Wokeness is not a system of morality with universal applicability. “With every breath we take,” Apple CEO Tim Cook declared in the wake of George Floyd’s death, “we must commit to being that change, and to creating a better, more just world for everyone.” Well, not for everyone—not for the tens of thousands of Chinese workers at Apple’s Foxconn iPhone factory at Longhua. In 2010, a spate of suicides led Foxconn to install nets outside many buildings to catch falling bodies.
Soukup also documents Disney CEO Bob Iger’s bullying of states like Georgia and North Carolina for passing laws that he dislikes—even as Iger disappeared minority actors from publicity for the Chinese market of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” There is indeed something nauseating about people claiming to be virtuous when they’re not, but to accuse Apple and Disney of hypocrisy would be to miss the point. Wokeness is directed at transforming America, using Wall Street and corporate America to help bring it about.
“The Dictatorship of Woke Capital” provides the best account so far of how finance capital ended up on the woke side of the culture wars. The book’s great strength is tracing the lineages of woke back to their sources. Soukup identifies two principal streams. The first, an all-American affair associated with progressives such as Richard Ely, Woodrow Wilson, and John Dewey, gave rise to the administrative state and the creation of a class of professional administrators unaccountable to voters and “trained in the ‘science’ of administration to manage society more rationally and carefully than the masses would, if left to their own devices.”
The second has its origins in Europe, with an assortment of Marxists and post-Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci, György Lukacs, and the Frankfurt School. It then proceeded, in the words of the German 1968-er Rudi Dutschke, on “the long march through the institutions,” the New Left successfully colonizing virtually the entire American system of higher education.
If anything, Soukup underplays the impact of Herbert Marcuse and the New Left. They had repudiated vulgar Marxism because the American working class refused to play the revolutionary role that Marx had assigned it, opening the way for the New Left’s rejection of industrialization and what a leading critic of the Frankfurt School called an “aesthetic repugnance for industrial society.” As willing customers of the “merchants of kitsch,” the American working class kept the system of oppression in business. The New Left transformed the American working class from oppressed into oppressors. The culture wars are in reality a class war waged against the working class and all those whose livelihoods depend on their work—in manufacturing, transportation, and farming and, most of all, in the energy sector.
This war will come to an end only when one side or another is beaten and knows it. The presidential election of last Nov. 3 did not produce that outcome. Despite President Biden’s calls for unity in his Inaugural address, his actions since indicate the start of a new, aggressive phase in this class war. For that effort, the Biden administration will have enthusiastic allies on Wall Street and among woke CEOs in Silicon Valley and Hollywood. For those looking to understand how we got here, “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital” is the best place to start. Along the way, Soukup brutally eviscerates many of the ESG and stakeholder myths deployed to justify woke capital. This is a book for our times.
