Why Corporations Embrace Anti-Racism
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- Опубліковано 15 вер 2024
- On The Jacobin Show, co-hosts Jen, Paul, and Ariella discuss why corporations love anti-racism and why the language of racial justice is easily embraced by the investor class.
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Intersectionality and wokeness was always suspect to people concerned about class.
You don't have to ignore race in order to focus on class. Pretending that systemic racism doesn't exist is nothing but intellectual foolishness
@@ATLKing404 Not what Chris Morlock said.
@@ATLKing404 what an absurd straw man. This is exactly how the elite argue to keep people fighting about BS that has littlle to no relevance while they continue to rape and pillage all the little people
This discussion reflects the complexity of race and class. Corporations want diversity of race without diversity of class. Note that the corporations who are strong opponents of unions have not used their union fighting skills on opposing police unions.
I can see that. There are different races in wall street, but they are all sons and daughters of businessmen from all over the world
Thanks to our Atomized culture, or how less sociable we've all become, Capital doesn't need racism as much to keep the working class divided.
The anti-racism issue is about pandering. .Corporations are used to doing that.
And the pandering is about dividing. The oppressors have and always will use anything they can to divide people. Race, sexuality, gender, religion, language, how to peel an egg - ANYTHING. Anything to keep us from uniting about the thing that unites us all (aside from simple shared humanity): our shared economic oppression
@@Cheyne4Chelsea But I'm not economically oppressed.
@@donjindra Nonetheless you have a choice of whether to care about those who are
@@Cheyne4Chelsea Very few are. People usually make their own problems.
@@donjindra Sure. I look around the world, and I see equal opportunity everywhere
For the algorithm ✊
Interacting with the interaction to feed the algorithm.
+
@@cdixonweekes Interacting with the interaction interacting with interaction to feed the algorithm.
Nudge, nudge, Al Go Rithm.
double meta
i don’t think these three ever broke a sweat on a work day.
Ya I was going to comment on something else but I’m not part of this club. They don’t want me.
I have a friend who wrote copy for a corporation including their annual holiday Calendar. They praised her for her historically accurate Juneteenth article and actually censored her historically accurate Labor Day article, which included information about the Pullman Strike and Haymarket Affair, because they said „we don’t want to offend our vendors“. I think this anecdote demonstrates that corporate power and left politics are contrary to one another.
Although it’s great that a handful of POC are getting higher pay, and it might have a few positive effects, but in general I think the institution representation will have a similar effect as Condoleezza Rice being the voice for invading Iraq, or numerous other examples that our similar like CEO of military contractors being women.
People will think it’s progressive until they see through the smoke screen.
To answer their question posed in the title, corporations are profit-maximizing entities by definition. All else equal, there are two ways of increasing profits: raise prices or lower costs. If there is a demand by the public to address racial inequality, or structural racism, or whatever you want to call it, that can seemingly be met by finding a diverse candidate for a job and paying them still less than it would cost to raise the wages/salaries of all “diverse” employees to the standards of “non-diverse” employees (however you choose to define “diverse” and “non-diverse” in this context), that’s the option they’ll go with. Additionally, among those they employ are people specifically trained in the art of being able to frame a debate to be as much in favor of their corporate overlords as possible, and many times the leaders of populist movements on the left fall for the trap of engaging on the terms preferred by corporations, a field on which we will not win, since they can afford to devote literally small armies of people to coming up with each and every possible response to every possible objection to their actions.
I'm not sure I buy Paul's generalization of the protests. The BLM march I attended in my city, the fifth most populated in California, was organized by local black activists with help from the NAACP, and the majority of the participants were black. It could simply be that the protests which generate the most attention happen to be the ones in very white cities like Portland.
What do you think about the fraud charges coming up against various local chapters and high end organizers for embezzeling donations? Also how do you think these cases splinter out into the smaller sects of the overall movement?
