Profane Existence: Capital Goes from Woke to MAGA

 In the US every presidential election is treated as a transformation of the nation, of the zeitgeist, like Brecht's line about the government electing itself a new people made true. This is especially true of the chattering pundit class who have greeted every election from Obama to Trump as a transformation not just of government but the nation. There is no small irony in this given low voter turnout, small margins, and anti-democratic institutions like the electoral college. What is often a small shift in numbers is treated as a major shift in values and ideals.

In the second election of Donald Trump one place this zietgeist shift took place was in corporate boardrooms. Dozens of corporations have abandoned or curtailed their commitment DEI. With the recent firings of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel it seems that we have gone from Woke Capital to MAGA Capital, and given the fact that I have written about "woke" capital here, and here, I thought that I would write about this shift.

As I argued before, the backdrop of any of these questions is a simple, but unfortunately overlooked fact, capital exists to accumulate capital first and foremost. What is often presented as "woke" capital, such as movies that cast minority actors in "white" roles, the yearly Pride celebration of every corporation, and sales for every religious holiday are just attempts to expand customer bases and accumulate revenue. What is often presented as a revolution of values or an imposition of the values of elites onto a populace is just a search for profit. Sometimes the invisible hand holds a pride flag. Adam Smith recognized something similar in the way that commercial interests brought down the feudal lords by offering something to buy. As he writes, 

"A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness, was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people, who had not the least intention to serve the public: To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchant and the artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of one and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.”

I cite Smith because it constantly frustrates me the way in which apologists for capitalism fail to understand its basic dynamics. Capital seeks profits, and in doing so it is indifferent to any norms, values, or hierarchies. Of course the locus classicus of this process comes not from Smith, capitalism’s most famous advocate, but from Marx, its most famous critic. As Marx writes, 

"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."

The revolutionary dimension of capitalism is something that both Smith and Marx agree on despite their other differences in terms of what this means. For Smith this revolutionary dimension is one of the many side effects of the pursuit of self-interest. It is of course possible to see this shift from woke to MAGA as driven by a similar pursuit of profit. To do so would be to put too much trust in the invisible hand, and overlook the visible hand of the state. The elimination of DEI programs follows Trump's executive order eliminating DEI. Of course such orders are not binding, and this might be just an attempt to embrace an opportunity on the part of CEOs and others who only reluctantly agreed to put on a veneer of diversity in the pursuit of profits. The cancellation of DEI programs reveals something of the difference between the woke and MAGA moments of capitalism. Woke capital was public facing, oriented to the customers, celebrating diversity to diversify the market: MAGA capital is more oriented towards the central office, promising a relief from programs that give power to workers to contest discrimination. 

Woke Capital is oriented towards the market, adding diversity to Marx's list of "freedom, equality, and Bentham. In contrast to this MAGA capital is not so much oriented towards the back room, although there is a promise of a restoration of labor discipline, of a reduction of the power of unions and the promise of equal opportunity to curtail management directives, but to the stock holders. Its promise is not so much oriented towards consumers, but to the owners and investors.

This is even more clear when we get to the big firings of the last few weeks, of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, both were connected to parent companies that needed mergers approved by the Trump administration. It is possible to see MAGA capital as one in which capital is being reconfigured around Trump, in order to do business you have to kiss the proverbial ring. There is much to be said about this kind of crony capitalism that Trump is imposing, in which deals, tariffs, and everything depends on how much you please the king. However, what is striking is that when Trump writes about these firings he always refers to their ratings (and talent). Of course this could be an attempt to put a democratic sheen on an authoritarian action, and Trump has always couched his destruction of democracy in the terms of the pseudo-democracy of ratings, retweets, and crowd sizes. He claims popularity even as his popularity dwindles. I do not think that this is just a feint or distraction, an attempt to displace responsibility to ratings, but a veiled assertion that it is capital that is calling the shots. Trump is an authoritarian without authority, and can only ever borrow the vague authority of business and profits, after all he played a businessman on television. Trump prefers the metrics of ratings and profits in part because they are the only power he recognizes and it part because of their tendencies to reflect the preferences of the racial majorities over minorities. "Go woke, go broke" is the mantra of a particular kind of criticism that takes the market as its standard precisely because of economies of scale, at least in the US, where cultural products aimed at white heterosexual families do better than than those reflecting the viewpoints and perspectives of minorities. If woke capital was predicated on the claim that capital values diversity, that a diversification of markets was synonymous with diversity, then MAGA capital is a reminder that any values are secondary to the accumulation of value.