Facebook and the end of "woke capital"
Zuckerberg's antiwoke turn presents a serious problem for the right's theory of "woke capitalism."
Facebook (or “Meta,” I guess) is shuttering its major DEI programs, according to Axios. This is just the latest in a number of internal moves meant to distance the company from egalitarian politics. On Thursday, for example, Sam Biddle reported at The Intercept that Meta’s speech guidelines are now more tolerant of hate speech; and today, 404media reported that Meta has removed trans and nonbinary themes from its messaging application.
I don’t think many socialists will be surprised by a giant corporation like Meta going antiwoke — but what about the right? It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that the right offered its own critique of what it called “woke capitalism”: in their telling, wokeness has systematically captured corporate America, which in turn imposes the woke agenda on hapless consumers and workers. Here’s a typical explanation by Darel E. Paul:
Woke capital is the result of an interaction within the corporation between the professional and managerial classes. Its impulse is professional-class employees, especially in the creative industries, who press employers to serve their class interests in autonomy, personal fulfillment, and progressive social values… In addition, both classes are strongly influenced by the unusual and increasingly dysfunctional culture of the American university, the institutional crucible of wokeness.
Certainly Meta should serve as an exemplary case-in-point for this argument. It has a large base of professional-class employees who, even as I write this, are pressing their employers to maintain “progressive social values”. But if such things were enough to impose a woke culture on corporate America, then how can we explain Meta’s behavior over the past week?
Here’s an alternative explanation: like every other firm in a capitalist economy, Facebook has a powerful incentive to avoid and resist government regulation. Doing so maximizes their ability to pursue profits without constraint. And with a Republican trifecta sweeping into power this month, Zuckerberg is worried about the possibility that regulations like the American Innovation and Choice Online Act will hurt business. He also, as Kevin Roose speculates in The New York Times, may be “cozying up to the incoming Trump administration” in order to secure contracts and other advantages from the government. Additionally, Zuckerberg also has an interest in maintaining Trump’s support for types of immigration that provide him with cheap labor, as Jessica Guynn notes in USA Today.
James McElroy, writing for The American Mind, argued in 2020 that “Facebook’s actions…cannot be explained in terms of profit.” But here we see that capitalism can account entirely for Meta’s antiwoke turn; ultimately, capitalism’s demand for profits is far more powerful than any woke influences coming from professional class employees or the universities.
None of this, to be clear, should be read as an argument that antiwokeness is necessarily more profitable than wokeness. The point is just that under capitalism, firms have no intrinsic commitment to either — they just follow the profits, which can lead them left or right with the shifting political winds. This political fickleness is why socialists have long been suspicious of rainbow capitalism, but you would think that it would give conservatives pause too: why would anyone want to live in a world where prevailing political norms change moment to moment depending on what’s best for business? This works out great for ruling class capitalists like Zuckerberg, but it’s less than ideal for everyone else.
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