Woke Capitalism w/ Sean J. Griffith: The J. Burden Show Ep. 406

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and what some people call the woke corporation. And so the essay that I sent to you is an attempt to explain the persistence of ESG and corporate wokeism.

are one and the same. And again sort of playing Desil Devil's advocate here, If communism and wokeness are synonymous, how can a corporate corporation corporate corporation, How can a big corporation go woke?

board level reporting to their DEI departments. And there are all these big corporations that are you know, that are that are resisting the pushing to eliminate DEI.

the corporation. Even when you talk to academics about ESG or woke corporatism, they're just like, Hey, isn't this just a some words that we have to say so that we can get back to business as usual And So that's kind of a paradox, right. You would think if the thing was insincere, it wouldn't be persistent, or you would think that if the thing was persistent, it couldn't it would have to be sincere. And it seems like

those two things are butting up against each other. So the essay is really attempt to explain that paradox, and the way that I explain it is that wokeism is a form of managerialism. It's a necessary iteration of the current managerial elite.

out when things aren't going well. For instance, my last real corporate job, the company ended up going under, but really about a month and a half before, when the writing was on the wall, everyone on the sales side, which is where I worked, was painfully aware that we're getting shell ACKed. And the big pivot was a pivot to diversity. We had hired this range of DEI consultants, and so I wonder if part of it is that

it is DEI diversity. All of that has entered this level of best practices where this is simply things that successful corporations do. We are not successful, we don't have this. So clearly this is part of the transformation into a successful business. Now, obviously you and I understand that that's not the case. But to me and I'm glad you tied it to managerialism, it has become for managers, for

the people who direct almost every company. It's become one of those key performance indicators, right, those metrics that determine whether or a company is successful or not. So in the same way that no one really questions why we want to be more profitable this year than last. It's not quite at that level, but it's a similar level of sort of received wisdom. If you see what I'm getting at, Sean, I do.

do that. That seems to be a move that they're loath to do, and so there must be something there, right, There's something about how these things that seem like obvious things for the chopping block don't tend to go there, and I think that's in the nature of managerialism itself.

which involved the death of the capitalist. At that time, there was a time where you could go to Ford Motor Company, walk up to the penthouse suite and there'd be a guy named Ford there who was in charge

of it, sort of this baronial figure. It was almost feudal arrangement, and that was replaced due to any number of financial or technical innovations with managers joint stock, you know, the idea that no one really owns the entirety of it, and so who runs it, well, these managers for hire, and what Burnham describes and again I think what you're getting at there is that the system becomes self interested.

Managers are interested in themselves, interested in people like them, and the fact that you know, their sort of jobs continue on continue being highly compensated. And so it really is like DEI and H. Let's be honest, HR is just DEI from a different era. They become entrenched interests and they become not for the corporation but for the managers essential both because they enable the managerial apparatus to run ever more minute parts of the office of the

corporation to increase their control. But also it is an element of patronage, right, Those are good, high paying jobs, which, let's be honest, in the case of DEI, don't seem to be particular, really strenuous, and so like anything else, there is a sort of client patron relationship there. Am I overstating the case, Sean, I.

So it's a thing to do, right, So I call it in the article a forever project. It's a perfect project for a manager because it's a project that you can always work towards but never achieve. But more importantly, maybe you can measure incremental movements towards that goal and goal, whatever it is, and get compensated for it, or at least pat it on the back for it by whoever it is that's patting you on the back.

and your characterization of it is exactly right. What I think is interesting is that it goes back even before Burnham, to a book called The Modern Corporation Private Property by burleyan Means, which is like a nineteen thirty two book which is still referred to in contemporary corporate law classes like which I teach, and we teach it in we cite it for the proposition of the separation of ownership

and control. So burleyan Means in the early thirties, notice that those big corporations, they're very large, and they've outgrown the size to where a single shareholder like Ford in your example, could exert any control over them. And and they are so they're large, and their control is separated from ownerships. So the capital contributors aren't really in charge anymore. It's this other class of managers, as you say, now,

burleyan Means call this the quasi public corporation. And their argument is that that's totally different from any other form of private property, and therefore it entitles the government to come in and run those companies for like stakeholders. Right, So this is kind of like what some people now call stakeholder capitalism.