@@mynameskobe6838 I haven't read anything about this, but I know many people were angry at Patrice Cullors for buying a fancy house in a white neighborhood. Cooptation of mass movements by liberal NGO grifters is inevitable. It doesn't discredit the genuine outrage at police brutality, nor the millions of people who protested for racial justice.
Thanks for Posting. So many fall for the ruling class project of multicultural neoliberalism. 💕 Love you cats 😺!
Sometimes they like to half-implement a social program disingenuously just to generate a bad example. They throw up their hands and say it's been tried.
Are you aware of Coca-Cola‘s “anti-racism” training?
It was exemplary of what these DEI programs offer.
Yep! It’s a box checking and to create the appearance that they are dealing with this to silence critique.
Great job . Real shit.
It is always a great pleasure to listen to the rhetoric of extremely smart young people.
Enjoying a healthy dose of mental self-touching?
Jen rocks!
*#CorporateWokeness*
*#HowellUnderground*
Screw off with the hashtags
Love what y'all are doing. ✊🏿✊🏿Like the intro music too
What a great conversation. 👍
Or it could just be to avoid lawsuits...
What about the tech companies that talk about diversity and inclusion on nonstop but have no diversity or inclusion
That’s the way the game is played you see this with network TV shows also who promote diversity but will show minimal representation of Latino or Native Americans.
....you mean all of them?
looking forward to seeing these weekly. good stuff!
Identity politics will ALWAYS be leveraged against the left when class-based issues are on the table. "You didn't vote for the gay black female because she doesn't support single-payer healthcare? You're a racist, sexist, homophobe!"
We will never win the votes of working-class people in the south by focusing on identity politics. There will ALWAYS be racists, sexists, homophobes, and bigots in general. We will still need their support if we want to defeat neoliberalism. Class issues first, identity issues second.
If you are in a leaky boat with a diverse group of people, which thing should you do first: A) everyone dump water out of the boat, or B) examine eachother's differences on identity issues? Yes, there are working-class people that exist that dislike you for a stupid reason. However, as working-class people you both share much of the same class-based struggle. You need each-other, regardless of the existence of bigotry.
Because it doesn't affect their profit
On the topic of "this is not the civil rights movement part two", who remembers malcom in his autobiography ranting about white elites overtaking and hollowing out the grassroots black movements, calling the March on Washington "The Farce Of Washington"
Do you even know the history of the March on Washington
Supply and demand. The demand for slacktivism is at an all time high and it is very profitable.
The focus never seems to be more opportunities or pay raises for black Americans. They're more focused on representation in the upper class. So they push for more black actors, politicians, etc. but not more black managers in the workplace, or higher pay. This is why it seems so disingenuous. Do they really care about people of color? Because a lot of them still lack job opportunities and languish in poverty. There's no upward mobility.
They want upward mobility to be rare but they want it to be noted and meaningful, in order to gaslight the public.
It has always been a numbers game.
Sounds like typical corporate recuperation and capitalism. Its a preference for concessions rather than actual change because that would be radical and outside the their control or preferred status quo.
Kamala Harris is saying what you want to hear.
Pandering and money...
For the algorithm
awesome talk thanks
I get it, class is the only issue, representation in a corrupt system is a corrupt enterprise. But the glorious revolution can't succeed if the 'workers' aren't able to imagine anything other than being a 'worker'. Representation in leadership is key to creating more leaders.
Seriously. It’s easy for these three jaded academics to write-off corporate, social media activism. But some people, even some POC, are just basic and that’s what gets them involved and paying attention.
And good for you if you don’t care that your representatives and leaders look like you, but A LOT of people do. Especially young people.
what would MLK say about this recent systemic racism issue. I think we know what Malcom X would say.
connect the dots. who killed these great men? who promotes racism?
Free t-shirt for all three of you if you want it. #safershirts
Is this a joke?
this is thoughtful commentary from the left
Why the digs against Kendi? His antiracism is explicitly anticapitalist. He could not be more clear on that point.
