves.’29 As Lewis suggests, care needs to be taken not just to
dismiss corporate wokeness as being meaningless, but rather to be
attuned to the seriousness of its political implications, especially as
they involve bolstering a socially unequal status quo. In particular,
the implications of woke capitalism for the future of democracy
are considerable, as the democratic tradition that values equality,
freedom, voice and debate between participating citizens becomes
overwhelmed by a corporate voice speaking its soundbite-size
version of morality.
What you will find in this book is an extended exploration of
the central themes and practice of woke capitalism as an affront
11

WOKE CAPITALISM

to democracy that needs to be replaced with an invigorated
democratic spirit. We need to be careful here how we use this
term ‘democracy’. As political theorist Wendy Brown reminds us,
the idea of democracy is not to be conflated with the idea of the
modern liberal democratic state. She argues that at our current
historical juncture ‘democratic state commitments to equality,
liberty, inclusion and constitutionalism are now subordinate to the
project of economic growth, competitive positioning, and capital
enhancement’.30 That is not to say that economic prosperity is not
essential, but rather the direction of the subordination would need
overturning to preserve democracy. The democratic ideal would
see economic prosperity at the service of the people, not the other
way around. In place of a woke corporate power, real democracy is
based on a fundamental belief in popular sovereignty. If anything,
the massive yet still growing power of corporations and their grip
on contemporary politics is a regression to a neo-feudalism where
political authority rests with the economically powerful rather than
being the will of the people. American constitutional attorney
John W. Whitehead gets straight to the point when he argues that
large corporations comprise a new elite who are fast superseding
democratic government in their power over society. Politically,
these corporations increasingly determine the laws which are
supposed to govern them. Economically, they dominate through
the elimination of competition and securing large government
contracts. Our age, Whitehead convincingly claims, is one where
‘corporate-state rulers dominate the rest of us’.31
Woke capitalism is today’s extension of this revamped feudalism,
one that cedes not just legal authority to corporations, but also
moral and political authority. This book will explore the contours
and expressions of woke capitalism, charting its dangerous course
to the ‘de-democratization of democracy’, to borrow a phrase from
Yannis Stavrakakis, professor of political science.32 As Stavrakakis
explains, democracy requires the institutionalization of political
antagonism and political competition such that no single authority
holds power in perpetuity. Totalitarianism and authoritarian power
are ever-present threats to democracy. They disavow the forms of
political difference and contestation that are democracy’s hallmarks.
The central ambiguity of democracy is that it is practised by a
united community of citizens who are simultaneously characterized
12

The Problem with Woke Capitalism

by antagonistic political positions. ‘To cover up the ambiguity in
democracy’, Stavrakakis argues, ‘is to de-democratize democracy’.33
In the case of the expansion of corporate political power of
which woke capitalism is a constitutive part, de-democratization
amplifies when politics moves from the public-political sphere to
the private-economic sphere. In this context, political dominance
is pursued not through the contest of political views in public
political forums, but rather through the loudness of the voices
of those with economic power. Thankfully, de-democratization
has not been achieved, with corporations regularly being held
to account publicly for their words and deeds. Nevertheless, it
is in the direction of de-democratization that woke capitalism is
moving. By implication, if we are to retain the values of freedom
and equality that are central to the democratic promise, we need
to resist woke capitalism.
Woke capitalism is a growing and troubling dimension of
contemporary economic and political life, especially among the
mammoth multinational corporations that dominate so many
aspects of our lives. To be critical of this dangerous trend does not
mean having to align with the reactionary conservative pundits.
They decry wokeness as an affront to the self-interested profitseeking heart of capitalism. By contrast, the real danger of woke
capitalism is not that it will weaken the capitalist system, but rather
that it will further cement the concentration of political power
among a corporate elite. That this trend continues is a threat to
democracy. It is also a threat to a progressive politics that dares to
retain hope in the possibility of equality, liberty and social solidarity.
To better understand this threat, this book begins by illustrating
the meaning of the term ‘woke’ by exploring the unresolvable
irony that is manifest when business corporations lay claim to
public purpose and social responsibility while profiting handsomely
along the way. From that start, the history of woke capitalism
is assessed as it can be charted from its disparate antecedents in
1950s corporate social responsibility, through the early days of
1980s neoliberalism, to the present time. This corporate history
is traced alongside the emergence of the term ‘woke’ in Black
American culture and its adoption and mutation by mainstream
culture, eventually intersecting with the corporate world in the
form of ‘woke capitalism’ in the late 2010s. As well as teasing
13

WOKE CAPITALISM

out the emergent meaning of woke capitalism, this leads to a
discussion of the various political causes that have been taken up
in global capitalism: for example, LGBTQI+ rights, marriage
equality, #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter and the prevention of sexual
harassment. What is perhaps most revealing about this are the social
causes that big business has not supported, such as income and
wealth inequality, the labour movement and corporate tax evasion.
As central themes, the book explores the specific corporate
activities that comprise woke capitalism in practice. Political
activism is a particular focus, examining how corporations and chief
executive officers (CEOs) are personally becoming spokespeople
for social justice causes and how this conflates corporate and social
power while at the same time making ethical heroes of managers
and the businesses they lead. Corporations are deploying their
considerable power through marketing, advertising and public
relations activities not to directly sell products, but to spread the
message of social justice causes. The book considers what the brand
association between those causes and corporate products means
for democracy. Also discussed is how corporations capitalize on
changing patterns of public sentiment when they seek to align
themselves with and influence the moral positions of consumers.
Similar issues are considered in terms of corporate philanthropy
and its escalation in size and scope in recent years.
This book is clearly and deliberately an extended critique of
woke capitalism as practised by large, usually multinational,
corporations. To be clear, this is not meant as a condemnation of
business activity per se. Rather, it draws attention to the political
problems created by how business is increasingly practised at the
big end of town. Businesses make a significant contribution to
society, most obviously through the provision of goods and services,
and employment. They also harbour the potential to support
democracy, especially through the payment of fair taxes, following
the rule of law, abstaining from unfair competition, and paying
decent wages that promote equality.
Too many corporations do not behave in this way. They engage
in elaborate practices of tax avoidance and even illegal tax evasion.
They bend and break laws, or pressurize politicians to change the
rules for their commercial advantage. They pursue monopolistic
control of the markets they operate in and engage in vicious price
14

The Problem with Woke Capitalism

gouging. They pay workers as little as possible, lobbying against fair
wages and moving operations around the world to get the cheapest
labour possible. On top of all of this, these same corporations
can promote themselves as ‘purpose driven’, ‘socially responsible’,
‘stakeholder driven’ and even ‘ethical’.
Woke capitalism is an attempt to break the compromise between
corporate moral legitimacy and capitalist inequality. Part and parcel
of this is the removal of the distinction between the private interests
of business and the public interests of the democratic state, such that
business can simply appropriate political power for its own purposes.
Existing responses to woke capitalism, however, tend towards two
dominant, yet opposing, directions. From the right, we have the
view that left-wing activists have hoodwinked businesses into
supporting progressive politics. Corporate wokeness is slammed as
a pathetic form of virtue signalling that is a harbinger of the end of
the prosperity afforded by liberal economies. These critics see this
woke capitalism as having distorted the true purpose of business.
According to this view, woke capitalism should be abandoned and
corporations should return to their natural purpose of maximizing
shareholder return. Many with more progressive political leanings
hold the view that corporations are, and should be, engaging in
a new era of enlightened capitalism. Corporations have a social
purpose that they should address directly, and business can be a
force for good when it comes to the social, political, economic
and environmental problems we all face. By this account, the term
‘woke capitalism’ underestimates the morally authentic motives that
businesses have when they support progressive political positions.
This book advances a third position: that the problem with woke
capitalism lies in shifting the balance of power from the political
sphere of democracy to the economic sphere of capitalism. To
this end, woke capitalism represents the surreptitious extension of
capitalism’s reach by backing safe-bet political causes. By adding
progressive righteousness to the corporate agenda and image,
capitalism is strengthened rather than questioned. If anything,
the rise of woke capitalism is a symbol of the vast and growing
impact that corporations now have on our everyday life. No longer
content to just influence our spending habits and lifestyles, with
woke capitalism big businesses enrol the very heart of our moral
beliefs into their commercial strategies. This book will explore
15

WOKE CAPITALISM

the perils of woke capitalism and what it means for the future of
democratic freedom.
Across the scope of issues and practices explored throughout
these pages, the intention is to prise apart and better understand the
origins, workings and weaknesses of woke capitalism. To some this
may appear to be a negative or cynical enterprise. It is not intended
to be. What is important is that becoming alert to the workings
of woke capitalism serves as a warning as to how changes in the
behaviour of corporations in recent years pose a deadly threat to the
very promise of democracy. This is a promise that political power
ought not to be held by the wealthy elite, but by all citizens. It is
also a promise of freedom from domination, the right to criticize
those who would seek that domination, and the values of solidarity
and citizenship. Woke capitalism offers the very opposite as big
business and billionaires use their economic might to infiltrate and
control the political sphere. In the name of democracy, and for the
benefit of the many, woke capitalism must be resisted.

16

2

Corporate Populists
I started writing this book in early 2020 as bushfires raged across
Australia, the place where I live and work. It was as devastating
as it was heart wrenching. More than 1,500 people lost their
homes, reduced to ash and rubble by the unrelenting onslaught
of flames. Most tragically, 33 people died in the fires themselves,1
with an estimated 417 dying as a result of smoke inhalation.2 The
environmental effects were overwhelming. Twelve million acres of
land burned, destroying wildlife and natural habitats. An estimated
one billion animals were affected.3 So massive were the fires that
the smoke was visible over Chile, some 11,000 kilometres away.4
The record-breaking inferno that engulfed Australia was
described as a ‘global catastrophe, and a global spectacle’. The
images of devastation appeared like scenes from the end of days.
It was also as if all of the horrors of climate change we had been
warned about had arrived. As reported in the New Statesman,
Australia had come to symbolize ‘the extreme edge of a future
awaiting us all’ as a result of climate change wrought by the hand
of humankind.5 It was international headline news. ‘Australia is
burning’ reported The New York Times. ‘Australia orders evacuation
of fire-ravaged town’ ran the Times of India. ‘Firefighters battle
catastrophic wildfires’ wrote the Financial Times in London. Images
of out-of-control blazes, apocalyptic scenes of red skies at noon,
and pictures of homes destroyed dominated the television news. It
looked and felt like Australia was a war zone.
Australia has always had bushfires, but this was different. The
events of 2020 confirmed what many had warned of for years.
A statement by the Australian Academy of Science laid out the
17

WOKE CAPITALISM

facts clearly: ‘The scientific evidence base shows that as the world
warms due to human induced climate change, we experience an
increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events.’6
The process of industrialization driven by the burning of fossil fuels
had created global warming, which was a significant contributor
to the conditions that enabled the bushfire catastrophe of 2019
and 2020. 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’.7
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 climate change. Inspired by the unwavering activism
of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, kids from 150 countries joined
forces to demand that something be done to save a world that
appeared intent on destroying itself.8 In Australia, the strikes were
especially targeted at the government’s dismal record of inaction,
with many politicians being dyed-in-the-wool climate change
deniers. More than 300,000 people participated in the strike across
Australia. They carried signs saying ‘why should we go to school if
you won’t listen to the educated’, ‘you’ll die of old age, I’ll die of
climate change’, and ‘wilful denial of climate facts is a violent act’.9
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 declared:
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.10
Downplaying or even denying climate change has long been a
refrain around the world, not the least in Australia where coal is
a primary export, peaking at A$69.6 billion in 2019.11 Morrison
has been centre stage with this for many years. He is infamously
18

Corporate Populists

remembered by many for holding up a piece of coal in parliament
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.12 But as the harsh smell of smoke filtered
into the houses and offices in Sydney, 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 over the
country, leaving destruction and death in its wake.
What does all of this have to do with ‘woke capitalism’? Woke
capitalism, as we have already begun exploring, is a term used to
criticize corporations who publicly support ‘progressive’ political
causes and take on political roles traditionally reserved for the state.
A Pepsi ad featuring the celebrity Kendall Jenner handing out cold
cans of cola to police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest
was called woke capitalism.13 Walmart CEO Doug McMillon
pledging US$100 million of his company’s money to support racial
equity has been called woke capitalism.14 Woke capitalism was used
to describe the public proclamation by Jamie Dimon, CEO of
JPMorgan Chase, that ‘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.’15 That is not, of course,
to suggest that all corporations have made a progressive turn in
either word or deed. Many have not as they continue their quest for
unveiled capitalist accumulation. Nevertheless, there is a significant
and observable trend of corporations, especially global ones, going
woke. The political causes such corporations have backed include
marriage equality, addressing domestic violence, combating sexual
harassment, fighting racism, ensuring rights for LGBTQI+ people,
promoting equality for people with disabilities, raising awareness
about mental illness, and of course action against climate change.
It was in the era of woke capitalism that flames were ravaging
Australia. The Australian government of the time had long worked
hard to downplay or even deny climate change,16 and many
corporations supported this. Billionaire mining magnate Gina
Rinehart, for example, had not long earlier been revealed as a
multi-million-dollar funder of the Institute of Public Affairs, the
climate-denying right-wing think tank.17 That said, many other
organizations seized on the zeitgeist in calling Australia to arms
19

WOKE CAPITALISM

to fight climate change. Rinehart’s mining rival Andrew ‘Twiggy’
Forrest, for example, promised a donation of A$70 million to
bushfire relief. While not explicitly linking the fires to climate
change, he did go public with the 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.’18
All well and good, until you look the gift horse in the mouth. Of
the A$70 million, $10 million went directly to bushfire victims, and
the same amount was given to fund an ‘army of helpers’ who would
help in the recovery. The remaining $50 million went to research
in ‘fire mitigation’ to be conducted by his very own Minderoo
Foundation, with questions raised about whether the findings
would need to align with their boss’s interests.19 All of a sudden,
the donation looked more like an investment.
In a telling example of another manifestation of woke capitalism,
on 11 January 2020 luxury jewellery company Tiffany & Co.
placed full-page advertisements in leading Australian newspapers.
Suddenly Tiffany had started to behave like a dyed-in-the-wool
climate activist. The ads demanded action from Prime Minister
Scott Morrison on climate change. The statement read as follows:
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.20
Why did Tiffany & Co. do this? It is a prime example of woke
capitalism where apparent corporate generosity comes hand-inhand with the pursuit of self-interest, in this case in the form of
brazen publicity.21 Head of Tiffany & Co.’s Australian operations,
Glen Schlehuber, was clear in expressing how the ad was
intended to position his company: ‘I feel very proud to work for
20

Corporate Populists

an organization who is willing to stand up and take action on
climate change.’22 It would appear that redirecting the company’s
advertising spend to a climate-related ad was what he thought
constituted political action. It would be easy to be cynical and
dismiss this ad as a calculated stunt designed to bolster the Tiffany
brand, with politically correct messages positioned as a substitute
for real action. Right-wing Australian tabloid The Daily Telegraph
ran the headline ‘Posh mineral retailer goes woke’.23 Elsewhere
the Australian media claimed that Tiffany and Co.’s ad used ‘the
pain and hardship of bushfire victims to sell itself to Australians’.24
While Tiffany and Co. were perhaps the least subtle in expressing
their woke corporate activism, they weren’t alone. Billionaire
Australian tech entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes of the
software company Atlassian openly criticized the government for
climate inaction. He also slated Australian businesses that argued
that taking severe measures to address climate change would
be ‘economy wrecking’.25 Meanwhile, Australian mega mining
company Rio Tinto publicly pressurized Australian companies
to take a positive stand on climate change advocacy.26 In more
direct action, 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. This help was most welcome, of course, but it still
raises the question of why corporations would act this way.
Australia burning was a telling sign of gross political inadequacy.
Lack of satisfactory action to combat climate change had made
Australia prone to more and bigger fires, and the land finally
succumbed to the flames. Woke capitalism is at play when
corporations step in, or at least appear to step in, to address inaction
on public issues by government; the response to the fires exemplifies
this. On the one hand, this 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 the long-term effects of this are on our political system.
There was a time where corporations were inextricably associated
with right-wing conservatism. Woke capitalism changed all of that
with corporations directly and unequivocally touting themselves as
progressive and politically active, often with a billionaire CEO as
the conspicuous spokesperson cum (political) action hero.
21

WOKE CAPITALISM

As we saw in the bushfires, major corporations were taking the
type of action once considered the preserve of anti-corporate green
activists, as well as bank-rolling activities that many would have
expected to be funded by the state. The situation we have arrived
at is one where a corporate and managerial overclass is shifting their
power base to include not only the economic realm but also the
political one.27 A range of questions are left open. Are corporations
being authentic in the traditionally left-leaning politics that many
of them have started to espouse? Why would organizations start
supporting progressive political causes? What changed to make
corporations engage in woke agendas? What are the effects of this
type of corporate political activism on politics itself?
While the fires were still burning, on 21 January 2020 the world’s
elite gathered in the Swiss Alpine resort town of Davos. Politicians
from around the globe rubbed shoulders with business moguls
and high-minded celebrities. Their stated goal was to ‘shape the
global, regional and industry agenda’.28 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’.29
The talk at Davos was all about the way that big business should
step up to directly address the grand challenges facing the world
today, whether that be climate change, inequality, populism or the
abuse of big data. And as William Burke-White from US think
tank the Brookings Institution surmised: ‘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.’30 BurkeWhite’s statement sums up how, under the conditions of woke
capitalism, it is big business and their billionaire owners who are
called on to define the world’s moral agenda and to address the
world’s problems.
Little did we know, at the time of the Davos meeting, of the
global devastation that was immediately to follow at the hands
of COVID-19. What the bushfires showed in Australia was
magnified to monstrous proportions by the pandemic. As the
world mourned when more than a million people lost their
lives to the virus, it became clear that the idea that people can
dominate and control nature was an all-too-human hubris. This
22

Corporate Populists

is the very arrogance that has defined the direction of humanity
since at least the Industrial Revolution. It has also defined what
we have come to regard as ‘progress’. The corollary of this ‘myth
of progress’, that business corporations can and should harness this
power for the good of humanity is as pathetic as it is dangerous.
It is a myth that assumes that the human race has the capacity for
God-like omnipotence to drive never ending positive development
– materially through science and technology, and economically
through market capitalism.
In 2020, with the rapid human and financial devastation
brought on by COVID-19 the promises made at Davos about a
‘better capitalism’ appeared laughable.31 Corporations would back
progressive political causes out of genuine concern for others,
Davos acolytes and enthusiasts told us. 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? Like fair-weather friends, big business did little
to make any significant difference. A gesture of BlackRock’s CEO
Larry Fink, leader among woke capitalism warriors, was especially
telling. Come COVID-19 time, BlackRock’s contribution was to
fork out just US$50 million of relief for those affected. Whoever
benefited from that would be undoubtedly grateful. Still, it was
a financial drop in the ocean for both the multi-trillion-dollar
fund management firm or for its billionaire boss. In any case, by
mid-2020 BlackRock’s stock price was up 14 per cent from the
beginning of the year as a result mainly of multi-billion-dollar
government injections into the US securities market.32 Meanwhile,
more personally, the financial press heralded Fink as the highest-paid
boss in his industry. Already a billionaire, his annual remuneration
rose to US$25.3 million. That’s more than 500 times the median
salary of workers in the US. This was just one example of how
COVID-19 was lining the pockets of the woke elite, while so many
regular people joined the breadline.
In the lead-up to 2020 Davos meeting, right-wing commentators
had been on their soap boxes decrying woke capitalism as a
corporate capitulation to the snowflake left. ‘Woke capitalism is
our enemy,’ they protested.33 ‘Woke capitalism corrupts business,’
they moaned.34 The conservative media vilified corporations
23

WOKE CAPITALISM

for practising ‘corporate socialism’35 or ‘woke capitalism’.36 The
claim was that business people should stay focused on the direct
pursuit of commercial goals. Messing around with public purpose,
political causes and social justice was simply none of their business.
Conspiracy theorists asserted that an ‘agenda of the left’ had
hijacked the corporate world.37 Others said that corporations had
been ‘succumbing to progressive ideologies’.38 The reactionary
right portrayed woke corporations as having been infiltrated by
latte-drinking snowflake liberals hell-bent on undermining the
future of capitalism.
If it wasn’t clear before, 2020 showed that the reactionary pundits
were wrong. Feel-good corporate self-righteousness did nothing
to make any real changes to the heart of capitalism’s agenda; if
anything, it strengthened it. Corralling wealth in the direction of
the owners of capital remained the name of the game. The response
to the COVID-19 crisis was a case in point. Nike, the poster
child of woke capitalism, 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. The ad
had an important impact in stimulating public debate about racism
and police brutality in the US and around the world. There is
more to it than that. It also bolstered Nike’s brand and presaged a
US$6 billion increase in the company’s market value.39
By comparison, Nike’s contribution of US$25 million in
response to COVID-19 in 2020 was pathetic.40 The list of other
global corporate giants making token contributions was pitifully
long. Amazon committed US$3.9 million in the UK in March
2020.41 Not bad for a company that had avoided US$100 billion
in tax over the previous ten years.42 At the more generous end of
the scale, as the pandemic took force the Gates Foundation and
Netflix pledged US$100 million each.43 Mark Zuckerberg, CEO
of Facebook, threw in US$25 million to develop treatments for
the virus.44 Such amounts are chump change when it comes to the
vastness of corporate wealth. Nike shares soared in price during
the pandemic, increasing its market capitalization by 37 per cent
to US$215.5 billion by the end of 2020.45 From the beginning
of the pandemic to the end of 2020 Mark Zuckerberg’s personal
wealth had increased by US$37 billion.46 In any case, corporate
24

Corporate Populists

contributions were infinitesimal 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 US$5 trillion in
the United States alone.47 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.’48
Regardless of any woke pretensions, COVID-19 was a boon for
the billionaire class. While workers suffered job losses, employment
insecurity and wage stagnation, the 1 per cent raked it in.49 Oxfam
calls it ‘pandemic profiteering’.50 What they were getting at
was that:
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the deep
systemic inequalities and massive failures in our
economic system, leaving tens of millions of people
in the United States without jobs, devastating public
services, and bankrupting countless small businesses. Yet
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 alreadywealthy 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?51
There were some big winners. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s
wealth grew by US$48 billion between March and June of 2020.
Others who benefited significantly include Tesla’s Elon Musk who
gained US$7.2 billion, and former Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer’s
US$15.7 billion windfall.52 The 634 people on the Forbes annual list
of the world’s billionaires increased their wealth by US$685 billion
between March and April 2020. That’s up by around 25 per cent
to a staggering US$3.7 trillion.53 Overall, the COVID-19 era saw
25

WOKE CAPITALISM

the number of billionaires in the world increase to 2,189, as their
collective wealth broke all previous records.54 Meanwhile, across
the world inequality widened as working people took on more
and more debt.55
The fact is that so-called woke capitalists handsomely profited
while COVID-19 devastated the economic wellbeing and security
of too many working people. This revealed that 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. By tipping their hats towards
progressive causes, billionaires are fast becoming corporate populists,
trying to appeal to what they see as a shifting public sentiment.
CEOs of major corporations are increasingly wanting to position
themselves as good-hearted and socially responsible citizens. This
posturing is the perfect distraction. As their wealth increases in
a world beset by exacerbating inequality and income insecurity,
the CEO billionaires stand proud as they profess deeply caring
progressive values. Central to the devastation of COVID-19 was
the sudden unemployment that affected so many working people
the world over. Where were the woke corporations looking to
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 left-sounding
platitudes and make a few tokenistic donations.
That large corporations and their billionaire owners and CEOs
achieve massive financial gain from their endeavours might on
the surface seem at odds with an espoused social justice agenda.56
After all, inequality is one of the most significant social and
political problems of our age.57 Look a little deeper and there is no
contradiction. A central characteristic of populist woke capitalism
is that it appeals to progressive politics while benefiting from
widening economic inequality. Like other kinds of populism, woke
capitalism appeals to people’s anxieties. In this case, it is the anxiety
that selfish and greedy corporate elites will hoard the world’s wealth
for themselves, pillaging a burning planet along the way. The bitter
irony is that this appeal is actually helping them to get away with
it. Talk of stakeholder inclusion, shared values and compassionate
capitalism are misconstrued by many as the shenanigans of a newly
left-leaning corporate world. Quite the opposite is true. Corporate
26

Corporate Populists

populism is a diversion from what is going on. COVID-19 has
magnified how espousing corporate purpose does nothing to curb
the scourge of inequality. It makes it worse as the people who
adopt it laugh all the way to the bank while sending others to
the poorhouse.
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’ –
‘customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders’.58
Hmm? That these same CEOs failed to step up in any significant
way to help with the COVID-19 crisis demonstrates the poverty
of the Roundtable’s sanguine proclamations. That they used
the crisis to feather their nests is a cruel and selfish joke. Come
troubled times, corporations were lining up the world over
crying poor-mouth in the hope of taxpayer-funded coronavirus
government bailouts.59 For decades neoliberal dogma had privileged
corporations by insisting on small government when it came to
corporate regulation, welfare and education. Malignant self-interest
is rife when those who fed ferociously from the neoliberal trough
were the first in the (corporate) welfare line.
The mass layoffs and surging unemployment that resulted from
the COVID-19 crisis showed where corporate priorities lie. So did
the risk of cashed-up corporates like Apple, Johnson & Johnson and
Unilever bolstering their monopoly power by buying up smaller
competitors struggling to survive.60 Corporates at the big end of
town scrambling for more and more power as the world got sick
marked a time not just to deal with COVID-19 but to plan for a
different future. The onset of the COVID-19 clearly showed that
the neoliberal experiment had failed to prepare the world for a
crisis. Corporations might like to talk up their social credibility
and political righteousness, but when times get tough they are
nowhere to be found.
Throughout the crisis, we saw the retreat of corporations and
the market and the return of elected governments in setting the
conditions for the future welfare of citizens, for better or for
worse. The lesson from COVID-19 is that we need to get back to
building a future that restores a socially driven democracy for the
people. In the hour of COVID-19’s darkness, there arose a need
27

WOKE CAPITALISM

to restore hope in a shared prosperity that does not cast its fate in
the fickleness of fair-weather friends.
What 2020 demonstrated was that woke capitalism is a
dangerous trend that poses a real and distinct threat to both the
idea and practice of democracy. As corporate power and influence
increasingly infiltrate our lives we need to look the gift horse
in the mouth and ask what the real effects are of businesses and
billionaires claiming that they can, will and should direct the moral
and political life of citizens. While it might be hard to refuse these
gifts, there is still a need to question what is expected in return.
When the answer to that question is that corporate righteousness
is a Faustian bargain, whereby we trade away the democratic right
to self-governance for gifts that the rich decide to give us, then it
is time to resist woke capitalism.

28

3

The Woke Reversal
Grammy Award-winning American R&B musician Erykah
Badu is largely credited with introducing the word ‘woke’ into
contemporary usage. Dubbed the ‘godmother of soul’ by The New
Yorker, Badu has a long history of not only selling records in the
millions, but also being a role model to others in her industry
for her self-styled success and creative independence.1 One of the
songs Badu is especially well known for is ‘Master Teacher’ from
her fourth album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), released
in February 2008. The song recounts the trials of a woman who
wistfully, if not at times hopelessly, asserts ‘a beautiful world I’m
trying to find’. The problems are many, she recounts, when ‘yo
baby ain’t got no money to support ya baby’, ‘the preacher tell you
some lies and cheatin’ on ya mama’.
Throughout this dream of a world without poverty, deception
and racism, Badu sings the phrase ‘I stay woke’ repeatedly as an
echoing conviction of what she aspires to be. As Badu explained
later, ‘we say that [woke] means we just pay attention to what’s
going on around us, and are not easily swayed by the media, or
by the angry mob, or by the group. You know: Stay focused,
pay attention.’ Adamant that being woke was about personal
awareness rather than judging others, Badu admitted that by the
late 2010s its meaning had strayed to become an excuse for a form
of righteous abuse.2
By using the phrase ‘stay woke’ Badu joined a long tradition
of African American culture that has used the metaphor of being
awake to signal a general awareness of one’s sociopolitical context.
This chapter traces part of the history of how woke arose from
29

WOKE CAPITALISM

the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, to becoming
popularized with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. It
also traces how, in being absorbed into mainstream language, from
the mid-2010s the meaning of woke was reversed to being a putdown aimed at vapid politically correct morality. It is in this latter
sense that woke capitalism became a term used to refer, usually
negatively, to the corporate world’s adoption of public stances on
progressive political issues.
In 1965, two years after his ‘I have a dream’ speech, Martin
Luther King addressed Oberlin College, outlining what needed to
be done to win the civil rights argument. This speech was called
‘Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution’.3 King recalled
Washington Irving’s short story ‘Rip van Winkle’, published in
1819, but set at the time of the American Revolution. As King
recounted it:
When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, the
sign had a picture of King George the Third of England.
When he came down twenty years later the sign had
a picture of George Washington, the first president of
the United States. When Rip Van Winkle looked up
at the picture of George Washington – and looking at
the picture he was amazed – he was completely lost.
He knew not who he was.
What King takes from this is the remarkable idea that someone
could not be aware of the significant social and political changes
that surrounded them, and by doing so could lose their very sense
of identity. More specifically, he took the idea of being awake as a
metaphor for social change. It was a way of advising his audience
that they should be alert to what was happening with the civil
rights movement. Despite ‘living amid a great period of social
change,’ King said, some people ‘fail to develop the new attitudes,
the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They
end up sleeping through a revolution.’
In the decades that followed the political meaning of being
awake remained fairly stable, even though it was not in wide
cultural circulation. It still appeared, however, in African American
popular culture. In Barry Beckham’s 1971 play Garvey Lives!, about
30

The Woke Reversal

Jamaican-born political activist Marcus Garvey, the character
Barry Beckham asserts: ‘I been sleeping all my life. And now that
Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. An I’m gon
help him wake up other black folk.’4 The reference is to Garvey’s
post-First World War writings, which advocated for Black unity,
emancipation and financial independence from White domination.5
A few years later, in 1975, Teddy Pendergrass’s song ‘Wake
Up Everybody’ on the Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ hit
album, articulated a similar political position. With smooth, soulful
sincerity, Pendergrass sang: ‘Wake up everybody […]’, and that
the world won’t change unless we change it: ‘you and me’. While
its usage remained relatively dormant for some decades, given its
legacy in African American culture it is apt that the term ‘woke’
was resurrected as a catchcry for the Black Lives Matter movement
that started in 2013. Historian and activist Barbara Ransby explains
that Black Lives Matter is a progressive and left movement focused
on economic and racial justice, as well as the relationship between
them. It is this focus on equality as a fundamental goal that identifies
the movement as democratic. This is not the democracy of state
institutions; however, it is a democracy that pursues justice and
equality by questioning and seeking to reform those institutions.
As Ransby articulated, Black Lives Matter offered hope in the
‘radically democratic impulses of inclusivity, non-sectarianism,
and collaboration’.6
The Black Lives Matter movement arose in the aftermath of the
tragic death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.
On 26 February 2012, Martin bought a bottle of iced tea and a
packet of Skittles at a 7-Eleven store. He intended to take them
as a gift to his father’s fiancée’s young son who lived nearby.
Minutes later George Zimmerman, a civilian self-appointed to
do neighbourhood watch, shot Martin dead in the chest at pointblank range. Zimmerman had reported Martin, who was wearing
a black hooded top, to the police for being ‘suspicious’ minutes
earlier. Zimmerman then gave chase and the two got into a physical
altercation during which Zimmerman fired a deadly shot at the
unarmed Martin.7
Zimmerman was arrested a little more than six weeks later on a
charge of second-degree murder, leading to a highly publicized oneand-a-half-year trial. The massive coverage in the media was aided
31

WOKE CAPITALISM

by significant support from politicians and celebrities, highlighting
racial politics where a Black youth wearing a hoodie was singled
out for special attention as being ‘suspicious’.8 The trial was so high
profile that then-US president Barack Obama had something to
say, commenting ‘when I think about this boy, I think about my
own kids […] if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin’.9 After
the prolonged trial, on 13 July 2013 a jury of five White women
and one Hispanic woman declared that there was not enough
evidence to prove that Zimmerman was guilty of either seconddegree murder, or the lower charge of manslaughter. Outside the
courtroom protestors chanted: “No justice, no peace!”10
Support for Black Lives Matter continued to build. On 21 July,
just eight days after the verdict, people in more than 100 cities
across the US held protests. In New York, Martin’s mother, Sybrina
Fulton, was joined by celebrity recording artists Jay-Z and Beyoncé
and civil rights leader Al Sharpton. They chanted “No justice,
no peace” and “I am Trayvon Martin.” Martin’s father was at the
Miami protests. He said to the crowd that he had “come to realize
George Zimmerman wasn’t on trial – Trayvon was on trial”.11
President Obama took the opportunity of a speech from the
White House to address the issue again:
You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said
that this could have been my son. Another way of
saying that is: Trayvon Martin could have been me
35 years ago […] And when you think about why, in
the African American community at least, there’s a lot of
pain around what happened here, I think it’s important
to recognize that the African American community is
looking at this issue through a set of experiences and
a history that doesn’t go away. […] There are very few
African American men who haven’t had the experience
of walking across the street and hearing the locks click
on the doors of cars. That happened to me – at least
before I was a senator.12
To the surprise of many in Washington, with these statements,
Obama weighed in on a debate that was dividing the nation, as the
reality of race relations in the US became shockingly transparent.
32

The Woke Reversal

Obama’s comments were especially surprising. Throughout
his presidency, he had done little to address American racism.
He preferred to effectively take a colour-blind approach to his
leadership of the American people, while not acting on pressing
racial issues ranging from Black incarceration to police violence.
Democratic intellectual Cornel West responded to Obama’s
public statements in the wake of the Zimmerman acquittal with
insightful and unexpurgated criticism. That Obama might identify
at some level with Trayvon Martin as an African American is all
well and good, West attested. The more important question he
asked, however, was:
Will that identification hide and conceal the fact
there’s a criminal justice system in place that has nearly
destroyed two generations of very precious, poor black
and brown brothers? He hasn’t said a mumbling word
until now. Five years in office and can’t say a word about
the new Jim Crow. And at the same time, I think we
have to recognize that he has been able to hide and
conceal that criminalizing of the black poor.13
Writing in the Black Agenda Report, activist Danny Haiphong
confirms that ‘Obama only began to pay attention when the
movement for Black Lives forced policing and prisons into the
national spotlight’. Effectively, the public backlash against Martin’s
killing meant that even the president could no longer stay silent
on matters on which he had long kept quiet. Whether Obama
had a change of heart, or whether he had simply had enough
is a moot point. The fact remains that he was responding to
changes in public opinion led from the activist politics of civil
society and not from the official political circles of Washington.
This was not leadership on Obama’s part, but rather capitulation
to a groundswell of public opinion that had been hard fought by
activists and protestors.14 Change was happening and the president
had to respond, even if just, as Cornel West described it, to ‘contain
the rage’ about ‘mistreating poor people across the board, black and
brown especially’.15
A quite different political response to Zimmerman’s acquittal
was happening in Oakland, California. Alicia Garza, who heard
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WOKE CAPITALISM

the news on television, composed what has been described as a
‘love note to black people’ on Facebook. It read: ‘Black people. I
love you. I love us. Our lives matter.’ The post was shared by her
friend Patrisse Cullors with the added hashtag #BlackLivesMatter
as derived from the original message. The two women joined
together with Opal Tometi and created a plan to make America
listen to the voices of African Americans. It worked! They
established Tumblr and Twitter accounts that were widely used
by people sharing and testifying to their experience of why
#BlackLivesMatter, as well as organizing protests. Deploying the
power of social media Black Lives Matter was beginning to emerge
as an engine house for political awareness and solidarity in the face
of institutionalized racism.
After another unarmed African American teenager, Michael
Brown, was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri, on 9 August 2014,
racial tensions in the US became even more emotionally charged.
#BlackLivesMatter continued to build momentum as a means
through which people could share information about what was
going on outside the more formal corporate media outlets.16
Following the killing in Ferguson, demonstrations turned into riots
and as the pressure intensified #BlackLivesMatter transformed from
a slogan that united protestors into a social movement against the
violence and injustice that African Americans faced, especially at
the hands of police. Black Lives Matter was a movement that was
active in planning and organizing demonstrations on a national
basis.17 As Garza, Cullors and Tometi recall on the Black Lives
Matter website:
It became clear that we needed to continue organizing
and building Black power across the country. People
were hungry to galvanize their communities to end
state-sanctioned violence against Black people, the
way Ferguson organizers and allies were doing. Soon
we created the Black Lives Matter Global Network
infrastructure. It is adaptive and decentralized, with a
set of guiding principles. Our goal is to support the
development of new Black leaders, as well as create
a network where Black people feel empowered to
determine our destinies in our communities.18
34

The Woke Reversal

There was also another key hashtag to the Black Lives Matter
movement, and it came from the term ‘stay woke’ that Erykah
Badu had been singing five years earlier. #StayWoke became a
way to identify solidarity in the movement’s political struggle.
#StayWoke’s meaning was culturally traceable to Martin Luther
King Jr’s ‘Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution’ speech.
It referred to a political consciousness that implored African
Americans ‘to remain aware of what is going on around you
and in society, more specifically, to remain politically aware or
conscious’.19 Even more precisely, it meant ‘stay conscious of the
apparatus of white supremacy, don’t automatically accept the official
explanations for police violence, keep safe’.20
The idea of staying woke soon became part of more mainstream
American culture. The American Dialect Society declared woke
as the slang word of the year for 2016, noting ‘its status as an item
of longstanding African American usage’. 21 Their definition was:
‘conscious, aware or enlightened, esp with regards to matters of
social justice and racial inequity; freq in stay woke’.22 In the same
year woke made it to the MTV list of ‘10 words you should know
in 2016’. They offered a more general definition: ‘being aware
– specifically in reference to current events and cultural issues’.23
Mainstreaming was especially evident when, in 2015, Buzzfeed
published an article heralding popular television series ‘Orange is
the New Black’ actor Matt McGorry as being ‘so bae and so woke’.
If you haven’t come across the word ‘bae’ it is early 21st-century
slang for a girlfriend or boyfriend, or more generally for a sexually
alluring person. Why was McGorry a woke bae? Not just because
he was strikingly attractive. He also publicly declared his support for
the Black Lives Matter movement, wrote an article in Cosmopolitan
about becoming a feminist, and acknowledged his privilege as a
straight White man.24 In 2016, Kara Brown published a series of
pieces on the feminist website Jezebel listing and describing ‘some
of the men who displayed their best and wokest selves’.25 The ‘baes’
in question were calling out racism, supporting diversity, and going
public on women’s rights.
These references to being woke stayed true to the original
meaning as it emerged from the Black Lives Matter movement,
albeit in a more frivolous manner. It did not take long, however,
for #StayWoke, as a symbol of political awareness and unification
35

WOKE CAPITALISM

of African Americans against systemic racism and racist violence,
to be appropriated by wider American society for entirely different
purposes. Initially, the call to stay woke extended to mean an
awareness of social injustice in general, rather than being restricted
to racism and police violence against African Americans. But by
2015 and 2016 the term ‘woke’ was also being used to criticize
people, especially White people, who bragged about their selfrighteous positions on political issues.26
The use of this terminology was built on an already established
cultural trend that called out political hypocrisy among elites.
In a book published in 2000, Bobos in Paradise,27 for example,
David Brooks humorously depicted what he saw as a new class
of people who combined the values of the bohemian with those
of the bourgeoisie. By Brooks’ account, counter-culture hippies
and capitalist success could go hand in hand in the 21st century.
For Brooks, this was not so much political as it was cultural, as a
new breed of success-hungry entrepreneurs turned to the creative
bohemian tradition as a means to boost their ability to build their
wealth. The bobos marked the apogee of what Thomas Frank
identified as the ‘conquest of cool’. With this term, he denotes
how the business world had, progressively from the 1960s,
adopted culturally radical dispositions to fuel its own economic
and politically conservative agendas. As Frank commented back
in 1997:
Nike shoes are sold to the accompaniment of words
delivered by William S. Burroughs and songs by The
Beatles, Iggy Pop, and Gil Scott Heron (‘the revolution
will not be televised’); peace symbols decorate a line of
cigarettes manufactured by R. J. Reynolds and the walls
and windows of Starbucks coffee shops nationwide; the
products of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft are touted as
devices of liberation; and advertising across the product
category spectrum calls upon consumers to break rules
and find themselves.28
What both Brooks and Frank identified was the way that 1960s
counter-cultures had effectively been depoliticized such that they
could be adopted as corporate and middle-class-friendly fashions.
36

The Woke Reversal

In effect, the rebelliousness and non-conformism of a previous
age had been fully incorporated into a corporate-led consumer
society. In so doing, cultural insurgence had become nothing more
than a fashionable selling point for big business.29 The adoption of
the term ‘woke’ marks a cultural recognition of and resistance to
the ‘conquest of cool’, especially when that coolness is associated
with political progressivism. To call out a person or a corporation
as being woke is a way of saying that they are either deliberately
insincere, or have been ignorantly manipulated in their holding of
particular political views.
In one sense anti-wokeness emerged as a backlash against the
conquest of cool, at least insofar as left politics is seen as part of
that coolness. Anti-wokeness marks a double hit when it comes
to appropriating and diluting left positions. With the first hit, the
value of progressive politics is diminished because it becomes seen
as something that can be adopted fashionably and superficially
by both individuals and corporations. With the second hit, the
sincere basis of progressive politics can be vilified by its opponents
by criticizing those who adopt those politics either partially or
insincerely (or by claiming that anyone else who espouses such
politics must be similarly insincere).
Why exactly the term ‘woke’ was the one used to describe such
a reactionary position is unclear. What we do know, however, is
that it follows an age-old historical trend of cultural and linguistic
transmission from Black American culture to mainstream culture.
As Elijah Watson describes it, ‘like anything created by black
people, the phrase was appropriated by the masses, transformed
into a trend term before ultimately mutating into a meme and
becoming a form of irony’.30 Social media played a key part,
enabling the global dissemination of the word. By 2014, woke
started being used to refer to political positions outside Black Lives
Matter. While the meaning of woke remained one of political
vigilance, it was cynically adapted to reactionary political statements
such as #AllLivesMatter as well as to insignificant if not petty
things.31 Business was central to this, as the activist and cultural
commentator Sam Whiteout observes:
Companies and brands and celebrities recognize that,
particularly on social media platforms, doing good is
37

WOKE CAPITALISM

powerfully attractive to people, which makes being woke
marketable and profitable. As with anything that scales
up to the so-called mainstream, aka white pop culture,
this presents complications. And as expected, there are
examples that run the gamut from brilliant modes of
leveraging the social clout of wokeness to do good to
gross and obvious attempts to profit off wokeness.32
The idea of profiting from wokeness was key to the transformation
of its meaning. Essentially, woke transmuted from being a political
call for self-awareness through solidarity in the face of massive
racial injustice, to being an identity marker for self-righteousness.
Whether it be personal self-interest or corporate self-interest, woke
became ‘all about me’.
Emerging from its initial popularization, from 2015 the ironic
use of ‘the woke’ emerged as a way of making fun of progressive
politics. At a time when right-wing populism had built itself on a
platform against ‘political correctness’ and the assumed dominance
of progressive politics in certain parts of the media and culture
industries, the term ‘woke’ may well have simply been a convenient
label to misappropriate. Whatever the case, the reversal of the
meaning of woke is a blatant form of cultural appropriation where
the African American vernacular is wrenched out of context and
used for purposes for which it was never intended.
Writing in the online creative and cultural platform GRIOT,
Celine Angbeletchy explains that it is the spread of language
through social media that has allowed the word ‘woke’ to be so
distorted and misinterpreted. This leads her to ask: ‘has the Internet
Era sparked the “awakening” of the masses – with special regards
to racism and racial historical discrimination – or has it prevented
it by juxtaposing the concept to mundane or ridiculous trends?’33
For the most part, it would seem that the latter is true. This is a
great misfortune. An opportunity for the broader population to
be engaged in an awareness of the lived realities of American racial
politics has been lost.
The reversal of the meaning of the word ‘woke’ as a means to
mock a vacuous politically correct morality is a blatant distortion
of the democratic potential of the original #StayWoke. Celebrities
are perhaps the most visible when it comes to being called out as
38

The Woke Reversal

woke in its reversed meaning. A startling example of this happened
in January 2020 when Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globes
Awards ceremony. His approach was to introduce the event by
roasting and insulting the assembled celebrities who were eager to
find out who would win the Tinsel Town accolades. Gervais held
nothing back. He made jokes about celebrities’ friendships with
infamous child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He jibed Hollywood
executives for being afraid of being identified as abusing their
power for sex. He condemned the Hollywood foreign press,
who were hosting the event, as being racist. Then, in conclusion
to the opening speech, he harangued the celebrities for being
woke hypocrites:
‘You say you’re woke, but the companies you work
for. I mean, unbelievable: Apple, Amazon, Disney. If
Isis started a streaming service, you’d call your agent,
wouldn’t you? So if you do win an award tonight,
please don’t use it as a platform to make a political
speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about
anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most
of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.
So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank
your agent and your God and fuck off.’34
The press lapped it up, applauding Gervais for ‘bursting the woke
bubble’,35 exposing ‘Hollywood’s “woke” culture’,36 and slamming
‘woke Hollywood’s sanctimony’.37 The support that Gervais
received was notable for its deep political conservatism. Even the
American evangelical news outlet The Christian Post got in on the
act, cheering Gervais ‘for courageously “speaking truth” to power
and by “taking a massive dump” on Hollywood elites for their
hypocritical “woke” culture’.38 This echoed a spirit of populism
that supported Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the US presidency
just a few years earlier. Combined with a more general political
zeitgeist of ‘right-wing incivility’, this amounts to the idea that
smugly and viciously insulting people for their progressive political
positions is socially acceptable, if not desirable. Defended as a
form of truth telling, for the anti-woke right, freedom of speech
translates as the freedom to attack those who disagree with them.39
39

WOKE CAPITALISM

Perhaps the most telling comment came from Piers Morgan, the
British broadcaster and journalist well known for his conservative,
if not reactionary, political positions. Writing in the right-wing
British tabloid The Daily Mail, Morgan congratulated Gervais for
attacking the fake wokery of Hollywood. He took pleasure in
noting how Gervais had punched ‘a gigantic crater in the absurdly
two-faced PC-crazed balloon that infests modern Hollywood’.
Woke culture, according to Morgan, was to be condemned on
account of its political positions, with the woke being castigated
as left-wing idiots: an ‘intolerant radical liberal mob intent on
sucking every ounce of freedom and joy out of life’. Gervais, on
the contrary, was described by Morgan as a ‘shining shaft of free
speech’, a conservative icon.
Hollywood celebrities and media personalities taking shots
at each other for their wokeness? Right-wing commentators
encouraging making fun of famous people for the assumed
hypocrisy of their public moral positions? We are a far, far cry
here from the solidarity and strength of the Black Lives Matter
movement that first claimed the political strength of staying woke.
The radical democratic politics that invigorated Black Lives Matter
was reduced to a tit-for-tat conservative stoush over celebrity moral
positioning. In reality, however, Black Lives Matter was ‘radical
democracy in action’, which included its way of organizing. Staying
woke was something that everybody in the movement needed to
contribute to and take ownership of, rather than being told what to
do by authority figures. As Barbara Ransby explains, staying woke
was a form of organization based on the idea that the ‘top-down,
male-centered, charismatic model of leadership [was] a political
dead end’, which disempowered the poor, the working class and
women. In contrast, the group-based leadership of the movement
eschews the leader-as-saviour model in favour of a democratic form
of collective responsibility.40
Emerging from a radical democracy activated through
open dissent to an unjust sociopolitical system centrally that is
characterized by the oppression and domination of African
Americans, woke was a call for equality and justice that has been
wilfully twisted through its popularization. What was rooted in
a politically switched-on, community-led and solidarity-based
political practice became transformed into a hollow shell of self40

The Woke Reversal

important and individualized righteousness. In their book Stay
Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, Professors
Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith clearly distinguish
between the original and reversed meaning of woke. They implore
us to ‘beware of woker-than-thou-itis’:
Striving to be educated around issues of social justice
is laudable and moral, but striving to be recognized
by others as a woke individual is self-serving and
misguided. So, to those of you who are making a
competition out of racial consciousness and progressive
politicking, please get over yourself! […] Let us all […]
orient ourselves to advocate passionately, and in the
spirit of the collective.41
It is this reversed, conservative sense of the word ‘woke’, the
same one that Gervais used against his star-studded Golden Globe
audience, that is deployed when woke is applied to corporations
and to capitalism more broadly. It is also the same form of
conservative backlash that condemns woke capitalism as being
a shallow morality. The difference is that while Gervais seemed
to hold genuine contempt for the celebrities, the conservative
scorn for woke capitalism is based on a desire for a more ‘real’
capitalism where corporations would return to the primary goal
of making money.
The conservative ideal that is used to criticize woke capitalism
desires a return to a political and economic order when
corporations were not tainted by association with political causes
identified with progressive and left-wing politics. Reflecting on this
nostalgic longing raises the question of whether woke capitalism
is a corporate betrayal of the left, as conservative critics assume, or
a corporate appropriation of progressive causes for the purpose of
building an even stronger and more powerful corporate capitalist
system. Either way, the progressive and emancipatory politics that
first inspired people to ‘stay woke’ is reversed and threatened in
a world where economic interests take precedence over political
convictions rooted in justice and equality.