But then Burnham says they didn't draw the logical conclusion that this is actually a revolutionary event. Just like a bourgeois capitalism replaced the hereditary monarchy or aristocracy as the governing class, this is this other class supplanting capital right, supplanting the ownership class as the governing class in the world.

And then he had examples in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union where he's trying to show that in spite of the surface differences between those regimes, they're actually all running the same code.

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the same structure, ultimately directed in the same way. And to me, this is sort of one of the the primary errors of to be kind shall we say, a previous era of conservative many who are right now in the sort of anti woke coalition because they're so wrapped up in the dichotomy of the Cold War, which we understand was a real event and one that, to be honest, threatened the existence of human life. But also that dichotomy between communism and capitalism, or say, is not nearly as

deep as many like to pretend. And also going forward, that dichotomy does not describe the current relationship with the whatever you want to call the woke mind virus, as the mean goes, Because you're completely correct, this is this managerial revolution is a revolution. It is a dramatic departure. But there is no inconsistency with this fusion of woke ideology and shareholder capitalism or managerialism, because ultimately they're pretty

much not the same, but very much related. And you see the hatred from both the managerial class and the wokesters, if we could use that term towards the closest things we have to modern day capitalists, someone like Elon Musk, who fair enough you can buy stock in many of his companies, but he owns his companies in a much more definite way than most other CEOs, that most other leaders. And look, this is not supposed to be a you know what, this is not supposed to be sort of

an acomium on Elon Musk. He certainly has many personality flaws we don't need to get into. But it's interesting that much of the hatred towards Elon Musk seemingly has very little to do with what he actually does or says. It is his stance as being outside of that managerial framework, again not entirely, look like we understand that his corporations are still run by managers, but he is a monarchical figure in that way. You know, he is the guy

who decides the direction of his companies. Again not necessarily in the same way that Henry Ford could have, but still it's a different it's a different arrangement than one often found. And I think that that explains why so many disparate people hate him, or seemingly disparate, because again, it really is a like, I mean, we could even say, like a class based disdain. You see what I'm getting at there, Professor Griffin, I.

we're thinking about. But there are definitely prior managerial projects, and the Cold War is one, right that is, and think about how the Cold War was fought. It was not fought with like, you know, a bunch of like separate business managers working on their own in separately and independently, like in a free market way. To deal with like the threat of Soviet communism, no where was a sort of a centrally managed central intelligence agency operation to undermine

the Soviet Union. There's sort of a central coordinated way to think about it. It was a problem that needed coordinated administration to solve. The Second World War from our perspective, the US perspective, was a a large problem that needed coordinated administration to solve. Right the army, I read this biography.

I think it was a Omar Bradley one time and the title of the biography was the Organizer in Chief, or maybe it was even the Manager in Chief, suggesting that Bradley's primary attribute and why he was a great general in the Second World War was that he was such a good manager. So a lot of like that giant, massive military effort, the coordinated economy that went into winning the Second World War, the administration of the military across

different continents was a managerial project run by managers. Those generals were managers, not necessarily war fighters. And then the Cold War is a definite managerial project. But then these projects are left and right, so you might think of both of those as a little bit right coded. But like the Great Society, all this sort of war on poverty, all those are managerial projects which are sort of co coordinated problem solving.

the forties is an interesting thing to remark upon. I think the interesting thing in front of us now, though, is like why this project, like what what what about managerialism has made it necessary to be a project focused on I don't know, anti racism, gender norms, uh, perpetual self sexual liberationism or something whatever you however you want to think about those nested issues that are at the core, why are those the the subjects of of of managerialism now?

And I think one of the reasons that Elon has hated is that he does not display those values. And it's and I don't I think that, as you were saying, Astutelee, he's kind of the controller of Tesla. I mean, if I wanted to nerd out on Delaware corporate law, which I will not do, I would tell you that there is a there's a dispute in Delaware about whether where Tesla was formerly incorporated, about whether Elon actually controls Tesla. But he is close to a controller of Tesla, for sure.

