2020 and the New Spirit of Capitalism

A woman walks across the near empty Charles Bridge in Prague, Czech Republic in early 2020. Petr David Josek/AP Photo

In two books written in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Slavoj Žižek suggested that a new “Communist prospect” was in the process of emerging. Extrapolating from the emergency measures being put in place in early 2020, Žižek foresaw the rise of a new worldwide political struggle. In falling back on their own resources and refusing contact with outsiders out of the fear of contagion, nation states risked reverting to simple “barbarism.” Only by adopting “something very much like communism”—foreswearing the market, suspending national interests and synchronising activities across state borders, globalising healthcare, and embracing a new ethos of collective solidarity—could humanity hope to get through the crisis.¹ This was not a crisis that capitalism could address on its own terms. Instead, “the global capitalist system” was facing a “perfect storm,” one in which the “health crisis” joined forces with the “economic and ecological crises” and the global anti-racist protests then underway. For the revolutionary-minded observer, recognising how all of these “struggles” were aligned in unison against capitalism could have “an immense emancipatory potential.” In the process, Žižek wrote, “we will have to rethink everything.”²

Expanding on the themes of Žižek’s first pandemic book shortly afterwards, the British sociologist Mark Featherstone largely endorsed its diagnoses. There seemed to be three possible paths ahead for nation states in the pandemic era. They could either plunge their citizens into an all-encompassing, Chinese-style biopolitical authoritarianism, insist that the accelerating, crisis-prone “business as usual” of late-2019 global capitalism was somehow capable of controlling this new crisis (and in doing so finally discredit themselves), or else find their way to something like Žižek’s “spirit of communism.” This final state of being would be a new economic settlement grounded in collective solidarity, an acknowledgement of human vulnerability, and a new respect for planetary resource limits and carrying capacities.³ If this had all seemed impossibly utopian before the virus, it was now just about imaginable due to the pandemic’s sudden and miraculous-seeming suspension of the pre-existing state of affairs.

There is something undeniably embarrassing about failed prophecies. It seems retrospectively impolite to revisit them. One feels a certain pressure instead to avert one’s eyes and pretend you never saw them. But the distinctive “structures of pandemic feeling” that arose on the progressive left in 2020 (and which Žižek’s pandemic books are testaments to) are worth re-examining. In the wake of the history that actually unfolded, it is easy to forget the euphoric intensities and collective enthusiasms that arose among certain fractions of the academy and the professional managerial class during the early pandemic period. The formal structures that had defined everyday life for these salary earners—the daily commute, the spatially defined routines of the office, the lecture hall, and the seminar room—fell away, replaced seemingly overnight by the strange “new normals” of pandemic life. The messy spontaneity of face-to-face meetings and conversations was supplanted by the simplifying and flattened remediations of workplace sociability offered by the Microsoft Teams and Zoom screens. These were spaces where new certainties and consensuses could rapidly emerge. The forbidding silences of the sceptical meeting room cease to be legible in the Teams environment. They can sound instead like simple assent.

As average weekly screentime surged among newly redeployed homeworkers, eyeballs turned en masse to the scrolling chyrons, the models and visualisations of infection rates and growth curves, the daily briefings, and the snippets of “expert opinion” that came to stand in for the pandemic on the Guardian live-blog, the BBC website, and the Twitter news feed. New structures of feeling—intense forms of synchronized emotion and opinion—arose among these temporally unified lockdown audiences, brought together in real time as “pandemic spectators.” Viewed from a more cynical perspective, the reduction of reality to an oddly game-like form of statistical modelling during the early pandemic period may have appealed especially to members of a professional-managerial class whose “identity” is wedded to “the control of social reality” through the “technocratic management of information.”⁴ The sense that there might be new possibilities opening up for transformative social and economic change on a global level thereby gained a new palpability.⁵ The disruptions generated by the early 2020 pandemic closures seemed to give rise to their own line of insistent questioning. We really couldn’t go back to the way things were before—could we?