41

4

Capitalism Goes Woke
It is difficult to pinpoint precisely when the term ‘woke’ came
to be associated with corporate activity and capitalism more
generally. One of the earliest examples came from The New York
Times columnist Ross Douthat in 2018.1 Douthat was responding
to what he saw as changes to corporate America that had emerged
since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United
States. Gun control was a case in point, especially as it related to
Trump’s lack of action in response to events such as the shooting
at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida,
which left 17 people dead on 14 February 2018. Trump offered
the usual thoughts and prayers to the victims, effectively resisting
any substantial change to gun control laws.2 While Trump failed
to respond to calls to condemn the position of the powerful gun
lobby group the National Rifle Association (NRA), the same was
not the case for corporate America. More than 20 corporations
dissociated themselves from the NRA, especially by withdrawing
discount programmes for NRA members.3
Douthat has suggested two possible explanations for the type of
corporate engagement in politics that was seen in the aftermath
of the Parkland shooting. The first was that changing public
opinion, together with Trump’s regressive approach to issues such
as gun control, transgender rights and immigration, had prompted
corporations to develop a genuine conscience. The second was
that corporations were playing a trick on the public by appearing
progressive to the public eye while benefiting handsomely from
Trump’s right-wing economic policies, especially corporate tax
cuts. Douthat was less than sanguine in his assessment, arguing that:
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Capitalism Goes Woke

Corporate activism on social issues isn’t in tension with
corporate self-interest on tax policy and corporate
stinginess in paychecks. Rather, the activism increasingly
exists to protect the self-interest and the stinginess – to
justify the ways of C.E.O.s to cultural power brokers, so
that those same power brokers will leave them alone (and
forgive their support for Trump’s economic agenda) in
realms that matter more to the corporate bottom line.4
Douthat submitted that corporations were engaging in a
‘performative wokeness’. By this, he meant that corporations
were using woke causes to manipulate the political system in their
own favour. Going woke was a much subtler strategy than direct
corporate lobbying. It involved becoming associated with progressive
and left-activist political and social causes so that governments would
be less likely to increase taxes or force regulation on the corporations
themselves. While Douthat did not necessarily doubt the sincerity
of the corporate employees behind the woke campaigns, he also
observed that woke corporate behaviour generally operated on the
fringe of corporate activity without affecting the core business.
Nevertheless, he asserted that brand identification was powerful
enough to mean that corporations could offer a viable alternative for
the collective values that had been decimated through a hollowing
out of contemporary American community life.5
Douthat’s article suggested a fundamental shift in the relationship
between business, politics and society. What he foresaw was how
corporations were using their significant financial and cultural
power to weigh in on political issues. Moreover, they were doing
this as part of an each-way bet where they could profit from
economic windfalls of right-wing economic policy, while also
benefiting from the cultural legitimacy afforded by being associated
with ‘good’ progressive causes. There was much more going on
here than corporations simply being hoodwinked by persuasive
progressives pressurizing them into adopting their causes. Writing
in The Atlantic, Derek Thomson saw this move as a significant pivot
point in US politics. As he described it:
It would be easy to write off this moment by saying
these companies are simply reacting to an online mob,
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WOKE CAPITALISM

or following each other like lemmings. But the fact
that companies, rather than Congress or the courts, are
shifting in response to political activism in the United
States says something profound – about American
tribalism, the demise of political cooperation, and the
rise of a sort of liberal corporatocracy.6
What this means is that woke capitalism is not just about
corporations behaving like do-gooding snowflake lefties. Instead,
they are playing hardball by working to seize political power from
the institutions of democracy, those very institutions that Trump
had been consistently undermining throughout his presidency.
Corporations pounced on this opportunity, eager to fill the void
that Trumpism was recklessly creating. But how did we get to
this point? Is woke capitalism the kind of fundamental change in
corporate behaviour that pundits such as Douthat and Thompson
have suggested? To address these questions, we need to look back
to debates about social responsibility from the 1950s and 1960s, the
terms of which set the scene for today’s woke capitalism.
The similarities between the rhetoric of mid-20th-century
American social responsibility and that of early 21st-century
global woke capitalism are remarkable. Historically, however, they
emerged under very different conditions. Social responsibility
arose in an era of shared prosperity and increasing living standards,
while woke capitalism was created at a time when inequality
was widening significantly. The implications of this have serious
consequences. The injustices created by our present economic
system are being criticized by the very people who benefit from
them the most – the business prime movers adopting the high
moral ground on progressive political issues. As Thomas Piketty7
has convincingly argued, the increasing concentration of wealth in
the hands of the few has deleterious consequences for social and
political harmony. While Piketty proposes a defensible solution of
progressive taxation and wealth distribution, woke capitalism offers
a different answer: retain the inequalities and control them through
political influence and the moralization of the corporation itself.
A good starting point to understand how we got to the current
state of affairs is to go back to 1953 when Howard R. Bowen
published a book called Social Responsibilities of the Businessman.8
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Capitalism Goes Woke

At the time, social responsibility was already a contentious topic of
discussion that had been growing since the early 20th century. This
was a response to what, at around the same time, Morrell Heald
referred to as ‘the inhuman offspring of greed and irresponsibility’.9
As early as 1902 William J. Ghent had identified capitalism as
creating a ‘benevolent feudalism’ that involved ‘conspicuous giving
[…] always shrewdly disposed with an eye to the allayment of pain
and the quieting of discontent’.10 This reflected a more general
trend to ‘humanize’ corporations and capitalism in the first half
of the 20th century. Building on these developments in business
practice, Bowen was the first person to address the specific topic
of social responsibility explicitly and comprehensively.
Bowen made clear from the outset that the idea that businesses
have social responsibilities was about the effective operation
of capitalism, understood as the ‘role of businessmen [sic] in an
economy of free enterprise’.11 Bowen acknowledged the increasing
power and influence of business on American life in the 1950s and
saw this as the basis of why social responsibility was important. In his
words, ‘The decisions and actions of the businessman have a direct
bearing on the quality of our lives and personalities. His decisions
affect not only himself, his stockholders, his immediate workers, or
his customers – they affect the lives and fortunes of us all.’12
Bowen’s version of social responsibility did not attend to the
same kinds of progressive political causes associated with woke
capitalism today, however. For him, social responsibility was much
more about business activity itself. The dimensions of business
he saw as attracting social responsibility included employment,
economic growth, income distribution, product availability,
industrial organization, labour-management relations, worker
satisfaction, resource utilization, international relations and national
culture. In all of Bowen’s considerations, power was central. He
asked whether corporations have a responsibility to society as well
as to shareholders, given the substantial growth in the power and
influence of business. For Bowen, the answer was a resounding ‘yes’.
He added that this was the prevailing view of the business people
of his time. He wrote: ‘It is becoming increasingly obvious that a
freedom of choice and delegation of power such as businessmen
exercise would hardly be permitted to continue without some
assumption of social responsibility’.13
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WOKE CAPITALISM

Bowen’s statement reflects a slippage of reasoning. On the one
hand, businesses should take up social responsibility because the
power that they hold means they have a moral obligation to do
so. On the other hand, businesses should take social responsibility
because if they do not corporate power might be brought into
question and possibly diminished. It is this disjuncture and
coexistence of a moral argument for social responsibility and a
case based on the preservation of corporate power that still dogs
corporate social responsibility today, especially in the form of woke
capitalism. The terms have changed, as have the sociopolitical
dimensions of business attended to. Still, the crux of the issue
remains the maintenance of the social legitimacy of corporate
capitalism and the attendant power of individual corporations.
The more common terminology nowadays is ‘social licence to
operate’, understood in terms of corporations requiring broad
public approval for their undertakings to avoid public conflict that
might be detrimental to the achievement of business objectives.14
In other words, businesses adopt social responsibilities and support
social causes to advance their interests, while ostensibly presenting
themselves as being interested in the wellbeing of others.
Bowen situated his argument for social responsibility in the
history of corporate regulation. He described very clearly how
such regulation had developed from the 19th century to address
the problems that arose from a laissez-faire economic system.
The right to unionize, labour laws, anti-monopoly legislation,
the formation of public utilities, social security, health and safety
regulation, free public education and progressive taxation were
all named by Bowen as ways that government had intervened to
ensure that capitalist business activity did not harm the public
good. Bowen worried that government intervention into business
had gone so far that it was threatening free market capitalism itself.
By the 1950s, he argued:
We have reached a point […] from which the continued
burgeoning of controls by government and by organized
economic groups could lead us to some form of state
socialism. The continuation of well-established trends
toward greater government control might jeopardize our
essential freedoms and curtail the spirit of enterprise,
46

Capitalism Goes Woke

of initiative, of productivity, and of freedom that has
distinguished American economic life.15
What we see here is that as much as it might have been presented
in terms of moral requirements to address social needs, businesses
taking on social responsibility was primarily a defensive tactic to
ward off what was seen as a real threat of socialism. Effectively,
this promised that if businesses would manage their social
responsibilities, then government would no longer have to
intervene to coerce them to produce fair outcomes for all members
of society. At the same time, Bowen noted that leading up to the
1950s social attitudes in the US were changing, with much greater
belief in social justice and care for humanity. Changing public
expectations, the growth of trade unions, improved education
and the professionalization of management notwithstanding,
behind the adoption of social responsibility by business was ‘the
tacit threat of further control by government or labor’,16 Bowen
argued. The social responsibility of business was, at its core, an
anti-socialist movement.
We need to be clear here that from the outset the adoption of
social responsibility by business was always a project designed to
strengthen the capitalist economic system, no matter how dressed
up it is in leftie-sounding good causes. Bowen was explicit in
associating social responsibility with the perpetuation of corporate
power and self-determination within a capitalist economy. Just as
happens now with woke capitalism, critics of the day often failed
to see this, instead accusing supporters of social responsibility of
being feeble-minded do-gooders who were distracted from the true
vocation of business. In 1958, management consultant Theodore
Levitt penned a scathing parody in Harvard Business Review about
how corporate executives were being ‘taken in by pretty words and
soft ideas’. He mockingly wrote:
Concern with management’s social responsibility has
become more than a Philistinic form of self-flattery
practiced at an occasional community chest banquet
or at a news conference celebrating a ‘selfless example
of corporate giving’ to some undeserving little college
in Podunk. It has become more than merely intoning
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WOKE CAPITALISM

the pious declarations of Christian brotherhood which
some hotshot public relations man has pressed into the
outstretched hands of the company president who is
rushing from an executive committee meeting to a
League of Women Voters luncheon. It has become a
deadly serious occupation – the self-conscious soulsearching preoccupation with the social responsibilities
of business.17
Levitt invoked a tone of elitism and misogyny as he dismissed
social responsibility as being superficial and womanish, unbefitting
the manly pursuit of business. If the language of the 2020s were
available to him, no doubt he would have invoked terms such as
snowflake, virtue-signaller, cuck or libtard to describe the advocates
of social responsibility. These were the people he so clearly despised
as inferior to his self-exalted status. ‘The business of business is
profits,’18 Levitt retorted. While Bowen saw social responsibility
as a defence against centralized state power, Levitt called it out as
its harbinger. Moreover, this would not arrive through democratic
government but on the wheels of a new form of ‘corporate
statesmanship’. This was a dystopia, Levitt averred, where the
corporation in its growing social power would return society to a
kind of undemocratic feudalism.
The arguments represented by both Bowen and Levitt, as they
were circulating in mid-20th-century America, shared a conviction
that the free enterprise capitalist system needed to be preserved
and celebrated. Their differences lay in the means through which
this could be done. From one point of view, social responsibility
would shore up capitalism’s public legitimacy. From the other,
social responsibility was an abrogation of the central purpose and
functioning of capitalist enterprises. It is this latter view that was
most famously articulated by the University of Chicago professor
Milton Friedman in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom.19
Friedman acknowledged that the idea of business leaders having
a social responsibility beyond their responsibilities to shareholders
had become increasingly widespread. His opposition to this was
unequivocal, describing it as a ‘fundamental misconception of the
character and nature of a free economy’.20 He went on to issue his
most famous credo and the one that has been a go-to catchcry for
48

Capitalism Goes Woke

unreconstructed capitalists ever since. Friedman’s doctrine is still
wheeled out to this day as a way of criticizing woke capitalism:21
There is only one social responsibility of business – to
use its resources and engage in activities designed
to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules
of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free
competition, without deception or fraud.22
Friedman invoked the even more famous economist, Adam Smith.
Friedman concurred with Smith that in pursuing profitability for
the direct benefit of the owners of capital, managers would be
moved as if by an ‘invisible hand’ to produce better outcomes for
society, even if they never intended to do so. For Friedman, social
responsibility subverted and distorted the fundamental principle
of self-interest that he saw as animating capitalism. Capitalism
required a strict division between public and private interests. In
this view, corporations should operate only in the private interests
of shareholders and not trouble themselves with politics.
As much as Friedman promoted the economic freedom of the
corporation, he also sought to preserve democracy. The reason
that Friedman decried social responsibility as being subversive is
because it is not a corporation’s place to interfere in the social
realm. Friedman asked: ‘Can self-selected private individuals decide
what the social interest is? Can they decide how great a burden
they are justified in placing on themselves or on their stockholders
to serve that public interest?’23 Such functions, Friedman declared,
are the responsibility of elected officials who represent the people,
and business should keep its nose out.
Friedman’s faith in laissez-faire capitalism supported by a strict
demarcation between the economic and political spheres was far
from ubiquitous at the time. As William C. Frederick24 argued
in California Management Review in 1960, the post-war interest
in social responsibility resulted from a collapse of the laissezfaire system from the beginning of the 20th century. Whether
it be Soviet communism, Italian fascism, German Nazism or the
American New Deal, Frederick conceded that the early decades
of the 20th century had seen a global transformation away from
capitalism and towards central economic planning. Frederick noted
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WOKE CAPITALISM

that concomitant with this was the growth of large and powerful
corporations run by professional managers. He argued that these
power shifts meant that Smith’s invisible hand was no longer
functioning in the way that Friedman assumed. Why? Because the
flow of the free market system was interrupted by the interference
of politicians and managers. Frederick saw social responsibility as
an intervention that could restore the social benefits of the invisible
hand, in a sense by making it deliberate and visible. He observed
that a central tenet of the doctrine of social responsibility was:
The deliberate and voluntary assumption of public
responsibility by corporate managers, even though at
times such a trusteeship might cause a managerial group
to forego immediate profits for the sake of the public
good. Management, according to this concept, has a
multiplicity of obligations – to the stockholders, to the
employees, and to the public at large.25
What is remarkable is how this argument from management theory
in the mid-20th-century United States so closely resembles today’s
globalized woke capitalism. The common claim is that business
will engage in socially responsible acts out of a genuine sense of
civic duty and moral commitment to others. By way of example,
we can look again at the Business Roundtable’s 2019 ‘Statement
on the purpose of a corporation’. The statement specified that
corporations should no longer be exclusively dedicated to the
interests of shareholders. They should ‘share a fundamental
commitment to all of our stakeholders’, by ‘delivering value to
our customers’, ‘investing in our employees’, ‘dealing fairly and
ethically with our suppliers’, ‘supporting the communities in which
we work’ as well as ‘generating long-term value for shareholders’.26
As could be expected, this statement quickly became associated
with woke capitalism. Writing in the Telegraph, Linda-Eling Lee
commented: ‘Whilst the ideas behind stakeholder capitalism aren’t
new, the growing number of business leaders pledging fidelity to
the manifesto indicates a new sensitivity among global elites, if not
yet a new chapter in “woke” capitalism.’27
Not new indeed. The debates from the US in the 1950s and 1960s
were being repeated in the same terms almost seventy years later.
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Capitalism Goes Woke

What also still holds is Frederick’s argument against the assumption
that businesses are interested in social responsibility out of some
sense of quasi-religious morality or voluntary trusteeship of the
public interest. While Friedman made the descriptive observation
that business should pursue profit as its principal objective, Frederick
made the argument that they would do so irrespective of their
attestation to social responsibility. He argued that it is ignorant
to expect that the ‘essentially materialist and self-seeking basis
of business enterprise as it emerged in Western culture’28 would
suddenly dissipate. He proposed that it was ‘preposterously naïve’29
to assume that, within a capitalist system, we can simply escape
from the ‘very powerful motive of private gain and profit’.30 The
same criticism applies to the Business Roundtable’s statement of
the purpose of the corporation, as well as to woke capitalism more
generally: one would have to be truly gullible to believe that the
capitalist leopard has changed its spots.
Coming back to the mid-century United States, there was still a
widespread belief that there had been a fundamental shift in social
expectations and business attitudes. Keith Davis, a management
professor who would go on to become one of the founding
theorists of corporate social responsibility, wrote in 1960 that ‘as
our culture changes, it is appropriate – even mandatory – that
businessmen re-examine their role and the functions of businesses
in society’.31 Like others before him, Davis emphasized power. He
argued that the growing size and influence of corporations implied
that they had an obligation to take on responsibility for the full
implications of their actions beyond business matters. The motive,
however, is not the form of moralism that Frederick saw as naive,
but rather a more sophisticated mode of self-interest. This is the
same kind of self-interest that Douthat was commenting on when
he first used the term ‘woke capitalism’, and that Bowen defended
in explicating social responsibility. Davis described this as follows:
To the extent that businessmen do not accept social
responsibility opportunities as they arise, other groups
will step in to assume these responsibilities. Historically
government and labor have been most active in the
role of diluting business power, and probably they
will continue to be the principal challenging groups.
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WOKE CAPITALISM

I am not proposing that this should happen, but on the
basis of the evidence, it appears that this will tend to
happen to the extent that businessmen do not keep
their social responsibilities approximately equal to their
social power.32
As Davis wrote sometime later in a 1967 article in Business
Horizons,33 politics was a major reason that businesses had become
interested in social responsibility. Most significantly this was
in the form of a fear that government would instil restrictive
forms of control and deregulation over corporate activity. Social
responsibility would forestall ‘giving government […] cause to
intervene’. While Davis’s arguments were not entirely novel, what
was new was that he offered them as a direct rebuke to Milton
Friedman’s criticisms in Capitalism and Freedom. Davis argued that
the Friedmanite doctrine that the only responsibility of business
was to maximize profit essentially assumed a free market system
of pure competition. In such a system, power is accorded to the
market rather than to the actors in it. Acknowledging that perfect
competition did not characterize the capitalism contemporary to
his time, Davis argued that businesses, especially large ones, had
developed to have considerable amounts of both economic and
social power.
Davis invoked what he now called the ‘“Iron Law of
Responsibility”: those who do not take responsibility for their
power ultimately shall lose it’.34 In other words, taking on social
responsibility is in the interest of corporations, at least insofar as
the maintenance of power is part of that interest. Davis remained
sanguine about this social power. By the early 1970s, he was
confident that the question of social responsibility for business
had already been decided in the US and most other economically
developed nations. What was the decision? That ‘society wants
business as well as all other major institutions to assume significant
social responsibility’ and that ‘social responsibility has become that
hallmark of a mature, global civilization’.35
As we have seen, the parallels of the debates about social
responsibility in the 1950s and 1960s and the debates about woke
capitalism today appear eerily similar. On the one hand, we have
a purely economic argument that business’s direct responsibilities
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Capitalism Goes Woke

are only to shareholders. By this account, corporations that
interfere in social issues are effectively overstepping their authority
by influencing that which should be democratically controlled.
On the other hand, we have the social responsibility argument
that proposes that the expansion of corporate power has meant
that the responsibility of corporations has increased. Moreover, if
corporations wish to retain that power, for the sake of long-term
profitability, they should engage in socially responsible activities.
Despite the similarities in the rhetoric of social responsibility
and woke capitalism, as pointed to earlier, there are also some
crucial differences. The burgeoning theories of social responsibility
from the mid-20th century on were limited mainly to the US and
occurred alongside a period of significant economic growth. In
a 1971 report called Social Responsibilities of Business Corporations,
the Committee for Economic Development set out what it saw as
‘a fresh and enlightened point of view about the role of business
as an important instrument for social progress in our pluralistic
society’.36 The ‘enlightened self-interest’ of corporations that the
report’s authors attested to came at a time of significant economic
growth in the US. Moreover, this growth was shared across society.
As the report states:
American business has provided increasing employment,
rising wages and salaries, employee benefit plans, and
expanding career opportunities for a labor force […]
Most important, the rising standard of living of the
Average American family has enabled more and more
citizens to develop their lives as they wish with less and
less constraint imposed on them by economic need.
Thus, most Americans have been able to afford better
health, food, clothing, shelter and education than the
citizens of any other nation have ever achieved on such
a large scale.37
This period of post-war prosperity and baby boom optimism was
one where the idea of corporations being socially responsible
would have had a particular resonance. The success of those
corporations was widely accepted as the reason for vastly improved
living standards. But the conditions of the mid-20th-century
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United States are a far cry from the context in which woke
capitalism has emerged. For one, woke capitalism is a much more
global phenomenon, especially in relation to the participation
of multi-national corporations in the woke agenda. The much
more significant contrast, however, is that we are now in a time of
persistent and widening inequality that, even in the US, is eroding
the middle-class affluence that provided the context for the growth
of the acceptance of corporate responsibility generations earlier.
In today’s US, three people – investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft’s
Bill Gates and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos – hold as much personal wealth
as the bottom half of all Americans. It’s been getting worse. Today
the richest American is worth more than 20 times the richest
American was worth in the early 1980s. Widening inequality is not
just happening in the US; it is a global phenomenon. The richest
1 per cent of the world’s population owns almost half of the world’s
wealth. The inequality is even starker if we compare the wealth of
individuals to that of countries. The ten richest people in the world
have a combined wealth of US$745 billion. That is more than the
individual GDP of Switzerland, Sweden, Thailand or Argentina.38
The reality is that over the past 40 years, inequality has become
progressively worse all over the world, effectively ending the liberal
democratic promise of shared prosperity that characterized the
post-war period.39
The obscenity of inequality in today’s world has become so
extreme that philosopher Frédéric Gros refers to ours as an ‘age
of indecency’.40 Gros uses the word ‘indecency’ to draw attention
to how ‘injustice’ is no longer an adequate term to describe the
inequalities present in today’s world. He explains:
The remuneration of the heads of large firms, the
payments of the sports celebrities in the media,
the emoluments of artists, have become obscene.
Inequalities have reached the point at which they could
only be justified by the assumption of two different
humanities.41
The two different humanities that Gros refers to consist, on the
one hand, of an elite class of the ultra-rich, and on the other hand,
the rest of us. Of course, this second group differs considerably in
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Capitalism Goes Woke

income and comfort, but for Gros they are still entirely separate
from the extreme minority of people who have been able to
accumulate increasing proportions of the world’s bounty.
Back in 1789, Benjamin Franklin, one of the ‘founding fathers’
of the US, quipped that ‘nothing can be said to be certain, except
death and taxes’.42 By the 21st century, while still not having
figured out how to cheat death, the extreme wealth of the super
minority has broken Franklin’s once self-evident edict. One recent
report in the US revealed that the top 1 per cent of the richest
people accounted for 70 per cent of all tax evasion. That is almost
US$90 billion per annum that stays in their own back pockets.43
Globally, the top 1 per cent are wealthier than everyone else taken
together, with this massive disparity being enabled by never-beforeseen levels of tax avoidance and tax evasion. Oxfam International
describes the situation with frightening honesty:
While millions across the world live in poverty, rich
individuals and companies, exploiting the secrecy
provided by tax havens, are continuing to dodge their
taxes, depriving the poorest countries from being able to
provide vital services. […] When it comes to paying tax,
there is one rule for the super-rich and big companies
and another for ordinary people.44
Tax evasion by the world’s biggest corporations is similarly
horrific. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has
identified corporate tax avoidance as a ‘particularly toxic aspect
of globalization [that] has not received the attention it deserves’.
In making this assertion, Stiglitz is referring to how multinational
corporations have effectively been able to engage in complex
accounting arrangements whereby they funnel revenues to lowtax countries. The upshot is, they don’t pay proper tax in the places
where they are doing real business. The cost of this is estimated
at around US$500 billion each year. In effect, companies like
Amazon, Netflix and General Motors can get away with paying no
tax whatsoever in the US despite raking in tens of billions of dollars
in profit. Stiglitz refers to this as a ‘race to the bottom’ that will lead
to different countries competing for an ever-diminishing amount
of corporate tax revenue, as tax rates continue to drop globally.
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This ‘benefits no one other than corporations’, he explains, and
they do so at the expense of widening inequality.45 This is far from
insignificant. In 1980, average corporate tax rates internationally
stood at just under 45 per cent of profits. Today that number has
fallen to about 25 per cent.46
In a global economy where billionaires and large corporations
hoard greater and greater proportions of the world’s wealth, the
democratic promise of equality is sacrificed. Human values of
community, sharing and justice become regarded as quaint when
faced with the inevitable consequences of an economic system
based on the pursuit of greed. Coming back to Gros, although
he does not use the term ‘woke capitalism’ specifically, he does
alert us to a particular mode of reasoning that underpins it. This
reasoning is not one where social responsibility is built on the hope
of shared capitalist prosperity. It is one where woke capitalism
buttresses a self-satisfied ruling elite who believe that their wealth is
deserved. Gros argues that it is not just that the world has become
increasingly unequal and unfair, but that the vast minority who
enjoy the spoils of this feel entirely morally justified about their
exalted positions.
The experiential realities of the ‘demented monstrosity of
inequalities’ are sidestepped in the assumption that those who do
not enjoy extreme privilege harbour an unmet aspiration to do so.47
Even worse, this can mean that the 1 per cent’s exalted economic
status makes them feel pious about their moral positions. Finally,
the compromise between wokeness and extreme personal wealth
is broken. It is assumed that the rich man can pass through the
eye of a needle en route to heaven, as if extreme wealth based on
profiteering and exploitation is entirely compatible with values of
fairness and equality. Assuming this compatibility is the condition of
woke capitalism; one where corporations are widening inequality
while at the same time positioning themselves as the moral arbiters
of capitalism. The existence of this cultural logic raises the question
of what has happened that corporate moralization is allowed to
rise alongside corporate greed and its attendant inequality. The
answer to this question is the key to understanding woke capitalism.
But to get to this answer, we need to look more closely at what
happened in the intervening period between mid-20th-century
social responsibility and 21st-century woke capitalism.
56

5

Shareholder Primacy
On 11 October 1985, at the height of her global power and
political influence, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher
addressed a buoyantly confident audience of proud members of
her Conservative Party. Just two years after her landslide election
victory, Thatcher’s second term in office saw the beginning of a
new economic boom in the UK. The bitter class feud of the coal
miners’ strike that had defined Thatcher’s leadership up until then
had largely been won. Thatcher’s right-wing economic policies
of privatization, trade deregulation, small government and labour
market liberalization were in full swing.
As she stood at the conference podium in the seaside town
of Blackpool, Thatcher was nothing if not self-congratulatory.
Reflecting on her six years in power she said:
Do you remember the Labour Britain of 1979? It was
a Britain – in which union leaders held their members
and our country to ransom; – A Britain that still went
to international conferences but was no longer taken
seriously; – A Britain that was known as the sick man of
Europe; – And which spoke the language of compassion
but which suffered the winter of discontent.1
Boasting of her government’s record of union busting, removing
controls on prices and wages, selling state-owned housing, and
denationalization, Thatcher pronounced that ‘enterprise is coming
to Britain’. Central to Thatcher’s vision of a newly innovative Britain
was the idea that capitalism, in its practice and ethos, should not be
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limited to the traditional owners of capital. Everyone could, and
indeed should, be a capitalist according to Thatcherite values. In
the 1985 conference speech she articulated a dream of a Britain
reinvigorated by the spirit of entrepreneurialism. Most practically,
Thatcher called for ‘resurgence of enterprise, with more people selfemployed, more businesses and therefore more jobs’. She also called
for a new Britain ‘where owning shares is as common as having a car’.
While Thatcher was uttering these words in the frayed workingclass holiday town of Blackpool, what she was saying reflected
a new cultural zeitgeist of which she was the chief protagonist.
While, traditionally, capitalism was based on a much stricter class
division between the owners of capital and those who worked
in capitalist organizations, Thatcher envisioned a world where
everyone thought of himself or herself as a property-owning
entrepreneur. Whether it be through business ownership, share
ownership or home ownership, the enterprising spirit of capitalism
was something that should inspire all of Britain’s citizens. Liberal
capitalism may have decreed that economic organization should be
based on free trade and private property, but in what later came to
be called neoliberalism, Thatcher wanted those very same values
to be adopted by all members of society. Gone would be the old
identities that saw working-class people identify with each other in
solidarity and unite to fight for working rights against the interests
of capital. Instead, the spirit of capitalism would filter through
the entire social body. Such was the moral justification of the still
maturing neoliberal order.
The 1980s was a significant time of social, cultural, political
and economic change where the values of a socially expanded
liberal capitalism were becoming entrenched across the globe. In
the US, President Ronald Reagan was spearheading broad-based
trade liberalization and deregulation. The crashing down of the
Berlin wall that, symbolically and practically, separated communist
East Germany from liberal democratic West Germany marked the
end of the cold war. The Soviet Union was soon to dissolve into
15 independent states, each no longer beholden to their communist
past. By the end of the 1980s, it appeared that liberal democratic
capitalism was an inevitable historical destination for all countries
around the world – the ‘end of history’ as political scientist Francis
Fukuyama dared call it.2
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It was at this end of history that the threat of socialism that
justified the ideas of the early advocates of social responsibility
had by and large dissipated. Before that, the cold war had been
raging between the United States-allied West and the Soviet
Union-allied East. As much as anything, this was a war fought on
social and moral grounds, with Reagan dubbing the Soviet Union
an ‘evil empire’, and the cold war itself as a ‘struggle between
right and wrong and good and evil’.3 Thatcher and Reagan were
both ardent anti-communists, and the end of the cold war was as
portrayed as a moral victory in which the ‘good’ of democracy and
capitalism had ‘won’ over the ‘evil’ of state socialism. Reagan and
Thatcher had worked hard for this success, and the victory was
not simply political. Economically it was a vindication of their
zealous advocacy for market capitalism, and the need for political
intervention to ensure the prevalence of the ‘free’ market.
The new right-wing ideas championed by Thatcher and Reagan
spread globally, not just through amorphous cultural transmission, but
also through the direct policies of the international financial bodies
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The influence
of this cannot be underestimated as these institutions predicated the
apparent necessity of low taxation, reduced corporate regulation,
removal of tariff barriers, the free-floating of currency, cuts to public
services and privatization of public organizations.4 This new economic
orthodoxy was coupled with deregulation of labour markets and
moves to limit the power of organized labour.5 Capitalism was
being unleashed, and an unbounded faith in the market mechanism
animated a new promise of economic growth and prosperity.6
While there is no space here to discuss the complex and contested
history of neoliberalism,7 it is important to consider how what was
understood as the social responsibilities of business changed from
the 1980s and how this fits into the genealogy of woke capitalism.
As Thatcher intimated, central to the neoliberal project was to
make every person a capitalist. ‘Popular capitalism is nothing
less than a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic
life of the nation’,8 Thatcher declared to the 1986 Conservative
Party conference. Neoliberalism was not just a functional matter
of wanting people to engage differently in the economy. It
was a deeply held aspiration to fundamentally change the way
that working people understood who they were as individuals.
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Thatcher’s ‘popular capitalism’ meant that everybody should be a
capitalist, and privatization was a key route to that end. To ensure
this would take place, the UK government even funded a massive
advertising campaign, replete with class stereotypes, to get workingclass people to take up share ownership through privatization.
One of the earliest thinkers to identify the trend of neoliberal
identity politics, even before Thatcher adopted it, was philosopher
and historian Michel Foucault. Foucault was clear in his lectures
from the late 1970s that the social and political changes going
on around him were not merely about free market economics
understood in the classic liberal tradition. Instead, Foucault
identified how the changes occurring were such that market
economic principles had moved beyond economics to influence
society more generally. As he describes it, neoliberalism prized
the liberal free market and minimal government intervention
in markets, while seeking to impel citizens to apply the same
economically liberal values to their own lives. In his words:
Neo-liberal governmental intervention is no less dense,
frequent, active and continuous than in any other
system. But what is important is to see what the point
of application of these government interventions is
now. Since this is a liberal regime, it is understood that
government must not intervene on effects of the market.
Nor must neo-liberalism, or neo-liberal government,
correct the destructive effects of the market on society
[…] it has to intervene on society as such, in its fabric
and depth. Basically it has to intervene on society so
that competitive mechanisms can play a regulatory
role at every moment and every point in society and
by intervening in this way its objective will become
possible, that is to say, a general regulation of society
by the market.9
Thatcher’s plan, launched just a few years after Foucault issued these
words of warning, was precisely not only to regulate the economy,
but to regulate society through the mechanism of the market.
‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and
soul,’10 she asserted. People would be freed from the paternalistic
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Shareholder Primacy

shackles of the welfare state and would use that freedom in a sober
and orderly quest for economic self-improvement. Thatcher’s
was a moral project as much as it was an economic one, to instil
discipline, independence and self-reliance in the British people.11
The ‘soul’ Thatcher sought to create was one that would be
both enterprising and capitalist in orientation and was reflected
in broader changes to business culture as well. The year 1983
was an especially important turning point. It was when the term
‘shareholder value’ became part of the everyday business lexicon.
The term had been used sporadically in the business press from the
mid-1960s, and was increasingly present in academic research in
the 1970s. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, however, that its usage
exponentially amplified as it became a central focus in corporate
boardrooms. By the 1990s, shareholder value was thoroughly
entrenched as representing one of the fundamental values expected
to be held by businesses.12 Shareholder value was entirely in keeping
with Thatcherite devotion to enterprise and the desire to turn
Britain into a nation of shareholders whose financial wellbeing
would be at the mercy of corporate commercial success.
It is worth remembering that Milton Friedman was an adviser
to Thatcher when she was prime minister, and both shared an
unwavering dedication to economic liberalism. When it came to
privatization, labour markets, unemployment, inflation, monetary
sovereignty and government debt, the Thatcherite policy drew
directly from Friedman’s economic theories.13 As Thatcher said
on the occasion of Friedman’s death in 2006:
Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty when
it had been all but forgotten. He was an intellectual
freedom fighter. Never was there a less dismal
practitioner of a dismal science. I shall greatly miss my
old friend’s lucid wisdom and mordant humour.14
It was Friedman’s insistence that managers were morally obliged
to take actions to maximize the financial interests of shareholders,
which formed the basis of a new direction in corporate governance.
Shareholders were principals, and managers were their agents,
no more, no less. While generations before had debated the
implications of the separation of corporate ownership from
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corporate managerial control,15 the 1980s embrace of shareholder
value asserted that executives should maximize shareholders’
financial value in terms of the share price. Moreover, they should
ignore any consequences that pursuing this singular objective
might have for anyone else.16 A fundamental shift in the balance
of power between shareholders and managers had occurred, with
shareholders (especially institutional investors) calling the shots.17
The long-held acceptance that ‘managers had become the princes
of industry and [that] no effective means existed to control them’
had finally been broken. Shareholders became primary.18
In principle, shareholder value refers to the financial benefit that
a business creates for shareholders in terms of both distributed
dividends and the increasing value of shares themselves. It has been
referred to as the ‘shareholder value movement’. The focus on
share value as an organizational value gained steam in the 1980s
to the point that it became the driving motivation of increasing
numbers of corporate executives. This refocusing was a response
to economic stagnation in the 1970s, especially in Britain and the
US, driven in part by the new competition corporations faced
in a globalizing economy. The legitimacy of prevailing attitudes
to corporate governance was deeply questioned, laying the
ground for a radical change in approach. The 1980s was a turning
point at which shareholder value became widely viewed as the
principal goal of corporations, with all other goals such as growth,
profitability, market share or attending to the needs of anyone
other than shareholders, were at best secondary. It was now widely
accepted that ‘instead of the previously dominant business strategy,
which focused on company growth and reserving and reinvesting
profits – the “retain and reinvest” strategy – serving the immediate
shareholder interest became key in the 1980s’.19
As a new ideology of corporate governance, shareholder value
was embraced first in the US and the UK, soon spreading to
Europe and affecting the whole world through the actions of
large multinational corporations.20 In effect, Milton Friedman’s
arguments from the 1960s and 1970s, that the sole responsibility
of corporations was to the owners of capital, had won. Writing in
Business Horizons in 1985, management professor Bernard Reimann
summed up what was being enthusiastically embraced as the new
management orthodoxy:
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Shareholder Primacy

The pursuit of excellence – be it in product quality,
competitive position, or innovation – will not be
undertaken for its own sake, but with the best interest
of the corporation’s shareholders explicitly in mind. The
creation of shareholder value can thus become a matter
of conscious decision rather than being left to chance.
This is the only way that shareholders can benefit from
the ‘excellence’ of their corporations.21
In no small measure, Thatcher and Reagan’s advocacy ushered in this
new era of shareholder primacy, especially as state intervention into
corporate takeovers was diminished on the grounds of increasing
competition, efficiency and enterprise.22 As the 1980s saw a slew of
hostile corporate takeovers, the market value of a company became a
growing concern for managers who did not want their organizations
to be subject to this hostility. At worst, a corporate raider would buy
the majority shares in a low stock price company, only to sell off
their assets for a value greater than the purchase price. This form of
corporate raiding and asset stripping reached its heyday in the 1980s.
While it had all but ended by the 1990s, its legacy was a fundamental
shift in power from managers to shareholders.
Shareholder primacy led to a revamping of executive
compensation. New pay schemes were designed to ‘incentivize’
growing shareholder value, smooth over antagonism between
managers and shareholders, and to protect corporate interests
by ensuring those executives who made the biggest bang for
the shareholder buck didn’t get poached by another employer.
Executive pay packets were directly tied to shareholder value in
the form of share ownership, stock options and share-price-linked
bonuses. It is hardly surprising that this time saw massive increases
in executive remuneration compared to that of average workers.
In the US for example, in 1978 CEOs earned about 30 times that
of average workers. This ratio doubled to around 60 by the end of
the 1980s. It was up to 400 by the end of the 1990s.23
Summing up these trends, economic sociologists Johan Heilbron,
Jochem Verheul and Sander Quak explain how:
The spread of shareholder value as a central business
objective was […] accompanied by a considerable
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increase in executive compensation, which partly
explains why the new doctrine was relatively quickly
embraced by manager ial elites. The spread of
shareholder value during the 1980s and the beginning
the 1990s coincides clearly with the rise of executive
compensation, which explains a significant part of the
rising inequalities in income and wealth.24
With stock-related incentives in place, managerial decision making
changed as executives launched business strategies that would reap
benefits to their own hip-pockets.25 As executive pay packets
bulged, there was an accompanying broad trend towards corporate
downsizing and employee layoffs, not as a means to respond to
financial crises, but as a way to boost share value during times of
economic growth. The result was not only the loss of jobs once
taken for granted as a source of livelihood. It was also the beginning
of increased job insecurity and precarity across the economy.26
Thatcher’s promise of shared prosperity through capital ownership
was revealed at best as a pipe dream and at worst as a scam. The
shareholders were primary and they and their managerial agents
were taking greater shares of global wealth at the expense of
everyone else.27
The very idea of shareholder value as a renewed form of capitalist
authority would seem to be at odds with the forms of social
responsibility advocated from the 1950s, especially given Friedman’s
opposition to any such ideas. In considering this, we should not
be too quick to assume that Friedman’s dismissal of managerial
responsibilities to anyone other than the owners of capital came
into force purely on Friedman’s terms. In fact, from the 1980s
calls for social responsibility did not go away. Quite the contrary,
the reality is that the era of shareholder value saw a concurrent
burgeoning of support for corporate social responsibility, or CSR
as it came to be referred to commonly. The key difference with the
new corporate social responsibility, however, was that it too became
part of the armoury of shareholder value. Less a primary concern
for society or a substitute for socialism, social responsibility was
even more fully incorporated into self-interested corporate strategy.
The ‘business case for social responsibility’ was at the fore of
these changes. In this new form, social responsibility was a part
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Shareholder Primacy

of a corporate strategy that managers could deliberately leverage
to improve shareholder value. If a corporation were to embrace
CSR, it would do so because there was a business case that justified
it by demonstrating that it would result in increased financial
performance. The corollary of this, of course, was that if socially
beneficial corporate activities did not contribute to shareholder
value, corporations should entirely avoid them. The prevailing
trend was that ‘most companies devote resources to CSR initiatives
as a means of maximizing long-run value rather than out of a
prior commitment to stakeholders’.28 Most particular, the strategic
connection was seen to arise because CSR could improve the
public legitimacy of corporate activity, enhance goodwill, and
ultimately mitigate the risk of stakeholder resistance to blunt
capitalist exploitation. As the hackneyed phrase has it, ‘good ethics
is good business’, or at least the appearance of good ethics is. In this
way social responsibility became seen as entirely consistent with the
corporate goal of shareholder value maximization.
Corporate governance researchers Paddy Ireland and Regine
Pillay sum up the connection between shareholder value and
CSR. They acknowledged that earlier versions of CSR did include
attempts to challenge shareholder primacy, but by the dawn of the
21st century things had changed considerably:
Ideas about CSR tend to be premised on a shareholderoriented model of the corporation as a private enterprise
in which directors owe enforceable duties only to
shareholders. While the earlier idea of the socially
responsible corporation had a genuinely transformative
edge […] contemporary CSR is essentially ameliorative,
seeking to temper without unsettling or displacing
the idea of the corporation as a private, exclusively
shareholder- and profit-oriented enterprise.29
So why did the shareholder value movement need CSR? While
shareholder primacy may have ruled in the 1980s and 1990s, its
value was deeply questioned in the first decade of the 2000s.
Faith in corporations waned as the public witnessed the corporate
accounting scandals of companies like Enron in 2001 and
WorldCom in 2002. The financial crises of the dot.com crash of
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2000 and the global financial crisis of 2007 also led many to doubt
the efficacy of the economic system. Global capitalism no longer
seemed the high road to prosperity that Thatcher and Reagan
had promised. Instead, these events were widely seen as a result of
CEO greed, stock market fanaticism and corrupt self-interest. In
response, CSR became a salve for shareholder primacy that made it
more palatable without fundamentally changing it. What we have is
what some call ‘enlightened value maximization’ where ‘each dollar
of investment in a corporate stakeholder group should be justified
by at least a dollar of expected return over a finite time horizon’.30
While an earlier generation had hotly debated whether corporations
should be socially responsible or responsible only to shareholders, in
the wake of Thatcher and Reagan CSR was fully subsumed as a
corporate strategy that would enhance shareholder value. Let us not
underestimate how widespread CSR had become in the corporate
world. By the 21st century, CSR was largely institutionalized
within large corporations. While technically it was voluntary, in
practice all corporations were expected to invest in CSR activities
– anything from corporate philanthropy to selling ‘ethical’ products
to environmental management – all justified based on an assumed
business case.31 Perhaps the most influential recognition of this came
from Harvard professors Michael Porter and Mark Kramer. In their
influential 2011 article ‘Creating shared value’,32 they argued that the
best corporations had moved on from a myopic and old-fashioned
conception of ‘value creation’ focused on short-term financial results.
They suggested that corporations would achieve their long-term
interests only if they found ways to maximize value for themselves
while also addressing societal challenges. Porter and Kramer named
corporations like General Electric, Wal-Mart, Nestlé, Johnson &
Johnson, and Unilever as exemplars of this approach.
With Porter and Kramer’s notion of shared value, what were
once social problems became recast as strategic opportunities for
business – in other words, a means to enhance shareholder value.
While such a concept was broadly popular in the business world,
it glossed over the tensions between business interests and social
problems, ignored widening inequality, and vastly simplified the
complexities of business activity. Conveniently for organizations,
shared value pretended to ‘rethink the purpose of the corporation
without questioning the sanctity of corporate self-interest’.33
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Shareholder Primacy

As shareholder value took hold as a guiding principle of corporate
governance, corporations had become increasingly dominant in a
globalizing economy. So powerful were multinational corporations
that they have been described as achieving a level of sovereignty
traditionally reserved for nation states. If the gross domestic product
of nation states are compared to the sales revenues of global
corporations, by the turn of the century, 51 of the world’s largest
economies were corporations.34 It is important to acknowledge
here that the power shift towards corporations is not just about the
wealth and power of individual corporate entities, but rather a shift
in the political system that cedes power to the corporate sector and
to capitalism more generally. After all, individual corporations come
and go. In a telling analysis, finance professor David Michayluk
tracked companies with ‘single-letter ticker symbols’ through
the history of the New York Stock Exchange. The single-letter
symbols were given to the most elite companies with the highest
volume of stock trading, enabling a single keystroke to be used to
track transactions. From the beginning of the 20th century to the
beginning of the 21st century, and especially from the 1960s, the
value of single-letter ticker symbol firms declined massively. It has
reached the point where these symbols are barely used today. By and
large, these companies either died off or declined in importance.35
Corporate capitalism has proven to be successful as a system that
adapts to its changing environment by recreating itself through
new corporations and practices. The moralization of corporations
through corporate social responsibility is a key example of this in
recent times. In the era of corporate sovereignty, social responsibility
has taken on the new purpose of extending corporate power
through a moralization of business. The move was to establish
corporate ethical credentials that would provide a smokescreen for
their rapacious global expansion.36 Management professor Bobby
Banerjee lays out the conditions in stark terms:
[D]espite its emancipatory rhetoric, discourses
of corporate citizenship, social responsibility and
sustainability are defined by narrow business interests
and serve to curtail interests of external stakeholders.
[They are] ideological movements that are intended to
legitimize the power of large corporations.37
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Whereas the forms of social responsibility present before the 1980s
endeavoured to temper corporate power to preserves capitalism, by
the 2000s things had changed. Now the apparent responsibilization
of business was all about maintaining and extending corporate
power to enhance corporate capitalism.38 What we see here, at
last, is the full incorporation of social responsibility into the idea
of shareholder value.
The connection of social responsibility with corporate power
and shareholder value formed the basis of what would become
woke capitalism. The key shift was that rather than corporations
taking advantage of business cases for CSR, woke capitalism relies
on what we might call a ‘political case’. The corporate ambit
is broadened with woke capitalism as corporations engage in
seemingly responsible behaviour that is no longer directly related
to their core business activity. Most commonly, this relates to the
public support and funding of progressive social causes. It would
be easy to conclude that this is simply a matter of corporate
branding, with businesses wanting to benefit from being associated
with political issues they think have broad public appeal. While
that may be the case, woke capitalism goes much further in terms
of corporations muscling in to control the public sphere that, at
least in the democratic tradition, has been the realm of the state
and civil society. Woke capitalism is primarily about corporate
power: it involves breaking the chain that has long connected
liberal democracy and capitalism so that corporations can continue
on the path of global domination in the political as well as the
economic realm.
An important signal of the shift to the new era of woke capitalism
is that by 2020 the whole debate about shareholder value seemed
to be over. Nowhere was the international impact of this more
evident than at the World Economic Forum’s convention held
in Davos in the Swiss Alps. As we saw in Chapter 2, in 2020
the conference’s explicit theme was ‘stakeholder capitalism’. The
Forum’s stated purpose is to engage ‘the foremost political, business,
cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and
industry agendas’.39 Every January, a global elite of world leaders,
billionaires, celebrities and other power brokers convene to do this
‘shaping’. The year 2020 was an especially interesting conference,
because not only was it the Forum’s 50th anniversary, but also
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because it marked the coming of age of woke capitalism. Walking
around the conference, Columbia law professor Tim Wu observed
that members were spruiking the message that ‘the corporate
world is cleaning up its act’. While Thatcher may have defended
the virtues of enterprise and free market some 40 years earlier,
Wu’s observation of Davos’s wokeness was that he thought he
had mistakenly stumbled in to ‘a business-casual Bernie Sanders
rally: unrestrained capitalism has gone too far; corporate greed has
endangered the planet; the time has come for radical change’.40
Capitalism was wearing the cloak of anti-capitalist socialism!
What Wu was alluding to was the World Economic Forum’s
manifesto that was released to coincide with the 2020 get-together.
The manifesto avowed the need for ‘a new form of capitalism’
that moved beyond what was depicted as the economically
unsustainable nature of shareholder capitalism. Describing itself as ‘a
set of ethical principles to guide companies’, the manifesto offered
a set of non-binding feel-good statements about the purpose of
corporations. Businesses were to ‘engage all its stakeholders in
shared and sustained value creation’. In this context, customers
are offered an attractive value proposition, workers are treated with
respect, suppliers are partners, taxes are paid to government, and
corporations regard themselves as global citizens with a duty to
improve the world. That might all seem like a utopian vision of a
new form of ‘loving’ capitalism, where once self-interested, profithungry, share-price maximizers would realize the errors of their
ways and start using their power for the common good. Here’s the
rub. The manifesto makes the motive for its principles clear: all
of the ‘stakeholders’ should be animated by ‘shared commitment
to policies and decisions that strengthen the long-term prosperity
of a company’.41 Woke capitalism, although dressed in progressive
sheep’s clothing, remains fundamentally and primarily wedded to
long-term corporate interests. Moreover, what appears on first
glance like a genuinely other-focused programme of corporate
generosity, when read more closely is revealed as a corporate
attempt to appropriate all members and institutions of society into
its web of self-interest. As IKEA’s retail chief Tolga Öncü described
it when he was at Davos: ‘It’s good business to do good.’42
Jeremy Cliffe, an international editor of the New Statesman,
provided a telling analysis of Davos’s woke agenda. Essentially
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the new manifesto was a response, at least a rhetorical one, to
the corporate excess and inequality that had been unleashed by
Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s and grown to maturity by
the early 21st century. In an era of populist backlash to widening
inequality and the disenfranchisement of large swathes of the world’s
citizens, Cliffe called out the new woke capitalism as being ‘as
much as an insurance policy against hacked-off workers, consumers
and voters as it is a serious answer to the world’s problems’.43 As
a direct affront to social democracy based on wealth distribution
through taxation, state regulation of markets and the unionization
of workers, with woke capitalism, it is the capitalists who call the
political shots. What makes today’s woke capitalism different from
the corporate social responsibility of the past is that it is not just
about maintaining legitimacy, preventing revolt and forestalling
regulation; it is about the direct takeover of democracy, both
ideologically and practically.