And and he is not an ordinary CEO in the way that that Jamie Diamond at JP Morgan is an ordinary CEO. And so Elon has certain kinds of power inside his organization that other CEOs don't have. I like the I like what you were saying. He's sort of more monarchical than managerial, and he as a result of that, doesn't have to toe the line of the managerial orthodoxy, which is all of this woke ESG stuff.

human experience. Obviously, you know, with a great number of you know, the laws coming out of the nineteen sixties, you have an injection of management into freedom of association you know. Later, obviously we have this applied to the War between the sexes. We mentioned HR earlier. But it effectively creates another sort of deeper apparatus for control when you think to the sort of things that are often

mentioned in these you know, DEI seminars. Obviously you have the personnel question, which is from my perspective, creating a patronage network within the workplace, right, people who understand even if you know implicitly that they are there because of

the DEI and other things. But also, I mean, I think that it's a natural extension from the perspective of ever greater control over just human existence, right, the idea that things that were previously not to say, a political in the sense that people didn't have opinions about them, but outside of the realm of politics have entered into it and entered into management. Right, things that were previously organic, were previously mediated consocially and informally become part of you

could say, like the political or managerial apparatus. It's not a fully formulated thought. And I'm gribbing from a book that I read two years ago, so you know, don't don't don't crucify me for it, But that's I think at least one element to it.

something about managerialism that codes left? And so my answer to that question probably Orn's answer to but I'm gonna give my answer and he can speak for himself, is that there there there, you know, Burnham to go back to Burnham for a second. Burnham certainly thought that managerialism could be right coded.

material conditions better. So from that point onward, the left project is sort of to make life easier for human beings. And so the motivating energy on the left is always to like incrementally improve things through coordinated administration, and that I think is the managerial project par excellence. If everything is a problem to be solved through coordinated administration, then everything comes into managerialism and it becomes something to work on.

Whereas the motivating energy on the right, I think is something else, and we can talk about what that could be, and maybe it's something like hierarchy and transcendence. To put it somewhat provocatively, right, the left, the managerial left, wants to save mankind, but the right knows that mankind was saved two thousand years ago by God's intervening grace.

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objection to the possibility of right wing managerialism. The practical ejection is just these days, like left liberalism is the cultural code of the elite. And so if the if the managerial elite UH want to get into positions of authority in the managerial state, Uh, they need to they need to you know, internalize that code. And and as a pragmatic matter, it happens in you know, three different ways.

It happens at school, right, So UH, to get into the managerial elite, you have to be credentialed through elite schools. And as everyone your entire audience knows, elite schools are a place of you know, intellectual conformity, left intellectual conformity. So you have to come out with a credential from

that credentialing institution inside the manage the organization. To rise to positions of authority in the managerial uh organization, you have to survive successive promotion tournaments, right, And so in a promotion tournaments, the question is are you going to get promoted or is it going to be some other person? And that's an opportunity for you to be well more competent, would be the nice way of putting it. But the other possibility is other factors could enter into that promotion dynamic,

and those factors can be ideological factors. So if you don't conform ideologically to the norms of the organization or to the norms of the culture, generally, you don't survive in the promotion tournament to move up. And as those organizations are more and more woke, those tournaments are more and more woke. And you know, this is the reason that you know, white men complain about their inability to rise within.

that is a mathematical possibility. I wonder if one could ask, I guess if our current situation is a result of sort of living in the house that FDR built, that this great progressive figure sort of entrenches the managerial regime in America, and ultimately our government still exists in FDR mode. Right The French would kind of number their republics. We don't. But effectively it's sort of a new dispensation, some might say, of America. That's one point, and I'm actually not convinced

either way. On that question, is it possible to have a right wing managerial regime. But you're quite right to bring up the question of intragroup competition and also of status, because I think that the status question is incredibly important to this. You mentioned that all of these institutions which both provide accreditation, which is both a key to enter, you know, different kind of tears of the managerial regime, but also provide status, and I think that that cannot

be underestimated. To kind of pull a trick out of my Marxist hat here, I think that the the middle class is incredibly interested in social status and social standing. And for instance, you see this with there's certain changes in American society. Gay marriage is unpopular before Berga fell, it becomes popular the law of the land, and all of a sudden we see that sixty forty split reverse because again, you know it is it is endorsed by

the government. It is a normal quote unquote, actually we could just say normal and statistical sense opinion now and it becomes widely held. And I think that your your comments again about the necessity the necessary level of capital to insulate yourself from this, I mean, look, that's entirely correct, Like, look all the Shenaniganst. Peter Teal has had to go through. Right, He's he's in California. He's clearly fighting off the kind of encroachment of the Wolke regime, and he's resorted to