The New COVID Capitalism

Rather than bearing witness to the rise of Žižek’s “new spirit of communism,” however, the first two years of the pandemic turned out to be a remarkably transformative period for global capitalism. If the dominant sense of time for furloughed employees and PMC homeworkers under lockdown had been one of temporal suspension—an uncanny sense that time itself was slowing down or had stopped altogether—certain pre-existing trends in the corporate world continued to accelerate.⁶ The concentration of wealth spiked ever-upward. A record 493 new billionaires made Forbes Magazine’s World Billionaires list between March 2020 and March 2021.⁷ In fact, global billionaire wealth increased by over 5 trillion US dollars between March 2020 and November 2021, a larger increase in 20 months than that seen over the previous 14 years combined.⁸

At the same time, however, corporations and the management profession also began to pivot overtly towards the recognition of social concerns, aligning themselves with the radical social critique that typified protest during the first pandemic year. In an audit of racial equity-related corporate philanthropy in the United States, the management consultancy firm McKinsey put the amount of money donated to racial justice causes in 2020 at more than 200 billion US dollars. The vast bulk of this money—over 90%—was pledged by financial organisations.⁹ Conducting another audit of the field in 2023, McKinsey’s researchers determined that the 1369 Fortune 1000 companies whose donations they had tracked committed a further 141 billion US dollars after the initial 2020 “racial reckoning,” between May 2021 and October 2022.¹⁰ Of the firms McKinsey looked at, fully 40% issued corporate “statements in support of racial justice” during the period surveyed and a further 30% made “external commitments to support racial equity” (through, for instance, donating to “affordable housing” charities with a racial justice focus). 25% of firms, meanwhile, made “internal commitments” to improving “diversity and inclusion” within their own organisations, by, for instance, “requiring diverse candidate pools,” seeking out “Black suppliers,” or by inviting outside speakers to address their employees on racial equity topics.¹¹

What is also significant is how this information was conveyed to readers. McKinsey deployed an emotive form of financial reporting that merged the functions of audit and activism, recalling BLM’s own commemoration-based rhetoric and the language of police abolition at the same time as it collapsed racial justice into the wider context of the pandemic itself:

2020 has been a year of losses. First, lives have been lost—around the world, and in the United States in particular. Those lost lives are disproportionately Black lives. 2020 saw the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others at the hands of police, and the deaths of more than 46,000 Black Americans from COVID-19.¹²

At the height of the Summer 2020 protests, the Guardian’s Silicon Valley correspondent Kari Paul produced her own audit of how American tech companies were responding to the racial justice movement. In its previous tech reporting, the Guardian had often been critical of Silicon Valley’s record on identity issues, focusing, for instance, on the tech industry’s “toxic” culture for women. Although Paul’s article led (sceptically enough) with the question of “symbolism”—corporate leadership statements condemning racism—she had to admit that many firms were now putting considerable money and resources where their CEOs’ mouths were.

At Facebook, for instance, an “impassioned” statement from Mark Zuckerberg on 31 May 2020 claiming that “We stand with the Black community” was followed by a commitment of more than 200 million US dollars to support “Black businesses and organizations, in part through cash and … credit grants to Black-owned businesses and in part through” a new undertaking by Facebook to source its own internal “business supplies from Black-owned suppliers.” In addition, Facebook committed itself to “increasing the number of Black people in leadership positions by 30% in the next five years and doubling the number of Black and Latinx employees overall by 2023.” Facebook also announced plans to increase “hate speech enforcement on the platform, including prohibiting a wider range of hate speech in ads.” Despite these considerable financial undertakings, however, Paul noted that Facebook had faced widespread criticism from other large multinationals for the perceived insufficiency of its response to racial equity concerns. Mobilized by “civil rights groups,” over 1000 companies, “including Coca-Cola and Unilever,” suspended their Facebook advertising for the duration of July 2020 “in protest of the company’s failure to address hate speech.”¹³