While I don't see class as simply another identity or' intersection' - and Kendi's layout can lead one to see that in his work - I think to associate him with some kind of pro-capitalist stance is silly given his, as you point out, explicit position to the contrary.
@@non-standardproletarian3356 "While I don't see class as simply another identity or' intersection' "
I saw the recent Zero Squared saying the same thing, but I don't really understand the point. The image of an intersection is orthogonal lines converging--i.e. two or more incommensurable dimensions like an x-axis, y-axis, and z-axis.
Considering the interactions between race, class, and gender doesn't reduce them to being the same thing. It just means having a three dimensional analysis rather than one dimensional.
@@mikeberkey In capitalist states, 'class' has been obscured by reducing it to demographics based in fuzzy financial calculations (ie the colloquial use of 'the middle class') which further obscure the more insidious class dynamics between owners/employers and wage-earners/employees. Class analysis is more analogous to, say, ecosystem ecology, where energy flows and nutrient cycles are studied throughout the system, whereas what we refer to as 'intersectionality' or identity politics is more along the lines of population or community ecology where interactions between and among the latter is taken up. It would be silly - and far less objective - to say we 'intersect' with with our habitat since we're in an inseparable dialectical relationship, a co-evolutionary relationship - with our habitat . It's just as silly, though, to say a system, in this case an ecosystem, is somehow a 'thing' to which these relationships can be reduced to. It's a system.
The owners of the means of production - that is, the means of our subsistence - can be of any racial or gendered identity as can be the wage-earners, but the latter are still under the authority of the former in a capitalist state, be it a so-called liberal democracy or a semi-fascist dictatorship. In either case, it's a dictatorship of the capitalist class. The 'energy flows and nutrient cycles' of the entire system are under that class's authority. *How* that class warfare plays out across populations/communities (say, race and gender) is where the analyses of idpol (ie intersectionality) are better suited rather than in the register of the totality of the system. This is why I don't think class and identity play out as intersections within X and Y axes as both axes owned and controlled by the capitalist class, but neither are they mutually exclusive and most definitely need not be at war with each other...which only serves the ruling class.
@@non-standardproletarian3356 that's a very interesting framing
@@brucejohnston5845 That’s fair. But I guess I never cared about the man. His writings specifically are what I care about. I learned a lot from them.
Do better.
This is just a game for companies! Fix the issues with Native black Americans if you are serious!
❤️
👍
Alg
There's no pleasing some people
Though he's the complete opposite to you guys about most stuff, I think it would be worth listening to Dave Smith's (Ancap/libertarian) take on corporate wokeness. I'm a right-libertarian but I also like to listen to a lot of socialist content in earnest (eg Jacobin), and I'm always struck by how much the far left and far right actually have in common regarding the cancer of corporatism. Listen for about 4-5min from 41:44 onwards: ua-cam.com/video/yNx6mK12BWk/v-deo.html
It is interesting how opaque it has become, from both left and right, to see distinctions of perspective within different political groups or parties. I, for one, would not usually imagine a right-wing person criticizing corporatism (even though we can understand that there are very different possible reasons for the criticisms). In the same way, I would imagine that it is uncommon to a right-wing person to distinguish between the socialists and the liberals within the Democrats (or US left in general). This is something that I think is important: we need first to understand people's concerns/worries and after that understand how they articulate their diagnosis and their possible solutions.
Regarding this particular case of corporate wokeness, we very quickly get to the point of corporations trying to buy out some sort of political power. I've seen the part of the video you linked and, even though I disagree with some of his broader assumptions, I can somewhat understand his logic. Here, our concern is the same: corporations buying out political power. But the diagnosis is already very different, being that socialists would identify this as the effort do disengage racial (and gender an everything regarding identity) issues from class politics. That, again, would be in accord to the whole socialist/marxist/intersectional studies of the attempt by the ruling group to alienate (atomize, separate, estrange) the oppressed groups such that they can't realize the commonalities in their material conditions, thus becoming unable to form cohesive political resistance.