all kinds of crazy stuff. Right, He's required to have a woman on his board, and he finds some random reporter who's never sat out a boardroom in his life, that's loyal to him personally and says, all right, she's my woman. So point is like, that's not something that that sort of entry is of just working your way up. And then, as you said, raising the Jollie Roger, it

is not possible for any number of reasons. I guess I'm kind of spoiling this, but I will have Will hild On soon, who's you know, writes quite a bit about this, to talk exactly about the sort of capital controls, artificial or not, that are put in place to keep that exact thing from happening, to keep there from being a conservative company, or even a company that puts out a right of center product, you know, whether entertainment or not. And I realized I threw a bunch of you there.

But let's specifically pivot to that question of status, because I'm not entirely sure how you and many have tried. I mean, Barry Weis, so I'm no big fan of, but she's, you know, part of this project to create sort of an alternative anti woke university in Austin, which

doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But it seems to be a very difficult nut to crack because the system is ever more left wing, because the institutions which provide both entry to that system and accreditation are incredibly left wing and without effectively, you know, as Jarvin would say, putting tanks in Harvard Yard, I don't know how you create or destroy that network of prestige and accreditation.

which we're talking about now, or corporations. At the end of the day, it's still true that if you know, for as woke as some CEO wants to be, if they're not returning dividends or growing the share price or whatever, they're going to be consequences for that, and so there's a there is a I don't think it is an adequate correction, but there is some correction.

for example. Right, there's a there's a pretty big delta, but that's okay. And so the people that go into universities to make those sorts of those same sorts of.

social thought. And I think that what happened you can draw so those we were talking earlier about those people who want to say this is all Marxism, and there's definitely a group of people that want to say this is like neo Marxism, and this like marching of the take it like a Gramskia control of the institutions. I think that is a You can tell that story much more convincingly in universities than you can tell in corporations.

And the reason why is the people that are in the universities are were trained by, like literally trained by members of the Frankfurt School, came over to the United States and created disciples who trained further classes of university professors. So there's a straight line if you wanted to draw

a straight line from person to person to person. And then there's just the fact that cultural, that post colonial, deconstructivist mode of thought took over American universities and whenever it was in nineteen sixties or nineteen seventies, and won't let go it's critical theory now. So I think that universities are run by true believers, and I think there's no fixing that other than to have our own institutions. As you say, and I don't disagree, that's really hard

to do. It's interesting why that's so hard to do. Maybe that's something it's a sort of separate question. But I will agree with you that I wouldn't describe universities as simply managerial. I don't think they are. I think

that corporations are simply managerial. I think that managerialism codes left and because of that, corporations, big corporations, the quasi public corporation's code left, But university's code left for a different reason, which is that they are ideological and their faculty are very often true believers.

is a system becoming more and more managerial. You see the same thing in K through twelve right that the student to teacher ratios have stayed the same, the number of administrators have grown. I think this the figure I'm talking about with. I think just since no child left behind but was up over one hundred percent, couldn't you say, well that is maybe it was not at one point, but it's becoming more and more managerial, especially as there

is the infusion of government cash. So just a sort of a hypothetical throw at you there.

And so if you're a left wing faculty member, you are super happy to have a bud of diversocrats at your university because basically that put that ensures the hiring of future left wing ideologues and throughout the personnel structure of the university, where you know, you can only control faculty hiring, but in the administration of the university you can sort of push.

I can't remember what his half of that diet is, but point is, I think that even in that you see a common thread between both the kind of priors of liberal academics and I mean capital L liberal, and then also with the you know, the DEI kind of business model, because both of them place a primacy on training, right, the idea that you can fundamentally change people through the application of training, basically either forcing someone to sit through

a seminar. And of course the versions that you and I see of this are kind of the cartoonish, right, the billboard that says, you know, stop raping women. It's like, okay, well, does does any you know, violent park rapist particularly care about this being you know, wrong or incorrect? And that's silly. But you see the same thing in other areas as well, the idea that man can fundamentally be transformed through the application of technique into something different, He can be improved.