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6

A Wolf in Woke Clothing
‘Unnerved by fundamental economic changes and the failure of
government to provide lasting solutions, society is increasingly
looking to companies, both public and private, to address pressing
social and economic issues.’1 So wrote Larry Fink, billionaire head
of the investment management company BlackRock. The message
came in his 2019 annual letter to the CEOs of the corporations
in which his company invests. The letter was a platform from
which Fink proselytized about what he saw as the responsibilities of
corporations to society. Fink painted a picture of a bleak world where
financial markets were uncertain, confidence had ebbed, wages were
stagnant, and technology was threatening jobs. The result, he opined,
was a wave of social unrest that was manifesting around the world
in ‘popular anger, nationalism, and xenophobia’. Democratic states
were dysfunctional and trust in public institutions was deteriorating.
What can be done to emerge from such dark times? Fink
answered that people wanted corporations to come up with
the solutions. Whether it be about environmental protection,
sustainable retirement incomes, gender inequity or racial
discrimination, corporations, according to Fink, needed to come
to the rescue. ‘The world needs your leadership,’ he explained to
the CEOs with an air of moral certainty. This position wasn’t a
radical departure for Fink. It reinforced what he had said in his
2018 letter to the same CEOs. In that missive, he also insisted that
‘society increasingly is turning to the private sector and asking that
companies respond to broader societal challenges’. His message
was clear: ‘Society is demanding that companies, both public and
private, serve a social purpose.’2
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Fink’s letters attracted significant attention in the media with
pundits hotly debating his insistence that corporations need to
have a social purpose. On the far-right, Breitbart News responded
in 2018 with the sensational headline ‘BlackRock’s betrayal:
#WokeWallStreet pushes leftist agenda on corporate America’.
For Breitbart, Fink insisting that CEOs have a responsibility to
ensure that the corporations they manage contribute to society
was an abuse of power. Moreover, it was a socialist conspiracy with
Fink using his position nefariously so that companies would ‘adopt
left-wing policy goals in the name of corporate responsibility’.3
Fox Business made a similar assessment, labelling Fink’s stance
as exemplifying a dangerous trend of ‘corporate socialism’. Fox
cited Charles Elson, a professor of corporate governance at the
University of Delaware, who asserted the hackneyed right-wing
credo that ‘A CEO shouldn’t use house money to further a goal
that may not create economic returns.’4 Herein lies a standard kneejerk critique of woke capitalism: that it is dangerous, if not outright
morally bad, because it had succumbed to the corrupting allure of
progressive left-wing politics.
There were similar responses when Fink released his 2020 letter
to CEOs. This time it was environmental matters that were on
his mind. With direct reference to the climate change protests in
2019 that saw millions of people take to the streets demanding
action, Fink implored the CEOs to understand ‘how climate risk
will impact both our physical world and the global system that
finances economic growth’. Fink’s message was that CEOs had a
responsibility to support a global transition away from using fossil
fuels as an energy source. This wasn’t just friendly advice; the
power of Fink’s company and its ability to steer the direction of
investment dollars means he carries a big stick, and he promises that
he will use it. In what appeared as a veiled threat, he stated clearly
that: ‘[BlackRock] will be increasingly disposed to vote against
management and board directors when companies are not making
sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the
business practices and plans underlying them’. In other words, he
was threatening CEOs that unless they support addressing climate
change, BlackRock would be taking its money elsewhere.5
BlackRock was not just rehearsing empty woke-washing rhetoric.
In January 2020, the company formally announced that it would pull
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out of investments that had high levels of sustainability risk. In what
only years earlier would have appeared like a political impossibility,
environmental activists rallied behind Fink and his firm, declaring this
to be a ‘historic moment’ and ‘a remarkable breakthrough’.6 Many
applauded Fink, positioning him as a model of the contemporary
CEO. Peter Horst, writing in Forbes magazine, compared Fink’s
2018 letter to the invention of the internet and the launch of the
iPhone. The similarity? They all ‘stand out as watershed moments
that re-define the environment and re-direct the course of events’.
Horst describes the letter as ‘electrifying’. It was nothing less than a
‘clarion call for CEOs to seize the mantle of leadership in making
the world a better place, beyond simply delivering profits’.7
Fink was not bluffing. ‘BlackRock punishes 53 companies over
climate inaction’ was the headline in the Financial Times on 14 July
2020. What they were referring to was a report that BlackRock
had released naming companies that it had assessed as not having
made adequate progress on climate changes. The long list named
244 companies who were chastised for not having done enough.
This included big names like auto manufacturer Daimler, coal
mining giant Peabody, and the electricity company Fortum. The
shortlist of 53 companies were those that BlackRock had taken
direct action against at annual shareholder meetings. The main
outcome was BlackRock using its shareholdings to vote against
the re-election of directors and to block proposed management
decisions. BlackRock was not afraid to threaten others who dared
to consider not complying. Some companies were told they had
been put ‘on watch’ by BlackRock for lack of progress. They were
instructed to clean up their acts within 12 to 18 months. What
happens if they fail to comply? According to BlackRock they ‘risk
voting action in 2021 if they do not make substantial progress’.8
Despite these strong-arm tactics, the motives behind Fink’s
divestment decisions were called into question as bowing to
‘populist pressure to do more to save the planet’.9 It is noteworthy
that this populism appears very much a domestic issue. Despite
its woke proclamations at home, BlackRock has been widely
criticized for hypocrisy, given its massive holdings in greenhouse
gas-gushing businesses in China.10 That this might reflect Western
populism affirms the idea that corporations get involved in woke
capitalism because they are following a fashion that has public
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support. Taking this even further, there is a view that in following
the woke trend, corporations are being bullied into turning left
with their politics. There are plenty of historical examples that
demonstrate the effectiveness of pressure groups on redirecting
corporate activity. Think, for example, of the pressure Nestlé came
under in the 1980s for promoting powdered breast milk to women
who did not have access to clean water, or the global boycott of
French products in the 1990s following the French government’s
testing of nuclear weapons at the Mururoa atoll.
Woke capitalism is different. Rather than just complying with
the demands of activists and protestors, corporations are taking the
lead in promoting their causes, and blowing their trumpets about it
too. BlackRock is quick to trot out the names of, in its own words,
‘just a few examples of the numerous organizations recognizing
BlackRock for our leadership in corporate social responsibility,
sustainability, investment stewardship, transparency and inclusion
and diversity’: America’s Most JUST Company for 2020; ‘A+
for Strategy & Governance in the Principles for Responsible
Investment (“PRI”) Assessment Report’; included in the Dow
Jones index of most sustainable companies in North America.11 And
just a week after proclaiming that ‘every government, company and
shareholder must confront climate change’, in February 2020 Fink
boarded his company’s US$98 million private jet in New York to
travel 16,000 kilometres to Sydney to lecture the Australian finance
industry on the global state of play. En route, the luxury plane
burned 1,100 kilograms of jet fuel per hour. Hardly surprising that
the press dubbed him self-righteous or hypocritical.12
The Spectator has described Larry Fink’s actions as being indicative
of a ‘more general trend of “woke capitalism”, whereby companies
that would not dream of taking sides in party political battles enter
the culture wars’. By this account, corporations are bowing to the
pressure of an angry political mob of lefties who threaten their
livelihood if they do not comply with their anti-business demands.
The Spectator opined that ‘Extracting coal, oil and gas from the
ground is not an antisocial act which calls for punishment by
“enlightened” bankers; it is part of a process that has transformed
living standards beyond all recognition over the past two centuries
[…]’.13 BlackRock, however, has simply succumbed to the green
tyrants whose aim is to attack capitalism.
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A Wolf in Woke Clothing

What we see in these responses to Fink’s words and deeds is
indicative of the broader right-wing criticisms of woke capitalism
as being a direct and misinformed assault on the very virtues of
a purer form of capitalism. It is suggested that corporations have
lost sight of their true vocation as well as the ideological economic
conservatism that supports it. Woke capitalists are positioned as
weak willed and puny in their inability to resist the left-wing con
artists peddling the likes of climate activism, political correctness
or identity politics. Samuel Gregg, of Emory University’s Acton
Institute, puts it bluntly: ‘woke capitalism corrupts business’.14 This
is so, he argues, because it shows how progressive politics have
seduced corporations, and in so doing, have forgotten their true
social purpose.
Businesses, Gregg argues, have a particular purpose and that in
pursuing it they should not stray by meddling with pesky leftwing agendas. This purpose is limited to the economic sphere,
which leads to the conclusion that involvement in political causes
(especially progressive ones) is outside a business’s primary goals,
and therefore should be avoided in their entirety. The focus on
politics marks a big difference between contemporary criticisms
of woke capitalism and those of social responsibility. People
condemn woke capitalism not just because it involves corporations
engaging in activities that are not strictly business, but also because
those activities are considered politically progressive.
Calling out corporations for being woke is part of a larger
move in conservative politics to attack left-wing ideas wherever
they arise. That is not to say that the conservative position is that
businesses don’t contribute to society, but rather that, at least for
Gregg, such contributions are limited to ‘the creation and growth
of the wealth that provides for people’s material needs and wants’.
With conservative bravado, Gregg asserts that ‘business does not
exist to engage in Marxist-like consciousness-raising exercises, alter
family structures, establish world peace, or even right a nation’s
historical wrongs’.15 It would seem that woke capitalists were radical
communist entryists infiltrating capitalism in a Trojan horse full of
blue-suited bankers and financiers!
Rod Dreher, senior editor at The American Conservative magazine,
has been especially vocal about the idea that business should keep its
hands out of anything woke. Dreher declares that ‘woke capitalism is
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our enemy’, with the ‘we’ in question being political conservatives.
He sees woke capitalism as being both totalitarian and manipulative
in its attempt to convert people into what he describes as a kind
of religious fervour that comes along with progressive politics.
‘[Woke capitalism] is all about coercing people into accepting and
participating in a cultural revolution by redefining the revolution’s
goals and methods as good for business, and a chance for employees
to exercise virtue’,16 he railed. For Dreher, woke capitalism is a
form of ‘cultural imperialism’ or ‘soft totalitarianism’ whereby
corporate adoption of progressive positions exerts considerable
political pressure on others – for example, employees – also to
espouse those same positions, even if they don’t believe in them. An
example he gives is Swedish furniture company IKEA firing a man
for objecting to the company’s support of the gay pride movement
because it contravened the man’s religious beliefs.17
To the extent that woke capitalism is yoked to progressive
causes culturally, as already mentioned, the conservative critique
also extends to the idea that it is an abrogation of the true and
virtuous values of ‘real’ capitalism. Woke capitalism is simply leftwing brainwashing that has captivated CEOs and led them down
the garden path of anti-capitalism. But, coming back to Fink, if
you read his letters this is not what he is saying at all. While he
implores CEOs to go woke for numerous reasons, chief among
them is that it is good for business. Fink is not appealing to the
CEOs’ moral consciousness; he is trying to get them to redirect
their views on the best ways to make money, especially in the long
term. If anything, Fink sees himself as a saviour of capitalism. By
following his gospel, business can be redeemed so as to invigorate
its economic rule. While Fink espoused how corporations can
and should address public issues, the question of motive was also
answered. ‘Companies that fulfill their purpose and responsibilities
to stakeholders reap rewards over the long-term,’18 he wrote.
What kinds of rewards would these be? Fink answers in the
negative, warning that companies not dealing with public issues
might lead to forms of civil unrest and industrial militancy that
would threaten corporate activity. A second motive that Fink
offered was that, as a new generation emerges, the financial value
of companies and their long-term profitability will be increasingly
based on ‘environmental, social, and governance issues’.19 On
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A Wolf in Woke Clothing

environmental matters, for example, Fink states: ‘climate change
has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects’.
What this means is that people should invest in climate-friendly
companies so that they can make more money. There is no
interpretation or analysis needed here. Fink says it directly: ‘Our
investment conviction is that sustainability- and climate-integrated
portfolios can provide better risk-adjusted returns to investors.’20
It is reasonable to conclude that Fink is genuine in his conviction,
rather than having been duped by scurrilous lefties into believing
that progressive causes should be pursued on the grounds of the
collective good. No. He appeals to private interests, as represented
by the CEOs to whom he is writing. As much as he advocates for
corporations to take on greater social responsibility, care for the
environment, care about workers’ retirement incomes, and support
communities, what it boils down to is that ‘companies that fulfill
their purpose and responsibilities to stakeholders reap rewards over
the long-term. Companies that ignore them stumble and fail.’21 In
other words, go woke or go broke!
Fink’s position shows that woke capitalism is not an abrogation
of capitalism that has coasted in on the crest of a resuscitated
socialism. Woke capitalism emerges as a way for capitalism, or at
least corporate capitalism, to adapt to present conditions to preserve
its future viability. For some, this is a reason to celebrate. Writing
in Forbes magazine, Harvard Business School’s Bill George went on
the front foot by stating not only that ‘Fink is not a socialist’ but
that he ‘is one of the world’s great capitalists’. Why so? According
to George, it is because when a company has a social purpose, its
employees, in a bid to make their lives meaningful, will align their
sense of purpose with that of the company. The result is that they
work harder and are more innovative, and ‘that, in turn, leads to
increased revenues and ultimately greater profitability – the basis
for creating ongoing shareholder value’.22 In other words, acting
woke is a way to squeeze productivity out of people without paying
them any more.
Responding specifically to criticism that Fink’s public purpose
message was socialism in disguise, Mark Kramer, a social impact
strategist also at Harvard Business School, asserted that ‘business
leaders must finally, once and for all, let go of the outdated and
erroneous notion that social factors […] are irrelevant to the
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economic success of our companies [and] that economic success is
strongly determined by the way a company addresses social issues’.23
He goes on to argue that this shows how Fink’s actions are about
reshaping his organization for future success, as indeed he believes
all corporations should. After all, social impact is competitive
advantage dressed up as do-gooding.
So far, we have considered three responses to Fink’s CEO letters
on social impact and purpose. The first is to embrace him on
account of his dedication to society. The second is to condemn
him for peddling a nefarious green-left political agenda that will
destroy the lucrative beauty of corporate capitalism. The third is
to go back to celebrating him, not because of his social credentials,
but rather because he has found a novel way to make money using
social impact as the new driver of shareholder value. This latter
position posits that his approach will be the saviour of corporate
capitalism. The first position is naive, if not gullible. The second
and third remain fundamentally economically conservative in their
values, even if they disagree on the methods that will best ensure
the longevity of the dominance of the corporate system.
There is another, more political and much more worrying
perspective that I am advocating in this book. It is that woke
capitalism is a subterfuge for the corporate takeover of democracy.
It is a means through which private companies are trying to take
political power away from government and put it in their own
hands. One does not have to read too far between the lines of
Fink’s letters to see this. In the 2018 letter, he admitted that since
the 2008 global financial crisis ‘those with capital have reaped
enormous benefits’, while those without capital suffered from
‘low wage growth, and inadequate retirement systems’. The result,
he asserts, is a polarized world between the haves and have-nots,
hinting that this polarization presents as a risk to the wealth of the
people he just classed as ‘those with capital’.24 Fink’s high moral
ground on social purpose suddenly looks more like class-based selfinterest. We might legitimately ask whether his concern for people
without capital is based on a genuine sense of justice and concern
for others. Could it be the result of an anxiety that emerges when
the billionaire class of which he is a member are frightened that
they have pushed capitalist inequality so far that those who are
disaffected might, at last, revolt?
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There is no need for exaggeration or overinterpretation as Fink
states it clearly without the need for analysis. In his 2019 letter,
Fink admits that the vast inequalities that capitalism has created
have ‘fueled popular anger, nationalism, and xenophobia’. In other
words, the fact that latter-day capitalism has created such massive
inequality serves as a threat to the continued existence of capitalism
itself. This threat, he argues, does not come from socialism, but
from fascism. If corporations do not, collectively, do something
about it, they risk, according to Fink, the full-scale effects of ‘great
political and economic disruption’.25 Fink’s apparently goodhearted words suddenly appear as a manifestation of deep fear.
A fear that what he calls ‘economic disruption’ that might even
jeopardize capitalism itself.
Fink’s proposal is not to restore democratic values of equality and
solidarity, but that corporations should take over – with hostility,
if necessary – the functions of government. If they don’t, he
holds deep worries that the system that enables the inequality he
personally benefits from is at risk of destruction. The purpose of
woke capitalism is thus revealed as being to save capitalism itself.
Fink is explicit in arguing that the public wants corporations to
step in because governments have failed. In 2019, he affirmed the
‘failure of government to provide lasting solutions’ to economic
uncertainty,26 just as in 2018 he referred to ‘governments failing
to prepare for the future’ as far as workers’ financial survival
is concerned.27
In style befitting an investment banker, instead of trying to fix
a broken democratic system Fink proposes a hostile takeover by
corporations and for corporations. He justifies this by saying that
it is members of society themselves – political citizens – who
are demanding that corporations step up and fill the gaps that
governments have failed to fill. This attestation to ‘society’ is
itself an abrogation of democracy. Fink proposes that the reason
corporations need to step in is because ‘society’ – that is, the people
– are demanding it. He is claiming that corporations have some
kind of democratic mandate to interfere in the affairs of the state,
even if they do so, primarily, for their own long-term financial
benefit. He repeats: ‘Stakeholders are pushing companies to wade
into sensitive social and political issues – especially as they see
governments failing to do so effectively.’28
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The fundamental problem with Fink’s solution to a world being
broken by escalating economic inequality and the populist response
it has created, is not to restore democracy but to destroy it. While
claiming an uncounted popular mandate, Fink is disguising the real
implication of his proposal: that corporations can and should take
over the democratic functions of the state. Although Fink appears
pragmatic, this is a pragmatism that hides the political implications
of his position. The problem is, of course, that corporations are
ruled by private interests that have long resisted democratization,
whether it be through worker representation in the form of trade
unions, or the sharing of decision rights with workers.29 But when
private interests seek to take over public functions, no matter how
ethically it is couched, this is the high road to the end of democracy
and the advent of a new plutocracy where nations are governed by
the wealthy rather than by the elected.
It would be easy to dismiss Fink as a lone wolf in how he
pursues a woke agenda, or in how he uses that agenda to bolster
the power and profits of his organization. This is far from the
case, however, with Fink being something of an ambassador for
the more general expansion of woke capitalism. A point in case
is the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs representing
‘the chief executive officers of America’s leading companies’.30 In
August 2019, Business Roundtable released an official ‘Statement
on the purpose of a corporation’.31 In this statement, they made
what appeared to be a solemn admission. They confessed that each
version of the principles of corporate governance that they had
published since 1997 had stated that ‘corporations exist principally
to serve their shareholders’. In an apparent mea culpa moment,
the 2019 communiqué had made a policy about-turn, to, in their
words, articulate a set of principles that ‘more accurately reflects our
commitment to a free market economy that serves all Americans’.
What is this commitment? Reiterating Fink’s phobic response to
the inequality that contemporary capitalism had exacerbated, the
statement read: ‘If companies fail to recognize that the success of
our system is dependent on inclusive long-term growth, many
will raise legitimate questions about the role of large employers in
our society.’ Again, we see writ large that woke capitalism is about
ensuring that capitalism, and the inequalities that it produces, can
survive without popular revolt.
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Roundtable’s statement offered a range of commitments to
those people it listed as its stakeholders. The ideal is that value is
delivered to customers, employees get paid fairly, suppliers are dealt
with ethically, communities are supported, and long-term value is
generated for investors. Roundtable’s new feel-good and inclusive
approach to business met with mixed responses. For some, it was a
welcome turnaround, announcing a new age of enlightenment for
capitalism. Rick Wartzman of the Drucker Institute proposed that,
while ambitious, the statement was ‘a monumental step toward
setting broader standards for corporate leadership’.32 For others,
it was woke capitalism gone mad, with corporate America finally
succumbing to the worst excesses of the left. This was all part of
a trend whereby businesses that were situated ‘comfortably on the
left side of the political spectrum [used their] social position and
market share to impose their cultural priorities on a disagreeable
public’, reported Matthew Continetti of the left-leaning think tank
the American Enterprise Institute.33
Looking beyond these polarized and somewhat simplistic
responses means looking the gift horse in the mouth. What we find
in Roundtable’s statement is the same woke rhetoric issued by Fink.
Also similar is that this rhetoric is a thin mask covering a deepseated fear that the excessive greed of contemporary capitalism has
gone too far and seeded its own destruction. Alan Murray, president
and CEO of Fortune magazine was straightforward: ‘For more than
two decades, the influential Business Roundtable has explicitly
put shareholders first. In an atmosphere of widening economic
inequality and deepening distrust of business, the powerful group
has redefined its mission.’34
The form of neoliberal capitalism that made people like Larry
Fink into billionaires is also what has resulted in massive increases
in inequality. We are talking here again about what is broadly
referred to as ‘neoliberalism’, a set of political and economic
reforms that took force in the UK and the US in the 1980s and
soon became a global movement. The neoliberal focus has been
on small government, privatization of public organizations, lower
taxes, deregulation, and general trust that the efficiency of global
markets would lead to economic growth and prosperity. The
promise was that if government policy allowed for corporations and
their shareholders to prosper, then that prosperity would somehow
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‘trickle down’ to regular working people, resulting in shared
prosperity. The term ‘trickle-down economics’ is commonly used
to criticize the convenience of the self-justifying, but ultimately
flawed, logic of neoliberal ideology. Put simply, trickle-down
economics is a sham, with empirical research showing that the
result is quite the opposite, with the real direction of income
transfer being from the poor to the rich.35 Woke capitalism is, to
a great extent, a nervous response to this by attempting to bathe
business in an ethical glow so that the excesses of inequality it has
produced don’t create an angry mob hell-bent on destroying it.
A report written by Mike Konczal, Katy Milani and Ariel
Evans for the Roosevelt Institute lays out the facts. Using the
US economy as an example, they show that neoliberal economic
policies have delivered exactly the opposite of what they promised.
While the economy grew by 3.9 per cent per annum from 1960
to 1980, after 1980 growth slowed to an average of 2.6 per cent.
So, while deregulation did not lead to economic growth, it did
result in the trickle-up effect of widening inequality. From 2000
to 2011 the share of income paid to workers fell from 85.3 per
cent to 78.5 per cent, with average hourly wages only going up by
0.6 per cent each year.36 These trends are not limited to the US. A
recent report by the World Inequality Lab showed how ‘in recent
decades, income inequality has increased in nearly all countries’.37
The report also states that, while in 1980 the top 1 per cent of
wealthy people collected 16 per cent of the world’s income, the
share going to the bottom 50 per cent was stagnant at around 9 per
cent. Central to this was the transfer of public capital to private
companies through privatization and changes to taxation systems
to better favour corporations and the rich.
The coming realization that the very rich have skimmed all of
the spoils from 40 years of neoliberal reform is reason for the rich
to be scared. Rising tides of political populism across the world,
symbolized at its extreme by Donald Trump’s US presidency,
provided sure signs that people downtrodden by the neoliberal
excesses of the rich are directing their anger through a renewed
right-wing form of anti-establishment politics. Big corporations
are very much part of that establishment. The rise of populism is
a direct reflection of what Fink has been saying. He wrote in his
2019 letter to CEOs:
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Around the world, frustration with years of stagnant
wages, the effect of technology on jobs, and uncertainty
about the future have fueled popular anger, nationalism,
and xenophobia. In response, some of the world’s
leading democracies have descended into wrenching
political dysfunction, which has exacerbated, rather than
quelled, this public frustration. Trust in multilateralism
and official institutions is crumbling.38
Woke capitalism is a defensive move that serves to quell this
frustration, to preserve, if not enhance, a status quo where
corporations hold an increasing share of political power. This is a
power, however, that can no longer be justified by the assumption
that the invisible hand of capitalism will lead to shared prosperity.
That is a myth that has very much been busted by the facts of history.
In place of the invisible hand, with woke capitalism, corporations
seek a moral justification for their existence, positioning themselves
as the saviours of the exploitative inequality-generating system that
they produced. This is being achieved by a hostile takeover of
democracy. First, in Fink’s words, by pointing the finger at the
‘failure of government to provide lasting solutions’,39 and second,
by positioning themselves as the saviours that ‘the people’ have
been waiting for. It is essential to see through this self-serving and
weakly constituted authoritarian logic if the equality promised by
democracy is to be retained as a cherished vision. Not doing so
risks being fooled by a wolf in woke clothing.

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7

All that Glitters Is Not Green
On 17 February 2020, Jeff Bezos, founder and then CEO of
the giant technology company Amazon, took to Instagram
to announce the launch of the Bezos Earth Fund. He made a
staggering US$10 billion commitment to the fund with the stated
aim of working ‘alongside others both to amplify known ways
and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of
climate change on this planet we all share’. Bezos designed the
fund as a vehicle to payroll projects by scientists, activists and
non-governmental organizations to develop ways to ‘preserve
and protect the natural world’.1 This was not a commitment from
Amazon’s corporate coffers. Bezos, the richest man in the world,
was using his own money. And quite a lot of money it is. Around
the time of him announcing the Bezos Earth Fund he had amassed
a staggering personal fortune of US$131 billion.2
Bezos’s multi-billion-dollar gesture came just after what had
been described as the ‘year of climate consciousness’.3 The
year 2019 marked an unprecedented growth in climate change
awareness and activism. This development was in no small part
due to the effectiveness of the political activism of 16-year-old
Swedish school student Greta Thunberg. In 2018, Thunberg
skipped school to protest the lack of action in addressing climate
change. A sole figure, she sat outside the Swedish parliament next
to a homemade placard that read ‘School strike for climate’. This
simple act of resistance triggered a global movement that not only
made Thunberg a household name but also led to a worldwide
protest movement against the stubborn inaction by government and
business on climate change. Things reached a head in September
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All that Glitters Is Not Green

2019 when four million people from 185 countries around
the world took part in the biggest climate change protest ever
seen. Climate change could no longer be ignored, and the rich
and powerful were becoming intimidated by the influence that
Thunberg had garnered.
Thunberg had achieved such a high level of influence that
she attracted the ire of many world leaders who have long had
vested interests in the status quo of climate devastation. Then
US president Donald Trump said that Thunberg ‘must work on
her anger management problem’.4 Russian president Vladimir
Putin dismissed her as a ‘kind but poorly informed teenager’.5
Meanwhile Thunberg had been twice nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize, and was named Time magazine’s 2019 person of the
year. The Collins Dictionary listed ‘climate strike’ as the word of the
year.6 At the end of 2019, Thunberg was addressing the United
Nations Climate Change Conference for the second year running,
schooling the international delegation of government officials in
the meaning of democracy:
I have seen it, but it does not come from the governments
or corporations. It comes from the people. The people
who have been unaware, but are now starting to wake
up. And once we become aware, we change. People
can change. People are ready for change. And that is
the hope because we have democracy and democracy
is happening all the time. Not just on election day,
but every second and every hour. It is public opinion
that runs the free world. In fact, every great change
throughout history has come from the people. We do
not have to wait. We can start the change right now.
We the people.7
In sharp contrast to Thunberg’s popular democratic grass-roots
activism, Bezos’s climate fund was an explicit action from the
very apex of the world’s financial elite. Perhaps ironic, or perhaps
hypocritical, Bezos’s high-profile public embrace of action against
climate change came at a time when his company admitted to
being responsible for emitting the equivalent of 44.4 million metric
tons of carbon dioxide each year. As far as corporations go, this puts
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them in second place, with fossil fuel companies taking the number
one spot.8 While Amazon may have committed to reducing its
carbon footprint, it had long been under pressure to do so from
its staff,9 and many argue that it was too little too late. Quicker
action to reduce Amazon’s creation of carbon emissions and cutting
ties with the extraction industries would have had a much larger
and direct impact. But that would have been far less public and
sensational than the promise of a multi-billion-dollar gift.10
So, if that is why Bezos made the gift, why did he do so at this
particular time? In the past, Bezos had been criticized for lack
of engagement in philanthropic work, despite his astronomical
wealth. Indeed, his previous donations have been quite small in
relative terms. Prior to the Earth Fund, among his biggest personal
gifts were US$10 million to Seattle’s Museum of History and
Industry, US$15 million to the Princeton Neuroscience Institute
(both in 2011), and US$2.5 million to support same-sex marriage
advocacy in 2012.11 Things began to change in 2018 when he
gave US$2 billion to help schools and homelessness charities.12
Because of that donation, Bezos was named America’s number one
philanthropist. The total amount given by the top 50 philanthropists
combined in 2018 was US$7.8 billion.13 That was dwarfed by
Bezos’s single commitment to climate change in 2020.
While Bezos’s climate fund pledge was especially excessive, it is an
example of the established trend of the world’s billionaires coming
forward to put their own money towards causes of their choice.
Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet has given billions to fight
poverty and support social justice. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has
given similar amounts for vaccine development, and towards HIV
and malaria prevention. Business tycoon and former mayor of New
York, Michael Bloomberg, has used his substantial wealth to fight
drug addiction and support education.14 Fighting climate change
itself has been something of a pet project for many billionaires and
large corporations. The year 2019 saw Michael Bloomberg pledge
half a billion dollars towards shutting down coal-powered electricity
plants. In the same year investment bank Goldman Sachs promised
three quarters of a billion dollars for ‘sustainable finance projects’.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also backed the cause by
formally adding climate change to its priorities when deciding
what to do with the return on its US$47 billion endowment.15
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In many ways, Bezos was simply outdoing others in the billionaire
class as they race to give more and more away, even though their
fortunes continue to grow as a result of their business interests.
High-profile philanthropy is a great way to divert attention to the
systemic problems caused by capitalism while casting its CEO and
billionaire agents as the good guys.16 Wealth information specialists
Wealth-X report that the mega-wealthy hand out more than
US$150 billion a year worldwide.17 More than half of that goes to
education, health, arts, culture and sports.18 Notable among the
biggest givers are businessman Michael Bloomberg, the late hotelier
Barron Hilton, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Walmart’s
Jim Walton.19 This kind of giving has become so widespread that
conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson declared 2019
to be ‘The year of the woke billionaire’. Tucker commented with
scathing, if not ill-informed, right-wing sarcasm:
So, what is the message? Rich people are highly
progressive now, and you can see why. They love
mass immigration – it brings them servants. They
support federally-mandated snobbery, masquerading
as environmentalism. Abortion is essentially a
sacrament to them, especially when practiced in poor
neighborhoods.20
Knee-jerk reactionary criticism of woke capitalism such as that
epitomized by Tucker is notably facile. His position points to woke
billionaires as faux-socialist elitists. The unchecked assumption is
that the mega-rich adopt pretentious political positions to destroy
regressive conservative values in pursuit of their self-interest. These
billionaires, so the story goes, are out of touch with real people and
their values as they pursue lofty and misguided progressive goals.
The right-wing critique of woke capitalism is a direct extension
of contemporary conservative populism that has seen the rise of
a new cadre of national leaders, like the US’s Donald Trump and
UK’s Boris Johnson. Theirs is a politics that dismisses experts as
out-of-touch boffins, and condemns any form of perceived cultural
elitism as being pretentious and inauthentic. Similarly, for such
populists, woke billionaires are seen as one-dimensional narcissistic
do-gooders frittering their money on worthless progressive causes.
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Unsurprisingly Bezos’s multi-billion dollar giving has also been
characterized as woke. For some years he was described as ‘the first
woke billionaire philanthropist’.21 With his US$10 billion excess he
was named as the prime mover in what has been disparaged as the
‘epidemic of “climate woke-ness” sweeping the world’.22 As well
as this, Bezos is widely regarded as a left-leaning liberal. For one
thing, he owns The Washington Post, well known as a left-centre
newspaper. Then there is Bezos’s long-standing public feud with
Donald Trump. Trump took to Twitter regularly to criticize Bezos,
and his paper The Washington Post, for publishing anti-Republican
(read anti-Trump) propaganda.
With his typical schoolyard bully name-calling style, Trump
referred to the Amazon boss as ‘Jeff Bozo’.23 When The Washington
Post published a story about how Trump’s affair with pornographic
movie star Stormy Daniels was damaging the Trump family’s
businesses, he was quick to hit back. The very next day, he
unloaded on Twitter with a claim that Amazon had ‘scammed’
billions of dollars from the US postal service in a distribution deal.
‘This Post Office scam must stop. Amazon must pay real costs (and
taxes) now!’ Trump tweeted on the short drive from his Mar-aLago property to the Trump International Golf Club.24
Bezos has not been afraid to go head-to-head with Trump. In
2017, he was especially outspoken in criticizing Trump’s policy
of not giving visas to people from a hand-picked list of Muslim
majority countries. While Trump played the well-worn populist
anti-immigration card, Bezos said of the US: ‘No nation is better
at harnessing the energies and talents of immigrants.’25 Elsewhere,
Bezos’s vocal and financial support for progressive causes such
as same-sex marriage won him the Human Rights Campaign’s
equality award.26 He has also been lauded for helping families in
need and supporting early childhood education.27
Despite criticisms, the philanthropy of mega-rich capitalists
such as Bezos could be understood simply as a genuine form
of giving whereby altruistic billionaires put their money where
their mouths are to bankroll social and political causes. Instead
of selfishly hoarding the gargantuan profits accrued through the
exercise of their enterprising spirits – or so the story goes – they
are giving something back to society. This behaviour is presented
as nothing less than a sign of the benevolence and magnanimity
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of the billionaire lending a helping hand to those less fortunate
than they are. It all resounds like some sort of happy-ending fairy
tale where billionaire heroes come to the rescue of the hapless
citizens who are unable to effectively look after their own interests
on account of their impoverishment. The billionaires are cast as
corporate action heroes – and male ones at that, with only about
one in seven of them being women28 – whose business acumen
and personal chutzpah can be redirected to serve the good of all
of the people.29
Can the philanthropy of the mega-rich be explained away so
easily? Is it really plausible that billionaires are the heroes of a
21st-century morality tale? Might there be a more self-interested
explanation of billionaire ‘giving’ that is more in keeping with
predatory capitalism and the escalation of corporate power? Should
we just naively assume we have entered a new era of loony-left
billionaires? To simply stereotype tycoons like Bezos as bleeding
heart liberals defies even the most casual consideration of the facts.
The idea that billionaires have made a genuine shift to the political
left is radical if not entirely preposterous. As political commentator,
Tom Perret analyzes the situation:
[…] ‘Woke Capital’ provides an opportunity for the
Right to assert that large corporations are in fact, the
tools of a left-wing elite that is hostile to the common
man, and so doing, to downplay the culpability of
capitalism itself. […] this is arguably one of the most
galling examples of the hypocrisy of corporations
who cynically feign awareness and progressivism while
continuing the profiteering.30
In one sense, as Perret argues, woke capitalism is a means of
aligning corporations with contemporary social values to help
them in marketing their goods and services. The aura of corporate
billionaire wokeness might foster a façade that the mega-rich are, in
Perret’s words, ‘ideologically-motivated, left-wing, virtue signalling
elites’. More profoundly, however, this does little to undermine
the capitalist structures that enabled the billionaires to earn their
billions in the first place. Offering some light relief of the symptoms
does nothing to change the underlying disease.
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Bezos is certainly a case in point of Perret’s argument, and while
he may be dishing out huge dollars for climate change, education
and LGBTQI+ rights, the way he manages his business tells an
entirely different story about rapacious capitalism. Tax avoidance
is a particular example. We need to remember here that paying
tax is the main way that corporations can contribute to society.
By paying a fair share of tax, they are providing the resources
that contribute not only to the government and legal services on
which they rely, but also to the upkeep of the schools, hospitals
and social services that members of society use. Paying tax is the
corporate social responsibility and a means through which a share
of corporate profits can be allocated for the provision of social
goods by a government that, in liberal democratic countries, is at
least notionally able to represent the interests of the people. Not
so for Amazon, however, who has long been the poster child as a
tax avoider par excellence.
Let us be clear. No one is accusing Amazon of doing anything
illegal. What they are accused of is using every mechanism
possible to take advantage of tax loopholes within countries, and
booking revenues in lower-tax jurisdictions, aggressively avoiding
paying as much tax as possible. On account of this extreme tax
aggressiveness, in the decade from 2010 to 2019 Amazon paid
US$3.4 billion in tax despite earning revenue of US$960.5 billion
and amassing a profit of US$26.8 billion. That is an effective tax
rate of 12.7 per cent compared with standard corporate tax in
the US of 35 per cent.31 In 2018, Amazon paid no corporate tax
in the US whatsoever despite earning profits of US$11 billion.
Profits in 2019 were US$13 billion, but the effective tax rate was
just 1.2 per cent.32 It is hardly surprising that Bezos’s Amazon
has been dubbed the ‘worst offender’ within a rogues’ gallery of
corporate tax dodgers that include international corporate giants
such as Facebook, Google, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft.33
As much as tax avoidance can be cast as a matter of corporate
selfishness, it is also a matter of shifts in power from governments
to corporations. The US$10 billion that Bezos gave to fight climate
change is three times what his company paid in tax over ten years.
This shows a clear transition of decision making over public issues
from tax-funded democratic government to private individuals,
billionaires in particular. By way of comparison, the amount of
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tax that Amazon avoided in the UK in 2018 was estimated to be
equivalent of the amount of money required to employ 2,400 nurses
for an entire year.34 Because of its aggressive tax avoidance, Amazon
has come under sustained criticism for its failure to make a fair
contribution to the governments of the countries in which it
operates. Further, this tax avoidance has allowed Amazon to drive
an anti-competitive business strategy. Fair Tax Mark, a not-forprofit organization that accredits businesses for paying their fair
share of tax, issued this statement about Amazon’s fiscal shenanigans:
The company is growing its market domination across
the globe on the back of revenues that are largely
untaxed, and can unfairly undercut local businesses
that take a more responsible approach. The situation is
unlikely to reverse soon given the $9.3bn of operating
loss carryforwards available to offset against future profits
and taxes.35
What Fair Tax Mark were getting at is that not paying tax is not
just a way of making unfair profits. As well as that, it is a strategy
to gain power and domination over business rivals.
Amazon’s aggressive approach to business is not limited to its
tax affairs. A similar form of hostile business practice has also been
the basis of extended and harsh criticism of how Amazon treats
its workers. Back in 2014, CNBC released a documentary that
opened the lid on the inhumane working conditions in Amazon’s
warehouses. Titled Amazon Rising,36 the film showed in stark terms
the extreme physical and emotional demands that working for
Amazon entailed. Describing the workplace as being like a ‘prison’,
the documentary made public what so many Amazon workers
already knew: the company operates to ensure customer satisfaction
and efficiency at any cost. Central to that is the human toll taken by
the merciless speed at which the warehouse workers are expected to
operate. As one warehouse worker described it, with temperatures
approaching 40 degrees Celsius, ‘people were passing out from the
heat, and having trouble breathing […] they want you to make
100% regardless and in the heat it’s so much harder to make it.
It’s excruciating.’ The result was a broad range of complaints, legal
cases, and worker protests.
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Other workers complained of mandatory overtime, minimal
work breaks, and a surveillance-based management style that put a
workers’ every move under harsh scrutiny. As one former employee
described it:
‘I felt like Amazon was a prison. You had a set time
that you could go to the bathroom, if you weren’t out
of the bathroom within that time period, then they
were looking for you. You could not stop if you were
getting sick, you could not stop to get a drink of water,
without them questioning where you are at.’37
Despite the exposé, things did not change and the maltreatment
of workers around the world continued unabated. In 2018, a
report told of warehouse workers in Britain urinating in bottles
rather than going to the toilet, so that they did not miss their
performance targets or were not disciplined for being idle. In
2019, Amazon workers in Germany went on strike, with their
trade union asserting that the extreme pressure workers were
put under amounted to ‘withholding basic rights’.38 In New
York, in 2020, 600 of Amazon’s workers delivered a petition
to management demanding basic items such as decent break
times, reduction in injury rates (which were three times the US
average), and an end to impossible working conditions. One
of the stowers, the workers who manage the inventory in the
warehouse, described it like this:
You’re being tracked by a computer the entire time
you’re there. You don’t get reported or written up by
managers. You get written up by an algorithm […]
You’re keenly aware there is an algorithm keeping track
of you, making sure you keep going as fast as you can,
because if there is too much time lapsed between items,
the computer will know this, will write you up, and
you will get fired.39
So infamous was the work of the stower that Swagazon,40 a
company that makes satirical t-shirts for people who work at
Amazon, released such a shirt emblazoned with the statement:
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All that Glitters Is Not Green

BEING
A STOWER
IS LIKE RIDING A BIKE
EXCEPT IT’S ON FIRE
AND YOU’RE ON FIRE
& EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE
& YOU’RE IN HELL
At the time of writing the shirt could even be purchased on
Amazon’s US website.41
Amazon’s response to the risk of transmission of COVID-19 in
its workplaces was no different. From the very beginning, Amazon
workers protested the lack of COVID-19 protections in their
workplaces, to little avail. By October, just under 20,000 Amazon
workers had been infected.42 Activists joined Amazon workers in
the ‘Make Amazon Pay’ campaign, stating:
We are warehouse workers, climate activists, and citizens
around the world, taking on the world’s richest man and
the multinational corporation behind him.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon became
a trillion dollar corporation, with CEO Jeff Bezos
becoming the first person in history to amass
$200 billion in personal wealth.
Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked
their lives as essential workers, and faced threats and
intimidation if they spoke out for their rights to a
fair wage.43
The case of Amazon exemplifies one of the apparent contradictions
of woke capitalism. On the one hand, corporations espouse
and support social and political causes that would generally be
considered progressive, liberal or even left-wing: in Amazon’s case,
climate change, poverty, education, same-sex marriage and human
rights. On the other hand, their business operations demonstrate
extremes in capitalist greed and exploitation, as exemplified above
in terms of aggressive tax avoidance and worker exploitation.
When it comes to unpicking the machinations of woke capitalism,
however, the question is whether this contradiction is real. Is it
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possible that those corporate actions that appear to be generously
focused on the common good are really just a more sophisticated
means through which to pursue corporate financial interests? In
other words, is woke capitalism entirely compatible with more
traditional and obvious corporate strategies that seek to minimize
cost and maximize the extraction of labour from workers?
Jeff Bezos’s multi-billion-dollar pledge to address climate change
is especially telling. On the surface, this appears to be a simple act of
a multi-billionaire businessman throwing his financial might behind
the biggest challenge to humankind’s continued existence. There
is much more to the idea that Bezos was simply coming to the
planet’s rescue, however, with some even speculating that this move
was a potential early step in Bezos mounting a campaign for the
US presidency in 2024.44 More conservatively, a key to considering
the motives of billionaire philanthropists such as Bezos has been
critically analyzed by Anand Giridharadas in his book Winner Takes
All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.45 Giridharadas notes
that the world’s ultra-rich are engaging in bold acts of philanthropy
and overtly generous engagement with social, environment and
political causes. The reason for this, however, is not so much to
‘make the world a better place’ as it is to preserve, or even enhance,
the status quo that has led them to their extreme riches. If there is
any change, it is ‘fake change’ that is limited to that which can be
tolerated by the rich and powerful.46 Social progress and equality
are not enhanced by this apparent altruism. Instead, it reinforces
the existing social structure that places the rich and powerful on
the top and the rest of us at their mercy.
A key point that Giridharadas makes is that the apparent
generosity of the rich in addressing political problems is profoundly
undemocratic, most especially in that the solutions involve
circumventing government. Moreover, the ‘solutions’ preferred by
the billionaire class, of which Bezos is at the zenith, generally focus
on ‘improving lives within the faulty system rather than tackling
the faults’.47 This amounts to a gesture of giving something back
to society, without acknowledging the harm that has been done to
the environment and to social equality by the very activities that
allowed them to accumulate the wealth that they have pledged in
the first place. Proposing that billionaires will come to the world’s

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rescue is tantamount, Giridharadas argues, to declaring democracy
as having failed. In his words:
What is at stake is whether the reform of our common
life is led by governments elected by and accountable
to the people, or rather than by wealthy elites claiming
to know our best interests. We must decide whether,
in the name of ascendant values such as efficiency
and scale, we are willing to allow democratic purpose
to be usurped by private actors who often genuinely
aspire to improve things but, first things first, seek to
protect themselves.48
The primary focus on self-protection and self-interest has never
escaped Amazon. Despite the intentions of the Bezos Earth
Fund, Amazon has come under massive criticism for the effects
of its business activities on climate change. In April of 2019,
8,703 Amazon employees sent a letter49 to Bezos demanding
that the company take more action to address its contribution
to the climate crisis. The letter complained vociferously about
Amazon’s lack of leadership in reducing carbon emissions, support
of extractive industries, political donations to legislators who
support climate denialism, and lack of adequate sustainability
goals. When Bezos announced his Earth Fund in early 2020, the
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice were quick to point out
the inconsistencies. The real questions, they insisted, were much
closer to home:
When is Amazon going to stop helping oil & gas
companies ravage Earth with still more oil and gas
wells? When is Amazon going to stop funding climatedenying think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise
Institute and climate-delaying policy? When will
Amazon take responsibility for the lungs of children
near its warehouses by moving from diesel to all-electric
trucking? Why did Amazon threaten to fire employees
who were sounding the alarm about Amazon’s role in
the climate crisis and our oil and gas business?50

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Still left unanswered is the even bigger question of why Bezos
would make such a massive and public gesture towards dealing
with climate change without doing anything about it in his own
company. Writing in The Atlantic, Franklin Foer argues that Bezos’s
somewhat bizarre and unanticipated donation is a sign of basic
political dysfunction as billionaires fund projects that were once
the domain of the state. Bezos’s giving is a sign of the growth of a
new ‘private state’ where the personal whims and predispositions
of the ultra-wealthy determine the future of the world’s citizens. As
Foer goes on to discuss, ultimately this ability to shape the climate
debate will be of immense value to Amazon itself. After all, Bezos
would not want government policy to turn in a way that would
be harmful to his business. Would a project funded by Bezos’s
billions be able to ask serious questions about the effects of the
global network of fast-paced delivery networks? In Foer’s words:
A reasonable debate about planetary future would at
least question the wisdom of the same-day delivery of
plastic tchotchkes made in China. Then there are the
policies that permit companies, like Amazon, to pay
virtually nothing in taxes – revenue that would ideally
fund, say, a Green New Deal. It hardly seems likely that
the Bezos Earth Foundation [sic] will seek to erode the
very basis of the fortune that funds it.51
What all of this shows is that woke capitalism is an extension of
plutocracy: a government by the rich. In Bezos’s case, the richest
man in the world was able to make a personal US$10 billion
donation that was on par with the investment made by the entire
US government to combat climate change.52 Of course, US
plutocracy is nothing new, and Bezos himself has long been held
up as an exemplar of how the rich dominate US politics, political
lobbying and campaign finance.53 Woke capitalism extends this
when private individuals and corporations start directly taking
on the provision of public goods and taking on responsibility for
solving public problems.
The difference is key to the profound risk that woke capitalism
poses for democracy. While government is at least on some level
accountable to the people, the same is not the case for Bezos who
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acts entirely as an individual citizen beholden to no one but himself
within the confines of the law. Even worse, the effect of this can
be that democratic government can itself seem redundant when
it comes to dealing with the world’s problems. Bezos is a case in
point of a more general trend in capitalism, whereby the ultra-rich
present themselves as the saviours of a system that they have been
central to creating and that has garnered them their billions. The
gifts are the pieces of silver that are paid in exchange for the end
of democracy.