Cadres: Capitalism’s Internal Stakeholders

Interviewed in the IPPR Progressive Review in autumn 2020, the climate activist Daze Aghaji reflected on the sea-change in public opinion that was occurring in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. This event—and the global protests that followed—had, she said, “brought racial justice to the front line of issues we are facing.” However, the simultaneous contexts of the pandemic and the climate crisis added further dimensions to people’s understanding of the world. “At this moment,” she said,

people are starting to envision a very holistic image for where the world is at and what needs to happen next. An example of this is people increasingly understanding intersectionality and environmental racism ... We’re seeing cries from people for ideas like defunding the police and really interesting ways of restructuring society so we should be listening to them more.¹⁴

Ideas like environmental racism, police abolition, and intersectionality, in other words, were finally going mainstream. If these concepts had once been restricted to their own “ecological zones” in academia and on the fringes of radical thought, they were now spreading to other, much more epidemiologically “naive” populations. This phenomenon was by no means new. It was already visible in the 2010s.¹⁵ However, the pandemic and the Summer 2020 protests, and more importantly pandemic and protest interpretation and commentary—those “snippets of expert opinion” embedded within reporting—greatly increased the signal strength of the stations carrying these ideas, as well as the number of frequencies on which they were being broadcast.

In her interview, Aghaji identified the “people” now taking up these ideas as “the masses” that her organization was ostensibly trying to mobilize.¹⁶ However, the fact that her words appeared in the official journal of the Institute for Public Policy Research—one of Britain’s leading and most influential progressive think tanks—means that we should probably define Aghaji’s “people” rather more narrowly. Those tuning into the newly amplified “radical” frequencies with the greatest enthusiasm were probably not “the masses.” Instead, they were arguably what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism, term “cadres”—the managers, experts, and professionals who occupy leadership and specialist positions in firms and institutions and who have their own intense and idiosyncratic relationship with radical critique.

To a certain extent, we could see the term “cadres” as a cognate form of the Anglophone “professional managerial class” (or PMC). However, it is, perhaps, a less potentially problematic one, as Boltanski and Chiapello do not claim that cadres function as “a class” in the Marxian sense.¹⁷ However, they suggest, cadres are prone to certain kinds of persuasion, occupational habits of mind, status anxieties, and problems of motivation and belief, all of which are relevant for assessing their role in shaping how contemporary capitalism and managerial culture manifest themselves.¹⁸

Cadres, as Boltanski and Chiapello describe them, are especially susceptible to motivation problems. To maintain their sense of self-worth, cadres need to believe that the work they carry out contributes to the common good. They need credible signs that the organisations that employ them have status and legitimacy. Reading through three decades of management literature, Boltanski and Chiapello found that certain key questions kept reappearing—“How can we give work in firms some meaning?” What special reasons do cadres have for making an “engaged commitment” here? What does this company do other than make money?¹⁹ Cadres therefore constitute an important internal stakeholder group within companies. They expect their own corporate leaders to behave in socially responsible ways. In the current environment, as Lisa M. Fairfax observes, that means directing the corporate mission in ways that address key contemporary “social issues”, especially “environmental matters” and “race relations.”²⁰

These sensitivities to the issues of corporate meaning and purpose make cadres particularly amenable to critiques of capitalism issuing from outside the corporation. In fact, Boltanski and Chiapello place critique—and in particular anti-capitalist critique—at the heart of how contemporary capitalism functions. External critique, according to this model, forces capitalism’s representatives (we can think here of the CEO “statement”) to “justify” the operations of capital “in terms of the common good.” The more compelling critique’s claims are, and the more buy-in they have among the general population, the more concessions they can win from capitalism in order to “guarantee a positive improvement in terms of justice.”²¹ In fact, a particularly convincing line of critique can force capitalism to cease justifying itself in certain ways entirely.

At moments like this, capitalism can partially incorporate “the values in whose name it was criticised” in order to placate its opponents and “rally the troops.”²² There can, in other words, be a swift transition from one “spirit of capitalism” to another. Capitalism’s response to the new social movements and protest cultures of the 1960s can be read in this way. The anti-capitalist critique of the conformist “organisation man” was so compelling that it caused companies to change their marketing approaches entirely, producing a new, bohemian-inflected consumer culture that emphasized freedom, authenticity, and idealistic self-expression.