And obviously, you know, capital L liberals from another era would have a much more reasonable view of that ability to transform man from a lower to a higher status. They might have said, but you see the same idea sort of echoed dimly in the idea of diversity training, This idea that you know, racism is this sort of you know, inherent invisible force, but it can be pulled out of you. And look are their true believers? Are their synics with regard to that premise one hundred percent?

But I think that that's an interesting sort of shared prior in both the idea of fectibility of man, that you can transform man from being flawed and understand that the classic liberals and the modern you know, Wolkesers have a very different understanding of what it both means to be flawed and then perfected. But I think that's an interesting kind of shared like load bearing premise. Do you see what I'm getting at, Sean, Yeah.

of patronage. And I think a lot of training programs, a lot of the diversocrat stuff, is really just patronage for that the team, And once you understand it in that way, it's hard to take it very seriously. But on the subject of training, there's a there's a case that drives me crazy. So this is a case on the in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Florida,

and it's about a diversity training program. So Governor DeSantis in Florida had passed a law that said something like you couldn't corporations couldn't force their employees to attend training woke training, I think it was diversity training or some kind of training. You couldn't force your employees to attend the training, and so you know, if they didn't want to attend, they didn't have to attend.

defeats the State of Florida in this case. Now what that means is that, according to the eleven Circuit Court of Appeals, the speech rights of the corporation, which isn't it's an artificial entity, right, it's not, it doesn't exist.

The speech rights of the corporation itself trump the citizen rights of the citizens of Florida that the governor was trying to protect from being sort of you know, ideologic, you know, propagandized by the court by the training program to not have to hear the message, to be free from that sort of a thing. And I think that's a whole that's a whole, separate area of Like, the managerial problem in our society is the extent of the power,

including legal power, constitutional rights power, that corporations have. So you take this giant managerial corporation, the quasi public corporation that Burleian means and Burnham identify, and you.

we're in. I think the reason why I think it is important to think about managerialism and in the corporate context is that it allows you to see corporations as potentially as much of a problem as the administrative state, and specifically, it allows conservatives to see them as a problem like liberals have seen have seen corporations as problematic for a long time, mostly for wealthy whatever reasons, and their their critiques are not entirely crazy, but conservatives have

trouble right the the the alliance between big business and the Republican Party is an ancient and honorable alliance, right, And but I think that the conservatives need to see that these corporations aren't very conservative and and if you're just going to default to protecting big corporate rights as a political matter, you're not protecting conservatives.

sort of an cap capitalist system anymore. Right, Like, Okay, sure, you know, Raytheon isn't literally part of the government, But I mean, would it really be that much of a change if we just did what the Russians did right and made it a state owned corporation A functionally there's

not that big of a difference. And I see exactly what you're talking about, which is people on the right who understand this problem, who understand that this segment has become an ideological enemy, but lack the lack the language to address it, last lack the language to discuss it. And some of it. I think that role has been taken up, although you see less of this now by kind of the you know, the the wef tinfoil hat

kook stuff. Right, that's a way to address that. And look, I'm not going to pretend that I like Klaus Schwab, but I don't necessarily take the maximalist view of his abilities. But nonetheless I think that's a very important project because ultimately, if you could right, if you could could smash the education system, you know, route them into the sea, right in sort of a cone and the barbarian esque move like, sure,

that would be positive from an ideological perspective. I'm speaking hyperbolically, of course, but that still doesn't solve this other problem, which is everyone works for a company that has ultimately the same teleology, right is pointed in the same direction, at the same set of values. And I think that

that's why this needs to be addressed. And again going back to that false dichotomy, the idea that the only way you can oppose big business is if you are secretly woke, which is something you see from you know,

alleged conservative influencers constantly. This idea that if you have any issue with you know, big corporations, if you have any issue with this managerial system, that you are communist in some ways is laughable and to be honest, needs to just be driven out of you know, the public conversation is not a serious uh, not a serious point there. So one of the things that I think is important to address with this right is, uh, how how do you how do you to lack of a better term.

How do you market this? Because look like this has been a very heady academic conversation. We're citing our sources. How do you explain this without going into to be honest, fairly grim domes from one hundred years ago?