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8

The CEO Activist
Once upon a time, the heads of major corporations were thought
to be rather conventional characters. As corporate employees, their
main interests were directly pursuing the commercial goals of the
firms that they led, and they did so as members of a conservative
and wealthy elite. This image of a managerial class was in stark
contrast to that of the political activist. The activist was a nonconformist who resisted the status quo in the name of progress and
righteousness. While corporations represented the establishment,
activists fought against the inequalities and injustices that the
dominant system had created and exploited.
Woke capitalism has turned this order on its head. Today’s CEOs
are increasingly using their positions as platforms for what appears
suspiciously like political activism. Take, for instance Starbucks’
head Kevin Johnson who closed shop so that all of his staff could
attend training designed to prevent racism in his organization. In
terminology borrowed from critical race theory, Johnson bemoaned
‘the violence, hatred, and empowerment of white supremacists’.1
Then there is Apple’s Tim Cook who, in defiance of former
president Donald Trump, has been a long and vocal supporter of
the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. This policy
enables undocumented immigrants who entered the US when they
were minors to be granted permission to stay.2
In another example, after the violence of the neo-Nazi Unite the
Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 that saw one person
killed and 19 injured, CEOs banded together in protest. Intel’s
Brian Krzanich, Merck’s Kenneth Frazier, and Under Armour’s
Kevin Plank were all high-profile CEOs who very publicly resigned
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from President Trump’s American Manufacturing Council. They
did so to express their disdain at his lack of leadership against
the racist extremism displayed in Charlottesville.3 Depicted as the
‘moral voice of America’, CEOs such as General Motors’ Mary
T. Barra and Walmart’s Doug McMillon were also outspoken in
their condemnation both of the demonstrators and of Trump’s
lack of decisiveness. In a direct rebuke of the president, Barra’s
statement was:
Recent events, particularly those in Charlottesville,
Virginia, and its aftermath, require that we come
together as a country and reinforce values and ideals
that unite us – tolerance, inclusion and diversity – and
speak against those which divide us – racism, bigotry
and any politics based on ethnicity.4
President of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, described this
example of CEO activism as ‘a seminal moment in the history of
business in America. […] In this maelstrom, the most clarifying voice
has been the voice of business.’ No longer portrayed as exemplifying
elite authority, Walker suggested a new form of executive dissidence
when he opined that ‘these C.E.O.s have taken the risk to speak
truth to power’.5 ‘Speaking truth to power’ is a phrase that has
been historically used to describe the public courage of human
rights defenders, whistle-blowers, anti-war protestors, left-wing
intellectuals and dissident novelists, but CEOs? CEOs would have
once been regarded as the elite power holders to whom the truth
needs to be spoken, not the ones who are speaking it to others!
In 2018, JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon topped it off
with a call to arms ‘CEOs: Your country needs you!’ Walker
was proselytizing about how corporations could and should flex
their muscles to address a full gamut of social problems ranging
from affordable housing, racial economic inequality, poverty and
unemployment, to worker education.6 Two years earlier Bank
of America chief Brian Moynihan held a straight face when he
expressed how ‘[o]ur jobs as CEOs now include driving what we
think is right […] on issues beyond business’.7
The reasons proffered for this activist trend among corporate
bosses are varied. The simplest, and most corporate-friendly,
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explanation is that current times have seen the ascent of a higher
purpose for business that extends beyond the profit motive. Building
on a longer tradition of ‘enlightened capitalism’, we might accept
that the corporate profit motive can be entirely compatible with
ethical virtues. Woke executive can just ‘do well by doing good’
by addressing social ills through business activity.8 Positive media
attention, the creation of an aura of authenticity, improved employee
engagement and stronger brand allegiance have all been posited as
ways that CEO activism can drive dollars straight to the bottom line.9
It has also been suggested that activism allows CEOs to exercise
their power in the name of their own ethical and political beliefs.
Unlike many grass-roots activists, CEOs are in a powerful position
of influence. Their activism can be especially effective when they
take advantage of their public profiles to raise awareness and leverage
the financial power of their companies for political purposes.10
Further, while business leaders have weighed in on politics in the
past, this has more reach in the present day because of the ease with
which social media allows them to do so. That there is more CEO
activism today is only half the story, and as marketing consultants
Frank Grillo and Mark Blessington assert, the more substantive
differences are, first, that ‘more CEOs are taking liberal, rather than
conservative or religious, stands on political issues’, and second, that
the positive relationship between liberal activism, brand success and
stock price can now be better exploited by those companies that
want political activism to be a central part of their ‘brand strategy’.11
Culturally, at a time where corporations are more powerful
than ever, and control more and more of the world’s resources,
it can be made to appear fitting that they also take over the role
of political activists. It has been argued that it is overly simplistic
to castigate CEO activism as just a ‘brand gimmick’ that uses
wokeness to pursue less sanguine motives. Political scientist Cory
Maks-Solomon goes as far as to say that CEO activism is ‘a sincere
engagement with the policymaking process’. Maks-Solomon’s own
research shows that between 2008 and 2017 almost half of large
US companies were open in their support of rights for LGBTQI+
people, and advocacy for racial justice. Meanwhile, not a single of
these companies took a conservative position on the same issues.
To the extent that CEOs did back progressive causes, this was
positively correlated with their political ideology.12
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It would seem, then, that at least in some cases, CEOs are using
their powerful positions as business leaders to advance their political
agendas in the public sphere. Even better for them, doing so can
boost the commercial achievements of their companies too. If
this is true, then CEO activists would be going from strength to
strength when it comes to filling their pockets and at the same
time feeling the warm glow of moral righteousness. That CEOs
might exercise their power in this way appears even less surprising
at the present time in history. This is a time when a new breed
of populist politicians, from the US’s Donald Trump to the UK’s
Nigel Farage and beyond, have been all too eager to target big
business as the source of the economic problems affecting regular
citizens. Corporate activism might just be a way of fighting back
to reclaim moral ground.13
Marc Benioff, internet entrepreneur and multi-billionaire head
of cloud computing company Salesforce, exemplifies this by
describing the role of the CEO activist as follows:
What we’re doing is advocating on behalf of our
employees. We’re a company of 20,000 employees. […]
That traditionally has not been part of business. But if
I were to write a book today, I would call it CEO 2.0:
How the Next Generation CEO Has to Be An Advocate
for Stakeholders, Not Just Shareholders. That is, today
CEOs need to stand up not just for their shareholders,
but their employees, their customers, their partners,
the community, the environment, schools, everybody.
Anything that’s a key part of their ecosystem.14
What is revealed in Benioff’s statement is the view that CEOs, as
rich and powerful members of society, have both the right and moral
responsibility to represent their various constituents on political
matters. These executives place themselves in the self-contradictory
position of being non-elected democratic representatives, whose
political authority is justified purely by their economic power. This
development marks a contemporary evolution of what it means
to be a leader of a corporation. The narrative is that CEOs are
arising to provide strong public leadership that is sorely lacking in
the contemporary era of insecurity.15 The danger, of course, is that
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instead of trying to fix the failures of democracy, CEO activism
reflects a trend towards a new corporate plutocracy.
One of the key social issues that CEOs have been particularly
vocal about is equality for LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, queer, intersex and other) people. Indeed, LGBTQI+
activists have explicitly targeted corporations to garner support.
This was so effective that by the 2000s many big businesses had
become active and enthusiastic backers of the cause. Where only
a few decades ago corporations were either apathetic or resistant
to LGBTQI+ rights, we have more recently seen a complete
turnaround. Companies as diverse as Apple, Google, Marriott
and Walmart have all taken an open and visible stand, with
LGBTQI+ groups having been especially active in encouraging
corporates to support marriage equality. As part of direct and
organized campaigns, activists applied pressure through personal
meetings with senior corporate executives, facilitating the creation
of coalitions of corporations, and public acknowledgements of
companies who were prepared to express their support.16 This is a
clear example of how what might appear to be a bold initiative by
corporations to support progressive goals is the result of democratic
action from citizens who are creatively using their influence in the
name of equality. Corporations are the followers, not the leaders.
The marriage equality plebiscite held in Australia in 2017
provides a telling example of how corporations come to support
progressive causes. More problematically, it shows how this support
uses public debate about fundamental aspects of democratic equality
to serve corporations’ interests. In November 2017, a public
postal survey was held to determine whether same-sex marriage
should be legalized in Australia. The lead-up to the vote was a
case study in inflammatory rabble-rousing politics from the right.
Some conservative opponents argued that marriage equality was
really about religious freedom because it would prevent religious
schools, hospitals, welfare agencies and aged care services from
discriminating against LGBTQI+ people, whether they be staff,
students, patients or residents.17 Religious intolerance was being
espoused in public, entirely unveiled. The joint submission by the
Christian Schools Australia and Adventist Schools Australia to the
government inquiry on religious freedoms that took place after the
plebiscite spelled it out:
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If freedom of religion is to remain a legitimate hallmark
of Australian education then the rights of school
communities to operate in accordance with religious
beliefs must be upheld. This must include the right to
choose all staff based on their belief in, and adherence
to the beliefs, tenets and doctrines of the religion
concerned. Faith communities, including Christian
schools, must be able to take action that separates
individuals from that community when their actions
undermine the community.18
Essentially, they were arguing that their religious beliefs gave them
the right to discriminate against and publicly vilify people based
on their sexuality and gender.
Other reactionary responses included baseless incendiary claims
that children raised by same-sex couples were at high risk of being
neglected or abused.19 Posters were put up on the streets of capital
cities emblazoned with the slogan ‘stop the fags’, falsely asserting
that ‘92% of children raised by Gay Parents are abused. 51% have
depression. 72% are obese’.20 Print materials were distributed
claiming that homosexuality was a ‘curse of death’. Reactionary
political pundits even tried to whip up a storm by asking whether
the expansion of LGBTQI+ rights would mean that bakers would
be able to refuse to make wedding cakes to celebrate gay or lesbian
nuptials on religious grounds.21 The God-fearing right seemed
hell-bent on ensuring that religious bigotry should take precedence
over democratic freedom and equality.
In the end, just under 80 per cent of Australians chose to cast a
vote in the voluntary survey. It was a massive turnout that led to a
landslide victory for equality, with 61.6 per cent saying ‘yes’ to the
question ‘Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to
marry?’ A majority ‘yes’ vote was recorded in every single state and
territory in the country.22 This victory marked the end of years of
bitter political debate where majority conservative governments
had wilfully and deliberately stood in the way of marriage equality
despite overwhelming public support. Thirteen years before the
same-sex marriage plebiscite, the ruling right-wing government
had gone so far as to make constitutional amendments to try to
ensure that their dogmatic and minority prejudices would be
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inflicted on all Australians. The Marriage Legislation Amendment
Bill that was passed in 2004 enshrined discrimination in law that
stated unequivocally that:
marriage means the union of a man and a woman to
the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into
for life. […] A union solemnised in a foreign country
between: (a) a man and another man; or (b) a woman
and another woman; must not be recognised as a
marriage in Australia.23
The plebiscite in 2017 was a triumph for freedom, equality and
democracy in Australia, as the public made it clear that years
of discrimination and injustice that had been constitutionally
enshrined had to come to an end. The country celebrated.
Big business played a significant part in the campaign for the ‘yes’
vote. More than 800 corporations publicly aligned themselves with
the Equality Campaign and with public opinion by signing the
Australian Marriage Equality open letter. The letter stated:
Australians are increasingly supportive of marriage
equality, with a recent […] survey showing seventy-two
percent, believe same sex couples should be allowed to
marry. We agree. Of the remaining twenty-eight percent
only fourteen percent strongly opposed the proposition.24
While corporations offered little by way of financial support, banks,
auto manufacturers, major retailers, brewers and tech companies
were among those who put their names behind the campaign.25
The most vocal and high-profile supporter was Alan Joyce, the
CEO of Qantas, the third oldest airline in the world.26 As he said
at the time:
I believe we have to get behind it and make sure that
we have a Yes vote and certainly I will be out there
strongly campaigning for a Yes vote. […] I think it is
very important for our employees, customers and our
shareholders, and that is why Qantas is a supporter of
marriage equality.27
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And campaign he did. As well as personally donating US$1 million
to the cause, he pressurized other companies to join him in
support of marriage equality, and spoke candidly and publicly
about the subject. His efforts were so high profile that he was
acknowledged internationally by being named on the Financial
Times’ OUTstanding list as the most influential LGBT executive
in 2017.28 He even got involved in a very public stoush with Peter
Dutton, Australia’s Immigration Minister at the time. Dutton, well
known for his right-wing populist approach to politics said:
Mr Joyce is an exceptional CEO. He’s a good person and
I know him personally – I have no gripe against him.
But if he has a particular view on any issue it should be
expressed as an individual. It is unacceptable that people
would use companies and the money of publicly listed
companies to throw their weight around […] Don’t
use an iconic brand and the might of a multi-billiondollar business on issues best left to the judgements
of individuals and elected decision-makers. I’d prefer
publicly listed companies stick to their knitting and
that is delivering the services for their customers and
providing a return for their shareholders.29
Perhaps unknowingly, Dutton had entered into the classic debate
about corporate social responsibility, taking the Friedmanite
stance that corporations had no business meddling in things
beyond their capitalist remit. His invocation of the role of
government in preserving a democracy led by ‘elected decisionmakers’, however, did seem more about political positioning
than a real ideological commitment. As well as being a loud and
opinionated opponent of marriage equality, Dutton is part of the
conservative faction of the Australian Liberal Party that concocted
the divisive and unnecessary postal vote on marriage equality.
The plebiscite was part of a long-term reactionary strategy of
using LGBTQI+ rights as a political tinderbox. In this case, the
gambit was the hope that if the government’s opposition, the
Labor Party, supported same-sex marriage, then Labor voters
who disagreed might change their votes to Liberal.30 As it turned
out, the plebiscite was shown to be ultimately unnecessary, as for
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many years polling had consistently shown that the majority of
Australians were in support.31
The case of the campaign for same-sex marriage rights in
Australia raises the question of whether CEO activists such as Joyce
are true to their word when they claim that their intentions are
based on a desire to shape society for a better future.32 Such claims
of woke socially and morally driven motives run counter to much
research into why contemporary corporations associate their brands
with social causes. Indeed, one does not have to be too cynical
to realize that connecting brands with popular political positions
is likely to enhance the commercial success of those brands.33
Well before ‘woke’ capitalism had developed into a widespread
phenomenon, business ethics professor David Vogel coined the
term ‘the market for virtue’.34 In its most simple terms, this is
a market where ethical behaviour (or at least the appearance of
ethical behaviour) is exchanged for an improved public image or
for warding off regulation. By this account, corporations engage in
socially responsible activities with a business mindset. They invest
in them if there is a commercial pay-off. In one way this provides
corporations with an incentive to take up what they see as socially
beneficial activities. On the other, however, it sets out the limits of
how much corporations can or will really do. By Vogel’s account,
corporate virtue is regulated by a market mechanism, and subject
to market constraints. As such, the limits are based on the exchange
value of the actions taken. This type of corporate activity is, of
course, a far cry from what we would understand as a civic political
responsibility to civilians, where people’s freedom, equality and
solidarity are the primary goals. With the market for virtue, virtue
itself is a means to an end, rather than being an end in itself. If
pursuing their commercial interests makes executives feel righteous,
that is a bonus.
If we examine Alan Joyce’s defence of his political position the
way that he is trading in a market for virtue becomes clear. This
trading was displayed in relief when Joyce responded to Peter
Dutton’s condemnation of him wasting shareholders’ money on the
pursuit of his political convictions. In a public statement, he said:
There is an economic argument for marriage equality,
backed by research. In short, more open societies
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attract better talent. But basically, Qantas is one of
200 Australian companies that has publicly pledged
support for marriage equality because we don’t think
some people should have fewer rights than others. Polls
show that’s also what the majority of the Australian
community believes – people who are our shareholders,
customers and employees. So, we’re comfortable with
our position and on speaking out about it.35
What we see here is an apparent conflation of the economic
and political arguments for marriage equality. On the one
hand, legalizing same-sex marriage is a matter of fundamental
human rights. On the other hand, it is economically productive
for organizations like Qantas. In claiming a business case for
supporting marriage equality, Joyce backed up his position by
referring to a study by the consulting firm Deloitte.36 The Deloitte
study found that LGBTQI+ customers, as well as those from an
Indigenous background or who have a disability, were three times
more likely than other customers to avoid an organization if it
had a bad reputation on ‘diversity issues’ such as being treated
with respect and fairness. A quarter of overall respondents to the
Deloitte study, and over 40 per cent of younger people, said that
an organization’s stance on marriage equality influenced their
buying decisions.
As is typical of woke capitalism, what we have here is a blurring
of the distinction between the economic and the political. Should
marriage equality be supported because it is a basic dimension of
democratic freedom and equality, or should it be supported because
it is good for business? Joyce’s assertion that these two arguments
were consistent must surely be more than a happy coincidence.
We might ask, what would happen if the political argument and
economic ones were at odds with each other? Would society simply
give up on the rights of LGBTQI+ citizens if it could be proven
that they were bad for business? If Joyce’s justification was taken at
face value, then the answer would be ‘yes’.
In practice, while the business case is often cited by activist CEOs
as a justification for engaging in politics, it is rarely that simple or
economically rational. Research has shown that executives’ own
beliefs affect what causes their businesses pursue, and that cost–
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benefit analyzes are often the justification for taking on political
causes, rather than being the actual underlying reason.37 These
findings add an ideological dimension to the activism – executives
are more likely to back a cause they strongly believe in rather
than just the ones that yield their corporations the best bang for
the buck. As much as business and moral cases might be debated,
when it comes to CEO activism there is a powerful political motive
at play that seeks to enhance the power of the corporation by
aligning it with what are perceived to be important and popular
political positions.38
We can see this in the fact that businesses like Qantas only backed
marriage equality after it had majority support in Australia. This is
good news for those of us who believed in marriage equality, at least
because it was a sign that Australians were backing a fundamental
dimension of equal rights for all, irrespective of sexuality. There
is little doubt, too, that Joyce was of this view. The issues are
bigger than one person’s ethico-political convictions, however. By
the late 2010s marriage equality was a very established political
issue and people had been fighting for this cause for many years.
What had changed, however, was the business case. As it had been
justified by the Deloitte study, supporting LGBTQI+ rights was
good business, so companies started leaping on board. Despite
the individual convictions of Joyce or other CEOs, under woke
capitalism commercial logic places a limit on what is politically
possible. By 2017, LGBTQI+ rights were tradeable on the market
for virtue in a way that they had never been before.
Backing marriage equality had become an easy proposition
for businesses. It cost very little to send out a press release or
have prominent executives talk favourably about the cause in
public. Further, as the Deloitte study pointed out, having a good
reputation on this issue promised a positive impact on employees
and customers, especially the younger demographics who will
make up the majority of consumers in the future. In such cases,
ethical pursuits, even if business leaders support them personally,
cannot be pursued at the expense of commercial interests.
Executives and businesses have a narrower range of interests than
society as a whole, often simply hitching themselves to one political
cause that they have an affinity to. While CEO activists can be
dismissed as hypocrites, that would be a vast over-simplification.
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For example, Joyce is openly gay and his personal contributions to
the campaign show that his support was genuine.39 Still, while the
corporate support of marriage equality was positive, on a broader
scale it demonstrates an inherent risk of the growth of woke
capitalism. As businesses become political actors in areas beyond
their direct commercial interests, the personal and commercial
limits of their interests will increasingly shape, as well as potentially
limit, public debate.
Unsurprisingly, for example, tax avoidance is rarely mentioned
in the corporate social responsibility reports produced by major
corporations, nor is it condemned by CEOs. This is so, despite
the importance of paying tax for education, healthcare and
poverty elimination. Instead, corporations focus on other forms
of nominally ethical behaviour such as environmental and diversity
programmes. What the Qantas case shows is that while Joyce was
on the right side of history in this instance, his politics combined
his personal beliefs with the interests of his employer. Of course,
when corporate interests have a say in which issues get political
airtime, important matters like taxation, income inequality and
insecure work are likely to be left out. Wealth and income are
especially relevant; nevertheless, while being among the most
pressing political problems of our time,40 they are rarely addressed
head on by CEO activists. In this case, the personal financial
interests of the CEOs themselves come into the equation of what
kind of politics corporations will or will not fight for.
Just after he campaigned for marriage equality, Alan Joyce
became the highest-paid executive in Australia, with his pay packet
estimated to have been A$23 million in 2018.41 Whatever Joyce’s
social justice instincts on other issues, he is not the person to talk
about inequality. It is not just that he was silent on this issue.
Instead of retreating to his counting house when his extravagant
salary was made public, he came out swinging in defence of his
earning almost 300 times the average Australian income. ‘My salary
was determined by our shareholders,’ he said. ‘That’s because our
market capital went from just over $2 billion to $10 billion. And our
shareholders did exceptionally well out of it.’42 Joyce’s comments
reflect a fundamental tenet of woke capitalism: commercial selfinterest is not at all incompatible with corporate activism. As a
corollary, support for a limited range of progressive social causes is
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entirely compatible with defending the inequality epitomized by
super-size executive salaries.
While Joyce justified his salary on commercial grounds only,
when it comes to CEO activism there is an added political and
moral justification. In Joyce’s own words, his support of marriage
equality was his and Qantas’s democratic duty. Not only was there
a ‘big business case’ but it was ‘the morally right thing to do’.43 It
would appear, however, that while moral righteousness has a place
in taking action on marriage equality, it can be rapidly sidestepped
so as to avoid facing up to income inequality. Woke capitalism is
only interested in politics that do not threaten the commercial
interests of corporations, or the personal financial interests of its
executives. So, what does this mean for democracy?
Declaring, as Joyce has done, that unelected corporate executives
have a responsibility to use their privileged position in the economic
pecking order to push business-friendly political causes is, at best,
controversial. At worst, it represents the belief that big business
bosses have the right to represent people who have not chosen
them as political representatives. Such political self-appointment is
a central dimension of woke capitalism, and it is downright antidemocratic. More practically, this means that the fair distribution of
economic prosperity among working people has been left off the
democratic table. Such are the limits of woke capitalism.

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9

The Race to Wokeness
On the first Monday of September 2018, former National Football
League (NFL) quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s post on Twitter
marked the start of a political maelstrom. The tweet, accompanied
by a black and white image of the top half of his head, read ‘Believe
in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt.’
Although the sports shoe company Nike was not mentioned in
the tweet, their famous slogan ‘just do it’ made it clear that they
were somehow involved. Famously, former president of the United
States Donald Trump was so provoked by Nike’s endorsement
of Kaepernick that the next day he too went to his infamous
Twitter account. ‘Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and
boycotts. I wonder if they had any idea that it would be this way,’
he pronounced. A few days later, and in apparent desperation, he
tweeted: ‘What was Nike thinking?’1
Kaepernick’s original tweet was posted just before the start of
the NFL season. Nike’s launch of a major print and television
advertising campaign quickly followed. Called ‘Dream Crazy’
and narrated by Kaepernick, the television ad called for people
to follow their dreams, no matter what the obstacles. ‘Don’t
become the best basketball player on the planet, be bigger than
basketball,’ Kaepernick narrates. Alongside, we see National
Basketball Association (NBA) superstar LeBron James opening the
I Promise elementary school in Akron, Ohio, which his family
foundation supports. German boxing star Zeina Massar, Paralympic
basketball player Megan Blunk, and ‘rebel queen of skateboarding’
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Kaepernick’s statement: ‘Don’t ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if
they’re crazy enough.’2
At face value, this might seem like just another ad campaign
playing up to the mythology of the American dream. The idea
that with passion, hard work and determination, anyone can rise
to the top of his or her chosen field is reinforced. Whatever the
structural barriers of race, class or gender a person is born into,
it is individual merit that determines achievement, so the story
goes. Failure to achieve this American dream is an individual
failure, not a social one, with each person taking responsibility for
their own success. Whether you were born into a wealthy White
New York family, or brought up in the neighbouring housing
projects, it is simply down to your initiative as to whether you
make it in life.
That Nike played on long-standing fantasies embedded in
American culture is clear, but there was much more to ‘Dream
Crazy’ than that. Most especially this is because Nike decided to
make Kaepernick the central figure of the campaign. As much as
he was known for his football career, in the years preceding the
release of the ad, Kaepernick had become a household name on
account of his direct, uncompromising political activism for the
rights of African Americans. This activism was especially focused
on protesting against police violence towards, and killing of, Black
men in the US.3 Kaepernick achieved such a high profile for his
activism that he was named ‘citizen of the year’ for 2017 by men’s
fashion and culture magazine GQ. Kaepernick was described as ‘a
lightning rod and a powerful symbol of activism and resistance’.4
The most compelling image of Kaepernick sees him kneeling
at the beginning of football games while refusing to sing along to
‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. The kneeling was in explicit protest at
the epidemic of African Americans killed at the hands of the police.
That all started back in 2016 when Kaepernick was the quarterback
for the American football team the San Francisco 49ers. He had
been playing for the team for some six years. On 26 August
2016, in a pre-season game against the Green Bay Packers, as the
American national anthem was played before the game, Kaepernick
remained seated while other players stood as a traditional symbol of
patriotism. He did not stand for the anthem in the next game too.
On this occasion, his African American teammate Eric Reed went
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down on one knee beside him in solidarity. When interviewed,
Kaepernick explained his reason for not standing:
I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a
country that oppresses black people and people of color.
To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish
on my part to look the other way. There are bodies
in the street and people getting paid leave and getting
away with murder. […] This is not something that I am
going to run by anybody. I am not looking for approval.
I have to stand up for people that are oppressed. […]
If they take football away, my endorsements from me,
I know that I stood up for what is right.5
As the football season started, Kaepernick consistently kneeled
when the anthem was played. A national controversy ensued.
Bolstered by an era of Trumpian populism, reactionary conservatives
unimaginatively damned Kaepernick for disrespecting the US.
Some even went so far as to burn replicas of his football jersey in
effigy.6 Such extreme acts of disapproval did not stop Kaepernick’s
determined activism leading to powerful and meaningful results. As
Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report, the Black left-wing
news website, described it, Kaepernick emerged as a ‘revolutionary
figure’ who stood up to racial violence in America in a way that so
many elected officials and public figures failed to do.7 Described as
‘the face of the new civil rights movement’, Kaepernick resurrected
public awareness and political debate, albeit through a commercial
platform. Heralded by civil rights activists under the banner of the
United We Stand Coalition, Kaepernick had done nothing less
than reinvigorate calls for racial equality in America. As Stephen
A. Green, president of civil rights group the People’s Consortium,
explained at the time:
When you think about what he has put on the line for
himself personally, with what he could lose and what
he has already gone through, that’s not [hyperbole]. He
has risked a lot to elevate the issues that affect black and
brown bodies in America. For our community, we can’t
afford to let him be silenced.8
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Kaepernick’s work as a leader of political protest has been a centrally
important part of marshalling action to combat discrimination
and police violence against African Americans. As political
scientists Christopher Towler, Nyron Crawford and Robert
Bennet demonstrate, ‘Kaepernick significantly influences black
political action, specifically encouraging action beyond voting’,
concluding that ‘activism by black professional athletes matters to
black political action’.9
Kaepernick paid heavily for his acts of protest. At the end of
the 2016–17 football season, his sporting career was prematurely
over. In 2017, he left the 49ers and became a free agent. No other
team offered him a contract despite his skills and accomplishments
placing him ahead of many others in the league. The NFL circled
their wagons. Having concluded that Kaepernick’s protests were
not in their commercial interests, the league effectively excluded
him. As Joe Lockhart, head of communications at the NFL at the
time of Kaepernick’s protests, confessed some years later: ‘No teams
wanted to sign a player – even one as talented as Kaepernick –
whom they saw as controversial, and, therefore, bad for business.’10
It was US president Donald Trump who once again poured fuel
on the fire of the Kaepernick controversy in 2017. While Nike’s
position was to dare people to dream crazy, Trump played the
American dream card a very different way with his ‘Make America
great again’ (MAGA) sloganeering. As Noam Chomsky describes
in his Requiem for the American Dream, the 1950s and 1960s was the
golden age of the American dream, with the economy growing, and
the benefits of that growth being distributed relatively equitably:
It was pretty egalitarian growth, so the lowest fifth of
the population was improving about as much as the
upper fifth. And there were some welfare state measures,
which improved life for much of the population. It was,
for example, possible for a black worker to get a decent
job in an auto plant, buy a home, get a car, have his
children go to school and so on. And the same across
the board.11
The present day is radically different from this. In one sense, this is
because economic growth accrues largely to the rich as inequality
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widens across the world.12 But there is a much more qualitative
difference, as Chomsky explains. In the US, as well as in many
other liberal democratic countries, the post-war period was a time
of hope, and ‘an expectation that things were going to get better’.
Such hope is much harder to come by today, and whether we are
dreaming crazy or believing that America can be great again, we
are leveraging the hopefulness of a previous age.
Trump was clear to distinguish Nike’s American dream of racial
progress and equal opportunity, from that of MAGA’s White
supremacy and blind patriotism. By 2017, although Kaepernick
was out of the NFL, his protest had spread with other players either
not appearing for the anthem, or following Kaepernick in kneeling
when it was played. Speaking in Alabama on 22 September 2017,
Trump went into full rabble-rousing mode:
‘Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners,
when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, “Get that
son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired.
He’s fired!” You know, some owner is going to do that.
He’s going to say, “That guy that disrespects our flag,
he’s fired.” And that owner, they don’t know it. They
don’t know it. They’ll be the most popular person,
for a week. They’ll be the most popular person in
this country.’13
Trump’s statement appealed not only to a certain variety of
American patriotism, it also pointed to one of the most fundamental
elements of traditional capitalism: the assumption that those who
own capital have the right to control labour. Trump politicized
this power relation by demanding that the owners of NFL teams
exercise their authority based on a conservative vision of what
loyalty to the US means. By Trump’s account, Kaepernick was
unpatriotic because of the way he expressed his protest at the history
of violence, killing and racial injustice towards African Americans.
This represents a deeply reactionary politics that stands in the way
of progress by using all means possible to silence dissent. It is also a
blatant attempt to infringe the first amendment to the United States
Constitution that states unequivocally that there can be no legal
basis to prohibit the exercise of free speech. In doing so, what is also
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silenced is any acknowledgement or responsibility for ‘America’s
original sin’ of White racism, exercised first in the genocide of
Native Americans, and second by the enslavement of Africans.14
To this day, the enduring legacy of that sin is unreconciled with
espoused American values of equality and freedom.15 It is for his
unwavering commitment to addressing the racial contradiction at
the heart of America that Kaepernick was excluded from the league
while being publicly pilloried from the highest political office in
his country.
It is worth noting that the symbolism of going down on one
knee, rather than just sitting, was borrowed from an American
military tradition whereby soldiers would show respect by kneeling
by the grave of those who had lost their lives in war.16 Indeed,
Kaepernick had adopted kneeling as a form of protest for precisely
this reason after he had been advised on the matter by Nate Boyer,
a Green Beret in the US Army and war veteran.17 The kneeling
was not seen as respect by Trump, however, who used the protests
to foment rage among his followers. It was a populist move that
was deliberately divisive and politically self-interested. The division
that Trump sowed had a distinctly commercial tone to it, yet one
that was ignorant of the growing trend of woke capitalism. Part of
Trump’s claim was that the protests were hurting the NFL because
ratings were down on television broadcasts on account of fans not
tuning in as a counter-protest to the kneeling. Trump’s position
was thus revealed as one that did not acknowledge any distinction
between the political and the economic. In practice, the belief
that the bosses would fire the players for commercial reasons was
conflated with the idea that they would do it for patriotic reasons.
This was by no means a traditional defence of capitalism on the
basis that businesses should keep out of social matters and focus
entirely on profit making. Instead, Trump believed that businesses
should be involved in politics, at least insofar as those politics
aligned with his brand of regressive Republican conservatism.
In bringing Kaepernick in as the spokesperson of their ‘Dream
Crazy’ campaign, Nike were betting on the complete opposite
commercial and political logic to that which Trump espoused.
We might cast our minds to 1990 when basketball megastar
Michael Jordan’s Air Jordan range of shoes had just gone global
as a hugely successful Nike brand. Since its inception, the range
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has netted Jordan an estimated US$1.3 billion18 as well as having
been touted as ‘one of America’s most successful examples of
marketing’.19 But it was marketing of a particular kind. In 1990,
when quizzed about whether he supported Republican candidate
Jesse Helms or Democrat Harvey Gantt in the Senate ballot for
North Carolina, Jordan refused to answer. Instead, he reportedly
quipped ‘Republicans buy sneakers too.’20 The joke, of course, was
that taking political positions ran the risk of alienating potential
customers, and hence would be a bad commercial decision.
Fear of losing customers was what motivated the actions of the
NFL in the 2017 debacle. What Trump and the NFL had not
realized was that the function of capitalism in culture had changed
drastically in the intervening years, rendering Trump and his like
practically anachronistic in their approach to business. Nike, on the
other hand, was an early adopter of the woke capitalist way of doing
business, despite Jordan’s protestations. As far back as the late 1970s,
they aligned with the women’s movement, naming their women’s
running show ‘the liberator’. Connecting their brand with socially
conscious causes has been a motif for Nike ever since. In 1988,
Nike addressed ageism by featuring an 80-year-old runner in its
very first ‘Just do it’ advertisement. A year later, Paralympian Craig
Blanchette was featured in support of people with disabilities, just
as in 2007 wheelchair basketball player Matt Scott was in another
Nike ad. In 1995, Nike ran a campaign featuring HIV-positive
runner Ric Muñoz as part of their ‘socially conscious branding’.21
While Nike advertising campaigns were designed to benefit
from the controversy of aligning with socially progressive political
positions, Nike attracted attention of a different kind when it
came to how its shoes were produced. In the late 1990s, Nike
was denounced for the abuses that went on in the sweatshop
factories in Asia where its shoes were made. These were places
where workers, some of them children, lived in poverty, were
forced to work inhumanely excessive shifts, and were exposed to
dangerous amounts of toxic gas. In 1991, labour activist Jeffrey
Ballinger released a report that exposed child exploitation in Nike’s
factories in Indonesia.
Later that decade Jim Keady’s documentary ‘Beyond the Swoosh’
revealed the inhumane living conditions that Nike’s factory workers
were forced into on account of the poverty wages they were paid.22
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It was an international scandal that posed a fundamental threat
to Nike’s business. Nike promised to fix the working conditions
in their factories, but despite significant publicity not much
changed. As human rights activist Leila Salazar put it in 2001,
‘Nike has continued to treat the sweatshop issue as a public relations
inconvenience rather than as a serious human rights matter.’23 It
worked. In the decades that followed, Nike had been able to
downplay its image as a sweatshop exploiter and strengthen its
identity as a socially progressive leader of woke capitalism. Nike
achieved this despite continued accusations of horrendous working
conditions in its factories to this day.24
Nike’s ‘Dream Crazy’ ad was a great success. On the one hand,
it was an antidote to Nike’s image as a sweatshop profiteer. On the
other, it demonstrated how the old-style capitalism followed by the
likes of Trump and the NFL was no longer the only game in town.
Responses at the time were polarized along political lines. Those
on the right complained that Nike was kowtowing to pressure from
the woke left. There were even those whose token acts of regressive
resistance involved burning their Nike shoes and cutting the famous
swoosh trademark off their Nike clothing. Concurrently, there
were also those on the left enamoured by a major corporate brand
supporting Kaepernick’s activist cause, even though this support
was not explicit in the campaign.25 These divisions, however, did
nothing to stand in the way of Nike capitalizing financially on its
association with Kaepernick.
The commercial peril of taking divisive positions that Jordan
joked about in the 1990s did not play out in the late 2010s. In the
end, the campaign proved to be a huge commercial success, with
the risk of being associated with a polarizing and uncompromising
political figure such as Kaepernick paying off handsomely. Nike had
experience with controversial marketing that they could draw on.
After all, they had continued to back NBA star Kobe Bryant when
he was charged with sexual assault. They didn’t stop their support
for Manchester United’s soccer star Eric Cantona when, wearing
a Nike boot, he kicked a fan and then punched his head. They
stuck with golfer Tiger Woods when he faced the full brunt of an
infidelity scandal. Revenues kept growing.26 If anything, supporting
Kaepernick’s kneeling against racism, while politically controversial,
was much easier to defend.
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The ‘Dream Crazy’ ad won a Creative Arts Emmy in the category
of Outstanding Commercial.27 Financially, after the release of the ad
Nike’s stock price rose 5 per cent, adding some US$6 billion to its
market value. Revenues and share prices have risen consistently year
on year since, much to the envy of their competitors. What was
Nike thinking of? They were making a calculated risk that worked
out in their favour. Banking market strategist Art Hogan explained
Nike’s motives frankly: ‘I don’t think they just randomly decided
to put this ad out, thinking, “Let’s commit political-correctness
suicide”. People vote with their wallets, and the one clear winner
in athletic apparel remains Nike.’28
Exemplifying the central tenet of woke capitalism, Nike proved
that being associated with progressive political causes was in no
way inconsistent with standard commercial objectives. Indeed, it
went so far as to show that the exposure that was harnessed through
controversy had extremely positive commercial outcomes for the
Nike Corporation. At the same time, the ‘Dream Crazy’ ad was
largely consistent with Nike’s long-term marketing strategy of
getting sports celebrities to be seen wearing their shoes, whether
it be on the court, on the track or on the street. Nike’s extended
and long-term relationship with Michael Jordan is a case in point.
The Air Jordan 11s released in 2019 were Nike’s best-selling
shoes of all time,29 and the Jordan range of products remains to
this day a multi-billion-dollar business for Nike.30 With Serena
Williams also featuring in the ‘Dream Crazy’ ads, this follows
the same trajectory in terms of Nike’s endorsement strategy. The
key difference, especially with Kaepernick, is that the positions
of Jordan and Williams as African American cultural role models
were based on them representing dominant American social values
of individualism, success, competition and determination. The
‘Dream Crazy’ campaign reinforced those same ideals, adding to
them democratic values of freedom and equality in the form of
fighting against racism and for social equality. The shift of Nike
towards this political position suggests that they believed that it
would enhance their commercial position, itself indicative of the
woke shift within capitalism.
While socialism is founded on a fundamental questioning of
the injustices created and abetted by capitalism, woke capitalism’s
association with progressive politics does not recognize this.
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For the woke capitalist there is no necessary contradiction been
righteousness and capitalism even though the idea of being woke
is associated with left progressive politics. Kaepernick has been
described as ‘the face of the new civil rights movement’ and, as we
have seen, he attracted the ire of right-wing populists all the way
up to Donald Trump.31 With ‘Dream Crazy’, Nike demonstrated
how woke capitalism operates, because embracing a controversial
character like Kaepernick and his progressive politics was entirely
consistent with their expansionist corporate agenda.
Let us remember that many Americans had vilified Kaepernick
for his political positions. Take, for example, Republican Senate
candidate for Kentucky, Alex White. Building on Trump’s
condemnation of Kaepernick, he contributed:
Kaepernick is by definition racist, totally detached
from reality that The United States is one of the best
cultures in world history, our service members deserve
respect and honour, and that murderous-communistdictators should be hung and shot in public squares – not
celebrated and worn on T-shirts.32
The reference was to an old photo of Kaepernick wearing a t-shirt
with a picture of a meeting between 1960s Black rights activist
Malcolm X and former communist leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro.
Colin Kaepernick was not the first African American sports
star to use a public and media profile to protest racism. At the
height of the civil rights movement in the US, John Carlos and
Tommie Smith stood on the winners’ podium to collect their gold
and silver medals for the 200 metres sprint at the 1968 Olympic
Games in Mexico City. They each wore a single black glove in
a clenched fist raised above their head as a potent symbol of the
demand for equality for African Americans. This was not a spurof-the-moment action. Carlos and Smith were associated with the
Olympic Project for Human Rights, of which Smith was one of
the founders. The idea was to promote Black liberation through
the platform and publicity available via international sports. Just
like Kaepernick decades later, this act brought criticism from
mainstream America. One reporter described the protests as ‘an
ignoble performance that completely overshadowed a magnificent
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athletic one’, and denounced Smith and Carlos as ‘a pair of darkskinned storm troopers’.33
Such reactionary responses entirely elide the cultural and political
importance of the success of African American sportspeople.
Competitive sports rely on the idealistic notion of a ‘level playing
field’, contrasting sharply with the prejudice, discrimination
and division that characterize other domains of life. Historically,
professional boxing is a special case in point, with White boxers
in the US refusing to fight African Americans up until the early
20th century. The exception came in 1908, when African American
heavyweight Jack Johnson beat the Canadian titleholder Tommy
Burns in 14 rounds. This was the first time a Black heavyweight
boxer had gone into the ring with a White man. The match was so
controversial that no city in the US would agree to host it. It was in
Sydney, Australia, in front of 20,000 spectators, that the bout took
place, with those watching as eager to see the fight as to yell racial
insults at Johnson. The dominant White society could simply not
bear to see a Black man proving himself superior at anything.34 As
another heavyweight champion, James J. Jeffries, said at the time:
Burns has sold his pride, the pride of the Caucasian race
[…] The Canadian never will be forgiven by the public
for allowing the title of the best physical man in the
world to be wrested from his keeping by a member of
the African race […] I refused time and again to meet
Johnson while I was holding the title, even though I
knew I could beat him. I would never allow a negro
a chance to fight for the world’s championship, and I
advise all other champions to follow the same course.35
Two years later Jeffries went back on his word. ‘I am going into
this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better
than a Negro,’36 he said in the lead-up to the fight. With Jeffries
hailed as the ‘great white hope’, the contest in Reno was always
about race, and from the perspective of the White American media
it was about restoring the belief in White supremacy by returning
Johnson, as a symbol of Black America, to what they saw as his
rightful place of subordination. As it was reported in The Chicago
Defender newspaper, the fight would ‘settle the mooted question
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of supremacy’.37 The New York Times opined that ‘If the black
man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will
misinterpret his victory’.38 It did not happen that way. After 15
rounds of punishment Jeffries’ corner threw in the towel, and
Johnson held on to his title. Riots ensued across the US and White
America responded violently, in some cases with deadly force, to
the piercing of the insecurity over their self-proclaimed supremacy.39
There is a direct lineage between Johnson and Kaepernick, even
though Johnson was not explicitly making a political protest, nor
did he even stand in solidarity with other African Americans.40 As
psychiatrist J. Corey Williams explains, however, the backlash that
they both received is part of ‘an entire history of blacks stepping
outside of the social order – or protesting it – only to be told they
can’t. [This reflects an] underlying hatred, disgust and impulses
to punish prominent, “poorly behaved” black figures’.41 For
Kaepernick, it meant being effectively exiled from the NFL. For
Johnson, it meant being sent to jail on trumped up charges by an
all-White jury.
History records many other powerful examples of African
American athletes serving as potent political activists, many of
whom paid a heavy price for doing so. Jesse Owens won four gold
medals at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 while being watched
by Adolf Hitler, but his athletics career was scuppered after being
boycotted for attempting to earn endorsements in an era when
track and field was meant to be pristinely amateur. Mohammed
Ali refused to be conscripted into the army to fight in Vietnam as
a protest against American imperialism, leading to the suspension
of his boxing licence. In the 1990s, basketball player Mahmoud
Abdul-Rauf was suspended from the NBA for refusing to take part
in the ovation for the national anthem, claiming that the US flag
stood for ‘oppression and tyranny’.42 These are but a few examples
of how African American athletes have used the platform of their
star status to bring the harsh realities of racism in the US to public
attention and to support broader political projects for equality and
justice, at their own expense.
What makes Colin Kaepernick different is that his activism was
supported and capitalized on by a multi-billion-dollar corporation.
Nike aligned its brand with Kaepernick in a deliberate move.
With this move, political activism became deeply entwined with
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corporate marketing. Suddenly the commercial value of political
protest and dissent was being fully realized. Along these lines,
professional marketers began to ask themselves questions like: ‘Do
you risk going with a Nike/Kaepernick-type approach on whatever
issue your management and/or consumers care most about? Or do
you just stick your head in the sand?’43
It is the presence of such questions that marks out how woke
capitalists approach political activism. Of course, there is no reason
to doubt that the corporate bosses involved (or at least some of
them) have genuine political commitments to racial equality and
an end to racially based police brutality. There is also no reason to
doubt that they would only put their corporate reputation behind
such a cause if they believe it will benefit them commercially.
Some call it a ‘win-win’ scenario. Others call it crass opportunism
and exploitation. Either way, this marks the limit of what kind of
politics will get airtime in a world increasingly dominated by large
multi-national corporations. For those who support the cause, the
publicity that a corporation like Nike creates can be attractive,
but it also worth looking the gift horse in the mouth. As urban
sociologist Jordanna Matlon argues:
the controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick’s
Nike contract [saw] the terrain of struggle […]
transformed into one of brand visibility and consumer
allegiance. Meanwhile Kaepernick’s endorsement,
embraced as a victory, overshadows the fact that his
appointment as a Nike spokesperson in no way altered
the fragility of black life in the United States – not to
mention the debased conditions of Nike’s sweatshop
laborers abroad.44
As Matlon goes on to elaborate, we might well ask whether Nike’s
actions have the potential to lead to real or significant change, or
yet another example of racial capitalism that associates ‘blackness
and manhood [with] capitalist registers of worth’. There is no
reason to question the value or sincerity of Kaepernick’s protest
in raising awareness of police violence against African Americans.
There is every reason to ask whether corporations are simply riding
the trend created by others for their benefit.
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Woke Capitalism
In July 2020, the National Football League (NFL) announced that
at every opening game of the 2020 season the song ‘Lift Every
Voice and Sing’ would be played immediately before ‘The StarSpangled Banner’. Given the controversies just a few years earlier
surrounding Colin Kaepernick and others kneeling in protest as the
American anthem played, this was an especially significant gesture
by the league.1 The same NFL that had effectively boycotted
Kaepernick for speaking out against racism and police brutality
against African Americans seemed to have taken a political U-turn.
The song ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ started as a poem written
by James Weldon Johnson, a leader of the civil rights organization
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). The poem was put to music in 1899 by his brother
John Rosamond Johnson.2 It grew in popularity among African
Americans in the decades that followed, and in 1919 the NAACP
declared the song as the ‘Negro national anthem’.3 This was the
song that was sung in 1990 when Nelson Mandela was released
from prison. It was played in 2009 when Barack Obama was
inaugurated as president of the United States.4
Compared to the patriotic triumphalism of ‘The Star-Spangled
Banner’, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ exposed the opportunities and
the contradictions inherent in the American dream; a dream where
the promise of freedom is racially tainted. As Shana L. Redmond,
professor of musicology and African American studies, describes
it, the song gains its significance as ‘a living document of the Black
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experience’ and the battle for self-determination against a history
of slavery, segregation, racism and oppression.5 Redmond explains
that ‘To sing this song is to revive that past – but also to recognize,
as the lyrics of the song reveal, that there is a hopeful future that
might come of it.’6
Usually played and sung as a hymn, the song opens hopefully,
attesting to the possibilities of the human spirit:
Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
But this is not a naive hope or a bitter pipe dream. The lyrics
remind us of how the hardships of the past should never be
forgotten in the pursuit of a better future:
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died.7
In exploring the history and meaning of the song, Rudolph P.
Byrd, professor of American studies, describes it as a statement
of African American racial pride. Although the history of race
and racialization in the US is not explicitly mentioned, the song
contains both a remembrance of America’s foundation in slavery, as
well as the hope that comes from the continued fight for freedom.8
This song has deep meaning in the African American community,
and is considered widely as a source of hope and inspiration. It is
also a song that has attracted controversy and served as a means to
draw attention to the continued need to fight for racial equality
in America.9
The announcement about ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ came not
long after NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell released a video
statement apologizing for how the league had dealt with protests
against racism in the past. In vowing to do better in the future,
he stated:
We, the National Football League, condemn racism
and the systematic oppression of black people. We, the
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National Football League, admit we were wrong for
not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all
to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the National
Football League, believe Black Lives Matter. I personally
protest with you and want to be a part of the much
needed change in this country. Without black players
there would be no National Football League. And the
protests around the country are emblematic of the
centuries of silence, inequality, and oppression of black
players, coaches, fans, and staff. We are listening, I am
listening, and I will be reaching out to players who
have raised their voices, and others on how we can
move forward together for a better and more united
NFL family.10
Goodell’s statement was in direct response to the global outcry
following the brutal death of George Floyd as he gasped for his
last breaths with the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin pressing
mercilessly and lethally on his neck. On 25 May 2020 Floyd went
to a convenience store in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to buy a packet
of cigarettes. The cashier suspected that the US$20 note he used
for the purchase was counterfeit and called the police. By the time
they arrived Floyd was sitting in a car nearby. With guns drawn
the police demanded that the unarmed Floyd make his hands
visible. He was then forcibly pulled out of the car, handcuffed and
arrested under the charge of ‘passing counterfeit money’. Just ten
minutes after the police had arrived Floyd was handcuffed and
lying face down on the ground. It was at that point that Chauvin
started kneeling on his neck. In the 7 minutes and 46 seconds that
followed Floyd complained more than 20 times that he could not
breathe. ‘You’re going to kill me, man,’ Floyd said as he begged for
his life. ‘Tell my kids I love them. I’m dead,’ he uttered. Minutes
later, he was.11
Footage of the incident taken by bystanders on mobile
phones spread like wildfire on social media. Widespread public
demonstrations erupted across the US and around the world,
once again having to assert that Black Lives Matter. This was an
international show of outrage and solidarity against systemic racism
and racial violence like no other before it. In the US, there were
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about a thousand protests in all 50 states, and across 400 different
towns and cities. Especially notable was that the protests took
place even in White majority conservative states that had not
previously been outspoken about racial justice or police violence
in any significant way. The jarring reality of watching George
Floyd suffocating to death under the knee of a police officer led
finally to mainstream support for Black Lives Matter.12 The placards
read ‘silence is violence’, ‘racism is a pandemic too’, ‘no peace, no
justice’ and most chillingly ‘I can’t breathe’.
The protests soon went global with demonstrations held in more
than a hundred cities across Europe, Asia, Canada and Australia.
While Floyd’s murder was the trigger for these events, they were also
a performance of solidarity for the long history of racial violence
experienced by people the world over. In Australia, there was
special solidarity. Floyd’s death brought back the painful memory
of David Dungay, a young Indigenous man of the Dunghutti people
of northern New South Wales, who died in prison in 2015. On
29 December prison officers entered his cell, to stop him eating a
packet of biscuits, of all things. Dungay was diabetic. Given only
two minutes to comply with the demand that he stop eating, five
officers were deployed, using physical force to move Dungay to a
different cell. Dungay screamed “I can’t breathe” 12 times before
the officers sedated him. He immediately became unresponsive, and
attempts to resuscitate him failed. He went into cardiac arrest and
died soon after. Dungay died just weeks before he was scheduled
to be released from prison.13 This was another tragic example of
the plague of Aboriginal deaths in police custody in Australia,
and one with the bitter refrain of ‘I can’t breathe’. Since 1991,
450 Indigenous Australians have died in police custody. No police
officer has been held to account for any of these deaths.14
The widespread and effective political activism against the global
scourge of anti-Black racism was enabled by well-organized Black
Lives Matter organizations who provided support and guidance
for the protests. The success of these protests reflected a shift in
mainstream political opinion about racism. As social movements
expert Professor Douglas McAdam summed it up:
It looks, for all the world, like these protests are
achieving what very few do: setting in motion a period
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of significant, sustained, and widespread social, political
change. […] We appear to be experiencing a social
change tipping point – that is as rare in society as it is
potentially consequential.15
Faced with such overwhelming public support, it is not surprising
that the NFL made a commercial decision to flip its position on
racial violence and protest. They came to realize that their previous
stance on Colin Kaepernick and the flag protests was out of favour,
as the US and the world finally listened to the overwhelming
evidence of racial violence and injustice. The NFL is a business,
and as a business, it cannot afford to alienate its customers. If the
world supports Black Lives Matter, then it makes commercial sense
that it should too, even if it means flipping on its anti-protest stance,
which just a few years earlier had been presented as an authentic
statement of patriotism. Michael Bennett, NFL star and co-author
of the best seller Things that Make White People Uncomfortable,
described the NFL’s position as follows:
I think it’s hard to say that you believe in these issues
when you still have owners supporting Donald Trump.
But I think the NFL is trying to find a common ground
where they can find a balance of being a company and
also being socially active. The question is whether this
is about propaganda or is it about changing the lives of
other human beings. I think the jury’s still out on that.
[…] I think the NFL is starting to see that the world
is not going to accept blatant racism in the way that
it used to.16
If the world is no longer going to accept blatant and overt racism,
it would be a commercial catastrophe for businesses not to take
the same line. There is no real change in corporate politics here;
it is simply that the same commercial logic of self-interest is
responding to a different set of circumstances. It took the success
of an international social movement for businesses to realize that
anti-racism was fast gaining majority support. Not speaking up for
Black Lives Matter might just be a public relations disaster. This
wasn’t limited to the NFL. Corporations of all types were quick to
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jump on the bandwagon by issuing public statements about their
backing. In effect, it was in a political milieu of mainstreaming
support of anti-racism that corporations around the world suddenly
feigned their political awakening.
The apparent hollowness of these statements was slammed
by many as an example of ‘brand activism’, a practice whereby
corporations act to align their brands with political causes. The
most sanguine and naive approach presents brand activism as
an activity of an enlightened corporation with a genuine desire
to make a positive contribution to society. Marketing guru and
corporate acolyte Philip Kotler describes it like this:
Societies are saddled with social problems and
governments seem too polarized or impotent to act.
Business is the major institution with the resources to
act and help improve the lives of people. Brand activism
is a company’s declaration that it wants to take some
social responsibility to advance the Common Good.17
Despite its unmitigated connection to corporate self-interest,
Kotler evinces a different moral justification for brand activism. For
Kotler, brand activism is simply a matter of corporations selflessly
taking on sociopolitical responsibilities as a result of the failure of
governments to do so. It is presented as an act of civic altruism that
is engaged in without any thought of personal gain or advantage.
True to form, this is also how corporations positioned themselves
in their support of Black Lives Matter following George Floyd’s
murder. The superfast marketing media of Twitter, Instagram and
Facebook were the favoured platforms.
The NFL’s decision to play ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ was a case
in point. The NFL was publicly outspoken about its new stance
on racism. It pledged significant funds to fight racism, releasing
the statement:
The NFL is growing our social justice efforts through
a 10-year total $250 million fund to combat systemic
racism and support the battle against the ongoing and
historic injustices faced by African Americans. The NFL
and our clubs will continue to work collaboratively with
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NFL players to support programs to address criminal
justice reform, police reforms, and economic and
educational advancement. In addition to the financial
commitment, we will continue to leverage the NFL
Network and all of our media properties to place an
increased emphasis on raising awareness and promoting
education of social justice issues to our fans and help
foster unity.18
They even decided to promote the cause by displaying the words
‘it takes all of us’ and ‘end racism’ in the end zones of football
fields. They also reneged on the previous rule of preventing players
from displaying slogans on their helmets. From 2020, the names of
victims of racism were allowed on the helmets.19
While on the surface we might think that the NFL was simply
supporting an important political cause, there is much more to
it than that. Rodney Coates, professor of critical race and ethnic
studies, was both scathing and insightful in his assessment of the
NFL’s newfound political consciousness. He described the NFL’s
political about-turn as a case of ‘blatant pandering to public
sentiment’ and an example of a vacuous ‘publicity stunt’. The issue
that Coates alerts us to is that in making symbolic statements about
Black Lives Matter, the NFL was not doing anything that would
make any material difference to the real lives of Black people in
America. ‘There are so many ways to show its commitment. If it
were serious it would open pathways for opportunities in a number
of ways. But a song? No,’ he said.20 This reflects the insidious
development of a long tradition of the exploitation of Black male
bodies for profit in American football. Seventy per cent of NFL
players are African American, but the teams are almost exclusively
owned by White men. Why just reap the profits from the brutality
on the field, when racial politics offers further possibilities for
bolstering earnings?
Nolan Rollins, an executive in the sports business industry,
expressed a similar sentiment in no uncertain terms, reflecting a
growing view that the NFL was simply trying to placate those
fans who disagreed with their earlier stance on Kaepernick. In
Rollins’s words:

