Marketwatch Goes Marxistwatch
Is there something in the air? The water? Hamburgers? How come everywhere you look, in the least expected places you look, everyone is falling all over themselves to be "woke" along the lines of Teen Vogue?
The latest is Marketwatch.
I'm not kidding. This comes from Marketwatch. Nicholas Tampio and Enzo Rossi, profs of poli sci, write:
The argument that we make here was presaged by Karl Marx in his famous essay, "On the Jewish Question." According to Marx, capitalism is happy to extend political freedom to more and more people. Capitalism wants a lot of people to work and consume.Discriminating against laborers or buyers does not make business sense--especially for large corporations with a global reach. But that is a very different thing that granting the majority of people the right to control the means of production.
Woke and exploitative
Capitalism is a pyramid with a small number of owners and managers on top of a large base of workers. Capitalism, to restate Marx's idea, is woke and exploitative.To be clear: we agree with many theorists of racial capitalism that capitalism as it currently exists disproportionately harms people of color, if only because the racial wealth gap is concentrated at the top 10% of all races by now, as Matt Bruenig recently noted: "The lower and middle deciles of each racial group own virtually none of their racial group's wealth."
Charisse Burden-Stelly observes that "Blackness expresses a structural location at the bottom of the labor hierarchy characterized by depressed wages, working conditions, job opportunities, and widespread exclusion from labor unions." This seems like an accurate description of places like Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia, or the Bijlmer neighborhood in Amsterdam, Holland and many other such places in rich countries.
The racial capitalism literature enriches our understanding of the racial dynamic of what Marx called primitive accumulation, the seedy side of capitalism that depends on extralegal resource extraction, brutally repressive policing of the underclass, and so forth.
Wokewash
However, racial capitalism does not seem to apply to elite institutions of higher education or modern corporations that have diversified their leadership. "Lesser" organizations may or may not follow this trend, but elite ones set the tone that makes something like cancel culture a widespread reality that can take away the livelihood of (often innocent) ordinary workers.Capitalism still exploits leadership, but the leadership is becoming evermore rainbow colored. That is why we think that woke capitalism, rather than racial capitalism, is the ascendant order of the day.
To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, the old racial capitalism is dying and the new woke capitalism is not fully born yet. Arguably, woke capitalism is transracial rather than postracial, and it remains to be seen whether a truly postracial capitalism can be achieved.
What is clear is that while the woke transformation of capitalism admittedly improves the opportunities of some people of color, it does little to address the fundamental problems of capital's exploitation of people and planet, and it may even work as a new legitimation story--call it wokewash--for capitalism's old racket.
The obsession on color is making for increased racism, resentment, and discrimination. Now, however, it's just okay and even "good" to discriminate against whites, Jews, and Asians.
P.S. This is not progress. It is regress. And people for this sort of thing would more accurately call themselves "regressives." Or, for simplicity's sake, "racists."
Oh, and finally, this "granting" business...
But that is a very different thing that granting the majority of people the right to control the means of production.
...is what we call theft of one person's labor and the thuggish "donation" of it to another.
Marketwatch has been trending leftward for quite some time now.
The view expressed in this piece assumes workers have no agency and must be granted wealth by some benefactor, i.e., the government. Wealth is created, not granted.
In capitalism, workers, even minority ones, are free to invent and innovate, free to build their own wealth or to squander it.
It's telling that this piece was written not by economists or business professionals, but by professors of political science (not a real science).
The "woke" capitalism that the authors advocate is nothing more than capitalism with an eye toward the marketing opportunities available in showing oneself to be "woke" - i.e., exploiting a heretofore untapped market of minority consumers anxious for validation.
It exists because segments of those minorities have been building wealth and economic influence. However, it's not going to magically put wealth in the hands of working class minorities; its main beneficiaries will be those minority segments who have already been building their own wealth.
Conan the Grammarian at September 12, 2020 5:49 AM
I suspect that the reason this sort of racialized thinking has exploded is because many people have thought this way all along. They were just concealing it because of the social stigma that had been attached to such ideas.
And you'll notice that it's most prominent among the same people who've been accusing us all of 'covert racism' and speaking in 'racist dog whistles' all these years. Now it's apparent that they were the dog whistling racists all along - a classic case of projection.
Sam at September 12, 2020 8:11 AM
If you can hear the whistle, you're the dog.
I R A Darth Aggie at September 12, 2020 9:00 AM
but by professors of political science (not a real science)
So true
Aslo if capitalism sucks so much why is it the only economic engine in all of human history to REDUCE world wide poverty?
Thanks to capitalism todays homeless live better lives than the nobility did 500 years ago
lujlp at September 12, 2020 10:44 AM
"capital's exploitation of people and planet" this is backwards. All economic systems "exploit" the planet by farming and mining, but communist countries pollute far more than democracies and have lower standards of living.
It is not capital that does anything. There is no such thing as capitalism. You have varying levels of government control of markets. The US has a mixed economy, with some services provided by gov and many regulations (e.g. zoning, permits). In a communist country, there is still capital, still banks, it is all just controlled by the gov. The "people" do not control anything in for example the old soviet union or in China. Even in modern china, the bulk of people do not have much if any "wealth". The idea that communism solves the "problem" (and i put quotes because it is not a problem) of wealth inequality is simply delusional--it never has and never will. In Cuba castro and cronies were rich, the people poor. Same in Venezuela. Same in North Korea. They exploit envy to gain power but then grab wealth for themselves.
As to race, I would point out 2 things: slavery is as old as humanity and was worldwide 200 yrs ago. Every country. The Brits grabbed Irish to be sailors--they had no choice. etc. But who shut down the slave system around the world: white people, beginning with the brits then the US.
Second, for over 50 years the doors of opportunity have been open. It is long enough for blacks to have a career in medicine, engineering, the military, whatever and retire, even die of old age. The persistent cultural problem of inner city attitudes and habits cannot be changed by outsiders. this is what keeps blacks down--not systemic racism, not oppression.
cc at September 12, 2020 1:46 PM
I like Amy Alkon's politics.
Crid at September 12, 2020 10:25 PM
I like Amy Alkon's politics.
Crid at September 12, 2020 10:25 PM
I like Amy Alkon's politics.
Crid at September 12, 2020 10:29 PM
I like Amy Alkon's politics.
Crid at September 12, 2020 10:29 PM
I don't like them THAT much, her site hosting service is fucked up.
But Amy's had more excellent, perceptive and nuanced commentary in 2020 than in any year heretofore.
And this isn't meant to diminish the compliment in any way… But the stupidities floating around this year may have made it somewhat easier.
Crid at September 13, 2020 10:32 AM
Dear Miss Alkon
Prof. Henry Higgins recognised the nub of the problem some time ago:
Not everyone has the luck to be plucked out of it by an outsider. How much drive do you need to get out of a slum?
Perhaps some use their drive to keep everyone else from leaving.
DP
DP at September 14, 2020 4:30 AM
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