You know, some people say there's a civil war on the right, and there's some truth to that around all sorts of topics, and I don't like to think of it as a civil war. I guess what I would say is that the right is more intellectually interesting.

prior generation. And that's exciting, frankly. And I think part of the problem about how to express the relationship of conservatives to big business goes to what what is the what is our what is our identity as a conservative? Or what does it mean to be on the right?

And I think there are all kinds of answers to that right, Like there's a lot of people who want to just like go back to neutral principles of like I don't like the kind of liberalism, the kind of right liberalism, like libertarianism, or like the version of liberalism that's just free market capitalism and do whatever you want, right.

And then there's the kind of right, the kind of conservatism that says, look, that's that's that's maybe an okay intermediate spot, but that's not really conservative because if it's just do whatever you want, it's hard to distinguish that from like, you know, the heart wants what it wants and the you know, the decline of civilization, and so what we really need to do is reorient ourselves towards the good and there's some other source for that other

than what we want right now, and that's another kind of conservatism. I think this question goes to that. Right, if we're just orienting ourselves back towards libertarianism, we're not going to get out of managerialism. There's no way out of it. And there's no way to persuade people that it's even a problem, because they'll just say that the

market will self correct. By the way, when libertarians say that, when they say, look, I hear what you're saying, Griffith, Yeah, it looks terrible that these things are woke, but the market.

there's interesting things happening. I think that to your point about the kind of to be honest, the irrationality of the kind of libertarian economics, to me, I find it very, very frustrating, because and Jesus, this is a space on the bingo card for watching my show. But David French recently put out a piece the New York Times called what happens if you refuse to admit that America is

in decline? Or something like that, you'll be able to find it, And I wrote a piece responding to it because what's interesting to me about it is this sort of selective application of certain lines of attack. So for instance, he is talking about, you know, the new right, and he accuses them of nostalgia, right, you long for a world which never existed, And then the whole last third of the piece is saying, well, I just I long for the days of the conservative movement of the eighties

and nineties. Was everything so grand then, where men were wise and august and weren't into you know, partisan politics. So there's some hypocrisy there, but you see a very similar thing with that attitude towards social right. The meme if we can use that term of real socialism has never been tried. I mean, look, you can buy a t shirt that says that from you know, any number of you know, Republican T shirt shops. It's fully entered

into the culture. But very many of those same people will talk about the free market and it's like, well, okay, like do the free market of when, like the free market of four years ago? Well, I mean that wasn't really a free market. Again, this shore, the federal government wasn't quite as big as it is now, but it was still giant. It was huge, and you know, even companies like IBM, you know, maybe Boeing, any number of

these corporations existed in relation to the government. This public private partnership was not as advanced as it currently is now. But simply, you know, rolling the boulder off your own foot and further up the hill only to let it go again does not solve this problem. And look, I'm being dismissive to conservatives and being dismissive towards these arguments, not because I hate them, not because I disliked them,

far from it. But this is a losing playbook, Like we have tried and failed at this project before, and so to your point, like, you can't simply put your head in the head in the sand and pretend as if we are back in the Cold War, where we can neatly divide the line between you know, the Pinko's on one side and the you know, the patriots on the other. Like, look like I understand the appeal. There's

a certain amount of moral clarity. It's easy to dismiss, but as you said, it's simply not a strong argument, and clearly it does not lead to positive political results.

that has ever existed. You know what, if I could just indulge in a little nostalgia myself, you're mentioning French's nostage, you know, I would I would say the era of bourgeois capitalism right where where companies were set up by capitalists in in local communities with employees who and and a community that was also the consumers, right where everything was kind of like I think what I would say and I do say at the end of my essay is that like the managerial corporation is is the is

the enemy of bourgeois capitalism, is the enemy of local business, is the enemy of small business.

I mean, it seems to me that the whole idea of the republic is that the self governing middle class, right, And it seems like the self governing middle class they do things like run small businesses, like podcasts, like doctors' offices, like whatever. Like that's and that seems like the alliance between where the alliance between business and the conservatives should be. It probably should not be at the level of the multinational corporation.

I think I'm at the lowest setting on every site. It's like five bucks or twenty two cents a show. You get the episodes early in ad free. I know the ads are irritating, but they pay my mortgage. And let me tell you, modern interest rates mean that that is much more of a project than it would be otherwise. But that said, thank you guys so much. The podcast has been growing and I couldn't do it without you guys.

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