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The area to address in the African American community
is the inability to be economically mobile. […] You
can play ‘Lift Every Voice’ as much as you want, but it
will not put a dime in anyone’s bank account. It will
not put anyone to work. It doesn’t allow a father or
mother to put food on the table. […] That song will
not change anything.21
Even the apparently generous US$250 million pledge is not
significant compared to the richest of the league. Spread over ten
years, this amounts to US$781,250 per team per year.22 This sum
is small change considering that on average quarterbacks rake in
US$5.76 million from NFL each year. The personal earnings of
Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks significantly outstrip the
entire US$25 million a year pledge. He is on a four-year contract
worth US$140 million. Meanwhile, the overall spend on television
advertising for NFL broadcasts was US$4.48 billion in 2019. It is
clear where the priorities lie, and in the financial world of the NFL,
the money spent on social justice initiatives amounts to less than a
rounding error on their accounts.
The NFL is far from exceptional, with many of the biggest
names in the corporate world quick to join the action. McDonald’s
took a break from its more common light-hearted Twitter and
Instagram entries with a simple post listing seven names. It read
‘Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Alton Stirling. Botham Jean.
Atatiana Jefferson. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd.’ These are
all names of people who were fatally shot by police officers in
the US. The accompanying video to the tweet stated that ‘the
entire McDonald’s family grieves. It’s why we stand for them and
any other victims of systemic oppression and violence.’23 Again,
McDonald’s approach was far from unique. ‘We are not asking you
to buy our shoes. We are asking you to walk in someone else’s,’
was Reebok’s message.24 Playing on its ‘Just do it’ slogan, Nike
went with ‘For once, Don’t Do It’. ‘To be silent is to be complicit’
was Netflix’s contribution, while Warner Media quoted African
American novelist James Baldwin: ‘Neither love nor terror makes
one blind: indifference makes one blind.’ Starbucks encouraged
‘courageous conversations’.25

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Was this authentic support for the fight against the systemic
racism that has seen the repeated murders of Black Americans at
the hands of police? Or, was it an example of callous corporate
opportunism seeking to capitalize on the shifting tides of public
opinion? In considering this, marketing analytics company Ace
Metrix provides a telling example of the corporate logics that
lead to support for ostensibly contentious political causes. While
consumers might consider whether they agree with the politics
represented in ads like that of McDonald’s, Ace Metrix’s analysis
proposes that the key to successful woke advertising lies in the
balance between two factors. The first is customer perceptions of
the extent to which the ads are ‘empowering’ (that is, portraying
a positive and valuable position on a sociopolitical issue). The
second is the extent to which they are exploitative (that is, using
the sociopolitical issues to further corporate self-interest).
The situation, as Ace Metrix sees it, is that in the wake of the
2020 Black Lives Matter protests, large corporations were expected
by the public to speak up and take a stand. That they did is just
a matter of responding to those expectations, rather than a sign
of an established political position. Consumer response to the
McDonald’s ad was especially telling. Just over half of consumers
surveyed found that the message of the ad was empowering. Most
also strongly agreed that it was exploitative, especially if their
political position was aligned to Black Lives Matter. As one of
the survey respondents stated: ‘McDonald’s waited until it was
more socially acceptable with mainstream America to admit
that they support Black Lives Matter. The message would have
been more powerful when Kaepernick was getting slammed for
just kneeling.’26
Questions of authenticity were central to the public questioning
of corporate responses to Black Lives Matter marketing and
advertising. Simply riding a wave of changing public opinion is
certainly not a guaranty of being taken seriously. But riding such
waves has long been deployed as a corporate marketing strategy.
As Marcia Chatelain, professor of history and African American
studies at Georgetown University, explains, ‘McDonald’s is staying
on brand. […] They have consistently taken a position when they
knew that that position was going to be supported not only by its
consumer base, but also expand its profile.’27
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Laid bare is how the feigned political activism of corporations
like McDonald’s is, primarily, self-interested. Such are the workings
of woke capitalism. In her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in
Black America,28 Chatelain specifically explores the relationship
between McDonald’s and Black activists in the US, tracing this
back to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. While in the 1940s
and 1950s fast food restaurants in the US were largely for White
customers only or were racially segregated, things began to change
in the 1960s. Following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in
1968, over 100 US cities turned into scenes of civil disturbance,
looting and rioting. The assassination became a tinderbox that lit
a fiery response to the anger and frustration of Black inner-city
poverty, poor housing, lack of adequate school facilities and police
harassment. This uprising saw many of McDonald’s White franchise
owners unwilling or unable to return to business in predominantly
Black neighbourhoods. This led McDonald’s to develop a whole
new racially based business strategy.29
McDonald’s started to actively seek Black franchisees. This was
the business spirit of the age, as ‘Madison Avenue and Wall Street
were evaluating advertising and marketing reports that advised
that companies could capture a lucrative and growing market of
upwardly mobile black consumers’.30 Meanwhile, McDonald’s
started donating money to civil rights organizations in an attempt
to tie their corporate strategy to Martin Luther King’s dream.
Despite King’s explicit anti-capitalist position, McDonald’s has
continued to celebrate him as part of their public image to this
day. As Chatelain observes, rather than being a sign of corporate
support for Black America, the corporate support for this form of
‘black capitalism’ was more a sign of government neglect of the
economic hardships faced by many urban Black Americans. This
was woke capitalism in one of its earliest incarnations.
Chatelain concludes that the history of McDonald’s relationship
with Black America is one of ‘how capitalism can unify cohorts
to serve its interests’ and how that unification was only possible
because of the ‘stress of racial trauma, political exclusion, and
social alienation’.31 It is because of this that Chatelain portrays
McDonald’s relationship with Black America as an exemplar of
‘racial capitalism’, understood as ‘the deep connections between
the development of modern capitalism and racist subjugation and
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oppression’.32 The racial capitalism to which Chatelain refers to
has a long history dating back to the very beginning of American
capitalism itself. The term ‘racial capitalism’ was first used by Cedric
J. Robinson to explain how capitalism was and still is yoked to the
imperial history of racism as realized in slave ownership, racial
violence and even genocide. By this account, racism is not limited
to being a political issue of human rights and equality, but is built
into the structure of the economy. In the case of the US, to put it
most simply, capitalism was founded on slavery.33
In his 1983 book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical
Tradition,34 Robinson argues that even before capitalism, racism was
present in feudal Europe. This was, however, an ‘internal racism’
that created social stratifications based on racial divisions between
dominant Christian groups and Jewish, Irish, Slavic and Roma
peoples. For Robinson, capitalism did not arise as an entire break
from feudalism. Instead, it extended the racial basis of economic
activity and economic inequality in different directions, while still
being based on the exploitation of racialized groups of people.
Slavery marked the extreme of racial capitalism as, in Robinson’s
words, ‘for more than 300 years slave labor persisted beyond the
beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor,
peonage, serfdom, and other methods of labor coercion’. Capitalism
is about conflicts of interest and exploitation not just across class
divisions, but also across racialized ones. This is evidenced, for
Robinson, in ‘the persistent and continuously evolving resistance of
African peoples to oppression’. It is this racially based antagonism,
Robinson maintains, that the traditions of Black resistance and
Black radicalism were born as an ‘encompassing and conscious
experience of organized opposition to racism, exploitation,
and domination’.35
These are precisely the traditions that have informed the
Black Lives Matter movement. In their 2016 statement of policy
demands called ‘A Vision for Black Lives’, the activist coalition
Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) laid this out clearly on an
international scale:
Patriarchy, exploitative capitalism, militarism, and
White supremacy know no borders. We stand in
solidarity with our international family against the
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Racial Capitalism/Woke Capitalism

ravages of global capitalism and anti-Black racism,
human-made climate change, war, and exploitation.
We also stand with descendants of African people all
over the world in an ongoing call and struggle for
reparations for the historic and continuing harms of
colonialism and slavery.36
In performing resistance and dissent against the often-deadly
police violence that Black people suffer around the world, what
also becomes more apparent is the continuities of racial capitalism
from feudalism, to slave imperialism, to the present day. As critical
race scholar Siddhant Issar explains, racial capitalism evokes an
acceptance that race is and has always been central to the capitalist
enterprise and to the exploitation that happens within it. This is
important because it serves to ‘connect the histories of slavery and
colonialism with the contemporary economic-material predicament
of Black populations’,37 and how that history is permeated with
White supremacy and imperialism. Issar’s point is that the Black
Lives Matter movement is predicated on a conviction that ‘racial
domination structures the capitalist economy […] from colonialism
to slavery through food and housing redlining, mass incarceration,
and surveillance’.38 This is a radical position that is far removed
from that of the woke corporations who spruik Black Lives Matter
slogans on their websites and via their social media accounts. When
McDonald’s mourns the deaths of Black Americans whose lives
have been brutally cut short by police, it excises the radicalism from
Black activism for its image management purposes. The same goes
for the NFL, and its willingness to perform an about-turn when
its anti-resistance patriotism appeared to become unfashionable.
Despite all the corporate kerfuffle, there is no mention by these or
other corporations of, for example, Black Lives Matter’s demands
for reparations for historical slave exploitation and oppression of
Black people.
Black Lives Matter’s political demands include:
Reparations for past and continuing harms. The
government, responsible corporations and other
institutions that have profited off of the harm they have
inflicted on Black people – from colonialism to slavery
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WOKE CAPITALISM

through food and housing redlining, mass incarceration,
and surveillance – must repair the harm done.39
A Black Lives Matter tweet and a small donation to a charity are a
pittance that do not even remotely come close to the reparations
that have been demanded. If American capitalism has been built on
slave labour, then for American capitalism to take responsibility is
not the stuff of public relations slogans. Black Lives Matter has been
taken on board by corporations in a massively deradicalized form so
as not to disrupt the structure of capitalism, which, both in the past
and the present, has been and is entwined with racial oppression.
Deradicalized by woke corporations, Black Lives Matter is also
stripped of its fundamental political character – the character that
Barbara Ransby, in her book Making All Black Lives Matter, calls
a ‘Black-led class struggle’.40 Ransby’s point is that racial justice
and economic justice are inextricable from one another. To
talk the political talk without walking the economic walk is, in
effect, politically meaningless. Inequality, as a central feature of
contemporary life under capitalism, is not a result of differential
levels of merit and hard work, as conservative apologists would have
it. Instead, inequality is too often rooted in the nexus of classism
and racism, a form of oppression that has evolved from slavery
and colonialism. In making this point, Ransby quotes Gwen Carr,
whose son Eric Garner was killed in 2014 in New York by police
when he was trying to break up a fight:
At the time [Eric] was selling cigarettes to support his
family. These two things are, of course, connected. They
reflect the ongoing struggle the black community faces
every day for racial and economic justice. They’re at
the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement. Eric’s
senseless death has forced our country to confront the
toxic effects of police brutality. My hope is that together,
we can also change the system that trapped him and so
many black men and women across our city and nation
into poverty too.41
Corporations making public statements of support is all well and
good. But what is needed are fundamental changes that eradicate
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Racial Capitalism/Woke Capitalism

uneven levels of poverty and oppression based on race and class.
If the superficiality woven into much corporate activism wasn’t
enough, business enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter rubs more
salt into the wounds when it demands that its fawning activism
must also be regarded as a ‘business case’. Never mind avoiding
reparations, corporations seek a financial and commercial payback
from their dalliance with activism. When Black Lives Matter
becomes appropriated by Black Lives Marketing we are not seeing
real change, but rather a cynical extension of racial capitalism
whereby Black resistance itself is leveraged for the sake of increasing
corporate wealth and profit. Here woke capitalism is just another
form of exploitation of Black and working-class people. Not
limited to the labouring power of their bodies, the exploitation is
extended to their struggle, politics, ideas and spirit.
Commenting in the online magazine Black Enterprise, Tiffany
Hogan expresses it like this:
We are already seeing how some of these Black Lives
Matter statements ring hollow. Many companies have
a history of racial discrimination and exploiting people
of color and have failed to hire, promote and fairly
compensate their Black employees. The comments in
their posts tell you a lot – current and former employees
sharing stories of being overlooked, overworked,
underpaid, and abused. Hypocrites and exploiters are
being exposed.42
Indeed, it is all well and good, for example, for tech companies
like Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter to speak out in support
of Black Lives Matter. But is this making a difference when they
have failed to do anything about the fact that they have a largely
White male workforce that has robbed working-class people of
affordable housing in whatever vicinities they open offices?43 When
woke capitalism meets racial capitalism, corporations might well
be amplifying the slogans of the Black Lives Matter movement,
but they are also exploiting that movement for their benefit, while
simultaneously trying to strip it of the radical politics that is needed
if capitalist inequality and exploitation are going to change.

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11

The Best a Woke
Corporation Can Be
On Sunday 12 January 2019, Gillette released a television
advertisement using the slogan ‘The best a man can be’. Ostensibly,
the ad was a head-on challenge to toxic masculinity. There is no
going back to the days where male sexual harassment, bullying
and domestic violence were accepted as normal, the ad professed.1
The ad was somewhat of a turnaround for Gillette. Before this, it
had long marketed its products in the image of the competitive
go-getting alpha male, an image associated with the forms of
dominant masculinity that it was now bringing into question. So
how did it happen that Gillette suddenly took on political critique
of masculinity commonly associated with leftist feminism?2
To go back to the beginning, the Gillette Company was founded
in 1901 when King C. Gillette invented the safety razor. This was
an innovation that revolutionized men’s grooming, allowing them
to easily shave themselves at home rather than making regular visits
to a barber. Building on a proud history of innovation, Gillette
has remained one of the most well-known brands of shaving
products to this day.3 In terms of their marketing, since the late
1980s Gillette’s advertising slogan was ‘The best a man can get’, a
play on words suggesting that the company’s razors were the best
available, and that this signified an apex of masculinity. The very
first ‘best a man can get’ ad was played at the 1989 Super Bowl
as the Cincinnati Bengals fought it out with the San Francisco
49ers to be crowned overall winners of the American National
Football League.
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The Best a Woke Corporation Can Be

For the first time in the history of the competition, the Super
Bowl game was tied at half time. The half-time entertainment,
for which the Super Bowl is famous, featured a magician Elvis
Presley impersonator, Elvis Presto. He and his backup singers, the
Magic Wandas, did a routine called ‘BeBop Bamboozled’. In a set
designed to look like a 1950s theatre, Elvis lip-synched and did
magic tricks while the Wandas, dressed in pale blue halter-neck
dresses with white polka dots, danced around him.4 Harking back
to a foregone era of post-war American confidence, this was a
bizarre spectacle celebrating an America where men were centre
stage, and women fawned around them.
Gillette’s 1989 Super Bowl ad was on theme in celebrating a
traditional and conventional form of Western masculinity. The
background music proudly resonated with lyrics portraying strong,
masculine imagery about fathers and sons, races run and being a
champion, ending with the well-known tagline ‘The best a man
can get’. As these male champions are heralded in song, the ad
portrays men as heterosexual breadwinners, who work hard and
play hard. They are fathers who pass on their masculine cultural
heritage to their sons, are doted on by loving wives, and enjoy wellbonded homosocial relationships with other men. These are wellgroomed, handsome, muscular and physically active men. They lift
weights, run marathons, surf and play football. Whether they are
Wall Street executives, professional sportsmen or astronauts, they
are all winners. They are almost all White.5 The campaign was a
runaway success for Gillette, so much so that in 1990 they stopped
airing the ad on television, afraid that the demand for their product
was increasing so much that their production could not keep pace.6
For the next 30 years, Gillette retained the slogan ‘The best
a man can get’, with an image strategy rooted in dominant
masculinity pretty much along the same lines as that of the 1989
Super Bowl ad. The best men were those who won in life’s
competition. They had the best jobs, were the most handsome,
the fittest, had the most beautiful wives, and raised their sons to
be just like them. Independent winners, these men were rugged
leaders who achieved their goals, and nothing could stand in their
way. Despite these decades of success, by the late 2010s Gillette
had begun questioning this strategy, asking whether it was still
as relevant to the razor-buying market. In response, they began
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experimenting with marketing strategies that portrayed the
‘modern man’ as more sensitive and less stoical than his predecessor.
‘It’s no longer acceptable to tell men to man up, bottle it up and
show no weakness,’ was the message from Gillette’s creative team.7
The ad that came out on 12 January 2019 took this new direction
to its full potential. For a start, the slogan ‘The best a man can get’,
was changed to ‘The best a man can be’. Who was this new man
that Gillette was now portraying? The new ad begins calling out
‘bullying’, ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ as significant
social problems that affect girls and women, as well as men and
boys.8 ‘Is this the best a man can get?’ the ad asks as startling images
are portrayed of boys being bullied for being ‘sissies’, men catcalling
and sexually harassing women, and executives mansplaining business
to their female counterparts. ‘It’s been going on far too long’, we
are told, and we need to stop using the old excuse that ‘boys will
be boys’. In place, the ad portrays a new form of masculinity where
men hold each other accountable for sexist and violent behaviour.
We now see men stepping in to protect women from harassment,
stopping other men from stalking women, raising their daughters
to be strong, breaking up fights, and intervening when they see
people being bullied. The ad ends with the message: ‘It’s only
by challenging ourselves to do more, that we can get closer to
our best.’
A massive controversy ensued as the ad, originally released
on YouTube, went viral. It attracted some four million views
within two days of its release. Supporters of the ad lauded Gillette
for taking a stand against toxic masculinity. Glamour magazine,
for example, offered glowing praise for a ‘self-assured piece of
advertising that Gillette should be proud of ’. Gillette was extolled
for its ability to change with the times and for taking the progressive
stance that society, and men in particular, should no longer hide
from the realities of sexual harassment. The ad allowed men to be
empowered to hold other men accountable, advocates argued.9
That Gillette, as a major corporation, would take on this cause also
suggested that they believed that it had mainstream appeal to their
customers. As Jack Halberstam, professor of English and gender
studies at Columbia University, put it at the time, ‘There’s clearly a
cultural shift happening around masculine norms, and the fact that
corporate advertising realizes it needs to modify the way it markets
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The Best a Woke Corporation Can Be

to men and represents masculinity suggests that the shift is not just
happening at a subcultural level.’10
Suppose we were to be sanguine about the matter. In that
case, we could say that Gillette was supporting and amplifying
the voices of those who had long fought to draw attention to,
and reformulate, the damaging effects that masculinity can have
on men and women. To be more pessimistic would yield the
conclusion that Gillette was trying to cash in on changing public
sentiments towards gender identity, and masculinity in particular.
After all, Gillette’s decision to change its advertising messages
was not just because of ideology. It was informed by extensive
research involving focus groups and surveys of men and women.
Effectively, shifting perceptions of masculinity were identified as
a ‘market trend’.11 Let’s not forget too, that just six months earlier
the American Psychological Association had, for the first time,
released Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men. The
guidelines, designed to help clinicians working with men and boys,
were deeply critical of the limits of traditional masculinity and its
deleterious effect on the psychological wellbeing of many men,
linking it also to violence and discrimination against women and
gender-diverse people.12
Responses to Gillette’s ad also showed, however, that
not everyone shared progressive visions of the more diverse
possibilities of masculinity. Detractors decried the ad as being
anti-men. British television personality Piers Morgan was among
those who led the charge against Gillette. He called the ad ‘PCcrazed bilge’. It’s nothing less than ‘man-hating’ and a ‘war on
masculinity’, he ranted. Morgan held radical feminists and woke
virtue signallers to blame for wanting to emasculate men by
claiming that ‘it’s wrong, and harmful, to be masculine, to be a
man’.13 Right-wing reactionaries like Morgan seethed around the
world. Casting the ad as a ‘leftist’ conspiracy against men, many
believed that the forms of masculinity castigated by Gillette were
worth preserving. Selwyn Duke’s comment in The New American
sums up this anachronistic position: ‘Men are the wilder sex,
which accounts for their dangerousness – but also their dynamism.
You can’t have male inventiveness, innovation, civilizationbuilding, and lifesaving without the explosive masculine energy
that is their impetus.’14
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Extreme responses such as this echo the kind of snowflake
sensitivity that conservatives often and easily accuse others of. That
some men would respond so extremely to a challenge to their
macho self-image itself indicates the anxiousness and fragility of
traditional masculinity. Negative comments on Gillette’s YouTube
channel outstripped positive ones ten-to-one, circulating around
the idea that the ad was demeaning and stereotyping of men,
and that Gillette products should be boycotted.15 James Woods,
outspoken Hollywood actor and vocal Donald Trump supporter,
exemplified the reactionary critique on Twitter. On 15 January
2019, he tweeted: ‘So nice to see @Gillette jumping on the
“men are horrible” campaign permeating mainstream media
and Hollywood entertainment. I for one will never use your
product again.’16
Not surprisingly, Gillette was also cast as a woke capitalist antihero. The Spectator magazine, well known for its conservative
political stances, epitomized the right-wing critique. The argument
was not only that Gillette had made the ad as an attention-grabbing
publicity stunt, but also that ‘The modern-day blight of right-on
snobbery infecting the corporate world and a sign that, in these
increasingly polarized times, there is no corner of life that will not
be needlessly politicized by those who think they know better.
Down with this woke capitalism.’17
Over in the US the people at the conservative think tank the
Witherspoon Institute, were making similar claims, describing the
ad as a perverse reaction to the ‘sentimental humanitarian milieu’
of our times. They griped that ‘business does not exist to engage in
Marxist-like consciousness-raising exercises, alter family structures,
establish world peace, or even right a nation’s historical wrongs’.18
The ‘sentimental humanitarianism’ that Gillette was accused
of pandering to was that of the #MeToo movement. This was
not by implication. #MeToo was explicitly named in the ad as a
cultural turning point when it came to the social awareness of toxic
masculinity. The Gillette brand was deliberately aligning itself with
what had become a highly influential international social movement
designed to call out and combat the sexual harassment and assault
of women. The #MeToo movement had emerged suddenly
only a few months before ‘The best a man can be’ was released,
and had grasped the public imagination. It began on 5 October
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The Best a Woke Corporation Can Be

2018, when journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published
a breaking story in The New York Times about the big-name
Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.19 At the time, Weinstein
was riding high on success, having spent the previous four decades
creating a Hollywood empire. He produced or directed more than
200 movies, winning six Academy Awards for Best Picture. Sex,
Lies, and Videotape (1989), Pulp Fiction (1994), Good Will Hunting
(1997) and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013) are among the
many critically acclaimed and commercially successful movies
that he released. An active philanthropist, he supported charities
addressing poverty, AIDS, diabetes and multiple sclerosis.20
Kantor and Twohey ran the headline ‘Harvey Weinstein paid
off sexual harassment accusers for decades’. The New York Times
investigative team had interviewed Weinstein’s employees and other
people who worked in the film industry, as well as scrutinizing
emails and documents from his businesses. What they found was
that for three decades Weinstein had repeatedly been accused of
sexual harassment, but brokered financial settlements with his
victims to make those accusations go away. The article detailed
this long history of abusive behaviour and how Weinstein used his
massive Hollywood power and celebrity to manipulate and harass
both famous and aspiring actresses. In the article, actress Ashley Judd
gave personal testimony of how, in the 1990s, Weinstein invited her
to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for a business meeting. When
she got there, she found that the meeting was to be held in his hotel
bedroom. Dressed only in a bathrobe, Weinstein asked Judd if he
could give her a massage. He also invited her to watch him shower.
Other women offered accounts of how Weinstein would promise
career-breaking opportunities in exchange for ‘massages’, and was
often adamant in refusing to take no for an answer.
Less than a week after Kantor and Twohey’s article came out, the
exposé escalated when Ronan Farrow published ‘From aggressive
overtures to sexual assault: Harvey Weinstein’s accusers tell their
stories’ in The New Yorker.21 Farrow revealed even more testimonies
of women who had been sexually assaulted and harassed by
Weinstein. Horrifying stories were recounted about how he groped
women, exposed himself to them, masturbated in their presence,
lured them into his bedroom under false pretences, and forced them
into oral sex. He was revealed as a malignant serial sexual predator
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and rapist. In March 2020 Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years of
prison for sexual assault and rape by a Manhattan court.22
The outing of Weinstein as a serial sexual harasser kicked off a
worldwide movement. In response to Weinstein being outed in
the press, on the 15 October 2017, actress Alyssa Milano posted
on Twitter: ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write
‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.’ Thousands of women replied
almost immediately. Some were celebrities like Lady Gaga and
Viola Davis. Others were regular people who had suffered from
sexual abuse. Harrowing stories of rape, bullying, intimidation
and job loss flooded social media. Within weeks the #MeToo
movement was an international phenomenon, bringing the world’s
attention to just how common it was for women to suffer in this
way.23 Gymnast McKayla Maroney testified to having been sexually
assaulted by her former doctor, the convicted child pornographer
Lawrence G. Nassar. Anthony Rapp spoke up about being
aggressively propositioned by actor Kevin Spacey when Anthony
was a 14-year-old child actor. Comedian Louis C.K. admitted that
the accusations against him for sexual misconduct by a number
of women were true. The list of perpetrators goes on and on.24
Celebrities, businessmen, politicians and powerful men from all
walks of life were finally being called to account for their violent
and abusive behaviours.
The idea behind the hashtag #MeToo is not new. It was first
used by political activist Tarana Burke back in 2006 to help young
women collectively empower themselves. As Burke describe it:
I started this work […] 2006–07 while working with
young black and brown girls in the south – trying to
find resources for them because they were survivors of
sexual violence and sharing their experiences of sexual
violence. […] And as a survivor myself it was important
for me to find a safe space for them.25
With its viral spread through social media, the solidarity that Burke’s
movement represented became a worldwide phenomenon, where
Burke’s vision of ‘a world freed of sexual violence’ seemed closer
than ever.26 In the latter months of 2017 #MeToo had become
so strong that Time magazine named the movement’s ‘silence
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The Best a Woke Corporation Can Be

breakers’ as its ‘Person of the Year’. The power of solidarity was
acknowledged as women the world over shared stories that had
been hidden for years, sometimes lifetimes. Standing together,
against fears of being dismissed, ridiculed, shamed, accused of
lying, or losing a job, women were speaking up and being heard.
Men were being held to account and legally prosecuted. Time
described it as a ‘revolution of refusal’ that finally was resulting in
real consequences for male perpetrators.27
It was amid this revolution that Gillette decided to link its
valuable brand name to the movement. With ‘The best a man
can be’ Gillette was aligning itself with the growing tide of public
support against the kinds of toxic masculinity that the #MeToo
movement was alerting the world to. Gillette exemplified a new
type of corporate political activism28 – a central dimension of woke
capitalism where corporations and their CEOs publicly backed
political causes not directly related to their business activities.
Whereas in the past, corporations could be expected to be the
targets of political activists, for example on issues like climate
change and worker exploitation, today’s woke corporations are
becoming the activists. We need to be careful, however, not to
think that corporate activism is the same as traditional political
activism. Corporate activism is commercial as much as it is political
– it is a marketing strategy geared at the management of corporate
values and identity, as well as reputation building. Corporate
activism has been explicitly identified as having the twin objectives
of influencing public opinion and improving consumer attitudes
towards the company.29
This is not to say that nobody at Gillette had genuine political
beliefs in the causes their organization so publicly supported.
What it does say, though, is that support would not have been
given unless it passed the ‘business case’ test of being able to match
the social benefits with the self-interested commercial interests.
While none of this speaks to the authenticity of the socially minded
motives of corporate activists, it does tell us something about the
causes that they support. Put simply, when a corporation backs
a progressive social cause it is because they believe that cause has
mainstream support.
That Gillette has aligned itself with the #MeToo movement is
not something for them to be congratulated over. It is the #MeToo
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movement that deserves praise. Because of the very dedicated and
often thankless work of the genuine activists #MeToo became a
global social movement that has brought women’s experience of
sexual harassment, abuse and assault at the hands of men out of
the shadows.30 As well as Harvey Weinstein, without #MeToo it
would have been likely that serial abusers such as financier Jeffrey
Epstein, musical producer R. Kelly, comedian Bill Cosby and so
many others would not have been publicly held to account. As law
professor Penny Venetis explains:
There really is a wave of various high-profile individuals
who were protected by the criminal justice system,
among other institutions, who are now being examined
and are being prosecuted. […] Prosecutors will not
indict someone and will not prosecute someone unless
they think they have a really good case, and I think there
might be a feeling that jurors are now more attuned to
allegations of sexual abuse and sexual assault, and more
willing to believe that this occurred, including by highprofile, rich, well-connected people.31
That great steps have been taken to achieve this is neither about
selling razors nor vilifying men. It is about the power and solidarity
of a collective social voice and celebrating a global movement that
in the words of the #MeToo founder Tarana Burke, seeks to build
‘a world free of sexual violence’.32
In an era of woke capitalism, that Gillette chose to align itself with
#MeToo is not at all surprising. What is much more interesting
is how the ad was related to Gillette’s financial performance. By
mid-2019 Gillette’s owner, Procter & Gamble, had written down
US$8 billion on Gillette. This contributed to the parent company
reporting a loss of US$5.24 billion for the quarter ending 30 June.
This write-down had been a long time coming, as globally the
market for shaving products was declining, especially in developing
countries where social trends saw men shaving less often, if at
all. In the five years to 2019 the market had declined by 11 per
cent. Even worse for Procter & Gamble, Gillette’s share of that
shrinking market had also begun to fall in 2018. Coupled with
a strong US dollar, this meant that Gillette’s US dollar revenues
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were declining. The write-down was an action taken because of
these market conditions. The stock market responded favourably
to Procter & Gamble’s mid-2019 results, with the price of the
company’s shares reaching an all-time high.33
Despite the write-down being a response to established trends in
Gillette’s core business, the conservative press was keen to blame
the financial situation on the ‘best a man can be’ ad. Conclusions
were quickly and erroneously jumped to as headlines ran ‘Gillette
cut by $8B loss after “toxic masculinity” ad’,34 ‘Gillette’s “woke” ad
that insulted men cost P&G billions’,35 and ‘After going woke and
losing $8 billion, Gillette embraces masculinity again’.36 The rightwing culture warriors used Gillette as a convenient, if not falsified,
example to support their motto ‘get woke, go broke’. Writing
in the right-wing blog RedState, Brandon Morse was direct in
levelling accusations at Gillette and its CEO Gary Coombe:
This is billions of dollars gone. You upset an entire sex
by essentially telling them that every radical feminist
claim about them is true. […] Coombe made a horrific
call and the proof is in the numbers. Now we’ll see if
the good Captain Coombe learns from it, or continues
to poke massive holes into the side of his ship in the
name of looking ‘woke’.37
Morse’s lesson in reactionary conservatism was not learned by
Gillette, however. Coombe stood steadfastly by the brand’s position
in masculinity:
I don’t enjoy that some people were offended by the
film and upset at the brand as a consequence. That’s
not nice and goes against every ounce of training I’ve
had in this industry over a third of a century. […] But I
am absolutely of the view now that for the majority of
people to fall more deeply in love with today’s brands
you have to risk upsetting a small minority and that’s
what we’ve done.38
In defending Gillette, it is noteworthy that the business reasons
for supporting #MeToo were never far from Coombe’s mind.
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He saw the campaign as a means of securing Gillette’s future as
social values concerning masculinity were changing. He believed
that Gillette was in commercial danger on account of its image
being associated with a bygone era. We ‘lost connection with the
millennial generation. Gillette quickly became the brand of the
millennial generation’s dads,’ he argued.39
The gap between Morse’s and Coombe’s positions exemplify
two opposing positions on woke branding. From one perspective,
going woke is a smart business strategy that can see brands retain
relevance in a changing world. From the other perspective,
politically progressive causes are socially divisive and hence pose
an undue risk to business success. Amid all of this debate, the
arguments are all about the best way to do business. Whichever
side one might take, it is the real political issues that the #MeToo
activists had so effectively and successfully brought to the fore that
risk being rendered secondary to a commercial agenda. Again, here
we see the democratic work of social activists being subsumed by
woke capitalism.
Gillette’s ad reflects a particular irony of woke capitalism. On the
one hand, woke capitalism sees corporations co-opting political
and social issues and aligning them with a corporate interest that is
entirely independent of those issues. On the other hand, incidents
like Gillette releasing its toxic masculinity ad can and do stimulate
important public debates. As we have already seen, the advertisement
divided opinion on the values of contemporary masculinity. Gillette
did not do this unintentionally. As marketing professor Claudia
Kubowicz Malhotra has explained, using politically divisive issues
as the basis of marketing is a growing trend of corporations wanting
to locate themselves amid social controversy:
We’re at the very beginning of a curve or uptick in this
type of advertising. There probably will be a period
where it feels overcrowded, but I don’t see that any
time in the foreseeable future. […] People don’t watch
advertising as much as they used to, so you need to say
or do something that catches people’s attention. Then,
the whole social media aspect of amplifying that is also
very critical.40

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The ad had worked. Traditional and social media were saturated by
the public debate that followed. Gillette was headline news around
the world. That not everyone supported Gillette wasn’t a problem.
What mattered was that everyone was talking about them.
While the ad may have stimulated important democratic
debates, it is important to remember that generating democratic
engagement was not its main purpose, if it was a purpose at all.
Gillette CEO Gary Coombe was well aware that after watching
the ad, 65 per cent of customers were more greatly disposed to
buying Gillette products. Among millennials it was 76 per cent, and
among women under age 35 it was 84 per cent.41 At this point it
becomes hard to say whether #MeToo benefited from Gillette or
Gillette benefited from #MeToo. What is clear, to borrow a phrase
from Douglas Holt, a professor of marketing, was that Gillette was
an ‘ideological parasite and proselytizer’42 riding on the coat tails
of #MeToo. But the political implications are much broader than
that. In plying the division between commercial self-interest and
politically motivated democratic activism, corporations like Gillette
were breaking down the traditional division between the political
sphere and the economic sphere. This is a division that has long
been central to the idea of democracy, with the economy intended
to serve and sustain social and political life.43
Under neoliberalism conditions, the relationship between the
economic and the political has radically changed. Woke capitalism
is a symptom of this. Economist Yanis Varoufakis explains: ‘In
our democracies today, this separation of economic from the
political sphere, the moment it started happening, it gave rise to
an inexorable epic struggle between the two with the economic
sphere colonizing the political sphere to such an extent that it is
undermining itself.’44
Woke capitalism is a particular form of this undermining and
colonization. It was once assumed that the institutions of liberal
democratic nations could be divided into three sectors. The
first sector is the state and includes government, the police, the
judiciary, state schools, hospitals, publicly owned enterprises and so
forth. The second sector, or ‘for-profit sector’, consists of businesses
of all kinds, ranging from giant corporations to corner shops and
sole-proprietorships. Finally, there is the third sector which includes
private non-profit-seeking organizations that are democratically
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controlled and independent of the state. This sector can include
anything from churches to sports clubs to childcare providers to
charities.45 Woke capitalism does not respect these boundaries. It
involves second-sector organizations taking over the responsibilities
of the other two. The issue with this is that while the state and
the third sector are not motivated by profit, the second sector, by
definition, is. When this profit motive bleeds into the activities
of the other two sectors, things change. Most specifically, profit
becomes the primary driver for the provision of public services,
and in the promotion of democratic debate.
Economist Branko Milanovic describes the especially crucial
differences between the first and the second sectors:
Modern capitalism societies are built on a dichotomy: in
the political space decisions are (to be) made on an equal
basis with everybody having the same say and with the
structure of power being flat; in the economic space the
power is held by the owners of capital, the decisions are
dictatorial, and the structure of power is hierarchical.46
Woke capitalism involves this hierarchically controlled corporate
power gaining undue influence over, or even taking charge
of, political matters that affect everybody. In this sense, woke
capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic, even when individuals
within a democracy might agree with the political sentiments and
convictions expressed by a corporation like Gillette. Reactionary
conservatives who threatened to boycott Gillette because they
didn’t agree with its political position completely missed the point.
To only support people or institutions that one agrees with and
to try to silence the others is the high road authoritarianism. From
a democratic position, this is not the problem. The real problem
occurs when the holders of private financial interests use their
position and power to control a public agenda, while that control
is still ultimately guided by the profit motive and not by a motive
of pursuing the public good. Ultimately, Gillette intended to
increase the popularity of its products among a new generation of
consumers so that it could increase its share of a shrinking market
for shaving products. #MeToo was a vehicle for it to do that. That
is the best a woke corporation can be.
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12