Towards “Cadre Capitalism”?

The expectations of some on the Left that capitalism might just crumble in the face of COVID’s “perfect storm” obviously did not come to pass. Instead, COVID and the global protests of 2020 posed something like a “reality test” for the capitalist system, one that spurred corporate stakeholders to pursue their own internal courses of action.²³ For cadres tuned into “critical voices,” the particular mainstream media discourse that typified the way 2020 was reported—one that focused on racial and gender disparities, particularly in terms of death and exposure to state violence—indicated that there were dire problems with the way capitalism was operating.²⁴ These “critical voices” had, of course, been part of the scene for some time, but the events of 2020 gave a particularly urgent force to their messaging.

If the boomer-oriented “new spirit of capitalism” that arose in the late 1960s—and which matured into adulthood during the neoliberal 1980s and ’90s—had once been vigorous and vibrant, it had by now come to seem old, exclusive, and out of touch. Claims to corporate and institutional legitimacy voiced in its specific languages of justification now appeared suspect, if not actively offensive. If markets offered everyone “equality of opportunity,” why were so many so obviously excluded from them? If status and leadership within firms and institutions were decided solely by “merit” and “excellent performance,” why were these positions disproportionately occupied by old white men? If firms were failing to properly “account” for their manifestly obvious racial and gender disparities in hiring and senior leadership positions, how could they truly claim to be “accountable” to their stakeholders?

Faced with these new lines of questioning, the old watchwords of neoliberal audit culture—“discipline,” “efficiency,” “effectiveness,” and “value for money”—were quickly coming to seem outmoded.²⁵ These terms reflected how management had operated in an earlier professional discourse culture, where claiming to occupy a neutral or objective position was an important part of justifying decision-making.²⁶ In this new workplace culture of moral emergency and open emotionality, the old focus on “objective forms” was replaced with one that valorized the “subjective states” of both professional employees and their managers.²⁷ The forms of moral critique issuing from Critical Social Justice culture accordingly now seemed more in keeping with the urgent moral spirits of the moment than the more self-consciously “objective” postures of previous managerial regimes.

As they had done many times before, the institutions of capital reached beyond themselves for forms of moral legitimacy that they could use to justify their ongoing operations.²⁸ What Stephen D’Arcy calls the “Post-New Left Political Vocabulary” that arose in American activist circles in the early 1990s, and which by the 2010s had come to dominate modes of speaking and writing within NGOs and in the non-profit sector, began to appear with increasing frequency in the policy statements and communications of some of the world’s largest corporations. “Privilege,” “safe spaces,” “allyship,” and that potent new watchword, “accountability”—not “accountability” in the narrow financial sense but “accountability” in terms of an ongoing, real-time process of moral auditing in the eyes of peers and second-order spectators—became part of the mainstream institutional vocabulary. Lately, as Tyler Austin Harper observes, management theory and HR literature have also taken up the new languages with enthusiasm and a seeming near-total lack of criticality.²⁹

The new Amazon Studios Inclusion Policy announced precisely one year after the racial reckoning of 2020 reveals some of the contrasts between the old and new forms of corporate managerialism. Whereas corporate restructuring under an earlier managerial regime might have represented its “goals” and “targets” in purely financial terms (“growing market share” or “increasing profit margins”), Amazon’s new target culture was now expressed in the more holistic terms of justice and identity. The Inclusion Policy saw Amazon committing itself towards increasing diversity and equity across a range of identity categories in the films and TV series it would be commissioning in the future. It would, it announced, “seek out stories and storytelling that amplify voices across race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability (including mental health), body size, gender, gender identity, and gender expression.” In order for the company to do so, the Amazon Studios Inclusion Policy set some concrete and ambitious equity goals for future productions to meet:

• Each film or series with a creative team of three or more people in above-the-line roles (Directors, Writers, Producers) should ideally include a minimum 30% women and 30% members of an underrepresented racial/ethnic group. This aspirational goal will increase to 50% by 2024.

• Casting actors whose identity (gender, gender identity, nationality, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability) aligns with the character they will be playing.