Hoping for better communication within left and right.
@@alexandreseidy3577 Thanks for your reply. When I started listening to far-left/socialist/an-com content I was surprised at how vitriolic they were toward the "establishment" Dems. I think that commonly on the right, we will know all our differences with each other, but (as you say) will think of "the left" as a generic block. I often hear people on both sides say exactly the same things but the other way round, such as: _"us on the [left/right] aren't united under a single banner and it's why we can never achieve anything in politics, but them on the [right/left] will put aside their differences and put up a united front against us."_ And funnily enough, I'm saying exactly the same statement here: the neo-lib/neo-con/unholy-corporatist-demon are fully united under the same banner, while us populists, whether left or right just squabble, and the corporatists squash us. And we sit around complaining, while the only other people who agree with us are the ones we demonise and hate the most.
I would love to hear better communication between left and right, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for friendly conversation about common ground (which is why I posted this link, in good faith). It seems to me that the only time the far-left and far-right talk is in an oppositional debate in which each side is trying to trash the other, each grandstanding to their own audience. It just seems so baked-in to all popular speakers/writers on both sides that moral posturing over the evil of the other side is essential, and nobody seems to want to sit down for a beer with the other (figuratively speaking). Fundamentally, the left and right have different core values (to be overly simplistic, left:equality, right:liberty) and maybe this makes it impossible for us to do anything but scorn the other for being so immoral. Maybe it's the moral cores on either side which hampers us, given that the neo-lib-neo-cons have none. But I think there's so much potential, I yearn to see somebody on either side reach out for a genuine conversation, not point-scoring. The left-right dichotomy just seems so much less important to me than the corporate/populist division.
@@NotQuiteFirst I think it is a very difficult and prolonged exercise, but I hope these genuine conversations could happen more often too. I do think that even in difference, there ought to exist some common ground that we can both recognize as important. We (right and left, generally speaking) will then probably disagree in diagnoses and solutions, but that's exactly where the debate should start. Here is my humble and personal idea for points where we could find such common ground: material conditions (education, health, living conditions and opportunities in life in general) and ethics (not quite morality).
The first point, I believe, is according with what you said: I too think the left-right dichotomy is a distraction to the corporate/populist division or, in a socialist language, capitalist/worker or even the classical bourgeoisie/proletariat division (sorry, I am not trying to "convince socialism is the better assessment" haha, I just want to point out that we might have some common concerns and that this is how I understand it from a socialist perspective). Sure, the shutdown answer would be "this is class struggle, go read Marx". But, perhaps, the left could at least acknowledge that the right might have its legitimate concerns with the increasingly poor material conditions that people are facing in contrast to the big corporations having increasing profits (exploiting workers, obligatory socialist remark). I personally just don't know in too many details how the right, or rather, the different positions in the right diagnose them, other than the "typical leftist" idea that the "right" wants to diminish state power to weaken the capabilities of public services and social safety nets, like they were all bad faithed agents. Sure this type exist, but the point here is to exclude bad faith from the debate. I believe that this would ultimately lead to a discussion around the role of the government, but that is part of the (maybe lifelong) debate we should be having, instead of the superficial "hashtag politics" we have now.
On the second point, about ethics, I personally believe that it should be possible to find common ground within some of the normative moralities (cultural or religious) and a concretely universal ethics (in the direction of finding values that could be common to everyone's concrete lives, such as having humane living conditions, not being systematically exploited, opportunity and conditions to be able to enjoy freedom etc). This is also in contrast to the broad, relativistic idea that "every moral position is inherently different to the core, thus no universality will ever exist", which is found really in every side of the world but especially in the types of nihilistic anti-humanist positions.
This is most likely not a perfect model to direct the dialogue, but it is my personal effort in the belief that we could indeed do better politics with better, genuine, good faithed conversations.