The Right Hand Gives
In the summer of 2020, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made a
fundamental shift in how it distributed its grant funding. On 30 June
the Foundation, endowed with more than US$6 billion, sent out
a press release that heralded what they called a ‘transformational
moment in our history’. It went like this:
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation today announced
a major strategic evolution for its organization,
prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking.
The Foundation’s board has resoundingly endorsed a
refined mission statement and updated program areas.
While Mellon’s strategic shift – under the leadership
of Mellon President Elizabeth Alexander – has been
two years in the making, current events make the
Foundation’s new social justice lens even more relevant
to Mellon’s philanthropic efforts supporting the arts
and humanities.1
Andrew W. Mellon, whom this foundation was named after, was
one of the ‘robber barons’ who emerged after the American Civil
War. Robber baron was a pejorative epithet given to a small cadre
of American capitalists whose industrial empires grew to massive
proportions in the latter part of the 19th century. They were called
robbers because of how they accumulated wealth on a giant scale
at the expense of others. They were called barons because of their
elite social status. Their hallmark was being ‘cruel businessmen
who used ruthless business practices to get ahead and showed no
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compassion for others, including the working class. […] Ultimately,
the goal of a robber baron is to become a monopoly and completely
dominate an industry.’2 Mellon exemplified this, and his business
empire was as huge as it was diversified. Steel, coal, oil, chemicals,
railways and construction were among the industries he dominated.
He was in charge of 99 banks, and built five corporations that
would be later listed on the Fortune 500. His company Alcoa has
a full monopoly in the production of aluminium, and he owned
Gulf Oil.3
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed the post-Civil
War period in the US ‘The Gilded Age’.4 Their 1873 novel of that
name was a satire of its time, mocking the greed and selfishness of
what was to become American industrial capitalism. This age was
gilded in the sense of being gold plated. On the surface, American
culture glittered like solid gold, but at its core was a much baser
metal representing the similarly base possibilities of human
motivation. Twain and Warner’s book, by Twain’s own account,
was intended to illustrate the ‘all-pervading speculativeness’ of
19th-century American capitalism, and how it has led to a situation
where ‘every man [sic] has his dream, his pet scheme, whereby he
is to advance himself socially and pecuniarily’. Railing against the
individualism, materialism and intemperance of this age, Twain
saw this leading those in power into a ‘shameful corruption’ that
spread like ‘pollution’.5
The robber barons were protagonists of the Gilded Age. The vast
fortunes accrued by Mellon and his counterparts such as John D.
Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Leland Stanford marked a
new dawn of inequality brought on by industrial capitalism. These
people remain household names to this day in terms of the legacy
they left behind. They live on both in myth and in the cultural
and educational institutions that bear their names, memorializing
them in the hope of immortality. But this was a particular legacy
enabled by the vast wealth accumulated in the hands of an elite
few as the burgeoning American economy transitioned from being
based on agriculture and materials to one that led the world in
manufacturing and industry.
While the robber barons were merciless in their pursuit of
industrial greatness and the amassing of personal fortunes, they
also became known for large-scale philanthropy. Many of them
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gave away large swathes of their fortunes during their lifetimes
to establish charitable foundations and create public institutions.
Without them, the US would not have Stanford, Duke, Rice
or Yale universities. There would be no Carnegie Hall or Frick
Museum in New York. A contemporary of Mellon, and the person
who perhaps most exemplified the marriage of industrial wealth
and social philanthropy, was Andrew Carnegie. Steel was Carnegie’s
business. He amassed a large personal fortune; considered to be
the richest man of all time, Carnegie’s net was worth equivalent
to US$321 billion today. That leaves Jeff Bezos’s US$200 billion
in the shade.6
In 1901, at the age of 66, Carnegie sold the Carnegie Steel
Corporation for US$500 million, spending the next 18 years
until his death in 1919 developing an international network of
foundations, endowments and institutes to use his fortune for
philanthropic purposes.7 By the time he retired from business,
Carnegie had already set out the blueprint for his philanthropic
endeavours. This blueprint came in the form of his 1889 essay
‘The gospel of wealth’, first published in the periodical The
North American Review.8 The realities of industrial-scale inequality
between the owners of monopoly capital and a newly created
working class were never far from Carnegie’s mind. In the opening
paragraph of the essay he writes:
The problem of our age is the proper administration of
wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind
together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.
The conditions of human life have not only been
changed, but revolutionized, within the past few
hundred years.9
What Carnegie recognized was that the character and scale of
the inequality that capitalism produced in the 19th century could
easily lead to new forms of extreme conflict. This does not stop
here, however. According to Carnegie, the central differences
between the rich and poor were not simply a matter of wealth
and money, but of culture and merit. For this system of inequality
to be maintained, he was implying, something had to be done
to ‘harmonize’ the relationship between those who profited from
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industrial capitalism and those whose labour kept its machinery
moving. Carnegie was no socialist; he fully supported the capitalist
system through which he had transformed his own life from his
humble upbringing in Dunfermline, Scotland to becoming the
world’s wealthiest man.
Carnegie explicitly expressed the belief that the expanding
cultural and economic chasm between the rich and the poor was
a natural result of some essential differences between individuals,
with some having what it takes to rise to the top of society and
others destined to remain at the bottom. As Carnegie explained:
This change […] is not to be deplored, but welcomed as
highly beneficial. It is well, nay, essential for the progress
of the race, that the houses of some should be homes
for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts,
and for all the refinements of civilization, rather than
that none should be so […]. The price we pay for this
salutary change is, no doubt, great. […] Rigid Castes
are formed, and, as usual, mutual ignorance breeds
mutual distrust. Each Caste is without sympathy for the
other, and ready to credit anything disparaging in regard
to it. Under the law of competition, the employer of
thousands is forced into the strictest economies, among
which the rates paid to labor figure prominently, and
often there is friction between the employer and the
employed, between capital and labor, between rich
and poor.10
We have here a moral justification, or perhaps rationalization, of
social and economic inequality as manifest in the rigid separation
of the bourgeoisie as the owners of capital, and the working class
as its foot soldiers. The creation of this inequality, for Carnegie,
is not something that captains of industry such as him need take
any responsibility for. They are after all ‘forced into the strictest
economies’ by economic laws that are more powerful than them.
In absolving the rich of any personal responsibility for how
they acquired their wealth, Carnegie argues for the absolute
necessity and inevitability of inequality for human progress. He
also acknowledged that the new class system created by industrial
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capitalism leads to inexorable social antagonism that could well
undermine if not overthrow the system that created them.
For Carnegie, the material benefits accrued from industrialization
across society outweighed the malaise of the inequalities that existed
within it. His story was that vast inequality is simply the price
of progress. With social Darwinist verve, he declared that while
capitalist inequality ‘may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is
best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every
department’.11 It is here that Carnegie, in prefacing his advocacy
of philanthropy, reveals his deep seated right-wing cultural and
economic conservatism. For him, inequality is a natural feature
of society in that it results from the exercise of superior human
initiative on the part of those who become rich. Capitalism, for
Carnegie, has served to separate what he refers to explicitly as the
‘drones from the bees’.12 This statement reveals a deep disrespect
for, and feeling of superiority over, those very people who his
business ventures have left as impoverished wage labourers. This
is a philanthropy that, as much as anything else, justifies the value
and righteousness of the rich as an essential part of society. It is
bitterly ironic that charitable giving by the rich is the means by
which extreme inequality is morally justified.
The blueprint Carnegie set out was one where philanthropy was
explicitly formulated as an anti-socialist political strategy. Despite
the individualism that underpins capitalism and its ability to create
vastly unequal distributions of wealth, Carnegie maintains that the
‘laws’ of capitalism as they relate to competition, private property
and individual wealth accumulation are the ‘most valuable of all
that humanity has yet accomplished’.13 He also suggests, however,
that this system, which inevitably produces gross inequality, needs
a little tweaking, rather than the revolution being demanded by
the socialists of his time. Rather than giving ‘his’ (sic) wealth to his
family or allowing it to be subject to inheritance tax following his
death, Carnegie invokes the very wealthy to achieve a ‘reign of
harmony’ of the rich over the poor by administering their wealth
for the ‘common good’. Let us not forget that this is still a ‘reign’,
and one that equates wealth with the right to have power over
one’s fellow citizens in a manner that directly usurps democracy’s
primary basis in the sovereignty of the people. In Carnegie’s world,
capitalists should be kings.
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The only alternatives to the plutocracy that Carnegie entertains,
neither of which he could countenance, were disharmonious
inequality or communism.14 Harmonious inequality is what he
strove for. Of course, instead of accumulating gross levels of wealth,
employers could simply increase wages as a means of redistributing
wealth. But Carnegie did not trust the working classes with money,
instead regarding philanthropy as a much better way deploying
massive fortunes. After all, it means that the superior ‘man’ would
be making the decisions on behalf of the masses.
At the heart of Carnegie’s philanthropy, and a sentiment that lives
on in today’s woke capitalism, is the idea that the rich have the
right to determine what constitutes the public good. Carnegie’s
is a profoundly undemocratic position that assumes benevolent
plutocracy as the ideal political system. In marrying paternalism
with extreme capitalism, Carnegie asserts that ‘rich men should
be thankful for one inestimable boon. They have it in their power
during their lives to busy themselves in organizing benefactions
from which the masses of their fellows will derive lasting advantage,
and thus dignify their own lives.’15
Rich men are presumably thankful, then, that their wealth is
not just about self-interested material gain, but that it also allows
them to dominate those who are not rich. There is a strong trace
of Christian ascetic moralism running through this. Carnegie
insists that the wealthy should not direct their fortunes to drunken
and indolent beggars. Instead, by controlling wealth, the rich can
improve humanity, Carnegie informs us. Beyond the rhetoric
and the political bluster, the particular initiatives that Carnegie
supported were public parks where people can exercise and
improve their minds, public art galleries to allow people to improve
their cultural tastes, and public institutions such that promote
the common good. Carnegie urged the wealthy few to fund
universities, public libraries, hospitals, research institutes, concert
halls and churches.
From around 1870 to the outbreak of the First World War
in 1914, America’s Gilded Age was characterized by political
corruption, the creation of urban slums, worker exploitation,
environmental degradation, extreme wealth inequality and a rapid
escalation of corporate power. It was in the latter part of the Gilded
Age, however, that its excesses were salved by progressive social
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reforms, of which Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of wealth’ was a primer.16
Carnegie was clear that his proposal for a new philanthropy was
a way of addressing the problems of societies that are ‘face to face
with socialistic questions’.17 His goal was to preserve what he saw
as the progress in humanity that arises from industrial capitalism.
While Carnegie’s focus was on addressing the disharmony of
inequality, the philanthropic interests he promoted were largely
cultural. The poor, or at least the ones he decided were deserving,
were to be educated and granted access to the values of high
culture. As artist and scholar Alisa Zhulina explains, central to this
was an expansion of plutocracy by using ‘philanthropy as a way for
the wealthy to take control of public policy’ as well as a ‘a cultural
weapon in promoting the values of unbridled capitalism’.18 The
early seeds of woke capitalism had been planted.
Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of wealth’ set out a blueprint for the
philanthropy of the Gilded Age and beyond. At the time of his
death, Carnegie had distributed more than 90 per cent of the
wealth he had amassed as an industrialist. He founded the Carnegie
Institute of Technology, which merged with the Mellon Institute of
Industrial Research in 1967 to form Carnegie Mellon University.
He also funded the creation of over 2,800 public libraries, and
built famous concert venues including Carnegie Hall in New
York. Other robber baron riches were put to similar use. John
D. Rockefeller’s oil fortune was used to support ‘the well-being
of mankind throughout the world’. His money contributed to
building the University of Chicago, funding medical research,
and supporting public health education. The next generation of
big-time industrialists were similarly inspired. Auto tycoon Henry
Ford created America’s biggest charity the Ford Foundation,
and petroleum magnate John Paul Getty established the biggest
art foundation in the world under his name.19 These are but a
few examples.
Coming back to our opening example, one of the richest and
most powerful men of his time, Andrew W. Mellon built and
endowed the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. For
decades before that, he had been an art collector, specializing
in the old masters. This sizeable personal collection was part of
his donation. He also created the Mellon Institute for Industrial
Research. Again, as with Carnegie’s vision, his focus of giving
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remained on a cultural level through art and education. While
clearly this was political, in that it involved the creation of public
institutions with private money, specifically political causes were
not its focus. Mellon himself was a staunch right-wing Republican
and a direct opponent of the progressivism of the 1920s. When
later in life he became secretary of the US Treasury, his legacy was
achieving tax cuts for the rich on the basis that it was the road to
economic progress.20 This is why the statement at the opening of
this chapter from the Mellon Institute in 2020 is so telling about
the similarities and differences between robber baron philanthropy
and philanthropy in the era of woke capitalism.
The transformation is not about the anti-democratic aspirations
of extreme-wealth plutocracy – that remains unchanged. With
woke capitalism much of what has become associated with the left
is incorporated into the capitalist system rather than being opposed
by it. Carnegie’s foundational ideas of using philanthropy as a means
to combat the civil unrest created by capitalist inequality and the
threat of socialism that it creates remain. Today’s woke capitalism
adds a new dimension to Carnegie’s vision. Now, the focus is less
on creating public institutions, and more on backing progressive
political causes summed up under the seemingly ubiquitous rubric
of ‘social justice’. In a sense, this is a version of Carnegie’s doctrine,
updated for 21st-century political pretensions.
Was Carnegie’s vision achieved? A look at the history of
economic inequality in the US tells the story. In 1913, the top
1 per cent of US income earners took home 18.6 per cent of
the country’s earnings, while the bottom 50 per cent acquired a
total of only 15.4 per cent. Fast forward to 2019 and the situation
has worsened: the top 1 per cent claim 20.5 per cent while the
bottom half gets just 12.7 per cent. Clearly, economic equality in
the US is significantly worse today than it was a hundred years
ago when the likes of Carnegie and Mellon were distributing
their fortunes for the so-called public good. Remember, though,
that this deterioration has not increased in a straight line from the
early 20th century to now. Up until the dawn of neoliberalism in
the 1980s things had been getting much better, with the bottom
50 per cent earning about twice as much as the top 1 per cent.21
Things started getting worse from there. Effectively, the advent of
neoliberalism was the beginning of the end of the post-Second
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World War era, which saw prosperity more evenly shared. It also
marked the return to a new era akin to the robber baron capitalism
of old, although this time it was not mining and manufacturing that
led the way, but financial services and technology.
The escalation of economic inequality that was jump-started
in the 1980s and came hand in hand with globalization and
neoliberalism was not restricted to the US. A recent United
Nations report on world inequality stated that since at least the
1990s the share of national income being paid in wages had
declined in the majority of countries around the world. This
was so because improvements in labour productivity enabled
by technological advances had not fed into a wage increase
for workers. The result was a general trend of wage stagnation
for those on the lower half of income distribution, and the
enrichment of those at the very top. The situation today is that
globally the lower half owns less that than 1 per cent of global
wealth. Meanwhile the richest 10 per cent own 85 per cent, and
the richest 1 per cent own about half.22 It is indeed a rich person’s
world. As the UN report assesses, this unjust state of affairs is an
affront to democracy itself:
Without appropriate policies and institutions in place,
inequalities concentrate political influence among
those who are already better off, which tends to
preserve or even widen opportunity gaps. Growing
political influence among the more fortunate erodes
trust in the ability of Governments to address the
needs of the majority. This lack of trust, in turn, can
destabilize political systems and hinder the functioning
of democracy. Today, popular discontent is high even
in countries that have fully recovered from the 2008
financial and economic crisis and have benefited from
steady growth in recent years.23
It is in the context of this popular discontent that woke capitalism
emerged. It all came to a head in September 2011 when a handful
of protestors set up camp just in front of Zuccotti Park in New
York’s Manhattan, just down from Wall Street. The object of their
protest was the vast inequalities created by corporate capitalism
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and exacerbated by the financial crisis just a few years earlier. The
protest was focused especially on the bankers whose offices were
just down the road. Calling themselves ‘Occupy Wall Street’, the
protestors rallied behind the cry ‘We are the 99%’, registering the
massive divide between the top 1 per cent of wealth holders in the
world, and the remaining vast majority.
As the New York protest grew, Occupy spread across the US
and around the world. Protest camps were set up across Europe,
Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania. The camps, which offered
makeshift homes for the protestors, were deliberately visible.
Between the public chanting of protests and the threats of forcible
eviction issued to many of the camps, media attention boomed.
The result was increasing awareness of and debate about the
inequalities resulting from decades of globalization and neoliberal
economic policy.24 So successful was the movement, that ‘occupy’
was the most used word in the media in 2011. In that same year
‘the protestor’ was named as Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’,
an accolade that directly referenced the impact of the Occupy Wall
Street movement.25
While Carnegie’s advocacy for philanthropy was in response
to the social disharmony produced by the inequalities of his day,
woke capitalism is a response to the new and even more extreme
global inequality created by 40 disastrous years of the neoliberal
experiment. In other words, it is a corporate-friendly response
to the same problems that Occupy was protesting from an anticapitalist position. The Mellon Foundation’s ‘major strategic
evolution’ of shifting its priorities from supporting the arts to
backing social justice are symptomatic of this redirection in capitalist
self-legitimacy. Of course, there is much more to woke capitalism
than billionaire philanthropy, unlike what was happening in the
Gilded Age; today, corporations are themselves getting involved in
social and political causes, not just retired tycoons. Nevertheless,
just like the 19th-century robber barons poured money into public
institutions to preserve the capitalism that allowed inequality to
skyrocket, today woke capitalism is prioritizing social justice for
the same reasons.
As an added sting, today’s philanthropists are insisting that the
causes they support use methods derived from business in order
to deliver their services. With corporate philanthropy comes
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the spreading of corporate culture to domains of activity that
have traditionally been foreign to it.26 Behrooz Morvaridi offers
a scathing assessment of capitalism’s renewed intrusion into
philanthropy. He argues that contemporary philanthropy reflects
a deep-seated ideological commitment to neoliberal capitalism in
the form of market-based methods of social investment. Impact
investing and micro-finance are cases in point of how capitalist
methods are used to solve the problems caused by capitalism.
Bringing capitalist ideas and methods to the not-for-profit sector
is a way of securing corporate power that goes beyond the confines
of the direct business activities of the corporation. As Morvaridi
describes it, ‘Rich philanthropists are content to be concerned with
poverty so long as it diverts attention away from their own assets
and income and does not threaten the hegemonic structure through
which they gain.’27 The result is that while some of the symptoms
of the socioeconomic devastation that neoliberalism has wrought
on the world might be eased, the system that created them goes
from strength to strength.
It is not surprising that Carnegie’s vision of philanthropy leading
the way to create social harmony, by the uber-wealthy effectively
controlling public policy, didn’t work. Nor will it work today
as the calls for social justice have come hand in hand with the
scam of ‘trickle down economics’ and the assumption that freeing
the rich of taxes will create a market-led prosperity. If American
history serves as a guide, the periods in which inequality narrowed
were those where marginal tax rates were greatest and union
membership was higher, as well as during the Great Depression.
At the end of the Gilded Age itself, the inequality it produced
was redressed by ‘higher taxes, stricter regulations of business and
finance, and greater government investment in public enterprise’.28
While these policies continued as a feature of the post-Second
World War economy, neoliberalism put an end to this legacy of a
more equally shared progress.
The policies implemented from the late 1970s served well to
resuscitate a US economy wracked by stagnation and inflation, but
the price was that those at the top of the financial hierarchy were
the ones who claimed the lion’s share of the benefits.29 We might
call this prosperity, but it is just that it has been distributed towards
the wealthy at the expense of others. Woke capitalism might make
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some people feel a bit better about this because it means that
they are ‘giving back’. Nevertheless, it does nothing to fix the
system that enabled those people to ruthlessly take a grossly unfair
share in the first place. This is the context in which the Mellon
Foundation turned its strategic focus to social justice. In doing
this, the foundation’s president stated that ‘There was nothing
wrong with [the foundation’s] work […] but to focus it around
the question of, how does each grant, every penny, contribute in
some demonstrable way to a more fair and just society? What does
that look like?’30
There is no inkling here to examine the historical causes of
the problem as they can be traced back, at least in recent history,
to the gross and expanding inequalities created by the neoliberal
experiment. An example of the Mellon Foundation’s new social
justice initiatives is instructive. In July 2020, they announced a
US$5.3 million grant to the Million Book Project – an initiative
run out of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale University. The money
will be spent on sending a collection of 500 books to each of
1,000 prisons and 500 juvenile correction facilities. The result is
that the inmates will be able to read great literature.31 In announcing
this project, Yale Law School made the following statement:
The US has the highest incarceration rate of any
country on Earth, with overincarceration a cruel
and unjust reality of the American penal system.
Disproportionately, people of color bear the brunt of
systemic inequities in our conception and application of
the law. The Million Book Project creates a rhetorical
and functional response to this specifically American
fact, and offers the book as both a resource and a
symbol of freedom, restoring hope, dignity, meaning
and purpose to those incarcerated.32
It is easy to argue that giving prisoners access to books is a good
thing. Suggesting that it is a ‘functional response’ is also believable.
But it is what is unsaid that is especially pronounced. Any
implication that the Million Book Project comes anywhere close to
addressing the over-incarceration problem in the US and elsewhere
in the world is patently absurd.
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In seeking to unpack the causes of mass incarceration,
criminologists Anthony Lloyd and Philip Whitehead33 note
that the world’s prison population has increased by about a
fifth to 10.4 million people since 2000, with the highest rates
of incarceration being in the US, China, Russia and Brazil. In
countries like the US, England, Scotland, New Zealand and
Australia minority groups are disproportionately represented on a
significant scale. In the US, for example, a Black man is six times
more likely to go to prison than a White man.
So why is this the case? Lloyd and Whitehead’s analysis links
increases in incarceration directly to changes in the criminal justice
system connected to the neoliberal political and economic order
of our times. They describe hyper-individualism and economic
inequality as producing ‘bulimic effects’. What they are getting
at is that increased inequality and insecurity are threats to social
cohesion as more and more people are rendered unnecessary to
the economy. The poor and unemployed are rendered as simply
‘surplus to requirements’ of neoliberal capitalism.34 In dealing with
the increased crime rates that result, the neoliberal response is to
prioritize punishment and imprisonment. To cater to this, across
the world we have witnessed the criminal justice system creating
new possibilities for mass incarceration. Those people who threaten
the political order that benefits the wealthy are simply spewed up
into a prison system as if some form of human waste, recycled as
low-cost non-unionized prison workers:
The bulimic turbulence of the neo-liberal order
ejects its surplus human casualties into the turbulent
waters of social insecurity, compounded by the
transformed criminal justice response […] private
providers of criminal justice functions and apparatus also
collude in search of market share and profit, as do local
and regional political leaders who seek investment and
criminal justice employment opportunities in locales
ravaged by the first strike of neoliberal expulsion,
economic and social insecurity.35
Giving books to prisoners, while no doubt benefiting some
people, is not a way of dealing with the historic catastrophe of
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mass incarceration. At best, the new philanthropy provides some
light relief for the symptoms of the political and economic system
that enabled philanthropists to get rich, without addressing the
fundamental issues that caused them.
What is happening with philanthropy is not limited to changes
in the policies of robber baron foundations. As historian David
Huyssen observes, since the 1980s many people have been
describing the present era as a ‘New Gilded Age’ or ‘Second
Gilded Age’. The reason for this comparison, Huyssen explains, is
because just like it was back in the post-Civil War US we also have
been witnessing the continual expansion of economic inequality
coupled with the ‘excesses and egotism of great wealth’.36 What
he also points out, however, is a key difference in the political
contexts of the two eras. The first Gilded Age was fuelled by the
development of industrial capitalism and the class conflicts that it
created. Today, however, growing inequality has not produced any
class conflict that threatens the capitalist system, even though it
has been accompanied by de-industrialization and debt slavery in
advanced economies.
It is in this political context that a new generation of billionaires
has embraced philanthropy. And while Carnegie and others of
his age invested their wealth in bourgeois institutions of art and
higher learning, the new philanthropists pursue quite a different set
of interests. Chief among the purveyors of this new philanthropy
are the founder of Microsoft Bill Gates and investment mogul
Warren Buffett. These are both men who have long occupied
the top ten spots on the list of the richest people in the world.
As of 2020, Gates had a net worth of US$98 billion, with Buffett
close behind with US$67.5 billion.37 In 2010, Gates and Buffett
founded the Giving Pledge where they gained the support of 40
of the wealthiest people in the US to make ‘a commitment to
give the majority of their wealth to address some of society’s most
pressing problems’.
The entry requirement makes this much more exclusive than
even the richest country club. They put in writing that even to
be considered you need to have ‘U.S. $1 billion in personal net
worth and are ready to make a public pledge to donate the majority
of your personal wealth to philanthropy’. There was a queue.
Three years later the Giving Pledge became international, and
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The Right Hand Gives

by 2020 more than 200 billionaires had joined from 24 countries.
Billionaires from as far afield as Australia, Brazil, China, Germany,
Indonesia, Russia and Tanzania had all promised to hand over their
fortunes to socially oriented causes.38 Michael Bloomberg, Elon
Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are among their ranks. This is not
about libraries and galleries. The hundreds of billions of dollars
pledged is mostly for projects concerned with ‘climate change,
education, poverty alleviation, medical research, healthcare services,
economic development, and social justice’.39
In formulating its vision of a new age of billionaire philanthropy,
the Giving Pledge has a direct lineage to the Gilded Age. Aligned
with Andrew Carnegie, the idea is that billionaires use the
pledge as a vehicle through which they give away amounts of
their fortunes to good causes, both during their lifetimes and in
their wills. Carnegie’s essay ‘Gospel of Wealth’ is often quoted. As
John Fullerton from the economic think tank the Capital Institute
elucidated at the time that the Giving Pledge was created:
Andrew Carnegie’s essay titled Gospel of Wealth […] is
the touchstone of the great American philanthropic
tradition […] The Giving Pledge drive that Gates and
Buffett are championing follows the inspiration of
Carnegie […] Never mind that Carnegie’s call was to
surrender essentially all of one’s wealth (after meeting
family needs), not just for half of one’s wealth, which is
the minimum of the Giving Pledge. Intention matters.40
In internationalizing Carnegie’s gospel as well as shifting its
emphasis from giving to cultural institutions to directly intervening
in socioeconomic problems, the Giving Pledge is a powerful
symbol of woke capitalism. Francesca Sawaya, professor of English
and American studies, explains this philanthropy as an attempt
to fill the chasm left behind by the ‘retreat of the activist state’
since the 1980s.41 More telling is that this is the very chasm that
neoliberal acolytes promised would be filled through the magic of
the market mechanism and trickle-down economics. The need for
this kind of philanthropy is a sign of a system that doesn’t work –
market capitalism created a problem that governments are largely
unwilling or unable to address.
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WOKE CAPITALISM

So, if we look at the billionaires’ gift horses in the mouth, what
might be the motive behind their giving? Can it simply be that after
lifetimes of ruthlessly self-interested business practice they have seen
the light and decided to become altruistic social justice warriors?
Such an explanation is beyond naive. Under woke capitalism, the
state can no longer be relied on to address social injustice and
poverty. Instead, society turns to the philanthropic crumbs that
fall from the master’s table; crumbs that fall only in the places that
the uber-rich deign them to. Through rose-coloured glasses this
looks like a benevolent plutocracy. In the light of day, it looks
like a complex ploy to ensure that the system that created the
inequalities for which philanthropy is an ointment remains entirely
unchanged. The Giving Pledge certainly hasn’t harmed the wealth
of its founders. Gates and Buffett have kept their treasured spots on
the world’s richest list for years.
In the end, modern billionaire philanthropy is an exercise of
capitalist power, effectively an extension of that power beyond the
confines of the economy. It diverts private assets to public purposes,
yet without any public accountability. It is profoundly undemocratic
and serves to shore up the power and influence of contemporary
society’s billionaire protagonists.42 What these mega philanthropists
have learned is that their seemingly charitable enterprises offer a
much smoother path to political power and the shaping of public
policy than the traditional electoral process.43 Effectively, this means
that while the right hand gives billions to philanthropic causes, the
left hand takes away the hope of democracy and equality. Nothing
changes in the underlying system that produces inequality – the
deal is that the gifts of billionaires are exchanged for ensuring that
there is no fundamental change to the system that made them
billionaires in the first place.

166

13

Getting Woke to
Woke Capitalism
On 17 September 2020, US Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote
a letter to the chair of the Business Roundtable.1 About a year
earlier, Business Roundtable, whose members are the CEOs of
major corporations from Amazon to Xerox,2 had released the
new version of its statement of the ‘purpose of a corporation’.3
The new statement was a replacement for the one that they had
issued in 1997. Back then, the Business Roundtable’s CEOs had
endorsed the declaration that ‘The paramount duty of management
and of boards of directors is to the corporation’s stockholders.
[…] The notion that the board must somehow balance the
interests of stockholders against the interests of other stakeholders
fundamentally misconstrues the role of directors.’4
These words were nothing less than a celebration of unfettered
market capitalism. The 1990s statement trumpeted the assumedly
natural rights of the owners of capital to reap the financial benefits
borne of the labour of those people who worked for corporations.
Come 2020, the Business Roundtable had made a U-turn, at least
rhetorically. Admitting that ‘since 1997 [Business Roundtable] has
endorsed principles of shareholder primacy – that corporations
exist principally to serve shareholders’, the new statement
affirmed ‘the essential role corporations can play in improving our
society when CEOs are truly committed to meeting the needs of
all stakeholders’.5
The changes made at the Business Roundtable symbolized the
full mainstreaming of ‘woke’ capitalism. Two decades into the
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WOKE CAPITALISM

20th century even the most conservative bastions of corporate
capitalism were disavowing shareholder primacy. They were
proclaiming that businesses should have a social purpose and
asserting that they should care for all the constituents who have a
connection to them. All ‘stakeholders’ are important, they declared.
Corporations are committed to delivering value for each of them,
they promised.
Sent just over 12 months later, Senator Warren’s letter was
a detailed questioning of whether the Business Roundtable’s
promise had been kept. Noting the ‘great fanfare’ with which the
announcement of the new purpose had been made in 2020, Warren
pulled no punches in assessing whether anything had changed. She
wrote: ‘It is clear that the signers of the Statement have not kept
these commitments and that the BRT […] has been lobbying for
these CEO’s narrow, short-term interests rather than the broad
group of stakeholders espoused in the Statement.’6
Warren slammed the statement as a ‘public relations stunt’ that
has made no difference whatsoever to the corporate self-interests
being pursued by the leaders of the world’s biggest organizations.
Warren complained that ‘it is difficult to identify how any of these
[2020] commitments were widely operationalized, and corporate
actions instead indicate that there may have been no intention to
do so’.7
What Warren laid bare was that despite public attestations to
woke capitalism, corporations were still operating in a way that
benefited shareholders at the expense of consumers, workers and
communities in general. This was a telling example of how woke
capitalism operates, as well as one that served as a reminder that
while the system has changed, its fundamental basis in neoliberal
capitalism has not. Indeed, it is this absence of fundamental change
that is a defining character of woke capitalism. This is a system
where wealth and prosperity flow up to the rich, exacerbating
inequality on a global scale, and where claims of corporate
righteousness strengthen that very system. It also means that
corporations are less honest about it than they used to be in the
heady days of ‘greed is good’ corporate governance.
With woke capitalism, corporations have essentially realized
that they have needed to change how they go about pursuing the
financial self-interest of their shareholders, but have not made any
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Getting Woke to Woke Capitalism

changes to their dedication to that pursuit. They have also realized
that they have needed to change how the capitalist system in which
that pursuit happens is morally justified. What Warren’s criticism
of the Business Roundtable shows, is that this can be done by
trying to fool the community (and possibly even themselves) into
believing that things are changing at a basic level when in fact they
are not. If anything, gross inequality has proceeded to become even
more tragically exaggerated since corporations went woke. Warren
provides a political role model to us all in being prepared to see
through the corporate-speak and woke washing.
Warren’s position also reflects her belief that corporations should
not just talk the woke talk, but should also walk the woke walk. In
holding corporations to account for their claims to caring about
all stakeholders, Warren tacitly agrees that woke capitalism – if
done authentically – is desirable. Her letter advances the idea that
the problem with corporations is that they are not woke enough.
What is needed, this suggests, is that corporations should be much
more active in assuming social and political responsibilities. This
is a similar view to that put forward in the Harvard Business Review
by Erin Dowell and Marlette Jackson. They argue that corporate
woke washing is woefully inadequate and that corporations need
to move from talk to action when it comes to their progressive
political positions. No more executive hypocrisy, they demand.
What Dowell and Jackson also realize, however, is that change will
not come at the hands of corporate benevolence, but instead will
be based on democratic action outside corporations themselves.
Writing specifically about Black Lives Matter, they argue that:
Organizations must be cognizant of the fact that the
current outcry for justice is not ephemeral or confined
to social media. It is the culmination of decades of
advocacy and centuries of discrimination, and as such,
consumers are no longer willing to let organizations
squander those efforts. Consumers not only hold the
power of demand but are increasingly demonstrating
that they also have a powerful voice in deciding the
manner in which companies meet those demands – and
organizations need to be mindful of how this dynamic
is becoming part of the new normal.8
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WOKE CAPITALISM

Real change comes from democratic action, not from corporations
pulling themselves up by their boot straps. It is time to let go of
the idea that as primarily economic actors business organizations
will somehow lead the way politically to a more just, equitable and
sustainable world. Democratic politics is founded on the ultimate
belief that people have the right to rule themselves. This politics
needs to be reasserted as primary, with the economy demoted to
being secondary. With woke capitalism, we have seen the very
opposite trend come to a dangerous culmination as capitalist
organizations have encroached more and more on the moral and
political life of citizens.
Notwithstanding that corporations going woke is harmful to
democracy, the more standard conservative response is that woke
capitalism is harmful to the capitalist economic system itself. While
Warren expressed concern about the lack of action on corporate
commitments to society, it is more common for critics of woke
capitalism to suggest that big corporations have no business making
such commitments in the first place. From this point of view,
corporations have somehow been co-opted by manipulative leftists
into supporting political positions that they do not necessarily
believe in, or at least shouldn’t believe in. Writing in the magazine
Quillette, Vincent Harinam epitomizes this position when he claims
that woke capitalism is a response by corporations that have been
‘targets of the activist Left’. For businesses, according to Harinam:
going woke is a strategic decision to appease those who
would otherwise destroy them with taxes and boycotts.
As such, woke capitalism is corporate conservationism.
It is a fiscal stay-of-execution from the profit-killing axe
of the activist Left. […] The activist Left is placated, and
customers are reassured of a company’s commitment to
corporate social responsibility.9
By this account, weak-willed corporations are trying to appease
dangerous socialists, precisely because they fear what those socialists
might be able to do if they were not appeased. Another common
argument often made by reactionary pundits is that corporate virtue
signalling is a sign of businesses playing politics when they should be
sticking to their commercial knitting. In his book Corporate Virtue
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Getting Woke to Woke Capitalism

Signalling,10 Jeremy Sammut exemplifies this position. He argues
that big business is ‘meddling in politics’, especially progressive
politics, and it needs to stop. Why? Because it means that CEOs are
using shareholders’ money to pursue objectives that have nothing
to do with what a business should be focused on. Like Harinam,
Sammut is fearful of, in his words, ‘the takeover of business by
“corporate lefties”’. By this logic, we should be working to ensure
that ‘the business of business remains business’.11
Essentially, we have two opposing positions. One, from a liberalleft position such as Elizabeth Warren’s, agrees that corporations
should genuinely and authentically support the broad interests of
society rather than just focusing on shareholders. Another, from a
traditional right-wing perspective, believes that corporations should
be purely economic entities and not interfere directly in social or
political matters. This book has taken a third position. That is,
despite how it looks on the surface, corporate engagement with
progressive politics is harming democracy and preventing actual
progress. What this means is that being critical of woke capitalism
does have to necessitate a dismissal of progressive politics. Waking
up to the realities of woke capitalism means not being fooled into
thinking that it represents any genuine underlying change to the
primary interests that capitalist corporations are willing or able
to pursue. The real effects of woke capitalism are not about the
success of left activism in gaining support from big business. They
are about ensuring that there is no fundamental reform of the
dominant neoliberal world order that has exacerbated inequality,
fuelled fascist populism, and stood by as the climate crisis escalates.
Dismissing woke capitalism as just another example of virtue
signalling is counterproductive in that it fails to take seriously the
real damage that woke capitalism can do. Laughing at corporate
progressiveness as a superficial and inauthentic business practice
entirely underestimates its real power. This is not simply about
the short-term profitability assumed by the ‘go woke, or go broke’
credo. Going woke is about ensuring that market capitalism can
continue on the trajectory that it has been on for the past 40 years.
Woke capitalism is a strategy for maintaining the economic and
political status quo and for quelling criticism. Elizabeth Warren
was right to hold the Business Roundtable to account, but what
she didn’t consider was the broader anti-progressive effects of both
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WOKE CAPITALISM

the rhetoric and practices of stakeholder-based corporate social
purpose, especially when they are successful.
It is worth noting that when corporations do align themselves
with progressive positions, as Helen Lewis writes in The Atlantic,
they are generally engaged with socially radical issues, not
economically radical ones. The distinction Lewis is making is
between political changes that have social effects and those that
lead to structural and economic changes. The examples she gives
are as follows:
Equal pay is economically radical. Hiring a female
or minority CEO for the first time is socially radical.
Diversity training is socially radical, at best. Providing
social-housing tenants with homes not covered in
flammable cladding is economically radical. Changing
the name of a building at a university is socially radical;
improving on its 5 percent enrolment rate for Black
students – perhaps by smashing up the crazy system of
legacy admissions – would be economically radical.12
The distinction that Lewis enunciates sets out a blueprint for
the woke corporation. Lewis argues that the preservation of
corporate power will come by engaging in a modicum of social
radicalism, while completely avoiding economic radicalism. This
would explain why the minimum wage, aggressive corporate
tax minimization, income and wealth redistribution, scandalous
executive remuneration, and expanding economic inequality
are entirely off limits to the woke corporation’s pseudo-political
agenda. If anything, any politics that threaten the corporate bottom
line is to be avoided at all costs.
This points to a more general facet of woke capitalism. No
amount of feel-good moral conviction will allow a corporation
to engage in a politics that will harm its own financial fortunes.
We saw a telling example of this in 2019 when the National
Basketball Association (NBA) became embroiled in Chinese
politics and Sino‑American relations. For much of 2019 there had
been mass protests in Hong Kong with hundreds of thousands
of people assembling on the streets. They were demanding that
democracy be upheld in Hong Kong in the face of sanctions put
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Getting Woke to Woke Capitalism

in place by the Beijing government.13 The pro-democracy protests
received worldwide media coverage as images of police brutality
and violent clashes between police and protesters were beamed
around the world.14
Amid the protests, on 4 October 2019, Daryl Morey, general
manager of the NBA team the Houston Rockets took to Twitter
in support of the protesters. His tweet contained an image with
the slogan: ‘Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong’. Morey’s
sentiment was largely uncontroversial among American NBA fans,
with many subsequently going to games with banners and t-shirts
expressing support for the Hong Kong protesters. The NBA, of
course, is well known for being prepared to take political stances
in the US. At the time, it even caught the ire of Donald Trump
who complained about the league’s pro-democracy and anti-racism
activism at home. ‘The NBA has become so political that nobody
cares about it anymore,’ Trump insisted during the NBA finals in
2020.15 In this case, Trump was taking issue with NBA mega-star
LeBron James’s support of the American Democratic Party and
the league’s decision to promote social justice messages through
its television broadcasts.
This type of support was nowhere to be seen in Daryl Morey’s case,
however. Morey’s tweet, simple as it was, drew decisive condemnation
in China. This was not just a war of words. Following the
tweet, the Chinese Basketball Association made an official statement:
‘The Chinese Basketball Association strongly disagrees with the
improper remarks by Daryl Morey, and has decided to suspend
exchanges and cooperation with the team.’ Next, the China Central
Television (CCTV) network banned the broadcast of Rockets
games. The commercial and financial implications were huge and
the NBA rapidly went into damage control.16
Just two days after Morey’s tweet, the NBA took action,
ostensibly seeking to protect its business interests in China whose
value is reported as being greater than US$4 billion. The NBA
issued the following statement:
We recognize that the views expressed by Houston
Rockets general manager Daryl Morey have deeply
offended many of our friends and fans in China, which
is regrettable. […] We have great respect for the history
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WOKE CAPITALISM

and culture of China and hope that sports and the NBA
can be used as a unifying force to bridge cultural divides
and bring people together.17
Back in the US, both the NBA and China were widely condemned:
China for using its economic might to silence criticism and dissent,
and the NBA for prioritizing profits over values.18 Laid bare were
the limits of woke capitalism: no political cause or position will be
supported if it is bad for the bottom line.
LeBron James had become regarded as something of a villain by
his former Chinese fans in Hong Kong on account of not being
prepared to speak out about human rights in China. There was
even a specific protest against him where replicas of his NBA jersey
were burned to the words ‘Hong Kong lives also matter’.19 Let us
not forget that James’s US$1 billion deal to endorse Nike products
required him not to compromise sales in China by upsetting
Beijing. As one Hong Kong citizen put it:
It turns out LeBron values the Chinese yuan much
more than these fundamental values of the USA. He
has freedom of speech, and he enjoys the right to speak
on any issue. But he cannot take the moral high ground
and call himself a freedom fighter, and then also silence
himself on China and Hong Kong.20
The whole NBA–China debacle made one thing clear, when it
comes down to it, for woke capitalists the primary motivation is
economic, and politics is only of value if it supports that.
Woke capitalism is, at the end of the day, a matter concerned
with preserving the power, influence and prosperity of big business
and its beneficiaries, as well as with ensuring that the capitalist
market economy in which it thrives is maintained. The reality is
that corporations have neither the will nor the ability to address the
real social, environmental and economic problems that neoliberal
capitalism has fuelled. Inequality, discrimination, and climate
change are prime examples of these problems. If this book has any
central message it is not just that woke capitalism is a ruse designed
to maintain a status quo of inequality: it is a call both to resist and
to not be fooled by it.
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Getting Woke to Woke Capitalism

We return to the original meaning of the word ‘woke’ as it
emerged in the Black Lives Matter movement. Taken in its original
meaning, the idea of being woke is deeply democratic. As described
by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith in their book
Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter,
staying woke involves two principal components. The first is about
‘having knowledge about the facts of racism and the mechanics that
(re)produce racial inequality’. That by itself is not enough, however.
What is also needed is putting that ‘knowledge to use to eradicate
the problems of racial injustice’.21 In contrast, as we have seen, the
meaning of being woke has been sadly misshapen into meaning
insincere and self-serving expressions of moral righteousness.
When applied to capitalism, this has tended to refer pejoratively
to corporations that use politics to pursue economic self-interest,
or to denigrate corporations for being hoodwinked into supporting
progressive political causes. But, if we retain the original democratic
impulse of what it means to stay woke then there is another possible
meaning that can be taken from the valuable and important lessons
of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The approach taken by Black Lives Matter serves as a guiding
light for how to respond not just to racial inequality and
violence, but also to the broader and interconnected realities
of how capitalism has been allowed to run riot in its pursuit of
shareholder value over everything else. The gross inequalities and
environmental devastation that have resulted are a direct affront to
the very meaning of democracy, insofar as that meaning resides
in an ongoing pursuit of freedom, justice and shared prosperity
for all. Instead of this democracy we live in a world characterized
by systems of domination along class, geo-political, gendered
and racial lines. This is not just about the formal institutions of
democracy, but about democracy as a way of life whose principle
values are collaboration, social equality, fairness, participation, and
government by popular representation.
In sharp contradiction of democratic values, the neoliberal
economic order has produced ever widening inequalities of wealth
and income culminating in a woke capitalism that perpetuates the
exercise of power in the interests of the monied minority. We
also have an industrial system that is destroying the environment,
making the world progressively less liveable for future generations.
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WOKE CAPITALISM

Despite its pretensions, woke capitalism will not address these
problems. In fact, it is both exacerbating and trying to obscure
them. Now is the time to be woke to woke capitalism. It is time
to be aware of its characteristics and political effects. It is also time
to intervene to put the world on a path towards equality and justice
for all.

176

Notes and References
Chapter 1
1 Kelley, W.M. (1962) If you’re woke you dig it; no Mickey Mouse
can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip
assist. If you’re woke you dig it, The New York Times, 20 May.
2 Oxford English Dictionary (2017) New words notes June. https://
public.oed.com/blog/june-2017-update-new-words-notes
3 Kelley (1962) p. 46.
4 Ellen, B. (2019) It’s easy to mock eco-celebs. Better to give
them the benefit of the doubt, The Guardian, 3 August. www.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/03/easy-to-mockeco-celebs-better-to-give-them-benefit-of-doubt
5 Eloise, M. (2021) A guide to spotting and avoiding ‘wokefishing’
in dating, Cosmopolitan, 8 January. www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/
love-sex/relationships/a34795394/wokefishing
6 Smith, S. (2020) Have you been ‘wokefished’ while dating? Here’s
how to tell, VICE, 28 July. www.vice.com/en_uk/article/889daa/
what-is-wokefishing-dating
7 Binyam, M. (2016) Watching the Woke Olympics, The Awl,
5 April. www.theawl.com/2016/04/watching-the-woke-olympics
8 Anon (2020) Once Prince Harry was the life and soul of the
party, so how did he go from a fun loving bloke … to Prince of
Woke?, The Daily Mail, 9 January. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-7866757/Prince-Harry-went-fun-loving-bloke-PrinceWoke.html
9 Adam, K. (2019) British radio host fired for racist tweet comparing
Archie Harrison to a chimp, The Washington Post, 9 May. www.
washingtonpost.com/world/2019/05/09/british-radio-hostfired-tweet-comparing-royal-baby-archie-harrison-chimp
10 Ruiz, M. (2019) The Meghan Markle tabloid ‘pile-on’ – and how
to fix it, Vanity Fair, 5 April. www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/04/
meghan-markle-tabloids-racism-sexism
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WOKE CAPITALISM

11 The Royal Household (2016) A statement by the Communications
Secretary to Prince Harry, 8 November. www.royal.uk/statementcommunications-secretary-prince-harry
12 Cited in Weatherby, B. (2019) Eamonn Holmes calls Meghan
Markle ‘spoilt, weak, woke and manipulative’ in scathing rant,
Evening Standard, 11 November. www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/
eamonn-holmes-meghan-markle-royals-sussex-a4331791.html
13 Morgan, P. (2020) Why the Queen must FIRE Their Royal
Hustlers: deluded Meghan and Harry should be stripped of their
titles before this pair of grasping, selfish, scheming Kardashianwannabes bring down the monarchy, The Daily Mail, 9 January.
www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/ar ticle-7868371/PIERSMORGAN-Queen-FIRE-Royal-Hustlers.html
14 The Sun (2020) Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s obnoxious
behaviour betrays royalty and abuses the generosity and goodwill
of taxpayers, The Sun Says, 9 January. www.thesun.co.uk/
news/10708941/prince-harry-meghan-markles-obnoxiousbehaviour-betrays-royalty-taxpayers
15 Friday, F. (2017) The social causes that united Prince Harry and
Meghan Markle, The Observer, 29 November. https://observer.
com/2017/11/the-social-causes-that-united-prince-harry-andmeghan-markle
16 Cited in ABC News (2019) Former US president Barack Obama
urges ‘politically woke’ to get over themselves, ABC News,
31 October. www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-30/barack-obamaon-being-woke-donald-trump-us-president/11655790
17 Haiphong, D. (2019) Obama condemns ‘call out culture’ despite
being its biggest beneficiary, Black Agenda Report, 13 November.
https://blackagendareport.com/obama-condemns-call-outculture-despite-being-its-biggest-beneficiary
18 Berkowitz, J. (2019) Gillette responds to the backlash against
its woke viral ad, Fast Company, 17 January. www.fastcompany.
com/90293402/gillette-responds-to-the-backlash-against-itswoke-viral-ad
19 Ben and Jerry’s website (2020) The art of Pecan Resist: a Q&A
with Favianna Rodriguez. www.benjerry.com/flavors/pecanresist-ice-cream
20 Gutfeld, G. (2019) Gutfeld on Ben & Jerry’s new flavor, Fox
News, 31 October. www.foxnews.com/opinion/gutfeld-on-benjerrys-new-flavor

178

Notes and References

21 Demopoulos, A. (2018) More men are wearing stilettos – if they
can find their size, Daily Beast, 3 October. www.thedailybeast.
com/more-men-are-wearing-stilettosif-they-can-find-their-size
22 Grabowski, M. (2017) Adidas and Reebok should avoid
politicizing sports, Washington Examiner, 17 January. www.
washingtonexaminer.com/adidas-and-reebok-should-avoidpoliticizing-sports
23 Klein, P. (2021) Republicans should oppose corporate favors in
general, not just as retribution against woke capitalism, National
Review, 8 April. www.nationalreview.com/corner/republicansshould-oppose-cor porate-favors-in-general-not-just-asretribution-against-woke-capitalism
24 Dreher, R. (2019) Woke capitalism is our enemy, The American
Conservative, 22 April. www.theamericanconservative.com/
dreher/woke-capitalism-is-our-enemy
25 Friedman, M. (1970) The social responsibility of business is to
increase its profits, The New York Times Magazine, 13 September.
26 Pritchett, J.L. and Tiryakian, E. (2019) Milton Friedman was
right on corporate guidance, and ‘woke’ CEOs ignore him
at shareholder peril, Foundation for Economic Education,
26 August. https://fee.org/articles/milton-friedman-wasright-on-corporate-guidance-and-woke-ceos-ignore-him-atshareholders-peril
27 See Barkan, J. (2013) Corporate sovereignty: Law and government
under capitalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; and
Mikler, J. (2018) The political power of global corporations, London:
Polity.
28 Piketty, T. (2013) Capital in the twenty-first century, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press; Alvaredo, F., Chancel, L., Piketty, T.,
Saez, E. and Zucman, G. (2018) World inequality report 2018,
Paris: World Inequality Lab; United Nations (2020) World social
report 2020: Inequality in a rapidly changing world, New York: UN
Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations.
29 Lewis, H. (2020) How capitalism drives cancel culture, The Atlantic,
14 July. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/
cancel-culture-and-problem-woke-capitalism/614086
30 Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism stealth revolution,
New York: Zone Books.
31 Whitehead, J.W. (2013) The age of neo-feudalism: a government
of the rich, by the rich and for the corporations, Huffington
Post, 30 March. www.huffpost.com/entry/the-age-ofneofeudalism_b_2566546
179

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32 Stavrakakis, Y. (1997) Ambiguous democracy and the ethics of
psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 23(2): 79–96.
33 Stavrakakis (1997) p. 80.

