It is now Elon Musk’s turn to face the challenge of facing down the intolerant social justice crusaders. Since he bought Twitter, Musk has emerged as Public Enemy Number One of the ‘if it moves, it must be censored’ brigade. They organised the #StopToxicTwitter campaign with a coalition of more than 60 advocacy organisations and pressure groups [i.

No sooner did Musk claim that he was a free speech absolutist before social justice crusaders started to vent their hatred against a man who promised to get rid of the regime of language policing on the Internet. Now organisations like #StopToxicTwitter have shifted their focus and argue that since Musk got rid of so many Twitter employees, the company can no longer maintain content moderation standards.

Like many previous campaigns targeting a particular company, StopToxicTwitter has pressured corporates to pull their advertising from the Twitter platform. Major advocacy campaign groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) have demanded that corporations distance themselves from Twitter. NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson wrote, "until [actions] are taken to make Twitter a safe space, corporations cannot in good conscience put their money behind Twitter.” Johnson declared, "Twitter must earn its advertisers by creating a platform that safeguards our democracy and rids itself of any account that spews hate and misinformation”.

Many companies swiftly yielded to pressure in response to the campaign targeting Twitter. In a pair of tweets, Musk claimed Twitter suffered a "massive drop in revenue" after he purchased the platform and stepped in as CEO due to activist groups pressuring advertisers to discontinue ad purchases.

The New York Times reported that ‘growing fear that misinformation and hate speech would be allowed to proliferate on the platform led many large corporations to suspend advertising on Twitter. The boycott campaign did not have to do much campaigning to get large corporates like American Airlines General Motors, Anheuser-Busch, Disney and Procter & Gamble to roll over and pull their ads. Even the organisers of the boycott campaign were surprised by the speed with which Twitter’s top 20 advertisers stated that they were either considering a spending pause or implementing one.

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Musk responded by accusing ‘activist groups’ of ‘trying to destroy free speech in America’. It did not matter that since Musk bought Twitter, nothing had changed with content moderation; the mere possibility that Musk would loosen the policing of speech on Twitter was enough to provoke the anger of opponents of free speech. From their standpoint, it is mandatory that Musk and any of the major players involved in social media should be taught a lesson: that the regulation of speech is here to stay.

It is significant that President Joe Biden joined in to give a lead to the anti-free speech lobby. Adopting a histrionic tone, Biden asserted that ‘Elon Musk goes out and buys an outfit that sends and spews lies all across the world’. Biden dishonestly claimed that ‘there’s no editors anymore’ and asked ‘How do we expect kids to be able to understand what is at stake?’

Musk has threatened to name and shame advertisers who joined the boycott of his platform. However, his threat to retaliate against advertisers who left Twitter by organising a counter-boycott of these companies is unlikely to work because the corporate elite has embraced the intolerant ideology of social justice crusaders.

Hostility to a Musk-owned Twitter is communicated through an alarmist narrative that insists that allowing free speech on this platform would lead to an explosion of fake news and racist Hate Speech, which would lead to violence. And the mere suggestion that anyone who does not distance itself from Twitter is complicit in the dissemination of ‘extremist activity, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, disinformation and more’ is sufficient to pressure corporates to demonstrate that they are on the right side of history.

They have really embraced the intolerant dogma of social justice.

The willingness of Big Corporation to enthusiastically respond to the demands of social justice activists has come as a surprise to older generations of conservatives, liberals and even socialists who have tended to regard the capitalist class as inherently opposed to radical progressivism and the politicisation of the market and economic relations.

Numerous commentators suggest that what’s at work is simply a case of ‘woke washing’, of brands cashing in on the culture wars. The implication of the charge of woke-washing is that the branding of woke virtues is merely an opportunistic public relations exercise. Others assert that the wokeness of capitalist firms will not endure or that it is not as influential as it appears.

Writing in this vein, a commentator in the Wall Street Journal asserted that the American business community is on balance, all right:

‘The problem isn’t the American corporation. The problem is a small but influential and unbearably sanctimonious swath of leaders who’ve gone ga-ga over progressive politics’.

This assessment overlooks the dramatic transformation of the ideological outlook that prevails in the corporate world. Anyone reading leading management publications like The Harvard Business Review will note that its content bears an uncanny resemblance to the identity politics-inspired narratives that prevail in the higher education sector. When a commentator writing for the American business magazine Forbes informs readers that Woke Capitalism is good for the profit margins, it becomes evident that capitalism has undergone a massive rebranding exercise. Commentators in the mainstream media are in no doubt that ‘CEO activism has become the New Normal’.

Because of Big Business's vociferous support for the Black Lives Matter movement, many members of the public have become aware of the dramatic transformation of corporate ideology. Capitalist firms not only compete with one another for a bigger market share, but now they also compete to gain the maximum exposure for their woke credentials. All it took was for a Nike public relations campaign to respond to the protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd to tweet with a white letter on a black background, ‘Let’s all be part of change’, before numerous other brands piled in with the same message. One observer commented, ‘suddenly our social feeds were black and white and branded’!

In effect, an alliance of campaigning NGOs, the mainstream media, woke corporations and sections of the American political establishment have declared war on Musk. They are determined for Twitter to remain an intensely regulated social-media platform. Essentially, this coalition wants to ensure that the woke elites retain their role as social media’s gatekeepers.

Sermon “Beware: Gatekeepers of the Lord”. Sunday October 7 2018. Trinity Church, Newport RI. The Reverend Alan Neale

Corporates and their social justice supporters wish to monopolise the gateway to social media platforms.

