T he Q uarTerly J ournal
of
a usTrian e conomics
Volume 22 | No. 2 | 122–138 | summer 2019
www.QJae.org
Ludwig von Mises Institute Memorial Lecture
Libertarianism(s) versus
Postmodernism and ‘Social
Justice’ Ideology
Michael Rectenwald*
A
peculiar phrase recently introduced into the political lexicon
by media cognoscenti describes a new corporate philosophy:
“woke capitalism.” Coined by Ross Douthat of the New York Times
(2018), woke capitalism refers to a burgeoning wave of companies
that apparently have become advocates of social justice. Some major
corporations now intervene in social and political issues and controversies, partaking in a new corporate activism. The newly “woke”
corporations support activist groups and social movements, while
adding their voices to political debates. Woke capitalism has endorsed
Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo Movement, contemporary feminism,
LGBTQ rights, and immigration activism, among other leftist causes.
How can we understand woke capitalism, is it effective, and if
so, why? Meanwhile, what is now meant by “social justice” and is
*
Dr. Michael Rectenwald is a former professor at New York University and author
of nine books, most recently Google Archipelago.
This Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Yousif Almoayyed, was
given at the Austrian Economics Research Conference at the Mises Institute on
March 22, 2019.
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Michael Rectenwald: Libertarianism(s) versus Postmodernism…
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it a good thing? As it turns out, analyzing woke capitalism tells us
a great deal about contemporary corporate capitalism, the contemporary political left, and the relationship between the two. It also
recalls an earlier corporate leftism, as I’ll discuss later.
As for social justice, some will recall twentieth-century social
justice movements. The Civil Rights movement comes to mind.
But due to the influence of postmodern theoretical ideas and Soviet
and Sino-communist disciplinary techniques, social justice has
taken on new, distinct features. Whereas the campus free speech
movement was a hallmark of social justice in the 1960s, violent
skirmishes waged against free speech and academic freedom are
now associated with the term. Events that have unfolded on college
campuses, including at Yale, New York University, UC Berkeley,
Middlebury College, Evergreen State College, and many others,
bear the social justice insignia.
Among other postmodern theoretical notions, the contemporary
social justice creed draws on “social and linguistic constructivism,”
an epistemological premise derived from postmodern theory
holding that language constitutes social (and often all) reality,
rather than merely attempting to represent it. Under social and
linguistic constructivism, language is considered a material agent—
its uses, as tantamount to physical acts. This belief explains the term
“discursive violence.” For the social justice believer, language can
enact violence by itself, without any attendant actions.
Today’s social justice creed is marked by preoccupations with new
identities and their politics. It entails a broad palette of beliefs and
practices, represented by new concerns and shibboleths, including
“privilege,” “white privilege,” “privilege-checking,” “self-criticism”
or “autocritique,” “cultural appropriation,” “intersectionality,”
“discursive violence,” “rape culture,” “microaggressions,” “mansplaining,” “manspreading,” and many others. The terms proliferate
almost as rapidly as the gender identities.
Self-criticism and privilege-checking are the vestiges of
“autocritique” and “struggle sessions,” purification methods of
the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In the late 1960s, as
word from the communist revival spread to the West through the
student and feminist movements of Europe, especially France,
the birthplace of postmodern theory, they became part of the
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Western left’s vocabulary and toolkit. In struggle sessions, the
guilty party—accused of selfishness, ignorance, and the embrace
of bourgeois ideology—was pilloried with verbal and often
physical assaults by her comrades, until she broke down and
confessed her characterological and ideological flaws. Today, the
confessions involve privilege, or the unearned advantage enjoyed
by members of a dominant group based on appearance. Usually on
demand, checking one’s privilege means to acknowledge unearned
advantage and to atone for it publicly. Meanwhile, in the Chinese
Cultural Revolution, autocritique began with the guilty party, who
subjected herself to brutal verbal self-inspection and denigration
before the jury of her comrades. Autocritique and struggle sessions
could lead to imprisonment or death as the comrade was often
found to be insufficiently pure. In self-criticism (self-crit) and
“callout” routines, soft forms of autocritique and struggle sessions
became prevalent on the Internet sometime after 2009. They then
infiltrated universities and other social spaces.
