Review of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business by Stephen R. Soukup (2021)
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The Fall, 2021 edition of American Affairs, a journal of culture, philosophy, and politics contains a 4300-word review of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, by Stephen R. Soukup, a book, at its heart, about stakeholder capitalism and ESG investing. Though the review, written by Ronald W. Dworkin, is, more than anything, a discourse on dialectics and examines Soukup’s unwillingness to use the term to explain what he described as “woke capital,” one would be hard-pressed to find many books about markets and investing in the pages of such journals. ESG appears to be something different altogether. From the review:
| " | “[I]f Soukup had paid more attention to Marx, he might have found a better way to explain “woke capital”—and to fight it. In a supreme irony, those seeking to advance a center-right agenda today could benefit from reading Marx.
Marx thought dialectically. What does this mean? Take a certain social phenomenon: it develops to its utmost limits, makes use of all its potentialities, creates the highest thing it can, and stops. This is called the thesis. Then comes the antithesis, a hostile force. It also unfolds to the very end, and stops. Born out of these two hostile phenomena is a third force, the synthesis, making use of the result achieved by both, and reconciling them. And society moves forward again, always forward, toward the new. A rough dialectical history of the United States since the end of the Civil War might be said to unfold as follows, with woke capitalism the most recent entry. In 1870, most Americans worked as independent small farmers. Most business firms were also small, with one or two employees besides the owner. A culture of individualism and a religious ethos that gently repressed greed complemented this economy. The country prospered, yet the economy’s small scale limited how much it could produce. This was the thesis. Hostile forces emerged in the form of robber barons who built large corporations, sometimes through deceit and manipulation. A culture of social Darwinism that equated worldly success with spiritual superiority replaced the older, more innocent religious ethos. Many Americans found themselves subject to both the vicissitudes of the market and business chicanery, as large companies undercut their ability to make a living as independent operators. Indeed, one of the most important changes in the U.S. economy during the second half of the nineteenth century was the dramatic increase in the size of the average enterprise, along with a reduction in the number of firms in each sector. The new system produced more wealth than before through improved economies of scale, yet its boisterous atmosphere created uncertainty, and it soon reached its productive limits. This was the antithesis. Corporate America and welfare-state liberalism were the synthesis.”[1] |
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See also
- Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG)
- Economy and Society: Ballotpedia's ESG newsletter
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
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