Politicians, the mainstream media and big business rightly recognise that retaining their monopoly over social media is essential for maintaining their political and cultural hegemony more broadly. As long as they can decide what can and cannot be said on social media, they can deprive their opponents of a voice.

The Three Phases of the Genealogy of Woke capitalism

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Since the 1970s, it has been possible to identify three distinct phases in the genealogy of woke capitalism. During these different phases, large corporations began to internalise a cultural script that promoted social responsibility, ethical capitalism, sustainability and diversity. The values communicated through this script were actively promoted by a new industry of consultants, trainers and advisors. Often lobby groups and NGOs advocating these sentiments were employed by corporations to help ensure that their image and reputation reflected them. The development of an orientation towards cultivating a marketable corporate identity and branding ran in parallel with the development of identity politics.

Although these different phases overlap, it is useful to make a conceptual distinction between them as follows:

1. The 1980s and 1990s saw corporations become increasingly hospitable to post-material boomer values. At this point, corporate mission statements began to highlight a commitment to environmentalism and sustainability. Companies also undertook to take the question of racial and gender equality seriously. It was through the medium of Human Resources that post-material boomer values became integrated into corporate culture.

2. During the decades that followed, corporations radically transformed their internal office structure. Workplace relations became increasingly formalised, and codes of behaviour gradually limited the role of traditional banter and office politics. At this point, a code of conduct about bullying and harassment proliferated. At the same time, many corporations undertook to protect the interests of different stakeholders. At least at the level of rhetoric, there was a perceptible shift from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism.

3. During the past 10-15 years, corporations began to internalise the outlook of identity politics, and gradually more and more CEOs embraced woke causes and their side of the culture war. The most important development of this era was the rise in the political activism of corporations. Companies have always sought to influence the political process behind the scenes. However, during this period, their activity became self-consciously assertive and public.

The past decade has seen a dramatic reversal in the United States between the attitudes of Republicans and Democrats towards corporate power. Polls show conservative support for business plunging. Morning Consult found that the share of Republicans saying they trust corporate America had fallen from 53 per cent last October to 39 per cent in May 2021, while Democrats are now more likely to trust business.

It is important to realise that what is at issue is not simply the transformation of the business culture but also of businesspeople, particularly the CEOs of the leading sectors of the corporate world. Bill Gates of Microsoft, Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fink of Blackrock, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan, and PayPal Chief Executive Dan Schulman, for example, personify a new corporate executive type. They are very different from the old type of Protestant Ethic influenced capitalists. They are committed to redefining the purpose of a corporation away from solely serving shareholders to a diffuse notion of public duty.

These executives reflect the cultural attitudes promoted in higher education, business schools, publications and the media. The views of these so-called ethical capitalists were codified in August 2019, when the CEOs of nearly 200 multinational corporations signed a statement issued by the Business Roundtable publicly pledging to lead their companies for the benefit of customers, employees, suppliers, and communities in addition to shareholders. That sentiment was also echoed in The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a statement offered by World Economic Forum in December 2019.

Woke CEOs revel in their status as cultural celebrities and delight in demonstrating a degree of irrelevance towards society’s traditions. When you listen to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or the guys involved with new start-ups in London, they flaunt their commitment to being edgy and breaking taboos. This sentiment is constantly highlighted by the PR and advertising industry which encourages Brands to wear their social justice commitment on their sleeves and project the image of a taboo breaker. In effect, woke capitalism is in the business of creating new norms.

Some critics claim that all the corporate virtue signalling about gay marriage or gun control, or Black Lives Matter is simply an exercise in opportunism in public relations. Recently, Vivek Ramaswamy, who stepped down as CEO of his biotech firm Roivant Sciences in January, said in a New York Post op-ed on Tuesday that he was 'fed up' with corporate America pretending to care about social justice to boost profits. This is the argument of his new book, 'Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam'.

No doubt, many CEOs taking the knee are pragmatic and opportunistic individuals. But they are also the products of a cultural milieu hospitable to identity politics and hostile to traditional conservative and even classical liberal values. In effect, through their school and university education, many of today’s CEOs have been socialised into norms that underpin Cancel Culture. They are not merely scamming the social justice industry – they have become fully paid-up members.

With the recent intake of a millennial workforce, woke capitalism has come of age. Many millennials working at large corporations like Apple and Google expect to replicate their lifestyle in their place of work and demand that businesses become safe spaces for their identity play. They also expect their companies to support the latest woke fads.

Many critics of woke capitalism find it difficult to understand that the cultural attitudes driving Cancel Culture in universities are also prevalent inside many sectors of Big Business. Woke capitalism and its intervention in political life represent a far greater direct threat to democracy than Cancel Culture on campuses. Corporate power can have a formidable impact on political institutions and law-making. They have the economic muscle to threaten people’s livelihoods and force communities into submission. Curbing the political power of these sanctimonious authoritarian corporations is one of the most important challenges facing those of us committed to the cause of democracy.

These are democratically unaccountable institutions which wield great power over public life. They represent a clear and present danger to democracy.

Don’t imagine for one second that woke capitalism has reformed itself and has become the friend of the people. It is as exploitative and ruthless as the robber barons of the 19th century. Amazon – one of the world's largest companies – is imbued with woke values. It has also imposed a harsh regime of discipline on its workers. Amazon serves as living proof of the fact that wokeness does not make you nice or compassionate. On the contrary, when its intolerance is transposed into the workplace, the outcome is a harsh regime of labour discipline.

Cultural and economic domination go hand in hand in the world of woke capitalism. That is why fighting against their cultural values is no less important than restraining their economic power. Only a movement committed to the populist ideal of giving working people a voice can neutralise and defeat the corporate attempt to use their economic power to control our lives.

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