“Intersectionality” is the axiomatic oppression-ranking framework
that establishes a new social justice hierarchy based on the multiplicities of oppression as they may intersect and affect subjects in
multiple, supposedly subordinated social categories. It is no less
than a scale for weighing oppression. It then inverts the supposedly
existing hierarchy on the basis of this intersectional oppression
ranking, moving those on the bottom to the top, and vice versa. This
is not a temporary feature of social justice but represents a hierarchical inversion that must be maintained to engender the animus and
ressentiment necessary to continue fueling the movement.
This ranking system began with the work of the Hungarian and
Soviet literary critic and Marxist philosopher György Lukács. In his
book, History and Class Consciousness ([1923] 1971), Lukács introduced
a form of epistemology that has had an outsized impact ever since,
serving as a source for postmodern theory and social justice. The
social justice notion that each person has their own truth based on
their particular type of subordination can be traced to Lukács. He
argued that the unique position of the working class within the social
order and the relations of production provide the proletariat with a
privileged vantage-point for discerning objective truth and called the
theory “proletarian standpoint epistemology.” Lukács argued that
reality under capitalism is a single objective reality. But the proletarian
Michael Rectenwald: Libertarianism(s) versus Postmodernism…
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has a peculiar relationship to objective reality. The objective world
strikes the proletarian differently than it does the capitalist. Like the
capitalist, the proletarian is a self-conscious subject. However, unlike
the capitalist, the proletarian is also a commodity, an object for sale on
the market. The proletarian’s consciousness of the commodification
of his selfhood contradicts his experience as living subject, a person
with a subjective existence. The proletariat’s “self-consciousness
of the commodity” (that is himself) explains the working class’s
antagonism toward capitalism as Lukács saw it. While the proletariat
fully grasps the contradiction of its self-conscious commodification,
the class can only come to terms with the contradiction by upending
and abolishing existing conditions.
Feminists and postmodern theorists later appropriated
standpoint epistemology and siphoned it through various identity
filters. It is the root of the contemporary social justice belief in the
connection between identity and knowledge. Social justice holds
that membership in a subordinated identity group grants members
exclusive access to particular knowledge, their own knowledge.
Members of dominant identity groups cannot access or understand
the knowledge of subordinated others. For example, a white
“cishetero” male (a white straight man who accepts the gender that
he was “assigned at birth”) cannot have a black lesbian’s experience
and therefore can’t access or understand her knowledge. Individuals
within subordinated identity groups also have their own individual
knowledge. For social justice believers, knowledge is personal,
individual, and impenetrable to others. It is “muh knowledge.” I
call this notion of knowledge “epistemological solipsism.” Under
the social justice worldview, everyone is locked in an impenetrable
identity chrysalis with access to a personal knowledge that no one
else can reach.
Therefore, social justice ideology does not foster egalitarianism.
Rank is maintained, only the bottom becomes the top when the
totem pole of identity is inevitably flipped upside-down and
stood on its head. Is it any wonder then that social justice warriors
compete valiantly for the status of “most subordinated” in the
games derogatorily referred to as “the Oppression Olympics?”
The race to the bottom is really a race to the top—although the
race runs downhill.
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Both its epistemology and ontology—its assumptions about how
one acquires knowledge, who can know, and the nature of the
objects of knowledge—are enforced with authoritarianism. Claims
made on behalf of correct beliefs, correct wording, and proper
naming—that is, language itself—trump empirical evidence and
nullify scientific findings and methods in advance. Thus, social
justice represents an entirely new understanding, quite distinct
from previous versions. It also involves entirely different practices
and methods for implementing it. The social and linguistic
constructivist claims of social justice ideologues amount to a form
of philosophical and social idealism that is enforced with a moral
absolutism. Once beliefs are unconstrained by the object world and
people can believe anything they like with impunity, the possibility
for assuming a pretense of infallibility becomes almost irresistible,
especially when the requisite power is available to support such
a pretense. In fact, given its willy-nilly determination of truth
and reality on the basis of beliefs alone, philosophical and social
idealism necessarily becomes dogmatic, authoritarian, anti-rational, and effectively religious. Since it sanctions no push-back
from the object world and regards it with indifference or disdain, it
necessarily encounters push-back from the object world and must
double-down. Because it usually contains so much nonsense, the
social and philosophical idealism of the social justice creed must be
established by force, or the threat of force.