Chapter 2
1 Richards, L. and Brew, N. (2020) 2019–20 Australian bushfires
– frequently asked questions, Parliament of Australia website,
12 March. https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/
library/prspub/7234762/upload_binary/7234762.pdf
2 Arriagada, N.B., Palmer, A.J., Bowman, D., Morgan, G.G.,
Jalaludin, B.B. and Johnston, F.H. (2020) Unprecedented smokerelated health burden associated with the 2019–20 bushfires in
eastern Australia, The Medical Journal of Australia, 213(6): 282–3.
3 Gunia, A. and Law, T. (2020) At least 24 people and millions of
animals have been killed by Australia’s bushfires, Time, 7 January.
https://time.com/5758186/australia-bushfire-size
4 Australia Associated Press (2020) Smoke from Australia’s fires
reaches Chile, The Canberra Times, 7 January. www.canberratimes.
com.au/story/6569408/smoke-from-australias-fires-reacheschile/?cs=14232
5 Earle, S. (2020) Are Australia’s bushfire’s our future?, New
Statesman, 9 September. www.newstatesman.com/australiasbushfires-future-climate-change
6 Shine, J. (2020) Statement regarding Australian bushfires,
Australian Academy of Science, 10 January. www.science.org.au/
news-and-events/news-and-media-releases/statement-regardingaustralian-bushfires
7 NSW Government (2020) Final Report of the NSW Bushfire
Inquiry, Sydney: NSW Government.
8 Barr, S. (2019) Climate strike 2019: when are the global protests
and how can you take part?, The Independent, 27 September. www.
independent.co.uk/life-style/global-climate-strike-septemberprotests-when-where-london-sydney-greta-thunberg-a9111931.
html
9 Noyes, J. and Chysanthos, N. (2019) Global climate strike LIVE:
Australian school students march to protest climate change,
The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 September. www.smh.com.au/
national/global-climate-strike-live-australian-school-studentsmarch-in-protest-of-climate-change-20190920-p52t70.html

180

Notes and References

10 Quoted in Murphy, K. (2019) Morrison responds to Greta
Thunberg by warning children against ‘needless’ climate anxiety,
The Guardian, 25 September. www.theguardian.com/australianews/2019/sep/25/morrison-responds-to-greta-thunbergspeech-by-warning-children-against-needless-climate-anxiety
11 DFAT (2020) Composition of trade Australia 2018–2019, Canberra:
Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade,
January. www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/cot-2018-19.pdf
12 Hamilton, C. (2017) That lump of coal, The Conversation,
15 February. https://theconversation.com/that-lump-ofcoal-73046
13 Athayle, H. (2019) Woke capitalism and its impact on social
movements, Medium, 7 February. https://medium.com/@
hrishikeshathalye/woke-capitalism-and-its-impact-on-socialmovements-50629eb85a0
14 Nolan, E. (2020) Tucker Carlson attacks ‘woke’ companies
donating to fight racial injustice, Newsweek, 17 June. www.
newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-attacks-companies-donatingfight-racial-injustice-1511451
15 Kirby, J. (2020) Welcome to the era of woke capitalism, Maclean’s,
19 February. www.macleans.ca/economy/welcome-to-the-eraof-woke-capitalism
16 Remeikis, A. and Taylor, J. (2020) ‘There is no link’: the climate
doubters within Scott Morrison’s government, The Guardian,
16 January. www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/16/
there-is-no-link-the-climate-doubters-within-scott-morrisonsgovernment
17 Readfern, G. (2018) Gina Rinehart company revealed as $4.5m
donor to climate sceptic thinktank, The Guardian, 21 July. www.
theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/21/gina-rinehart-companyrevealed-as-45m-donor-to-climate-sceptic-thinktank
18 Quoted in Kwan, B. and Bolger, R. (2020) Mining magnate
Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest has announced a $70 million donation
to assist in bushfire recovery efforts, SBS News, 9 January. www.
sbs.com.au/news/twiggy-forrest-clarifies-climate-stance-after-70million-bushfire-donation
19 Turner, G. (2020) Philanthropy, the Twiggy Forrest way, Independent
Australia, 27 January. https://independentaustralia.net/politics/
politics-display/philanthropy-the-twiggy-forrest-way,13532

181

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20 Referenced in: Wilkinson Z. (2020) Tiffany & Co publishes an
open letter to Scott Morrison calling for ‘bold and decisive climate
action’, Mumbrella, 13 January. https://mumbrella.com.au/tiffanyco-publishes-an-open-letter-to-scott-morrison-calling-for-boldand-decisive-climate-action-612807
21 I draw here on my own discussion in: Rhodes, C. (2020) When
corporations back woke capitalism it means climate change action
has gone mainstream, ABC News, 18 January. www.abc.net.au/
news/2020-01-18/woke-capitalism-a-barometer-for-changingpublic-attitudes/11875996?view=invalid
22 Quoted in Bates, R. (2020) Tiffany places ads calling for climate
action in Australia, JCK, 13 January. www.jckonline.com/
editorial-article/tiffany-places-climate-action-ads
23 The Daily Telegraph (2020) Posh mineral retailer goes
woke, 11 January. www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs/
tim-blair/posh-mineral-retailer-goes-woke/news-story/
fe4c5da06a2c5bfe2bc6ab8a69534714
24 Sky News (2020) Tiffany and Co try to profit from bushfire tragedy,
15 January. www.skynews.com.au/details/_6122717154001
25 In Powell, D. and Johanson, S. (2020) Business Council of Australia
hits back as pressure mounts on climate change, Brisbane Times,
14 January. www.brisbanetimes.com.au/business/companies/
business-council-faces-criticism-over-regressive-climate-changepolicy-20200114-p53raa.html
26 Powell, D., Loussikian, K. and Johanson, S. (2020) Mining giant
Rio Tinto pressures BCA on climate as more members depart,
The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 January. www.smh.com.au/
business/companies/mining-giant-rio-tinto-pressures-bca-onclimate-as-more-members-depart-20200116-p53ryr.html
27 Lind, M. (2020) The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the
Managerial Elite, New York: Penguin.
28 World Economic Forum (2020) World Economic Forum Annual
Meeting, www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forumannual-meeting-2020
29 Wu, T. (2020) The revolution comes to Davos, The New York
Times, 23 January. www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/opinion/
sunday/davos-2020-capitalism-climate.html
30 Burke-White, W. (2020) The World Economic Forum deserves
criticism, but we need it now more than ever, Brookings
Institution, 28 January. www.brookings.edu/blog/order-fromchaos/2020/01/28/the-world-economic-forum-deservescriticism-but-we-need-it-now-more-than-ever
182

Notes and References

31 Earlier version of the discussion of woke capitalism and
COVID-19 that is presented here were published as: Rhodes,
C. (2020) Where are the woke capitalists now?, Common Dreams,
1 April. www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/01/whereare-all-woke-capitalists-now; Rhodes, C. (2020) Don’t be
fooled by a wolf in woke clothing: how the world’s billionaires
are cashing in on Covid-19, Common Dreams, 25 August. www.
commondreams.org/views/2020/08/25/dont-be-fooled-wolfwoke-clothing-how-worlds-billionaires-are-cashing-covid-19
32 Team, T. (2020) Why BlackRock’s strong stock rally isn’t over
yet, Forbes, 31 July. www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/
2020/07/31/blackrocks-stock-has-rallied-76-over-recentmonths-can-it-grow-more/#b3319f02b8fe
33 Dreher, R. (2019) Woke capitalism is our enemy, The American
Conservative, 22 April, www.theamericanconservative.com/
dreher/woke-capitalism-is-our-enemy
34 Gregg, S. (2019) How woke capitalism corrupts business,
Public Discourse, 2 October. www.thepublicdiscourse.com/
2019/10/56675
35 Gasparino, C. and Moynihan, L. (2019) BlackRock’s Larry
Fink rattles employees amid political posturing, Fox Business,
25 January. www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/blackrockslarry-fink-rattles-employees-amid-political-posturing
36 Bartleby (2019) Companies can appeal to workers and consumers
with liberal messages, The Economist, 26 January. www.economist.
com/business/2019/01/26/companies-can-appeal-to-workersand-consumers-with-liberal-messages
37 Carney, J. (2019) BlackRock’s betrayal: #woke wall street pushes
leftist agenda on corporate America, Breitbart, 16 January. www.
breitbart.com/politics/2018/01/16/blackrocks-betrayal-wokewall-street-pushes-leftist-agenda-on-corporate-america
38 Gregg (2019).
39 Abad-Santos, A. (2018) Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ad sparked a
boycott – and earned $6 billion for Nike, Vox, 24 September.
www.vox.com/2018/9/24/17895704/nike-colin-kaepernickboycott-6-billion
40 Nike News (2020) COVID-19 response efforts, 1 October.
https://purpose.nike.com/covid-19-response-efforts

183

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41 Day One Team (2020) Amazon donates over £3M to relief
organizations in the UK to support those impacted by the
COVID-19 crisis, The Amazon Blog, 27 March. https://blog.
aboutamazon.co.uk/in-the-community/amazon-donates-over3m-to-relief-organisations-in-the-uk-to-support-those-impactedby-the-covid-19-crisis
42 Neate, R. (2019) New study deems Amazon worst for ‘aggressive’
tax avoidance, The Guardian, 2 December. www.theguardian.
com/business/2019/dec/02/new-study-deems-amazon-worstfor-aggressive-tax-avoidance
43 Beer, J. (2020) Brands from Heinz to Netflix are donating to
COVID-19 relief. How you can join them, Fast Company,
21 March. www.fastcompany.com/90480388/brands-fromheinz-to-netflix-are-donating-to-covid-19-relief-how-you-canjoin-them
44 Blumenthal, E. (2020) Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg
Initiative to give $25M to fight COVID-19, CNET, 27 March.
www.cnet.com/news/mark-zuckerbergs-chan-zuckerberginitiative-to-donate-25-million-to-fight-covid-19
45 Thomas, L. (2020) Nike shares rise as pandemic fuels sneaker
maker’s online growth, annual revenue outlook gets a boost,
CNBC, 18 December. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/18/
nike-nke-reports-q2-fiscal-2021-earnings-sales-beat.html
46 CNNWire (2021) America’s billionaires have grown $1.1 trillion
richer during the pandemic: Report, ABC11, 27 January.
https://abc11.com/mark-zuckerberg-jeff-bezos-elon-muskbillionaires/10057605
47 Nocetti, D.C. and Echazu, L. (2020) Americans may be willing
to pay $5 trillion to stop the spread of the coronavirus and save
lives, The Conversation, 14 May. https://theconversation.com/
americans-may-be-willing-to-pay-5-trillion-to-stop-the-spreadof-the-coronavirus-and-save-lives-137569
48 L. Hildyard quoted in Neate, R. (2020) Call for super-rich to
donate more to tackle coronavirus pandemic, The Guardian,
11 April. www.theguardian.com/news/2020/apr/11/call-forsuper-rich-to-donate-more-to-tackle-coronavirus-pandemic
49 Rushe, D. (2020) Making billions v making ends meet: how
the pandemic has split the US economy in two, The Guardian,
16 August. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/16/usinequality-coronavirus-pandemic-unemployment

184

Notes and References

50 Oxfam America (2020) Pandemic profits exposed, Oxfam
media briefing, 22 July. https://assets.oxfamamerica.org/media/
documents/Pandemic_Profiteers_Exposed.pdf
51 Oxfam America (2020), p. 1
52 Woods, H. (2020) How billionaires got $637 billion richer during
the coronavirus pandemic, Business Insider Australia, 3 August.
www.businessinsider.com.au/billionaires-net-worth-increasescoronavirus-pandemic-2020-7?r=US&IR=T
53 Inequality.org (2020) Updates: billionaire wealth, US job losses
and pandemic profiteers, 6 August. https://inequality.org/
billionaire-bonanza-2020-updates
54 Neate, R. (2020) Billionaires’ wealth rises to $10.2 trillion amid
Covid crisis, The Guardian, 7 October. www.theguardian.com/
business/2020/oct/07/covid-19-crisis-boosts-the-fortunes-ofworlds-billionaires
55 Yun, J. (2020) Covid-19 has worsened inequality. So why are shares
higher than ever?, Yahoo! Finance, 12 August. https://au.finance.
yahoo.com/news/covid19-inequality-shares-212319670.html
56 Hanley, S. (2020) BlackRock CEO calls for social justice in
corporate culture, CleanTechnica, 17 January. https://cleantechnica.
com/2018/01/17/blackrock-ceo-calls-social-justice-corporateculture
57 Brown, K. (2020) 5 global issues to watch in 2020, United Nations
Foundation, 8 January. https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/5global-issues-to-watch-in-2020
58 Business Roundtable (2019) Statement on the Purpose of
a Corporation, Business Roundtable, 19 August. https://
opportunity.businessroundtable.org/wp-content/uploads/
2020/03/BRT-Statement-on-the-Purpose-of-a-Corporationwith-Signatures.pdf
59 Newsome, S. (2020) Coronavirus bailouts will cost taxpayers
hundreds of billions of dollars – unlike past corporate rescues
that actually made money for the US Treasury, The Conversation,
27 April. https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-bailoutswill-cost-taxpayers-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-unlike-pastcorporate-rescues-that-actually-made-money-for-the-us-treasury
-136138; Inman, P. (2020) UK Covid-19 business bailouts have
already cost more than £100bn, The Guardian, 1 May. www.
theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/uk-coronavirus-businessbailouts-have-already-cost-more-than-100bn

185

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60 Anon (2020) The pandemic shock will make big, powerful firms
even mightier, The Economist, 28 March. www.economist.com/
business/2020/03/26/the-pandemic-shock-will-make-bigpowerful-firms-even-mightier

Chapter 3
1 Sanneh, K. (2016) Godmother of Soul: Erykah Badu’s expanding
musical universe, The New Yorker, 18 April. www.newyorker.
com/magazine/2016/04/25/erykah-badu-the-godmother-ofsoul?verso=true
2 Ugwu, R. (2019) Erykah Badu helped define ‘wokeness’. Now
she’s a target, The New York Times, 6 February. www.nytimes.
com/2019/02/06/movies/erykah-badu-what-men-want.html
3 King Jr., M.L. (1965) Remaining awake through a great revolution
[speech], The King Papers Project, Stanford: The Martin Luther
King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
4 Beckham, B. (1972) Garvey Lives!, Charlottesville, VA: University
of Virginia.
5 Martin, T. (1976) Race first: The ideological and organizational
struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement
Association, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
6 Ransby, B. (2015) The class politics of Black Lives Matter, Dissent,
62(4): 31–4.
7 Luscombe, R. (2012) Trayvon Martin case: new evidence
includes video from night of shooting, The Guardian, 19 May.
www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/18/trayvon-martinsurveillance-video-zimmerman
8 Linder, D.O. (2020) The George Zimmerman trial: an account,
Famous Trials, Kansas: The University of Missouri-Kansas City
Law School. www.famous-trials.com/zimmerman1/2319-home
9 Bates, K.G. (2018) A look back at Trayvon Martin’s death, and
the movement it inspired, NPR, 31 July. www.npr.org/sections/
codeswitch/2018/07/31/631897758/a-look-back-at-trayvonmartins-death-and-the-movement-it-inspired
10 Alvarez, L. and Buckley, C. (2013) Zimmerman is acquitted
in Trayvon Martin killing, The New York Times, 13 July. www.
nytimes.com/2013/07/14/us/george-zimmerman-verdicttrayvon-martin.html
11 Upright, E. and Fagenson, Z. (2013) Thousands take to streets
to protest Trayvon Martin verdict, Reuters, 31 July. www.reuters.
com/article/us-usa-florida-shooting/thousands-take-to-streetsto-protest-trayvon-martin-verdict-idUSBRE96T1AL20130730
186

Notes and References

12 Lewis, P. (2013) ‘Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years
ago’, Obama says, The Guardian, 20 July. www.theguardian.com/
world/2013/jul/19/trayvon-martin-obama-white-house
13 In Goodman, A. (2013) Cornel West: Obama’s response to
Trayvon Martin case belies failure to challenge ‘New Jim Crow’,
Democracy Now, 22 July. www.democracynow.org/2013/7/22/
cornel_west_obamas_response_to_trayvon
14 Haiphong, D. (2016) The Obama legacy part iv: protecting the
racist state, scorning Black America, Black Agenda Report, 26 July.
https://blackagendareport.com/obama_legacy_iv_scorning_blacks
15 West, C. in Goodman (2013).
16 Johnson, G. (2016) The growth of #blacklivesmatter on social
media, #BlackLivesMatter, 7 December. https://scalar.usc.edu/
works/blacklivesmatter/the-growth-of-blacklivesmatter-onsocial-media?path=the-history
17 Chase, G. (2017) The early history of the Black Lives Matter
movement, and the implications thereof, Nevada Law Journal, 18:
1091–112.
18 Garza, A., Cullors, P. and Tometi, A. (2020) Herstory, Black Lives
Matter. https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory
19 Richardson, E. and Ragland, A. (2018) #StayWoke: the language
and literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Community
Literacy Journal, 12(2): 27–56
20 Pulliam-Moore, C. (2016) How ‘woke’ went from black activist
watchword to teen internet slang, Splinter, 1 August. https://
splinter news.com/how-woke-went-from-black-activistwatchword-to-teen-int-1793853989
21 Zimmer, B., Solomon, J. and Carson, C.E. (2017) Among new
words, American Speech, 92(2): 204–30, p. 206.
22 Zimmer et al (2017), p. 212.
23 Trudon, T. (2016) Say goodbye to ‘on fleek’, ‘basic’ and ‘squad’
in 2016 and learn these 10 words instead, MTV News, 1 May.
www.mtv.com/news/2720889/teen-slang-2016
24 Blackman, M. (2015) Can we talk about how woke Matt
McGorry was in 2015?, Buzzfeed, 17 December. www.buzzfeed.
com/michaelblackmon/can-we-talk-about-how-woke-mattmcgorry-was-in-2015#.mfdypXQdX
25 Brown, K. (2016) The wokest baes of January 2016, Jezebel, 2 January.
https://jezebel.com/the-wokest-baes-of-january-2016-1755751157
26 Pulliam-Moore (2016).
27 Brooks, D. (2000) Bobos in paradise: The new upper class and how
they got there, New York: Simon & Schuster.
187

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28 Frank T. (1997) The conquest of cool: Business culture, counterculture,
and the rise of hip consumerism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, p. 4.
29 Heath, J. and Potter, A. (2004) The rebel sell: How the counterculture
became consumer culture, New York: HarperCollins.
30 Watson, E. (2018) The origin of woke: how Erykah Badu And
Georgia Anne Muldrow sparked the ‘stay woke’ era, Okayplayer,
27 February. www.okayplayer.com/originals/georgia-muldrowerykah-badu-stay-woke-master-teacher.html
31 Pulliam-Moore (2016).
32 Whiteout, S. (2018) Popularizing wokeness, Harvard Kennedy
School Journal of African American Public Policy, 2017–18: 63–70.
33 Angbeletchy, C. (2018) ‘Stay woke’ is the new watchword: here’s
why, GRIOT, 18 May. http://griotmag.com/en/stay-woke-isthe-new-watchword-heres-why
34 Gervais, R. (2020) Full text: Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globes
speech, The Spectator, 6 January. https://blogs.spectator.
co.uk/2020/01/full-text-ricky-gervais-golden-globes-speech
35 Spiked (2020) Ricky Gervais bursts Hollywood’s woke bubble,
6 January. www.spiked-online.com/2020/01/06/ricky-gervaisbursts-hollywoods-woke-bubble
36 Stepman, J. (2020) At the Golden Globes, Ricky Gervais exposes
Hollywood’s ‘woke’ culture, The Daily Signal, 6 January. www.
dailysignal.com/2020/01/06/at-the-golden-globes-ricky-gervaisexposed-hollywoods-woke-culture
37 Soave, R. (2020) Ricky Gervais slams woke Hollywood’s
sanctimony in Golden Globes Speech, Reason, 5 January.
https://reason.com/2020/01/05/ricky-gervais-golden-globeshollywood-woke
38 Blair, L. (2020) Conservatives praise Ricky Gervais after he takes
‘massive dump’ on Hollywood’s ‘woke’ culture at Golden Globes,
The Christian Post, 6 January. www.christianpost.com/news/
conservatives-praise-ricky-gervais-after-he-takes-massive-dumpon-hollywoods-woke-culture-at-golden-globes.html
39 Kahn-Harris, K. (2020) If everyone was a little bit shameless,
it might deflate the ‘anti-woke’ right, The Guardian, 2 March.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/02/anti-wokeright-liberals
40 Ransby, B. (2017) Black Lives Matter is radical democracy in
action, The New York Times, 21 October. www.nytimes.com/
2017/10/21/opinion/sunday/black-lives-matter-leadership.html

188

Notes and References

41 Bunyasi, T.L. and Smith, C.W. (2019) Stay woke: A people’s guide
to making All Black Lives Matter, New York: NYU Press, p. 202.

Chapter 4
1 Douthat, R. (2018) The rise of woke capital, The New York
Times, 28 February. www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/
corporate-america-activism.html
2 Itkowitz, C. (2019) Trump referred to ‘gun violence’ in his
Parkland remembrance. Hours later, he changed it to ‘school
violence’, The Washington Post, 15 February. www.washingtonpost.
com/politics/2019/02/14/trumps-lengthy-parkland-shootingremembrance-doesnt-meaningfully-mention-guns
3 Thompson, D. (2018) Why are corporations finally turning against
the NRA?, The Atlantic, 26 February. www.theatlantic.com/
business/archive/2018/02/nra-discounts-corporations/554264
4 Douthat (2018).
5 Douthat (2018).
6 Thompson, D. (2018).
7 Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the twenty-first century, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
8 Bowen. H.R. (1953) Social responsibilities of the businessman, Iowa
City, IA: University of Iowa Press.
9 Heald, M. (1957) Management’s responsibility to society: the
growth of an idea, Business History Review, Winter: 375–84,
p. 376.
10 Cited in Heald (1957) p. 376.
11 Bowen (1953) p. xvii.
12 Bowen (1953) p. 3.
13 Bowen (1953) p. 4.
14 Demuijnck, G. and Fasterling, B. (2016) The social license to
operate, Journal of Business Ethics, 136(4): 675–85.
15 Bowen (1953) p. 26.
16 Bowen (1953) p. 105.
17 Levitt, T. (1958) The dangers of social responsibility, Harvard
Business Review, October: 41–50, p. 41.
18 Levitt (1958) p. 42.
19 Friedman, M. (1962) Capitalism and freedom, Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
20 Friedman (1962) p. 133.
21 e.g. Wiseman, O. (2019) In defence of shareholder capitalism,
CapX, 23 August. https://capx.co/in-defence-of-shareholdercapitalism
189

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22 Friedman (1962) p. 133.
23 Friedman (1962) p. 134.
24 Frederick, W.C. (1960) The growing concern over business
responsibility, California Management Review, 2(4): 54–61.
25 Frederick (1960) p. 56.
26 Business Roundtable (2019) Statement on the purpose of a
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27 Lee, L.-E. (2020) Companies must walk their lofty Davos talk –
they have no choice, The Telegraph, 20 January. www.telegraph.
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28 Frederick (1960) p. 58.
29 Frederick (1960) p. 59.
30 Frederick (1960) p. 60.
31 Davis, K. (1960) Can business afford to ignore social
responsibilities?, California Management Review, 2(3): 70–6.
32 Davis (1960) p. 73, italics in original.
33 Davis, K. (1967) Understanding the social responsibility puzzle,
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34 Davis (1967) p. 49.
35 Davis (1973) The case for and against business assumption of
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36 Committee for Economic Development (1971) Social responsibilities
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37 Committee for Economic Development (1971) pp. 11–12.
38 Inequality.org (2020) The facts that define our grand divides.
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39 Alvaredo, F., Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E. and Zucman, G.
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40 Gros, F. (2020) Disobey! A guide to ethical resistance, London: Verso,
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41 Gros (2020) p. 5.
42 Franklin, B. in Speake J. (2015) The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs,
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43 Johnson, J. (2020) ‘An absolute outrage’: Sanders rips ‘wealthy
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45 Stiglitz, J. (2019) Corporate tax avoidance: it’s no longer enough
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46 Asen, E. (2019) Corporate tax rates around the world, 2019, Tax
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47 Gros (2020) p. 3.

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4 Karjanen, D. (2015) World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
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5 Heilbron, J., Verheul, J. and Quak, S. (2014) The origins and
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6 Glyn, A. (2007) Capitalism unleashed: Finance, globalization, and
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7 For excellent historical reviews of neoliberalism, see: Harvey, D.
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8 Thatcher, M. (1986) Speech to Conservative Party conference,
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9 Foucault, M. (2002) The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège
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10 Thatcher, M. (1981) Economics are the method: the object
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13 Nelson, E. (2017) Reaffirming the influence of Milton Friedman
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24 Heilbron et al (2014) p. 17.
25 Lazonick, W. (2011) From innovation to financialization: how
shareholder value ideology is destroying the US economy, In G.
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27 Jeffries, T. (2015) What happened to Thatcher’s share ownership
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28 Lougee, B. and Wallace, J. (2008) The corporate social
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29 Ireland, P. and Pillay, R.G. (2010) Corporate social responsibility
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30 Martin, J., Petty, W. and Wallace, J. (2009) Shareholder value
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31 Brammer, S., Jackson, G. and Matten, D. (2012) Corporate social
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governance, Socio-Economic Review, 10(1): 3–28.
32 Porter, M.E. and Kramer, M.R. (2011) Creating shared value,
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33 Crane, A., Palazzo, G., Spence, L.J. and Matten, D. (2014)
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34 Anderson, S. and Cavanagh, J. (2000) Top 200: the rise of global
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35 Michayluk, D. (2008) The rise and fall of single-letter ticker
symbols, Business History, 50(3): 368–85.
36 Fleming, P. and Jones, M.T. (2013) The end of corporate social
responsibility: Crisis and critique, London: Sage.
37 Banerjee, S.B. (2008) Corporate social responsibility: the good,
the bad and the ugly, Critical Sociology, 34(1): 51–79.
38 Shamir, R. (2004) Between self-regulation and the Alien Tort
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39 World Economic Forum (2020) Our mission. www.weforum.
org/about/world-economic-forum
40 Wu, T. (2020) The revolution comes to Davos, The New York
Times, 23 January. www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/opinion/
sunday/davos-2020-capitalism-climate.html
41 Schwab, K. (2019) Davos manifesto 2020: the universal purpose
of a company in the fourth industrial revolution, World Economic
Forum, 2 December. www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/
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42 Cited in Foulkes, I. (2020) Welcome to a ‘woke’ WEF, SWI
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welcome-to-a--woke--wef/45507380
43 Cliffe, J. (2020) Solving global inequality through vacuous
buzzwords: welcome to the new ‘woke Davos’, New Statesman,
22 January. www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2020/01/
solving-global-inequality-through-vacuous-buzzwords-welcomenew-woke-davos

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1 Fink, L. (2019) Larry Fink’s 2019 letter to CEOs: profit &
purpose. www.blackrock.com/americas-offshore/2019-larryfink-ceo-letter
2 Fink, L. (2018) Larry Fink’s 2018 letter to CEOs: a sense of
purpose. www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/2018larry-fink-ceo-letter
3 Carney, J. (2018) BlackRock’s betrayal: #WokeWallStreet pushes
leftist agenda on corporate America, Breitbart News, 16 January.
www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/01/16/blackrocks-betrayalwoke-wall-street-pushes-leftist-agenda-on-corporate-america
4 Gasparino, C. and Moynihan, L. (2019) BlackRock’s Larry
Fink rattles employees amid political posturing, Fox Business,
25 January. www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/blackrockslarry-fink-rattles-employees-amid-political-posturing
5 Fink, L. (2020) Larry Fink’s 2020 letter to CEOs: a fundamental
reshaping of finance. www.blackrock.com/corporate/investorrelations/2020-larry-fink-ceo-letter
6 Helmore, E. (2020) Activists cheer BlackRock’s landmark climate
move but call for vigilance, The Guardian, 15 January. www.
theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/15/blackrock-climatechange-environment-divestment-coal

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7

8
9

10

11
12

13

14
15
16
17

18
19
20
21

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society. Here’s where to start, Forbes, 16 January. www.forbes.com/
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climate inaction, Financial Times, 14 July. www.ft.com/
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Gilbert, M. (2020) BlackRock’s climate activism has a passive
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The Spectator (2020) Treating oil companies as pariahs will kill off
any green revolution, 18 January. www.spectator.co.uk/2020/01/
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22 George, B. (2018) Why BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is
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23 Kramer, M.R. (2019) The backlash to Larry Fink’s letter shows
how far business has to go on social responsibility, Harvard Business
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24 Fink (2018).
25 Fink (2019).
26 Fink (2019).
27 Fink (2018).
28 Fink (2019).
29 Ferreras, I. (2017) Firms as political entities: Saving democracy through
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30 Business Roundtable (2019) About us. www.businessroundtable.
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31 Business Roundtable (2019) Our commitment. https://
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32 Wartzman, R. (2019) America’s top CEOs say they are no
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33 Continetti, M. (2019) Corporate America wants to be
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34 Murray, A. (2019) America’s CEOs seek a new purpose for the
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35 Akinci, M. (2018) Inequality and economic growth: trickle-down
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36 Konczal, M., Milani, K. and Evans, A. (2020) The empirical
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37 Alvaredo, F., Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E. and Zucman, G.
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38 Fink (2019).
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196

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Chapter 7
1 Bezos, J. [@jeffbezos] (2020) Post [Instagram profile], 6 March.
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2 Forbes (2019) Billionaires: the richest people in the world,
5 March. www.forbes.com/billionaires/#43c099a4251c
3 Brändlin, A-S. (2019) 2019: The year of climate consciousness,
MSN, 27 December. www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/
2019-the-year-of-climate-consciousness/ar-BBYodrV
4 BBC News (2020) Greta Thunberg: what is she and what does
she want?, 28 February. www.bbc.com/news/world-europe49918719
5 BBC News (2020).
6 Alter, C., Haynes, S. and Worland, J. (2020) Time 2019 Person
of the Year: Greta Thunberg, Time. https://time.com/person-ofthe-year-2019-greta-thunberg
7 Thunberg, G. (2019) Greta Thunberg UN Climate Change
Conference speech transcript, REV, 11 December. www.rev.com/
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8 Day, M. and Roston, E. (2019) Amazon’s emissions bigger than
some rivals, trail Walmart, Bloomberg News, 20 September.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-20/amazon-semissions-bigger-than-some-rivals-trail-walmart
9 Tarnoff, B. (2019) Hey, Jeff Bezos: I work for Amazon – and
I’m protesting against your firm’s climate inaction, The Guardian,
10 September. https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2019/
sep/10/jeff-bezos-amazon-climate-strike-aecj
10 Samuel, S. (2020) Donating $10 billion isn’t the best way for Jeff
Bezos to fight climate change, Vox, 19 February. www.vox.com/
platform/amp/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21142312/jeff-bezosclimate-change-ten-billion-philanthropy
11 Leskin, P. (2020) Here’s how much Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos,
the richest person in the world, has personally given to charity,
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12 Hamilton, I.A. (2019) Jeff Bezos shot straight to the top of a
ranking of America’s biggest donors – here’s how much tech
moguls gave away to good causes in 2018, Business Insider,
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13 Di Mento, M. (2019) Bezoses and Bloomberg top Chronicle list
of the 50 donors who gave the most to charity, The Chronicle of
Philanthropy, 12 February. www.philanthropy.com/specialreport/
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14 Wang, J. (2019) America’s top 50 givers; meet the philanthropists
who gave away the most money in 2018. Forbes, 20 November.
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15 Marx, P. (2020) Jeff Bezos’ climate change philanthropy has
quite a few (hidden) strings attached, NBC News, 28 February.
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16 Rhodes, C. and Bloom, P. (2018) The trouble with charitable
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17 Wealth-X (2019) UHNW giving trends: Wealth-X philanthropy
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18 Albrecht, L. (2020) These are the favorite charitable causes of the
world’s wealthiest families – and climate change is NOT one of
them, MarketWatch, 25 January. www.marketwatch.com/story/
the-1-gives-more-money-to-arts-culture-and-sports-than-tofighting-climate-change-survey-of-billionaires-finds-2020-01-23
19 Di Mento, M. (2020) The Philanthropy 50, The Chronicle of
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20 Carlson, T. (2019) ‘Woke’ billionaires love socialism because it
doesn’t cost them much, Fox News, 22 February. www.foxnews.
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21 Bendix, A. (2018) Jeff Bezos could be the first ‘woke’ billionaire
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22 Kapoor, S. (2020) What corporate leadership on fighting climate
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23 Burkee, A. (2020) Amazon wants Trump to testify about how
much he hates Jeff Bezos, Vanity Fair, 11 February. www.
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24 Stefansky, E. (2018) Always be escalating: Trump ratchets up
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25 Umoh, R. (2017) These 5 highly-successful tech CEOs are not
happy with Donald Trump’s travel ban, CNBC, 28 June. www.
cnbc.com/2017/06/28/these-5-tech-ceos-are-not-happy-withtrumps-travel-ban.html
26 Amazon staff (2017) Human Rights Campaign honors Jeff Bezos
with 2017 Equality Award, Amazon News, 2 November. www.
aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/human-rights-campaignhonors-jeff-bezos-with-2017-equality-award
27 Schleifer, T. (2019) Jeff Bezos is quietly letting his charities do
something radical – whatever they want, Vox, 12 August. www.
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28 Szmigiera, M. (2021) Number of billionaires worldwide 2019, by
gender, Statistica, 23 April. www.statista.com/statistics/778577/
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29 Bloom, P. and Rhodes, C. (2018) CEO society: The corporate
takeover of everyday life, London: Zed.
30 Perrett, T. (2020) ‘Woke’ capital: pinkwashing exploitation, The
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31 Neate, R. (2019) New study deems Amazon worst for ‘aggressive’
tax avoidance, The Guardian, 2 December. www.theguardian.
com/business/2019/dec/02/new-study-deems-amazon-worstfor-aggressive-tax-avoidance
32 Myers, K. (2020) Amazon paid a 1.2% tax rate on $13,285,000,000
in profit for 2019, Yahoo Finance, 6 February. https://finance.
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33 Neate (2019).
34 Hiscott, G. (2019) Amazon’s £90million ‘tax avoidance’ cash
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35 Fair Tax Mark (2020) Tax gap of Silicon Six over $100 billion so
far this decade, News, 2 December. https://fairtaxmark.net/taxgap-of-silicon-six-over-100-billion-so-far-this-decade
36 CNBC Documentaries (2014) Amazon rising, www.cnbc.com/
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37 Ghosh, S. (2018) Undercover author finds Amazon warehouse
workers in UK ‘peed in bottles’ over fears of being punished for
taking a break, Business Insider, 16 April. www.businessinsider.
com/amazon-warehouse-workers-have-to-pee-into-bottles2018-4?r=US&IR=T
38 Anon (2019) German Amazon workers strike on Black Friday,
DW News, 29 November. www.dw.com/en/german-amazonworkers-strike-on-black-friday/a-51473877
39 Sainato, M. (2020) ‘I’m not a robot’: Amazon workers condemn
unsafe, grueling conditions at warehouse, The Guardian,
5 February. www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/
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40 Swagazon Tees website. https://swagazontees.com
41 www.amazon.com/Being-Stower-Like-Riding-T-Shirt/dp/
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42 Grush, L. (2020) International coalition of activists launches
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43 https://makeamazonpay.com
44 Jackson, P. (2020) Jeff Bezos to the planet’s rescue, Fair Observer,
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jeff-bezos-10-billion-climate-change-grants-philanthropynews-15541
45 Giridharadas, A. (2018a) Winner takes all: The elite charade of
changing the world, London: Penguin.
46 Giridharadas, A. (2018b) Beware rich people who say they want
to change the world, The New York Times, 24 August. www.
nytimes.com/2018/08/24/opinion/sunday/wealth-philanthropyfake-change.html
47 Giridharadas (2018a) p. 6.
48 Giridharadas (2018a) p. 10.
49 Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (2019) Open letter to Jeff
Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors, Medium, 11 April.
https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/
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50 Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (2020) Statement on
Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund, Medium, 18 February. https://medium.
com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/amazon-employees-forclimate-justice-statement-on-jeff-bezos-earth-fund-bf39f6906589
51 Foer, F. (2020) It’s Jeff Bezos’s planet now, The Atlantic,
20 February. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/bezosclimate-oligarchy/606847
52 Levine, M. (2020) Movement capture: looking Bezos’s gift
horse in the mouth, Nonprofit Quarterly, 5 March. https://
nonprofitquarterly.org/movement-capture-looking-bezoss-gifthorse-in-the-mouth
53 Johnstone, C. (2018) Six things we can learn about US plutocracy
by looking at Jeff Bezos, Medium, 17 March. https://medium.
com/@caityjohnstone/six-things-we-can-learn-about-usplutocracy-by-looking-at-jeff-bezos-532ca4482ae2

Chapter 8
1 Böhm, S., Skoglund, A. and Eatherley, D. (2018) What’s behind
the current wave of ‘corporate activism’?, The Conversation,
14 September. https://theconversation.com/whats-behind-thecurrent-wave-of-corporate-activism-102695
2 MacLellan, L. (2019) Apple’s Tim Cook has pushed CEO
activism into uncharted territory, Quartz, 3 October. https://
qz.com/work/1721279/on-daca-apples-tim-cook-pushes-ceoactivism-into-new-territory
3 Reuters (2017) Three CEOs resign from Trump council over
Charlottesville, The Irish Times, 15 August. www.irishtimes.com/
business/economy/three-ceos-resign-from-trump-council-overcharlottesville-1.3187216
4 M.T. Barra quoted in Lewis (2017) These 18 CEOs had strong
words for President Trump’s Charlottesville response, Fortune,
18 August. https://fortune.com/2017/08/17/ceos-trumpcharlottesville-criticized
5 Gelles, D. (2017) The moral voice of corporate America, The New
York Times, 19 August. www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/
moral-voice-ceos.html
6 Dimon, J. (2018) Chairman & CEO letter to shareholders,
JPMorgan Chase & Co. Annual report 2018. https://reports.jpmorgan
chase.com/investor-relations/2018/ar-ceo-letters.htm?a=1

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18

Quoted in Walker, S. (2018) You’re a CEO – stop talking
like a political activist, The Wall Street Journal, 27 July. www.
wsj.com/articles/youre-a-ceostop-talking-like-a-politicalactivist-1532683844
O’Toole, J. (2019) The enlightened capitalists: Cautionary tales of
business pioneers who tried to do well by doing good, New York:
Harper.
Kaps, B. (2019) Four ways CEO activism can strengthen your
brand, Rent a PR, 15 May. www.rentapr.ch/en/2019/05/15/
four-ways-ceo-activism-can-strengthen-your-brand
Chatterji, A.K. and Toffel, M.W. (2018) The new CEO activists.
The Harvard Business Review, January–February. https://hbr.
org/2018/01/the-new-ceo-activists
Grillo, F. and Blessington, M. (2018) Does CEO activism create
a more human brand?, The Marketing Journal, 31 May. www.
marketingjournal.org/does-ceo-activism-create-a-more-humanbrand-frank-grillo-and-mark-blessington
Maks-Solomon, C. (2020) Corporate activism is more than
a marketing gimmick, The Conversation, 8 July. https://
theconversation.com/corporate-activism-is-more-than-amarketing-gimmick-141570
Böhm et al (2018).
Mark Benioff in Steinmetz, K. (2016) Salesforce CEO Marc
Benioff: ‘Anti-LGBT’ bills are ‘anti-business’, Time, 31 March.
https://time.com/4276603/marc-benioff-salesforce-lgbt-rfra
Gooch, A. (2019) Corporate activism in an age of radical uncertainty,
Communication Director, 5 March. www.communicationdirector.com/issues/game-changer/corporate-activism-ageradical-uncertainty/#.XpoZ3pozY2w
Ball, C.A. (2019) The queering of corporate America: How big business
went from LGBTQ adversary to ally, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Karp, P. (2018) Marriage equality campaign seeks abolition of
religious rights to discriminate, The Guardian, 4 February. www.
theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/14/marriage-equalitycampaign-seeks-abolition-of-religious-rights-to-discriminate
AAP (2018) Religious schools want right to hire, fire, SBS
News,14 February. www.sbs.com.au/news/religious-schoolswant-right-to-hire-fire

202

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19 Hunter, F. (2017) Marriage plebiscite: Tony Abbott urges a ‘no’
vote to reject political correctness and protect religious freedom,
The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August. www.smh.com.au/politics/
federal/marriage-plebiscite-tony-abbott-urges-a-no-vote-toreject-political-correctness-and-protect-religious-freedom20170809-gxs6m6.html
20 Bickers, C. (2017) PM won’t ban inaccurate posters, The Courier
Mail, 22 August. www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/
sunshine-coast/pm-wont-ban-inaccurate-posters/news-story/
f969ed968cb09d308a0fd1f38cafbf27
21 Elphick, L. (2018) The ‘gay wedding cake’ dilemma: when
religious freedom and LGBTI rights intersect, The Conversation,
27 March. https://theconversation.com/the-gay-weddingcake-dilemma-when-religious-freedom-and-lgbti-rightsintersect-93070
22 Australian Bureau of Statistics (2017) 1800.0 – Australian Marriage
Law Postal Survey, 2017, 15 November. www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/
abs@.nsf/mf/1800.0
23 Australian Government (2004) Marriage Amendment Act 2004,
Canberra: Federal Register of Legislation.
24 Australian Marriage Equality (2020) Join 851 corporations that
support marriage equality. www.australianmarriageequality.org/
open-letter-of-support
25 Karp, P. (2017) Marriage equality: lots of support but little funding
from corporate Australia, The Guardian, 2 September. www.
theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/02/marriage-equalitylots-of-support-but-little-funding-from-corporate-australia
26 The discussion of Alan Joyce and Qantas draws on my previously
published articles: Rhodes, C. (2017) The market for virtue: why
companies like Qantas are campaigning for marriage equality’, The
Conversation, 28 August. https://theconversation.com/the-marketfor-virtue-why-companies-like-qantas-are-campaigning-formarriage-equality-82905; Rhodes, C. (2019) Swollen executive
pay packets reveal the limits of corporate activism. The Conversation,
25 September. https://theconversation.com/swollen-executivepay-packets-reveal-the-limits-of-corporate-activism-123988
27 Quoted in Belot, H. (2017) Qantas CEO Alan Joyce to campaign
for Yes vote on same-sex marriage, ABC News, 21 August. www.
abc.net.au/news/2017-08-21/same-sex-marriage-alan-joyce-yescampaign-support/8826682

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28 Financial Times (2017) The OUTstanding lists: LGBT leaders and
allies today, 3 May. www.ft.com/content/b6a08ba0-b40c-11e7aa26-bb002965bce8
29 Quoted in Belot, H. (2017) Qantas to continue advocating
for same-sex marriage despite criticism from Peter Dutton,
ABC News, 18 March. www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-18/
qantas-continue-same-sex-marriage-support-peter-duttoncriticism/8366306
30 Johnson, C. (2017) Turnbull is on the winning side on marriage
equality, but his troubles are far from over, The Conversation,
15 November. https://theconversation.com/turnbull-is-on-thewinning-side-on-marriage-equality-but-his-troubles-are-farfrom-over-86928
31 Liddy, M., Hoad, N. and Spraggon, B. (2017) How Australians
think about same-sex marriage, mapped, ABC News,
14 September. www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-13/same-sexmarriage-support-map-vote-compass/8788978?nw=0
32 Joyce, A. (2017) Alan Joyce Opinion Piece – From economics to
equality, why companies speak up on the big issues, Qantas News
Room, 21 March. www.qantasnewsroom.com.au/speeches/
alan-joyce-opinion-piece-from-economics-to-equality-whycompanies-speak-up-on-the-big-issues
33 Palazzon, G. and Basu, K. (2007) The ethical backlash of
corporate branding, Journal of Business Ethics, 73: 336–46.
34 Vogel, D. (2006) The market for virtue: The potential and limits
of corporate social responsibility, Washington DC: Brookings
Institution Press.
35 Joyce (2017).
36 Deloitte (2017) Missing out: The business case for customer diversity,
Sydney: Deloitte Australia.
37 Hafenbrädl, S. and Waeger, D. (2017). Ideology and the microfoundations of CSR: Why executives believe in the business case
for CSR and how this affects their CSR engagements. Academy
of Management Journal, 60(4): 1582–606.
38 Rhodes, C. and Pullen, A. (2018). Critical business ethics: from
corporate self-interest to the glorification of the sovereign pater,
International Journal of Management Reviews, 20(2): 483–99.
39 Cockburn, P. (2017) Same-sex marriage: Qantas CEO Alan
Joyce urges ‘good businesses’ to support ‘yes’ vote, ABC News,
25 August. www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-25/alan-joyce-callsfor-businesses-to-support-same-sex-marriage/8842332

204

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40 Pinto, P.R. (2019) Inequality by numbers: the making of a global
political issue?, In Histories of Global Inequality, pp. 107–28, Cham:
Palgrave Macmillan.
41 Yeates, C. (2019) Qantas chief Alan Joyce tops CEO pay table,
The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 September. www.smh.com.au/
business/companies/qantas-chief-alan-joyce-tops-ceo-pay-table20190916-p52rta.html
42 Burgess, K. (2019) Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce says airport
fees stop Jetstar operating in Canberra, The Canberra Times,
18 September. www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6392297/whyjetstar-wont-fly-to-canberra
43 Coorey, P. (2019) Qantas needs to be ‘out there’ on social issues,
Australian Financial Review, 18 September. www.afr.com/politics/
federal/qantas-needs-to-be-out-there-on-social-issues-20190918p52sor

Chapter 9
1 Quoted in Bieler, D. and Bonesteel, M. (2018) ‘What was
Nike thinking?’ President Trump reacts to Nike ad featuring
Colin Kaepernick, The Washington Post, 7 September. www.
chicagotr ibune.com/sports/ct-spt-donald-trump-colinkaepernick-nike-ad-20180907-story.html
2 Heller, S. (2018) ‘Here’s the backstory of everyone who appeared
in the new Nike ad featuring Colin Kaepernick, Business Insider,
16 September. www.businessinsider.com/all-the-athletesin-the-nike-dream-crazy-ad-with-colin-kaepernick-20189?r=AU&IR=T
3 Martin, L.L. (2018) Black community uplift and the myth of the
American dream, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
4 The Editors of GQ (2017) Colin Kaepernick is GQ’s 2017
Citizen of the Year, GQ Magazine, 13 November. www.gq.com/
story/colin-kaepernick-cover-men-of-the-year
5 Quoted in Wells, A. (2016) Colin Kaepernick sits during national
anthem before Packers vs. 49ers, Bleacher Report, 2 September.
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2660085-colin-kaepernicksits-during-national-anthem-before-packers-vs-49ers
6 Carissimo, J. (2016) People are burning Colin Kaepernick
jerseys over his refusal to stand during the national anthem, The
Independent, 28 August. www.independent.co.uk/news/people/
people-are-burning-colin-kaepernick-jerseys-over-his-refusal-tostand-during-the-national-anthem-a7214281.html

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8

9
10

11
12
13
14
15
16

17
18

19

Kimberley, M. (2017) Freedom rider: Kaepernick and true protest,
Black Agenda Report, 24 August. www.blackagendareport.com/
freedom-rider-kaepernick-and-true-protest
Quoted in Reid, J. (2017) How Colin Kaepernick became a
cause for activists, civil rights groups and others, The Undefeated,
22 August. https://theundefeated.com/features/how-colinkaepernick-became-a-cause-for-activists-civil-rights-groups
Towler, C.C., Crawford, N.N. and Bennet, R.A. (2020) Shut up
and play: black athletes, protest politics, and black political action,
Perspectives on Politics, 18(1): 111–27.
Quoted in Robinson, C. (2020) In light of George Floyd’s
death, ex-NFL exec admits what we knew all along: protests
ended Colin Kaepernick’s career, Yahoo Sports, 31 May. https://
au.sports.yahoo.com/in-light-of-george-floyds-death-ex-nflexec-admits-what-we-knew-all-along-protests-ended-colinkaepernicks-career-175616379.html
Chomsky, N. (2017) Requiem for the American dream: The 10 principles
of concentration of wealth & power, New York: Seven Stories Press, p. 51.
See Piketty, T. (2020) Capital and ideology, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Quoted in Jenkins, A. (2017) Read President Trump’s NFL
speech on national anthem protests, Time, 23 September. https://
time.com/4954684/donald-trump-nfl-speech-anthem-protests
Wallis, J. (2007) America’s original sin: the legacy of white racism,
Cross Currents, 57(2): 197–202.
Gordon-Reed, A. (2018) America’s original sin: slavery and the
legacy of white supremacy, Foreign Affairs, 97: 2–5.
Boren, C. (2020) A timeline of Colin Kaepernick’s protests
against police brutality, The Washington Post, 2 June. www.
washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/06/01/colin-kaepernickkneeling-history
Russo, S. (2020) The politics of sport, Political Analysis, 21: 1–17.
Badenhausen, K. (2020) Michael Jordan has made over $1 billion
from Nike – the biggest endorsement bargain in sports, Forbes,
3 May. www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2020/05/03/
michael-jordans-1-billion-nike-endorsement-is-the-biggestbargain-in-sports/#20bdfbd46136
Morgan Hertzman quoted in Nash, B. (2020) A new documentary
takes a look into the darker side of the Air Jordan brand, GQ,
21 May. www.gq.com.au/style/news/a-new-documentary-takesa-look-into-the-darker-side-of-the-air-jordan-brand/news-story
/3c3ae4cc04460489a653f6ee97347c40
206

Notes and References

20 Bontemps, T. (2020) Michael Jordan stands firm on ‘Republicans
buy sneakers, too’ quote, says it was made in jest, ESPN, 4 May.
www.espn.com.au/nba/story/_/id/29130478/michael-jordanstands-firm-republicans-buy-sneakers-too-quote-says-was-madejest
21 Tyler, J. (2018) Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ad isn’t the first time
the brand’s commercials have made a social statement. See some
of the most memorable campaigns in its history, Business Insider,
8 September. www.businessinsider.com.au/nike-ads-make-socialstatements-2018-9?r=US&IR=T
22 New Idea (2019) Nike sweatshops: inside the scandal, New Idea,
18 November. www.newidea.com.au/nike-sweatshops-the-truthabout-the-nike-factory-scandal
23 Quoted in Wazir, B. (2001) Nike accused of tolerating sweatshops,
The Guardian, 20 May. www.theguardian.com/world/2001/
may/20/burhanwazir.theobserver
24 Bain, M. (2017) Nike is facing a new wave of anti-sweatshop
protests, Quartz, 1 August. https://qz.com/1042298/nike-isfacing-a-new-wave-of-anti-sweatshop-protests
25 Burns, W. (2018) With new Kaepernick ad, what does Nike
believe in?, Forbes, 4 September. www.forbes.com/sites/
willburns/2018/09/04/with-new-kaepernick-ad-what-doesnike-believe-in/#39a8b89e1081
26 Castle, S. and Bebek, G. (2017) Any publicity is good publicity:
Nike’s controversial campaigns and management of celebrities,
in S. Chadwick, D. Arthur, and J. Birch (eds) International cases
in the business of sport, 2nd edn, pp. 87–96, London: Routledge.
27 Carras, C. and Nordyke, K. (2019) Creative Arts Emmys:
complete winners list, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 October. www.
hollywoodreporter.com/lists/creative-arts-emmys-2019-fullwinners-list-updating-live-1236953/item/outstanding-animatedprogram-1236957
28 Quoted in Gibson, K. (2018) Colin Kaepernick is Nike’s
$6 billion man, CBS News, 21 September. www.cbsnews.com/
news/colin-kaepernick-nike-6-billion-man
29 Le, M. (2020) 2019’s Air Jordan 11 ‘Bred’ was Nike’s best-selling
sneaker in history, Sneaker News, 25 March. https://sneakernews.
com/2020/03/25/top-selling-nike-sneaker-in-history-jordan-11bred

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30 Mason, M. (2020) How Nike’s deal with Michael Jordan gave rise
to sneaker culture, Australian Financial Review, 19 May. www.afr.
com/life-and-luxury/fashion-and-style/how-nike-s-deal-withmichael-jordan-gave-rise-to-sneaker-culture-20200501-p54p1j
31 Reid, J.A. (2017) How Colin Kaepernick became a cause
for activists, civil rights groups and others, The Undefeated,
22 August. https://theundefeated.com/features/how-colinkaepernick-became-a-cause-for-activists-civil-rights-groups
32 Quoted in Bailey, P.M. (2018) Kentucky lawyer says Colin
Kaepernick is ‘by definition racist’, Courier Journal, 5 September.
www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/2018/09/05/
kentucky-lawyer-alex-white-says-colin-kaepernick-realracist/1200310002
33 Peterson, J. (2009) A ‘race’ for equality: print media coverage of
the 1968 Olympic protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos,
American Journalism, 26(2): 99–121.
34 Saeed, A. (2002) What’s in a name? Muhammad Ali and the
politics of cultural identity, Sport in Society, 5(3): 52–72.
35 Quoted in BoxRec (2017) Tommy Burns vs. Jack Johnson.
https://boxrec.com/media/index.php/Tommy_Burns_vs._Jack_
Johnson
36 Quoted in Nilsson, J. (2020) A black champion’s biggest fight,
The Saturday Evening Post, 2 July. www.saturdayeveningpost.
com/2020/07/a-black-champions-biggest-fight
37 Cited in Putnam, P. (2005) Johnson–Jeffries (Part 2): Jeff answers
call of the wild, The Sweet Science, 16 November. https://tss.ib.tv/
boxing/boxing-articles-and-news-2005-videos-results-rankingsand-history/2864-johnsonjeffries-part-2-jeff-answers-call-of-thewild
38 Quoted in Nilsson (2020).
39 Lamb, C. (2016) Introduction, in C. Lamb (ed.) From Jack Johnson
to Lebron James: Sports, media and the color line, pp. 1–18. Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press.
40 Barra, A. (2018) If Trump pardons Jack Johnson it won’t be for
his contribution to black America, The Guardian, 15 May. www.
theguardian.com/sport/2018/may/15/jack-johnson-presidentialpardon-donald-trump-boxing-mann-act
41 Williams, J.C. (2016) The oppressive seeds of the Colin
Kaepernick backlash, The Conversation, 8 October. https://
theconversation.com/the-oppressive-seeds-of-the-colinkaepernick-backlash-66358

208

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42 Chicago Tribune Staff (2017) When sports and politics collide,
The Chicago Tribune. www.chicagotribune.com/sports/ct-whensports-and-politics-collide-20170928-photogallery.html
43 Dumenco, S. (2018) Risky business: in defence of fear itself,
Advertising Age, 89(21): 30.
44 Matlon, J. (2019) Black masculinity under racial capitalism, Black
Agenda Report, 24 July. www.blackagendareport.com/blackmasculinity-under-racial-capitalism

Chapter 10
1 Treisma, R. (2020) The NFL will play ‘Lift every voice and sing’ before
each season-opener game, NPR, 2 July. www.npr.org/sections/
live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/07/02/886936096/
the-nfl-will-play-lift-every-voice-and-sing-before-eachseason-opener-game
2 NAACP (2020) NAACP History: ‘Lift every voice and sing’.
www.naacp.org/naacp-history-lift-evry-voice-and-sing
3 Peretti, B.W. (2009) Lift every voice: The history of African American
music, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
4 Karimi, F. and Willingham, A.J. (2020) What makes ‘Lift every
voice and sing’ so iconic, CNN, 10 September. https://edition.
cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/us/lift-every-voice-and-sing-trnd/
index.html
5 Redmond, S.L. (2014) Anthem: Social movements and the sound of
solidarity in the African diaspora, New York: New York University
Press, p. 79.
6 Redmond, S.L., cited in Lindsay-Haberman, C. (2018) Till
victory is won: the staying power of ‘Lift every voice and sing’,
NPR Music, 16 August. www.npr.org/2018/08/16/638324920/
american-anthem-lift-every-voice-and-sing-black-nationalanthem
7 Lyrics published in NAACP (2020).
8 Byrd, R.P. (2010) Song reflects racial pride, never intended
as anthem, CNN, 30 July. https://edition.cnn.com/2010/
OPINION/07/27/byrd.james.johnson/index.html
9 Ross, W.T. (2009) The Negro national anthem controversy, Texas
Wesleyan Law Review, 16(4): 561–76.
10 Transcribed in Cadeaux, E. (2020) Roger Goodell releases
statement condemning racism, admits NFL was wrong not
listening to players, NBC Sports, 5 June. www.nbcsports.
com/washington/redskins/roger-goodell-releases-statementcondemning-racism-admits-nfl-was-wrong-not-listening
209

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11 BBC (2020) George Floyd: what happened in the final moments
of his life, BBC News, 16 July. www.bbc.com/news/world-uscanada-52861726
12 Groppe, M. and Phillips, K. (2020) From coastal cities to rural
towns, breadth of George Floyd protests – mostly peaceful –
captured by data, USA Today, 20 June. www.usatoday.com/story/
news/politics/2020/06/10/george-floyd-black-lives-matterpolice-protests-widespread-peaceful/5325737002
13 Smith, D. (2019) A court has been told that the situation was
‘frantic’ as questions focus on resuscitation efforts, NITV, 5 March.
www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2019/03/05/daviddungay-inquest-doctor-breaks-down-while-giving-evidence
14 Daley, D. (2020) A wake up call to end Australia’s ongoing
racism, Independent Australia, 3 July. https://independentaustralia.
net/australia/australia-display/a-wake-up-call-to-end-australiasongoing-racism,14062
15 Buchanan, L., Bui, Q. and Patel, J.K. (2020) Black Lives Matter
may be the largest movement in US history, The New York Times,
3 July. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/georgefloyd-protests-crowd-size.html
16 Quoted in Zisin, D. (2020) Michael Bennett thinks the NFL is
starting to wake up, The Nation, 20 July. www.thenation.com/
article/society/michael-bennett-nfl-racism
17 Quoted in Intermite, S. (2019) Brand activism: an interview
with Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar, The Marketing Journal,
18 December. www.marketingjournal.org/brand-activism-aninterview-with-philip-kotler-and-christian-sarkar
18 In Vatour, M. (2020) Black Lives Matter: NFL pledges
$250 million to ‘combat systemic racism’, MSN Sports, 11 June.
www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nfl/black-lives-matter-nfl-pledgesdollar250-million-to-combat-systemic-racism/ar-BB15m4J1
19 Boren, C. (2020) NFL end zones will bear ‘end racism’ and ‘it
takes all of us’ messages in home openers, The Washington Post,
29 July. www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/07/28/nflend-zones-will-bear-end-racism-it-takes-all-us-messages-homeopeners
20 Quoted in Bunn, C. (2020) Black fans call NFL’s plan to play
‘Lift every voice and sing’ a ‘joke’, ‘placating’, ‘pandering’, NBC
News, 10 July. www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-fans-callnfl-s-plan-play-lift-every-voice-n1233164
21 Quoted in Bunn (2020).