Today, I will discuss some contemporary manifestations of
“social justice,” but not as it plays out in the academy, a topic I have
treated in my most recent book, Springtime for Snowflakes: ‘Social
Justice’ and Its Postmodern Parentage (2018). Instead, my topic today
is the “social justice” of U.S. for-profit corporations. Although
regarded as new, I will show that “woke capitalism” is but a subset
and recent type of a broader and longer-standing corporate ethos
that I call “corporate leftism.” Woke capitalism also helps to make
sense of the topic of my next book, Google Archipelago, a study of Big
Digital—the mega-data services; media, cable, and Internet services;
social media platforms; Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents; apps; and
the developing Internet of Things. The Google Archipelago is not
merely an amalgam of digital business interests. It operates and
will increasingly operate as what the only redeemable postmodern
theorist, Michel Foucault, called a “governmentality,” a means of
Michael Rectenwald: Libertarianism(s) versus Postmodernism…
127
governing the conduct of populations but also the technologies of
governance and the rationality that underpins the technologies.1)
Despite the initial backlash, Nike’s “Believe in Something” ad
campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick—whose national anthem
kneel-downs brought #BlackLivesMatter protest to the NFL—
dramatically boosted Nike’s sales. The ad’s success supported
Business Insider columnist Josh Barro’s (2018) theory that woke capitalism provides a form of parapolitical representation for corporate
consumers. Given their perceived political disenfranchisement in
the political sphere, woke capitalism offers representation in the
public sphere.2
With wokeness, Ross Douthat (2018) of the New York Times argues,
corporations offer workers and customers rhetorical placebos in
lieu of costlier economic concessions, such as higher wages and
better benefits, or lower prices. Short of a socialist revolution, New
York Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s
Green New Deal seems unlikely to materialize.3 Douthat suggests
that woke capitalism works by substituting symbolic for economic
value. The same gestures of wokeness may also appease the liberal
political elite, promoting their agendas of identity politics, gender
pluralism, transgenderism, lax immigration standards, sanctuary
cities, and so on. In return, the woke corporations hope to be spared
higher taxes, increased regulations, and antitrust legislation aimed
at monopolies.4
Meanwhile, at least one woke corporation appears intent on
scolding its customers. I refer to Gillette (2019) and its “We Believe”
ad. Like Nike, Gillette is a subsidiary of Proctor & Gamble. First
posted to its social media accounts in mid-January 2019, the ad
condescendingly lectures men, presumably “cishetero” men,
about “toxic masculinity.” In the provocative ad, three men look
into separate mirrors—not to shave but to examine themselves for
1
Michel Foucault introduced the term “governmentality” in a series of lectures from 1977
to 1979. By the rationality underpinning technologies of governance, Foucault meant
the way that power rationalizes the relations of power to itself and to the governed.
2
See Martinez (2018).
3
See Levitz (2018).
4
See Douthat (2018).
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Quart J Austrian Econ (2019) 22.2:122–138
traces of the dreaded condition. Voice-overs admonish men “to say
the right thing, to act the right way.” Dramatizations of bullying,
mansplaining, misogyny, and sexual predation shame bad men and
enjoin a woke minority of men to “hold other men accountable,” or
else face shame as well.
For Gillette, “shaving” now apparently means shearing away
the characteristics associated with manhood now deemed pathological by the American Psychological Association.5 To prevent
the sudden onset or relapse of man-disease, self-groomers must
exercise vigilance, scathing self-scrutiny, and unwavering determination. Even though their gender malignance has been “socially
constructed,” men are responsible for immediately discerning and
excising its outgrowths. The Gillette ad thus prescribes a new gender
hygienics by which such brutes can “move upward, working out
the beast,”6 becoming “The Best a Man Can Get,” a newly-shorn
animal, or rather a new kind of man shorn of animality.
Like the Nike Kaepernick ad, the Gillette “We Believe” ad
provoked significant backlash. But parent company Proctor &
Gamble’s executive response to the ensuing furor suggested that
the corporation was willing to forgo profits for virtue points, at
least for now. Jon Moeller, Proctor & Gamble’s CFO, told reporters
that post-ad sales were “in-line with pre-campaign levels.” In
advertising terms, in other words, the ad was a failure. Yet, Moeller
viewed the expenditure as an investment in the future. “It’s a part
of our effort to connect more meaningfully with younger consumer
groups,”7 he explained, perhaps referring to those too young to
sport the toxic stubble.
Unsatisfied with the above explanations, I still wondered how
and why corporations assumed the role of social justice arbiters and
how and why social justice came to be the ideology of major U.S.
5
6
7
See Pappas (2019). These damaging traits include “stoicism, competitiveness,
dominance and aggression.”
Tennyson (1850, 183). By “working out the beast,” Alfred Lord Tennyson meant to
eradicate the moral baseness of animal nature, rather than to establish an earthly
utopia, as his predecessor William Godwin had suggested, or to remove the traits
associated mostly with men due to evolutionary selection.
Meyersohn (2019).
Michael Rectenwald: Libertarianism(s) versus Postmodernism…
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corporations.8 But before venturing my own theory, however, I’d
like to retrace a history of corporate leftism, which will shed light
on the relationship between leftism and corporatism.
Corporate leftism has a long history, dating at least to the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I first recognized corporate
leftism through the histories that documented the funding of the
Russian and other socialist revolutions by leading U.S. capitalists
and bankers. As Richard B. Spence (2017) boldly declares in Wall
Street and the Russian Revolution 1905–1925, the term see, “socialist-capitalist” is not an oxymoron.
Spence was not referring to so-called “mixed economies” but
rather to a false dichotomy, a mating of two supposed economic
antinomies, socialism and capitalism. Understanding why the term
is not an oxymoron does not necessarily depend upon the historical
knowledge uncovered by Spence, and before him, by Antony C.
Sutton (2016)—although, given that I am a historian, I found this
material revealing. But the apparent contradiction in terms is
based on a mischaracterization of economic opposites and a failure
to detect in the original name for the field of economics, namely
“political economy,” the inherent possibility of such a conjunction.
The real opposites are not capitalism and socialism but rather individual freedom versus centralized political control, whether statist
or corporate.
According to Sutton’s Wall Street and FDR (1975), “corporate
socialism is a system where those few who hold the legal monopolies
of financial and industrial control profit at the expense of all others
in society.” For Sutton, “The most lucid and frank description of
corporate socialism and its mores and objectives is to be found
in a 1906 booklet by Frederick Clemson Howe, Confessions of a
Monopolist.” In attempting to validate Sutton’s reference to Howe
as the prototypical monopolist or even corporate socialist, I was
disappointed, but ultimately found the excursion rewarding.
Beginning with Spence’s Wall Street and the Russian Revolution
1905–1925, which had the same title as one of Sutton’s major
books except for an added date range, I searched feverishly for
8
For a summary of the relationship between corporate social activism and political
activists, see Lin (2018).
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“Howe” and “Confessions of a Monopolist.” (Actually, as is my
wont, I searched electronic texts and the Kindle version of Spence,
so my search produced nothing like a fever. But I am nostalgic for
a past that I never knew, when in nineteenth century novels, the
researches of fictional characters like Victor Frankenstein resulted
in life-threatening frenzies.)
My problem was that I wanted to introduce corporate leftism
and corporate socialism by referring to a television sitcom of the
1970s, namely, Gilligan’s Island. Some of you will be old enough and
will have hailed from backgrounds as plebeian as my own to recall
this program. The situation for this “dumb TV show,” as Mises
scholar B.K Marcus aptly put it, is a small community of seven
American castaways on a deserted island. Because it aired in the
‘60s, Gilligan’s Island is a collectivist Robinson Crusoe tale with a
socialist pretext. Each character represents a different life station
in an otherwise lost world of individualism, cast from a division
of labor that is rendered absurd let alone inapplicable by the
social and economic life of desertion. Since the show’s creator and
producer Sherwood Schwartz was at least an unconscious Marxist,
the sitcom demonstrated episode after episode that “in communist
society … nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity.” Actress,
professor, millionaire’s wife, and “all the rest” must “hunt in the
morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize
after dinner” (Marx [1845] 1968). They must outgrow the limited
specializations imposed on them by the capitalist order. This goes
for everyone on the island, except, it seems, for the monopolist,
Thurston B. Howell III.