210

Notes and References

22 Bleier, E. (2020) NFL putting money where its mouth is after
Black Lives Matter pledge, Inside Hook, 12 June. www.insidehook.
com/daily_brief/sports/nfl-putting-money-where-its-mouth-is
23 Christie, D. (2020) McDonald’s names victims of police
brutality, racist violence in new ad, Marketing Dive, 4 June. www.
marketingdive.com/news/mcdonalds-names-victims-of-policebrutality-racist-violence-in-new-ad/579184
24 In Mirzaei, A. (2020) Big brands take a stand and support Black
Lives Matter, AdNews, 11 June. www.adnews.com.au/news/bigbrands-take-a-stand-and-support-black-lives-matter
25 In Hsu, T. (2020) Corporate voices get behind Black Lives
Matter cause, The New York Times, 10 June. www.nytimes.
com/2020/05/31/business/media/companies-marketing-blacklives-matter-george-floyd.html
26 Ace Metrix (2020) Consumers put brands that stand with BLM
under the microscope, Ace Metrix Insights [blog], 22 June. www.
acemetrix.com/insights/blog/black-lives-matter-ads-2020
27 Quoted in Stein, C. (2020) McDonald’s and African Americans:
it’s complicated, professor says, Yahoo! News, 26 July. https://
au.news.yahoo.com/mcdonalds-african-americans-complicatedprofessor-says-034138318--spt.html
28 Chatelain, M. (2020) Franchise: The golden arches in black America,
New York: Liveright.
29 Blakemore, E. (2020) Why people rioted after Martin Luther
King, Jr’s assassination, History.com, 15 January. www.history.
com/news/mlk-assassination-riots-occupation
30 Chatelain (2020) p. 126.
31 Chatelain (2020) p. 18.
32 Chatelain (2020) p. 4.
33 Kelley, R.D.G. (2017) What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial
capitalism?, Boston Review, 12 January. http://bostonreview.net/
race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racialcapitalism
34 Robinson, C.J. (1983) Black Marxism: The making of the black radical
tradition, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
35 Robinson (1983) p. 3.
36 In MB4L (2016) A vision for black lives: policy demands for
black power, freedom and justice. https://cjc.net/wp-content/
uploads/2017/04/A-Vision-For-Black-Lives-Policy-DemandsFor-Black-Power-Freedom-and-Justice.pdf

211

WOKE CAPITALISM

37 Issar, S. (2020) Listening to Black Lives Matter: racial capitalism
and the critique of neoliberalism, Contemporary Political Theory,
Online ahead of print: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-02000399-0, p. 2.
38 Issar (2020) p. 10.
39 Issar (2020) p. 11.
40 Ransby, B. (2018) Making all Black Lives Matter: Reimagining
freedom in the twenty-first century, Oakland, CA: University of
California Press.
41 Ransby (2018) p. 236.
42 Hogan, T. (2020) Let’s not turn Black Lives Matter into Black
Lives Marketing, Black Enterprise, 29 June. www.blackenterprise.
com/lets-not-turn-black-lives-matter-into-black-lives-marketing
43 Lerman, R. (2020) From wake word to woke word: Siri and
Alexa tell you Black Lives Matter, but tech still has a diversity
problem, The Washington Post, 11 June. www.washingtonpost.
com/technology/2020/06/10/big-tech-black-lives-matter

Chapter 11
1 The discussion of Gillette’s here is adapted from: Rhodes, C.
(2019) ‘Gillette’s corporate calculation shows just how far the
#metoo movement has come’, The Conversation, 17 January.
https://theconversation.com/gillettes-corporate-calculationshows-just-how-far-the-metoo-movement-has-come-109936
2 For a discussion of the politics of addressing toxic masculinity
see: Kimmel, M. and Wade, L. (2018) Ask a feminist: Michael
Kimmel and Lisa Wade discuss toxic masculinity. Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society, 44(1): 233–54; Sculos, B.W. (2017)
Who’s afraid of ‘toxic masculinity’?, Class, Race and Corporate
Power, 5(3): 1–5.
3 Gillette (2020) Our Story. https://gillette.com/en-us/about/
our-story
4 Rossen, J. (2018) Oral History: The strangest super bowl halftime
show ever, Mental Floss, 4 February. www.mentalfloss.com/
article/74902/oral-history-strangest-super-bowl-halftime-showever
5 See the ad at Gillette (1989) 1989 Gillette – The Best a Man
Can Get, SuperBowlAds.com. https://superbowl-ads.com/1989gillette-the-best-a-man-can-get
6 Khamis, S. (2020) Branding diversity: New advertising and cultural
strategies, Abingdon: Routledge.

212

Notes and References

7

8
9
10

11
12
13

14
15
16

17
18

Deighton, K. (2018) Gillette upgrades its ‘Best a man can get’
slogan for the expressive modern male, The Drum, 17 August.
www.thedrum.com/news/2018/08/17/gillette-upgrades-itsbest-man-can-get-slogan-the-expressive-modern-male
The full advertisement is on Gillette’s YouTube channel and can
be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0
Wilson-Beevers, H. (2019) As the mum of a young son I salute
the new Gillette advert, here’s why …, Glamour, 15 January. www.
glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/gillette-campaign
J. Halberstam quoted in Fairyington, S. (2019) Gillette’s new
campaign takes on toxic masculinity in a way you’ve never seen
before, Thrive Global, 14 January. https://thriveglobal.com/
stories/gillette-ad-campaign-best-a-man-can-get-we-believetoxic-masculinity-progress
Dreyfus, E. (2019) Gillette’s ad proves the definition of a good
man has changed, Wired, 16 January. www.wired.com/story/
gillette-we-believe-ad-men-backlash
APA (2018) APA guidelines for psychological practice with men and
boys, Washington: American Psychological Association.
Morgan, P. (2019) I’m so sick of this war on masculinity and I’m
not alone – with their pathetic man-hating ad, Gillette have just
cut their own throat, The Daily Mail, 16 January. www.dailymail.
co.uk/news/article-6594295/PIERS-MORGAN-Im-sick-warmasculinity-Gillette-just-cut-throat.html
Duke, S. (2019) Gillette insults customer base, telling men to
shave their ‘toxic masculinity’, The New American, 14 January.
Taylor, C. (2019) Why Gillette’s new ad campaign is toxic, Forbes,
15 January. www.forbes.com/sites/charlesrtaylor/2019/01/15/
why-gillettes-new-ad-campaign-is-toxic/#3e240bb45bc9
J. Woods quoted in Gilchrist, J.E. (2019) Gillette ad infuriates
bigots including James Woods and Piers Morgan, Advocate,
15 January. www.advocate.com/media/2019/1/15/bigots-jameswoods-piers-morgan-are-furious-gillette
Slater, T. (2019) Gillette and the rise of woke capitalism, The
Spectator, 19 January. www.spectator.co.uk/article/gillette-andthe-rise-of-woke-capitalism
Gregg, S. (2019) How woke capitalism corrupts business, Public
Discourse, 2 October. www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/
10/56675

213

WOKE CAPITALISM

19 Kantor, J. and Twohey, M. (2017) Harvey Weinstein paid off
sexual harassment accusers for decades, The New York Times,
5 October. https://web.archive.org/web/20171014011811/www.
nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassmentallegations.html
20 Contactmusic.com (2020) Harvey Weinstein: biography. www.
contactmusic.com/harvey-weinstein
21 Farrow, R. (2018) From aggressive overtures to sexual assault:
Harvey Weinstein’s accusers tell their stories, The New Yorker,
10 October. www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/fromaggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accuserstell-their-stories
22 Mangan, D. (2020) Harvey Weinstein sentenced to 23 years
in prison for rape and sex assault in case that sparked ‘MeToo’
movement, CNBC, 11 March. www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/
harvey-weinstein-sentenced-in-prison-for-sex-assault.html
23 Pflum, M. (2018) A year ago, Alyssa Milano started a conversation
about #MeToo. These women replied, ABC News, 16 October.
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/year-ago-alyssa-milanostarted-conversation-about-metoo-these-women-n920246
24 Anon (2020) #MeToo: A timeline of events, The Chicago Tribune,
10 August. www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-me-tootimeline-20171208-htmlstory.html
25 Burke, T. (2017) #MeToo: Ten years before it was a hashtag, it
began as one woman’s search for safety, ABC News, 19 October.
www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-19/me-too-a-beginning-not-anend-of-fight-against-sexual-abuse/9065814
26 Wakefield, J. (2018) MeToo founder Tarana Burke: Campaign
now ‘unrecognisable’, BBC News, 29 November. www.bbc.com/
news/world-46393369
27 Zacharek, S., Dockterman, E. and Edwards, H.S. (2017) Time
Person of the Year 2018: the silence breakers, Time, 18 December.
https://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2017-silence-breakers
28 Chatterji, A.K. and Toffel, M.W. (2019) The new CEO activists,
in HBR’s 10 Must Reads, Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
29 Chatterji, A.K. and Toffel, M.W. (2016) Assessing the impact
of CEO activism. Harvard Business School Technology and
Operations Management Unit Working Paper No. 16-100,
Duke I&E Research Paper No. 16-11, https://ssrn.com/
abstract=2742209 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2742209

214

Notes and References

30 Peirso-Hagger, E. (2019) M is for #MeToo: how a Hollywood
moment became a global movement, New Statesman, 17 December.
www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2019/12/m-metoohow-hollywood-moment-became-global-movement
31 Venetis, cited in Reilly, K. (2019) How the #MeToo movement
helped make new charges against Jeffrey Epstein possible, Time,
9 July. https://time.com/5621958/jeffrey-epstein-charges-metoo-movement
32 T. Burke, cited in Criss, D. (2018) The media’s version of #MeToo
is unrecognizable to the movement’s founder, Tarana Burke,
CNN, 30 November. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/30/us/
tarana-burke-ted-talk-trnd/index.html
33 Rucha Naidu, S.J. (2019) P&G posts strong sales, takes $8 billion
Gillette writedown, Reuters, 30 July. www.reuters.com/article/
us-proctergamble-results/pg-posts-strong-sales-takes-8-billiongillette-writedown-idUSKCN1UP1AD
34 Haverluck, M.F. (2019) Gillette cut by $8B loss after ‘toxic
masculinity’ ad, OneNewsNow, 2 August. https://onenewsnow.
com/business/2019/08/02/gillette-cut-by-8b-loss-after-toxicmasculinity-ad
35 Morse, B. (2019) Gillette’s ‘woke’ ad that insulted men cost
P&G billions, RedState, 31 July. www.redstate.com/brandon_
morse/2019/07/31/gillettes-woke-ad-insulted-men-cost-pgbillions
36 Kay, B. (2019) After going woke and losing $8 billion, Gillette
embraces masculinity again, The Post Millennial, 22 August.
https://thepostmillennial.com/after-losing-8-billion-gilletteembraces-masculinity-again
37 Morse, B. (2019) Gillette CEO says the billions of dollars lost
over the ‘toxic masculinity’ ad was worth it, RedState, 2 August.
www.redstate.com/brandon_morse/2019/08/02/gillette-ceosays-billions-dollars-lost-toxic-masculinity-ad-worth
38 G. Coombe, in Gage, J. (2019) Gillette CEO: losing customers
over #MeToo campaign is ‘price worth paying’, Washington
Examiner, 1 August. www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/
gillette-ceo-losing-customers-over-metoo-campaign-is-priceworth-paying
39 G. Coombe, in Fleming, M. (2019) Gillette boss: alienating some
consumers with #MeToo campaign was a price worth paying,
Marketing Week, 29 July. www.marketingweek.com/gillettemetoo-campaign-fallout

215

WOKE CAPITALISM

40 Turtis, M. and Lufkin, B. (2019) How socially-charged adverts
could become the norm, BBC Worklife, 19 January. www.bbc.
com/worklife/article/20190118-how-socially-charged-advertscould-become-the-norm
41 Marketing Week Reporters (2019) Gillette, McDonald’s, CocaCola: 5 things that mattered this week and why, Marketing Week,
2 August. www.marketingweek.com/gillette-mcdonalds-cocacola-5-things-that-mattered-this-week-and-why
42 Holt, D.B. (2006) Jack Daniel’s America: iconic brands as
ideological parasites and proselytizers, Journal of Consumer Culture,
6(3): 355–77.
43 Leshem, D. (2016) The distinction between the economy
and politics in Aristotle’s thought and the rise of the social,
Constellations, 23(1): 122–32.
44 Varoufakis, Y. (2016) Is capitalism compatible with
democracy?, TED Radio Hour, 4 November. www.npr.org/
transcripts/500126088
45 Lyons, M. (2001) Third sector: The contribution of non-profit and
cooperative enterprise in Australia, London: Routledge.
46 Milanovic, B. (2020) Trump as the ultimate triumph of
neoliberalism, globalinequality, Blogger, 7 April. https://glineq.
blogspot.com/2020/04/trump-as-ultimate-triumph-of.html

Chapter 12
1 The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2020) The Mellon Foundation
announces transformation of its strategic direction and new focus
on social justice [press release], 30 June. https://mellon.org/newsblog/articles/mellon-foundation-announces-transformation-itsstrategic-direction-and-new-focus-social-justice
2 Scirri, K. (2019) Andrew Carnegie: Industrialist and philanthropist,
New York: Cavendish, p. 73.
3 Stoller, M. (2019) Goliath: The 100-year war between monopoly power
and democracy, New York: Simon & Schuster.
4 Twain, M. and Warner, C.D. (1873) The Gilded Age: A tale of
today, San Francisco, CA: American Publishing Company.
5 Twain, M. (2002) Mark Twain’s letters, volume 6, 1874–1875,
M.B. Frank and H.E. Smith (eds), Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
6 Green, C. (2020) At $200B net worth, Jeff Bezos is still
not richest man of all time, News Break, 27 August. www.
industryleadersmagazine.com/at-200b-net-worth-jeff-bezos-isstill-not-richest-man-of-all-time
216

Notes and References

7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19

20
21
22
23
24
25
26

27

Bostaph, S. (2017) Andrew Carnegie: An economic biography,
London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Carnegie, A. (1889/2017) The Gospel of Wealth, New York:
Carnegie Foundation.
Carnegie (1889/2017) p. 1.
Carnegie (1889/2017) pp. 1–3.
Carnegie (1889/2017) p. 3.
Carnegie (1889/2017) p. 4.
Carnegie (1889/2017) p. 5.
Carnegie (1889/2017) p. 10.
Carnegie (1889/2017) p. 11.
Nichols, C.M. and Unger, N.C. (2017) The companion to the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Chichester: Wiley.
Carnegie (1989/2017) p. 17.
Zhulina, A. (2018) Performing philanthropy from Andrew
Carnegie to Bill Gates, Performance Research, 23(6): 50–7, p. 51.
The Week Staff (2016) A brief history of billionaire philanthropists
and the people who hate them, The Week, 9 January. https://
theweek.com/articles/597963/br ief-history-billionairephilanthropists-people-who-hate
Pizzigatti, S. (2018) How Gary Cohn and Andrew Mellon
both failed America, Fortune, 10 March. https://fortune.
com/2018/03/09/gary-cohn-resigning-tariffs-andrew-mellon
World Inequality Database (2020) USA. https://wid.world/
country/usa
UNDESA (2020) World Social Report 2020: Inequality in a rapidly
changing world, New York: United Nations Department of
Economic and Social Affairs.
UNDESA (2020) p. 5.
Burgis, T. (2012) Origins of the Occupy movement, Financial
Times, 19 January. www.ft.com/content/90108158-41f7-11e1a1bf-00144feab49a
Anderson, K. (2011) Person of the Year 2011, Time,
14 December. http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/
article/0,28804,2101745_2102132_2102373,00.html
See Rhodes, C. and Bloom, P. (2018) The trouble with charitable
billionaires, The Guardian, 24 May. www.theguardian.com/
news/2018/may/24/the-trouble-with-charitable-billionairesphilanthrocapitalism
Morvaridi, B. (2012) Capitalist philanthropy and hegemonic
partnerships, Third World Quarterly, 33(7): 1191–210.

217

WOKE CAPITALISM

28 Huyssen, D. (2019) We won’t get out of the Second Gilded Age
the way we got out of the first, Vox, 1 April. www.vox.com/
first-person/2019/4/1/18286084/gilded-age-income-inequalityrobber-baron
29 Johnston, M. (2019) A history of income inequality in the United
States, Investopedia, 25 June. www.investopedia.com/articles/
investing/110215/brief-history-income-inequality-united-states.
asp
30 E. Alexander quoted in Florsheim, E. (2020) Elizabeth Alexander’s
fierce vision of social justice, Wall Street Journal Magazine,
13 August. www.wsj.com/articles/elizabeth-alexanders-fiercevision-of-social-justice-11597343784
31 Daniels, A. (2020) Elizabeth Alexander outlines Mellon
Foundation’s shift to social-justice grant making, The Chronicle of
Higher Education, 2 July. www.chronicle.com/article/elizabethalexander-outlines-mellon-foundations-shift-to-social-justicegrant-making
32 Yale Law School (2020) Mellon Foundation, Justice Collaboratory
Announce Million Book Project, Yale Law School, 30 June.
https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/mellon-foundation-justicecollaboratory-announce-million-book-project
33 Lloyd, A. and Whitehead, P. (2018) Kicked to the curb: the
triangular trade of neoliberal polity, social insecurity, and penal
expulsion, International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 55: 60–9.
34 Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) p. 63.
35 Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) p. 66.
36 Huyssen (2019).
37 Forbes (2020) World’s billionaires list. www.forbes.com/billionaires
38 The Giving Pledge (2020) The history of The Giving Pledge.
https://givingpledge.org/About.aspx
39 The Giving Pledge (2019) More than 200 philanthropists have
now joined The Giving Pledge, committing to give at least half
their wealth to charitable causes [press release], 28 May. https://
givingpledge.org/PressRelease.aspx?date=05.28.2019
40 Fullerton, J. (2011) Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of wealth’ and the
Gates/Buffett giving pledge, The Capital Institute, 3 January.
https://capitalinstitute.org/blog/carnegies-gospel-wealth-andgatesbuffett-giving-pledge
41 Sawaya, F. (2008) Capitalism and philanthropy in the (new) Gilded
Age, American Quarterly, 60(1): 201–13.
42 Reich, R. (2018) Just giving: Why philanthropy is failing democracy
and how it can do better, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
218

Notes and References

43 Schwab, T. (2020) Bill Gates’s charity paradox, The Nation, 20 March.
www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-foundationphilanthropy

Chapter 13
1 Warren, E. (2020) Letter to Business Roundtable, 17 September.
www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2020.09.17%20
Letter%20to%20the%20Business%20Roundtable%20re%20oneyear%20anniversary%20of%20their%20Statement%20of%20
Principles.pdf
2 Business Roundtable (2020) Members. www.businessroundtable.
org/about-us/members
3 The relevance of the Business Roundtable’s statement to woke
capitalism is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, as well as
mentioned in Chapters 2 and 4.
4 Business Roundtable (1997) Statement on corporate governance:
a White Paper from The Business Roundtable, Washington: BRT.
5 Business Roundtable (2019) Business Roundtable redefines the
purpose of a corporation to promote ‘an economy that serves all
Americans’, 19 August. www.businessroundtable.org/businessroundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promotean-economy-that-serves-all-americans
6 Warren (2020) p. 2.
7 Warren (2020) p. 3.
8 Dowell, E. and Jackson, M. (2020) ‘Woke-washing’ your company
won’t cut it, Harvard Business Review, 27 July. https://hbr.
org/2020/07/woke-washing-your-company-wont-cut-it
9 Harinam, V. (2020) Is woke capitalism profitable?, Quillette,
21 July. https://quillette.com/2020/07/21/is-woke-capitalismprofitable
10 Sammut, J. (2019) Corporate virtue signalling: How to stop big business
from meddling in politics, Cleveland, OH: Connor Court Publishing.
11 Sammut (2019) back cover.
12 Lewis, H. (2020) How capitalism drives cancel culture, The Atlantic,
14 July. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/
cancel-culture-and-problem-woke-capitalism/614086
13 Roth, K. (2020) China is desperate to stop Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement, Human Rights Watch, 19 August. www.
hrw.org/news/2020/08/19/china-desperate-stop-hong-kongspro-democracy-movement

219

WOKE CAPITALISM

14 BBC News (2019) The Hong Kong protests explained in 100
and 500 words, BBC News, 28 November. www.bbc.com/news/
world-asia-china-49317695
15 D. Trump quoted in Fox Sports (2020) ‘He’s a hater’: Donald
Trump lashes ‘nasty’ LeBron James in angry NBA rant, Fox
Sports, 10 October. www.foxsports.com.au/basketball/nba/
finals/nba-2020-lebron-james-donald-trump-los-angeles-lakersvs-miami-heat-nba-finals/news-story/042a42e99ef1a6231abb7
6d6c7043387
16 Perper, R. (2019) China and the NBA are coming to blows over
a pro-Hong Kong tweet. Here’s why, Business Insider, 11 October.
www.businessinsider.com.au/nba-china-feud-timeline-darylmorey-tweet-hong-kong-protests-2019-10?r=US&IR=T
17 In Greer, J. (2019) The Daryl Morey controversy, explained: how
a tweet created a costly rift between the NBA and China, Sporting
News, 9 October. www.sportingnews.com/au/other-sports/
news/daryl-morey-controversy-tweet-nba-china-explained/
r6fzkcu3pwct1q993qiz5xlzm
18 Gatto, T. (2019) NBA’s response to Daryl Morey’s Hong
Kong tweet draws scorn from US politicians, Sporting News,
7 October. www.sportingnews.com/us/nba/news/daryl-moreyhong-kong-tweet-china-nba-response-politicians/1dergufmvkn
mu1vdkm5t2x3pxn
19 Guardian Sport (2019) ‘LeBron stands for money’: Hong Kong
protesters burn James jerseys, The Guardian, 16 October. www.
theguardian.com/sport/2019/oct/15/hong-kong-protestorsburn-lebron-james-jerseys-nba
20 Quoted in HKFP (2020) LeBron James’s fall from grace: how the
basketball star alienated loyal Hong Kong fans, Hong Kong Free
Press, 16 August. https://hongkongfp.com/2020/08/16/lebronjamess-fall-from-grace-how-the-basketball-star-alienated-loyalhong-kong-fans
21 Bunyasi, T.P. and Smith, C.W. (2019) Stay woke: A people’s guide
to making all black lives matter, New York: New York University
Press, p. 12.

220

Index
A
Ace Metrix 132
ad hominem arguments 4
‘age of indecency’, Gros 54
Air Jordan, Nike brand 116–17,
119
Ali, Mohammed, refusal to fight in
Vietnam 122
Amazon
aggressive tax avoidance 55, 90,
91
climate inaction 86, 95
inhumane working conditions
91–3
token donation to COVID-19
pandemic 24
Trump’s ‘Post Office scam’
accusation 88
see also Bezos, Jeff
Amazon Employees for Climate
Justice 95
Amazon Rising (documentary)
91
American Conservative, The (magazine)
9, 75–6
American Dialect Society, definition
of woke 35
American dream 112, 114–15
‘Dream Crazy’ campaign, Nike
111, 114, 116, 118, 119,
120
‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’
124–5

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
151–2, 160, 162
Angbeletchy, Celine, on social media
distortion of ‘woke’ 38
anti-capitalism 76, 133, 159–60
anti-wokeness 37
Apple 98
support for marriage equality
102
athletes, African American, as
political activists 114, 122
Australian bushfire crisis 17–22

B
Badu, Erykah, ‘stay woke’ 29, 35
‘bae’ 35
Baldwin, James, ‘indifference makes
one blind’ 131
Ballinger, Jeffrey, child exploitation
scandal 117
Banerjee, Bobby, CSR 67
Barra, Mary T., General Motors
CEO 99
basketball 111–12, 172–4
Beckham, Barry, Garvey Lives (play)
30–1
Ben and Jerry’s, Pecan Resist ice
cream 8
Benioff, Marc, Salesforce CEO 101
Bennet, Robert 114
Bennett, Michael, Things that Make
White People Uncomfortable
128

221

WOKE CAPITALISM

‘best a man can be’ ad, Gillette
(2019) 138, 140, 142–3, 145,
147
‘best a man can get’ slogan, Gillette
(1989) 138, 139, 140
Beyond the Swoosh (documentary by
Jim Keady) 117–18
Bezos, Jeff 25, 54
climate fund 84, 85–6, 94, 95
donations to progressive causes
86, 87, 88
during Covid-19 pandemic 93
feud with Donald Trump 88
Foer’s critique of 96–7
tax avoidance 90–1
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
24, 86
billionaires
cashing in on COVID-19
pandemic 23, 25–6
and increased inequality 54–6,
81–2
philanthropy of 86–9, 94,
160–6
Binyam, Maya, ‘Woke Olympics’ 3
Black Enterprise (online magazine)
137
Black Lives Matter 31, 32, 126–30
deradicalized by woke
corporations 136
and George Floyd 126–7, 129
hashtag #BlackLivesMatter 34
McDonald’s support of 132
and the National Football League
125–6, 129–31
political demands 134–6
protests 32, 126, 127, 128, 132
radical democracy in action 40
and #StayWoke 35
taken over by marketing 137
Black Marxism: The Making of
the Black Radical Tradition
(Robinson) 134
BlackRock 23, 71–4

Blessington, Mark, CEO activism
100
Bloomberg, Michael 86, 87, 165
Bobos in Paradise (Brooks) 36
bohemian bourgeoisie, Brooks 36
books for prisoners, Mellon initiative
162, 163–4
Bowen, Howard R., social
responsibility 44–7, 48
boxing 121–2
Boyer, Nate, advice to Kaepernick
116
brands/branding
brand activism 129
and CEO activism 100, 106
Gillette and #MeToo 142–3,
145, 147–8
Nike and Kaepernick 116–17,
122–3
‘socially conscious’ 117
Brooks, David, Bobos in Paradise
36
Brown, Kara, feminist writer on
woke men 35
Brown, Michael, shooting of 34
Brown, Wendy, on democracy 12
Buffett, Warren 54, 86, 164
Burke, Tanya, #MeToo founder
144, 146
Burke-White, William 22
Burns, Tommy 121
bushfires, Australia 17–22
Business Roundtable 27, 50, 51
letter from Senator Warren
167–8, 169
statement on the purpose of a
corporation 80–1
Byrd, Prof. Rudolph P., ‘Lift Every
Voice and Sing’ 125

C
Cannon-Brookes, Mike 21
Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman)
48, 52

222

INDEX

carbon emissions, Amazon 85–6,
95–6
Carlos, John 120–1
Carlson, Tucker, woke capitalism
critique 87
Carnegie, Andrew 153–8, 160, 161,
165
CEO activism 98–110
charitable giving
justifying extreme inequality 155
path to political power 166
by rich vs poor people 25
see also philanthropy
Charlottesville, Virginia, racist
extremism 98–9
Chatelain, Marcia 132–4
China-NBA fiasco 172–4
Chomsky, Noam, Requiem for the
American Dream 114–15
civil rights
1960s movement 30, 133
Black Lives Matter protesters 32
Kaepernick 113, 120
NAACP 124
Cliff, Jeremy, Davos manifesto
69–70
climate change
and Australian bushfires 17–22
Bezos Earth Fund 84, 85–6, 90,
94, 95–6
denying/downplaying, Morrison
18–19
Greta Thunberg’s influence 84–5
Larry Fink’s response 72–3, 76–7
Coates, Rodney, on NFL’s position
130
colonialism 135–6
Cook, Tim, Apple CEO 98
Coombe, Gary, Gillette CEO
147–8, 149
corporate activism 21–2, 43, 101–2,
109–10, 137, 145
corporate capitalism 67–8
Wall Street protests 159–60

corporate righteousness 15, 24, 28,
168
corporate self-interest 38, 43, 129
Gillette 145, 149
McDonald’s 132–3
Qantas 109–10
and social responsibility 64–5,
106
Tiffany & Co. 20–1
corporate social responsibility (CSR)
51, 64–6, 67–8, 74, 77, 90,
105
corporate socialism 24, 72
corporate tax rates, fall in 55–6
Corporate Virtue Signalling (Sammut)
170–1
COVID-19 crisis 23–7, 93
Crawford, Nyron 114
‘Creating shared value’ (Porter and
Kramer) 66
criminal justice system 33, 163

D
Davis, Keith, corporate social
responsibility 51–2
Davos 2020, WEF convention
22–3, 68–9
de-democratization 13
Deloitte study, marriage equality
107, 108
democracy 12
de-democratization 13
failure of, Giridharadas 94–5
Hong Kong protests 172–3
radical, Black Lives Matter
movement 40–1
three sectors of 149–50
values of 79, 119
Dimon, Jamie, JPMorgan Chase
CEO 19, 99
Douthat, Ross, New York Times
columnist 42–3
Dowell, Erin, corporate woke
washing 169

223

WOKE CAPITALISM

‘Dream Crazy’ ad campaign, Nike
111, 118–19, 120
Dreher, Rod, condemnation of
woke capitalism 9, 75–6
Duke, Selwyn, response to Gillette
ad 141
Dungay, David, death of in prison
127
Dutton, Peter, stoush with Alan
Joyce 105

E
earnings
of Alan Joyce 109–10
of executives 63–4
footballers’ contracts 131
inequality 82, 158–9
of Jeff Bezos 93
Earth Fund, Jeff Bezos 84, 85–6,
95–6
economic inequality 154–5, 158–9
bulimic effects of 163
continual expansion of 164
destroying democracy, Fink 80
link to racial injustice 136–7
Elson, Charles, critique of woke
capitalism 72
Epstein, Jeffrey 39, 146
equality 31
American value 116
democratic value 79, 119
marriage equality 102–10
see also inequality
‘ethical behaviour’ of corporations
106, 109
‘ethical custom’ 10
exploitation
African American footballers
130
black people 135–6, 137
of Nike factory workers
117–18
of racialized groups of people
134

F
Facebook 137
marketing of brand activism 129
origins of hashtag
#BlackLivesMatter 33–4
tax avoidance 90
token contribution to
COVID-19 pandemic 24
Farrow, Ronan, stories of Weinstein’s
accusers 143
‘fauxgressiveness’ 2–3
feudalism 12, 45, 48, 134, 135
Fink, Larry, BlackRock 71–83
Floyd, George, death of 126–7
Foer, Franklin, on the emergence of
a ‘private state’ 96
football 111–18, 122, 124–6,
128–31
Ford Foundation 99, 157
Forrest, Andrew (‘Twiggy’), donation
towards bushfire relief 21
Foucault, Michel 60
Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black
America (Chatelain) 133
Frank, Thomas, ‘conquest of cool’
36
Frederick, William C., on social
responsibility 49–50, 51
freedom of speech 39–40, 115–16,
174
Friedman, Milton 9–10, 48–50, 51,
52, 61–2, 64
Fullerston, John, on the Giving
Pledge 165

G
Garner, Eric, killed by police 136
Garvey Lives (play, Beckham) 30–1
Garza, Alicia, ‘love note to black
people’ 33–4
Gates, Bill 54, 86
Giving Pledge 164, 165, 166
Gervais, Ricky, Golden Globes
speech 39–41

224

INDEX

Getty, John Paul, art foundation 157
Ghent, William J., ‘benevolent
feudalism’ created by
capitalism 45
Gilded Age, America 152, 156–7
Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of wealth’
157
and the Giving Pledge 165
New/Second 164
Gillette 138–50
alignment with #MeToo 142–3,
145–6, 147–8, 149
‘best a man can be’ ad (2019)
138, 140, 142–3, 145, 147
Super Bowl ad 138–9
Giridharadas, Anand, failure of
democracy 94–5
Giving Pledge 164–5, 166
Golden Globes Awards ceremony
39–41
Goodell, Roger, NFL Commissioner
125–6
Google 2, 87, 137
support for marriage equality
102
tax avoidance 90
Gospel of Wealth (essay, Carnegie)
153, 165
Green, Stephen A., People’s
Consortium 113
Gregg, Samuel, on corruption of
businesses 75
Grillo, Frank, on CEO activism
100
Gros, Frédéric, wealth inequality
54–5, 56
Guidelines for Psychological Practice with
Boys and Men (APA) 141
gun control 42

H
Haiphong, Danny 7, 33
Halberstam, Jack, cultural shift
around masculinity 140–1

Harinam, Vincent, on the activist
Left 170, 171
Harry, Prince, media attack on 4–5
Hildyard, Luke, on charitable giving
25
Hogan, Tiffany, on exploitation of
black employees 137
Hollywood
Golden Globes Awards ceremony
39–41
Weinstein, Harvey 143–4
Woods’ boycott of Gillette
products 142
Holmes, Eamonn, attack on Meghan
Markle 5
Holt, Douglas, Gillette as ideological
parasite and proselytizer 149
homophobia 103
Hong Kong protests 172–4
Houston Rockets games, CCTV
banning of 173–4
human rights
and NBA–China debacle 174
and Nike workers 117–18
Olympic Project for Human
Rights 120–1
Huyssen, David, present era as a
New Gilded Age 164
hypocrisy 9, 36, 39, 40, 73–4, 89

I
IKEA 69, 76
imperialism 76, 122, 134, 135
incarceration, US 162–4
income inequality 82, 158–9
indigenous people, Australia, deaths
in police custody 127
industrial capitalism 151–5, 157,
164
inequality
created by capitalism 79, 80, 81,
153–4, 159–60
Davos manifesto 69–70
in earnings/income 82, 158–9

225

WOKE CAPITALISM

inequality (continued)
and economic growth 82
harmonious, Carnegie’s 156
rationalization of, Carnegie
154–5
wealth 25–6, 44, 54–5, 56
Ireland, Paddy, shareholder value and
CSR 65

L
Levitt, Theodore, social
responsibility critique 47–8
Lewis, Helen 11, 172
LGBTQI+ people, rights of 102–8
‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ 124–5,
129–31
Lloyd, Anthony, incarceration rates
163

J
Jackson, Marlette, corporate woke
washing 169
James, LeBron 173, 174
Jeffries, James J. 121
Jenner, Kendall 19
Johnson, Jack 121–2
Johnson, James Weldon, ‘Lift Every
Voice and Sing’ 124
Johnson & Johnson 27, 66
Johnson, Kevin, Starbucks CEO
98
Jordan, Michael 116–17, 119
Joyce, Alan, Qantas CEO 104–5,
106–7, 108, 109–10
Judd, Ashley, Weinstein abuse victim
143

K
Kaepernick, Colin 111–20,
122–3
Kantor, Jodi, Weinstein story 143
Keady, Jim, Nike documentary
117–18
Kelley, William Melvyn 1–2
Kimberley, Margaret 113
King Jr, Martin Luther 30, 35
McDonald’s attempt to link their
image to 133
Klein, Philip 8
kneeling protest, Kaepernick
111–16, 124
Kotler, Philip, on ‘brand activism’
129
Kramer, Mark 66, 77–8

M
Major League Baseball (MLB) 8
‘Make Amazon Pay’ campaign 93
Make America Great Again (MAGA),
Trump’s slogan 114–15
Making All Black Lives Matter
(Ransby) 136
Maks-Solomon, Cory, on CEO
activism 100
marketing
McDonald’s 132–3
Nike 116–17, 118, 122–3
woke washing 8
Markle, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex,
media attack on 4–5, 6
Maroney, McKayla, sexual assault
of 144
marriage equality, Australia
102–10
Martin, Trayvon, shooting of 31–3
masculinity
toxic, Gillette’s 2019 ad 138,
140, 142, 145, 147, 148
traditional, Gillette’s 1989 Super
Bowl ad 139
mass incarceration, US 162–3
Matlon, Jordanna, urban sociologist
123
McAdam, Prof Douglas, ‘social
change tipping point’ 127–8
McDonald’s and Black America
131–4, 135
McGorry, Matt, ‘bae and woke’
actor 35

226

INDEX

McMillon, Doug, Walmart CEO
19, 99
Mellon, Andrew, W. 151–2, 157–8
Mellon Foundation 151–2, 160,
162
Mellon Institute of Industrial
Research 157–8
#MeToo movement 142–50
Michayluk, Prof. David, ‘single-letter
ticker symbols’ 67
Microsoft 25, 36, 86
Milano, Alyssa, #MeToo 144
Milanovic, Branko 150
Million Book Project, Mellon’s grant
to 162
moralization of business through
CSR 67
Morey, Daryl, Houston Rockets
general manager 173–4
Morgan, Piers 5, 40, 141
Morrison, Scott, Australian prime
minister 18–19
Tiffany & Co.’s climate action
demand to 20–1
Morse, Brandon, on Gillette’s ad
147
Morvaridi, Behrooz, capitalism’s
intrusion into philanthropy
161
Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)
134–5
Murray, Alan, on the Business
Roundtable 81
Musk, Elon 25, 165

National Rifle Association (NRA)
42
neoliberalism 27
changing economic-political link
149
Foucault 60
and income/wealth inequality
81–2, 158–9, 160
response to increased crime rates
163
Thatcher 58, 59–61
Nestlé 74
Netflix 24, 55, 131
‘New Gilded Age’, current era as
164
Nike 24, 36
‘Dream Crazy’ ad campaign 111,
112, 118–19, 120
factory workers’ inhumane living
conditions 117–18
marketing and politics 116–17,
122–3

O
Obama, Barack 6–7, 32–3
Occupy Wall Street movement
159–60
Olympic Project for Human Rights
120–1
Oxfam
‘pandemic profiteering’ 25
tax ‘dodging’ by the super-rich
55

P
N
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) 124
National Basketball Association
(NBA) 111, 118, 122
China debacle 172–4
National Football League (NFL)
111–18, 122, 124–6, 128–31

Pendergrass, Teddy, ‘Wake Up
Everybody’ song 31
‘performative wokeness’, Douthat
43
Perret, Tom, critique of billionaires
89
philanthropy
of billionaires 86–9, 94, 160–6
Carnegie’s 153–60, 161

227

WOKE CAPITALISM

philanthropy (continued)
contemporary 160–1
of robber barons 151–60
Piketty, Thomas, effects of widening
inequality 44
Pillay, Regine, shareholder value and
CSR 65
plutocracy 96, 156, 157, 158, 166
political activism
African American athletes 122
Black Lives Matter protests
127–8
Burke’s initiation of #MeToo
144–5
climate change, Thunberg 84
Kaepernick 112–14, 118, 122–3
by woke corporations 98–110,
133, 145
political correctness 3, 9, 21, 30,
38, 40
‘popular capitalism’, Thatcher 59–60
popular discontent 159–60
populism
corporate 26–7
pressurizing corporations 73–4
rise of 82–3
and Trump presidency 39, 88,
101, 113, 116, 120
Porter, Michael 66
poverty 136–7
Carnegie’s vision 153–4
trickle-down effect 81–2
prison deaths 127
prisoners, giving books to 162–4
Procter & Gamble, Gillette writedown 146–7
profit motive 51, 100, 150
progressive politics 2–3, 41
billionaires tipping their hats
towards 26
corporations usurping political
power 43–4, 68
incompatible with conservative
economics 9, 10

ironic use of ‘the woke’ to make
fun of 38
perceived insincerity of 5–6
recent dominance of 3–4
‘woke’ corporations 8, 15, 21–2

Q
Qantas airlines, and marriage
equality 104–5, 107, 108,
109, 110
Quillette (magazine) 170

R
racial capitalism 124–37
racism 33, 34, 36, 38
Charlottesville rally 98–9
towards Meghan Markle 4–5
radicalism
Black 134, 135
economic and social issues 172
Ransby, Barbara, Black Lives Matter
movement 31, 40, 136
Reagan, Ronald 58, 59, 63, 66, 70
Redmond, Shana L., significance of
‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’
124–5
REF market for virtue, trading in
106–7, 108
Reimann, Bernard, shareholder
primacy 62–3
religious freedoms 102–3
Requiem for the American Dream
(Chomsky) 114
Rinehart, Gina, mining magnate
19–20
robber barons 151–2, 157–8, 164
Robinson, Cedric J., ‘racial
capitalism’ 134
Rockefeller, John D., robber baron
152
Rollins, Nolan 130–1
royalty 4–6
Ruiz, Michelle, on racism towards
Meghan Markle 5

228

INDEX

S
same-sex marriage
Bezos’s vocal and financial
support for 88
plebiscite, Australia (2017) 102,
103–4, 105–6
Sammut, Jeremy, Corporate Virtue
Signalling 170–1
Sawaya, Prof. Francesca, on capitalist
philanthropy 165
‘Second Gilded Age’, present era
as 164
self-righteousness 3, 11, 24, 36,
38, 74
sexual harassment 140
#MeToo movement 142–3,
144–5
by Weinstein 143–4
wider exposure of 146
shared value creation, Porter and
Kramer 66
shareholder primacy 62–6, 157–8,
167–8
shareholder value 61–8, 77, 78, 175
single-letter ticker symbols 67
slavery 134–6
Smith, Adam, ‘invisible hand’ 49, 50
Smith, Serena, ‘wokefishing’ 2
Smith, Tommie 120–1
social justice
awareness of (stay woke) 35, 36
Mellon Foundation 151, 162
and the NFL 129–30
woke capitalism’s agenda 14,
26, 160
Social Responsibilities of the
Businessman (Bowen, 1953)
44
social responsibility 44–53, 56
corporate social responsibility
(CSR) 64–6, 67–8, 74, 77,
90, 105
socialism, threat of 47, 59, 158
‘speaking truth to power’ 39, 99

Spectator (magazine) 74, 142
stakeholder capitalism 50, 68
stakeholders, commitment to,
Business Roundtable 81,
167–8
Stanford, Leland, robber baron 152
Star-Spangled Banner 112, 124
Starbucks 98, 131
Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making
All Black Lives Matter (Lopez,
Bunyasi and Smith) 41, 175
#StayWoke 35–6, 38–9
Stiglitz, Joseph, on tax evasion 55–6
Stormy Daniels, Trump affair
allegations 88
Super Bowl (1989) and Gillette’s ad
138–9
Swagazon, satirical t-shirts 92–3

T
tax avoidance and evasion 14, 55–6,
90–1, 109
Thatcher, Margaret 57–61
and corporate social responsibility
(CSR) 66
popular capitalism 59–60
shareholder primacy 63, 64
Things that Make White People
Uncomfortable (Bennett) 128
Thunberg, Greta, climate change
activist 18, 84–5
Tiffany & Co., climate change action
ad 20–1
Time (magazine) 85, 144–5, 160
Towler, Christopher 114
toxic masculinity ad, Gillette 8, 138,
140, 142, 145, 147, 148
‘trickle-down economics’ 82, 161,
165
Trump, Donald 87–8
affair with Stormy Daniels 88
corporate tax cuts 42–3
critique of Thunberg 85
feud with Bezos 88

229

WOKE CAPITALISM

Trump, Donald (continued)
and the Kaepernick controversy
114–16, 120
lack of action on gun control 42
lack of leadership at
Charlottesville 98–9
political populist 39, 88, 101,
113, 116, 120
Twain, Mark, The Gilded Age 152
Twitter 88, 111, 131, 142, 144, 173
Twohey, Megan, Weinstein story 143

U
‘ungendered clothing’, Zara 8
Unite the Right, neo-Nazi rally
(2017) 98–9

V
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, robber baron
152
Varoufakis, Yanis, change in
economic-political link 149
Venetis, Prof. Penny 146
‘virtue signalling’ 3, 8, 15, 170–1
Perret’s argument 89–90
Vogel, David, ‘the market for virtue’
106

W
Walker, Darren, Ford Foundation
president 99
Wall Street protests 159–60
Walmart 19, 87, 99, 102
Warner, Charles Dudley, The Gilded
Age 152
Warren, Elizabeth, US Senator 167,
168–9, 170, 171–2
Wartzman, Rick, Drucker Institute
81
Watson, Elijah 37
wealth inequality 54–5, 156–7
Weinstein, Harvey 143–4
White racism, ‘America’s original
sin’ 116

white supremacy 115, 121–2, 134–5
Whitehead, Philip, incarceration
rates 163
Whiteout, Sam, wokeness
popularization 37–8
Williams, J. Corey, psychiatrist 122
Williams, Serena 119
Wilson, Russell, earnings of 131
Winner Takes All (Giridharadas) 94
woke 1–2
ironic use of ‘the woke’ 38
original meaning of 35–6, 175
pejorative application of 4–5
reversed meaning of 30, 38–9,
41
woke billionaires 86–7
woke capitalism 42–56
problem with 1–16
woke corporations 138–50
Woke Olympics 3
woke washing 8, 9, 72–3, 169
Woods, James, boycotting of Gillette
products 142
working conditions
Amazon 91–3
Nike 117–18
World Economic Forum, Davos
2020 convention 22–3, 68–9
Wu, Tim 69

Y
Yale Law School, on US
incarceration 162

Z
Zara, ‘ungendered clothing’ 8
Zhulina, Alisa, public policy taken
over by the wealthy 157
Zimmerman, George, shooting of
Trayvon Martin 31–2
and Obama’s speech 32–3
political response to acquittal
33–4
Zuckerberg, Mark 24, 165

230