Although their names were not identical, they were near
homonyms and I’d hoped to connect Frederic Howe and Thurston
B. Howell. I hadn’t been so sanguine as to expect that Thurston
Howell had been named directly after Frederic Howe. After all their
names were spelled differently. Yet, I still hoped for some reference.
And they were both monopolists, or so I thought.
Uh oh. Spence did not mention Howe as the model monopolist
or corporate socialist. In fact, he curiously omitted any reference
to Howe’s name and his “rule book.” Coming up empty in
such a cognate publication, I began to feel flush and somewhat
panicky. (As you know, we humanities scholars are susceptible
Michael Rectenwald: Libertarianism(s) versus Postmodernism…
131
to hyper-emotionality.) Nor could I find any mention of Frederic
Howe in connection with Thurston B. Howell at all. And, while a
few early reviews of Confessions took the book at face value and
came to the same conclusion as Sutton, that it represented the
autobiography of a real monopolist giving away his secrets, even
the most cursory assessment of Doctor Frederic Howe’s life and
other works would have quickly disabused anyone but the most
tendentious polemicist of the idea that Howe’s Confessions was a
rule book or how-to manual for monopolists. Howe was nothing
like the corporate magnate or mega-banker that Sutton suggested
he was, and so he could not possibly have helped bankroll the
creation of “a captive market and a technical colony to be exploited
by a few high-powered American financiers and the corporations
under their control,” that is, the Soviet Union. First of all, Howe had
earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. A real monopolist
would wait for an honorary degree. Furthermore, Confessions of a
Monopolist was not even an autobiography; it was a biting satire, a
criticism of monopolies and monopolists, written by a progressive
reformer and later FDR statesman. As it turned out, both Howe and
Howell had been fictional monopolists.
Yet the Thurston Howell on Gilligan’s island was certainly
something like the stereotypical monopolist described in Frederic
Howe’s book. Like the character in Confessions, Howell’s number
one rule was to “make Society work for you.” Thurston Howell
certainly managed to command the labor and deference of his fellow
islanders. As Marcus (2004) notes in “The Monetary Economics
of Thurston Howell III,” Howell was able to commandeer labor
and goods by virtue of his off-island status, to procure goods and
services by writing checks drawn on U.S. banks. The fact that this fiat
currency functioned in the absence of the government that backed
it suggests that money operates according to a cultural, Lamarckian
evolutionary process. Money’s governmentally-enforced fiat characteristic is an acquired characteristic that is passed along through
future generational transactions and retains these characteristics
even after its basis in force disappears—at least until it is replaced,
and sometimes even after that. As Mises showed, the value of a
currency is historical and the study of currencies must be historicist.
Howell’s expression of monopolistic desiderata, however, is
best expressed in episode 9, “The Big Gold Strike,” (Warner Bros.
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Entertainment [1964] 2013) when Gilligan, acting as Howell’s golf
caddie, falls into a giant hole where he notices something golden
embedded in the walls of the cave. Naturally Howell recognizes
gold and assumes that it is his property. After all, Gilligan was in
his employ, albeit fooled by a faux fiat currency. Howell swears
Gilligan to secrecy to secure his ownership against the islanders’
agreement that all property on the island would be communal.
But soon the mine is discovered by the rest of the community. The
unreliability of the state appears to account for Howell’s problem
in securing exclusive gold mining rights. Gilligan is the nominal
and ineffectual President of the island and a buffoon who has no
power. But Howell’s failure as a monopolist is more fundamental.
While he is perfectly capable to “let others work for you,” he does
not know the language or ways of corporate socialism, and does
not understand how to establish monopoly within such a state.
Rather than continually yielding expressions of blatant self-interest,
a corporate socialist would couch his monopolistic ambitions in the
language of equality.
Rather than Frederic Howe, King Camp Gillette would have
provided a much better model for Thurston Howell. The founder of
the American Safety Razor Company in 1901, who changed its name
to the Gillette Safety Razor Company in 1902, Gillette published
The Human Drift in 1894. While acknowledging that “[n]o reform
movement can meet with success unless that movement takes into
consideration the power of capital, and is based on present business
methods, and conforms to the same laws” (4), Gillette’s Human
Drift railed against competition, which he believed was “the prolific
source of ignorance and every form of crime, and that [which]
increases the wealth of the few at the expense of the many…the
present system of competition between individuals results in fraud,
deception, and adulteration of almost every article we eat, drink,
or wear.” Competition resulted in “a waste of material and labor
beyond calculation.” Competition was the source of “selfishness,
war between nations and individuals, murder, robbery, lying, prostitution, forgery, divorce, deception, brutality, ignorance, injustice,
drunkenness, insanity, suicide, and every other crime, [which] have
their base in competition and ignorance. This explains the recent
Gillette ad; the company has finally discovered that the root of
competition, and thus, of all evil, is toxic masculinity.
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But the corporate socialist King Camp Gillette may as well have
patented the disposable safety razor to prevent so many desperate
people from cutting their throats—at least until they realized the
answer to all of their problems, which he had introduced in Human
Drift: a singular monopoly, which would “naturally” control all
production and distribution, specializing in everything, such that
“every article sold to consumer, from the package to its contents, will
be the product of the United Company.” Under the United Company,
the production of necessary goods, and eventually of everything,
would be consolidated and centralized, eliminating the waste and
hazards of the many and widely dispersed manufacturing plants
and buildings of the current haphazard and chaotic system. Most
cities and towns would “destroyed,” as would all competitors, as the
vast majority of the population would relocate to “The Metropolis,”
where, powered by Niagara Falls, all production would take place
and everyone’s lives would center around the corporation, whose
commercial and governmental power would be total.
Lest one think that The Human Drift represented the lark of a
young idealist before he came to his senses and founded a company
with almost unparalleled name recognition, Gillette went on to
publish the World Corporation in 1910, a prospectus for developing
a world-wide singular monopoly. But, founding his company and
patenting his razor between writing these two treatises, Gillette’s
biographer Russel Adams quipped, “[i]t was almost as if Karl Marx
had paused between The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital to
develop a dissolving toothbrush or collapsible comb.” (Adams, 1978)
A few passages from World Corporation should be sufficient to
establish Gillette as the prototypical corporate socialist:
CORPORATIONS WILL CONTINUE TO FORM, ABSORB, EXPAND,
AND GROW, AND NO POWER OF MAN CAN PREVENT IT. Promoters
[of World Corporation] are the true socialists of this generation, the
actual builders of a co-operative system which is eliminating competition, and in a practical business way reaching results which socialists
have vainly tried to attain through legislation and agitation for centuries
(Gillette 1910, 9).
Opposition to “WORLD CORPORATION” by individuals, by states, or
by governments will be of no avail. Opposition in any case can only
be of temporary effect, barriers will only centralize power and cause
increased momentum when they give way (Gillette 1910, 62).
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The corporation will dominate material but also mental
production, as Gillette praises the hive mind:
“WORLD CORPORATION” represents individual intelligence and force
combined, centralized and intelligently directed. Individuals are OF the
corporate mind, but are not THE corporate mind (Gillette 1910, 45).
And, as if anticipating Google’s secret mission statement,
Gillette wrote:
“WORLD CORPORATION” will possess all knowledge of all men, and
each individual mind will find complete expression through the great
Corporate Mind.
Finally, waxing poetic in Ray Kurzweil mode, Gillette wrote:
“WORLD CORPORATION” will have life everlasting. Individual man
will live his life and pass into the great beyond; but this great Corporate
Mind will live on through the ages, always absorbing and perfecting, for
the utilization and benefit of all the inhabitants of the earth.
It is worth noting that Gillette’s business practices were not
wholly at odds with the ideas in his books. True to his monopolistic
impulses, he regularly filed patents, and in 1917 with the outbreak
of World War I, the company provided every soldier with a shaving
kit, paid for by the U.S. government. But did Gillette’s expressions
of corporate socialism actually help his business efforts, or merely
ease his guilty conscience? We can’t be sure, but speculating about
the objectives of today’s corporate leftists may help make sense of
the rhetoric of such corporate leftists of the past.
Today’s corporate social justice rebranding represents at least a
rhetorical overthrow of Milton Friedman’s extremely narrow view
of corporate responsibility. In Capitalism and Freedom ([1962] 2002),
Friedman declared that the “one and only one ‘social responsibility’
of business” is to “increase profits.”9 Friedman won the Nobel Prize in
9
In 1962, Friedman argued against the value of “corporate responsibility” that is
expressed by woke capitalism. In a section entitled, “Social Responsibility of
Business and Labor,” Friedman wrote: “The view has been gaining widespread
acceptance that corporate officials and labor leaders have a ‘social responsibility’
Michael Rectenwald: Libertarianism(s) versus Postmodernism…
135
Economics in 1976 and by the mid-1980s Friedman’s notion of limited
corporate “social responsibility” had become widely accepted.
Yet woke capitalism may still satisfy Friedman’s profit-only
maxim. If all the world’s a stage, then the corporate mouthing of
social justice bromides may be play-acting and therefore mawkish
parody. To be truly woke, then, might mean that one is awake to
the woke-acting corporations, the woke-believing consumers, and
maybe even the demands of wokeness altogether. This explanation
is consistent with the profit requirement and allows one to make
short-shrift of newly found corporate virtue. It is a cynical sham
and proves more than ever that the chicanery of corporations and
their billionaire owners knows no bounds. This view is similar to
that held by Anand Giridharadas (2019), critic of woke billionaires
and author of Winners Take All.10
Now, as tempting as such “post-truth” cynicism may be, it doesn’t
explain the promotion of woke or leftist views by corporations and
the effects that such promotions may have in making their consumer
bases more leftist, a circumstance they will have to deal with at some
point. Arguably, corporations would not espouse and thereby potentially spread political views merely to assuage a consumer contingent,
unless said views ultimately aligned with their own interests. One is
led to wonder what politics would best serve the interests of corporate
leftists, especially aspiring corporate socialists.
To benefit corporate leftists, corporate socialists, or any monolithic singular producer and governmentality, a political creed
would likely place a heavy emphasis on equality. Such an emphasis
would likely be accompanied by shaming of the privileged along
with demands that they surrender their advantages. To emphasize
equality, the creed benefitting the corporate leftist would recognize
refugees, the disenfranchised, and at least in theory would be
internationalist rather than nationalist or nativist. While declaring
that goes beyond serving the interest of their stockholders or their members. This
view shows a fundamental misconception of the character and nature of a free
economy. In such an economy, there is one and 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.” Friedman ([1962] 2002).
10
See Feloni (2019).
136
Quart J Austrian Econ (2019) 22.2:122–138
equality, the political creed of the corporate leftist might nevertheless stress difference—between identity groups and even within
them—and might benefit from the creation of utterly new identity
types. Such a creed would consistently keep the identity groups
concerned with whether or not they were losing ground to other
identity groups rather than worrying about the corporate socialist.
Watch words might include “equity, inclusion, and diversity.”
Always on the cutting edge, the corporate leftist would welcome
the promotion of the new and the disruption of the old, but
always with improvement in mind. A political creed that aimed at
dismantling traditional gender, the family, local customs, tradition,
and even historical memory would remove the last bastions against
state or major corporate power. Ultimately, the corporate leftist or
corporate socialist would benefit from a singular governmental
monopoly, with one set of rules. As Gillette noted, ideally this
global government would be the corporation itself.
Thus, woke capitalism or corporate leftism does not consist
merely of rhetorical placebos, symbolic over economic concessions,
or even the mere placating of liberal political elites. Woke capitalism
or corporate leftism actually represents the corporate interests of
the would-be monopolist, the corporate socialist, and the corporate
leftist in general.
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