• Aiming to include one character from each of the following categories in speaking roles, with minimum 50% of these to be women: LGBTQIA+, person with a disability, and three regionally underrepresented race/ethnic/cultural groups. A single character can fulfill one or more of these identities.

• Seeking at least three bids from vendors or suppliers on productions, one of which must be from a woman-owned business and one from a minority-owned business.³⁰

This policy effectively translates the Amazon Studios corporate mission into an entirely new moral language. Of course, management has always sought to create its own moral frameworks to safeguard decision-making. The point of justifying decisions in terms of numbers is to give “the agreed-upon figures” a specifically moral force, one that generates a “final picture” of “financial reality” and compels subordinates to obey.³¹ However, the way in which Amazon’s Inclusion Policy represents its new numerical goals effectively displaces them from the realm of commerce onto those of ethics and emotional “immediacy.”³² Profit and market share disappear in favour of a new, morally saturated set of targets, goals, and “aspirations.” Via this strategy, and by mimicking the sanctifying and emotionally laden language registers of the social justice movement, Amazon Studios is able to represent its core business in newly “meaningful” terms. The aspirational goals of “seeking out stories,” “amplifying voices,” creating authentic representations of marginalized groups, and faithfully mirroring a changing reality replace the rather less fashionable facts that Amazon Studios simply produces “content” and seeks to make a profit from it.

Intersectionality and positionality, each grounded explicitly within identity and the body itself, have begun to replace the older languages of “merit” and “excellence” as ways in which people can justify their positions (and compete for relative status and priority) within corporate workplaces and institutions.³³ If older management cultures now seem bloodless and dessicated, this is a new way of auditing activities and managing people (and encouraging people to manage themselves), one flushed with emotion, morality, and the strongly felt immediacies of identity and embodied experience. This new form of “inclusive capitalism,” in other words, seeks to ingest more and more of the moral and personal realms within its remit, to become “more real than real” to those who work within it. During the agonistic turmoil that swept through universities in the late 1960s, the campus arguably became “the world” for protestors, a “mini-homeland” in which the global transformations the campus movements desired could be enacted in miniature.³⁴ Now, the professional-managerial workplace likewise comes to stand in for the global situation, and new procedures and initiatives are believed to “make a difference” to justice issues everywhere.

If the ethos of “bringing one’s whole self to work” had been gradually normalized within professional workplaces over the course of the 2000s and early 2010s, this was one of the consequences. Cadres now seek meaning at work by, to paraphrase Byung-Chul Han, “flooding the workplace with their intimacy.”³⁵ In doing so, they try to make their identities, personal politics, and moral and emotional commitments relevant within their professions and to make their employers take notice of these deeply felt investments.³⁶ Various forms of workplace activism—petitioning employers to take political stances or make official statements on social issues and current events, forming workplace affinity groups, or denouncing “resistant” colleagues via the new “activist workplace technologies” of the “open letter” or the hostile Slack channel—have become the practical means of realising this new vision of “meaningful work.”³⁷ Each case represents a way of synchronizing the morally committed self with the wider corporate or institutional mission.

There are also some undeniable affinities between the corporate world and the “Post-New Left” and Critical Social Justice circles that many of these new discourses were adapted from. As Tara Isabella Burton observes, social justice culture has traditionally had a strong “blank-slate” ethos. Its adherents often possess a utopian conviction that old injustices can be addressed, existing power hierarchies overturned, and new realities manifested in the future if only the “right” rituals are performed and the appropriate “symbol sets” adopted for use.³⁸ Clear resemblances exist between these ways of thinking and the simplified truths employed by corporate and institutional management. Managerial technologies like “continuous improvement” and corporate restructuring operate according to their own utopian logic, whereby cost-cutting or redundancies become the “one true path” to a better set of outcomes—“returning to surplus,” “meeting performance goals,” or “setting new benchmarks for competitors.”³⁹

We could, perhaps, see the new “moral infusions” seemingly arriving from outside the sphere of capital as a refurbishment of corporate “symbol sets,” a way of restating some of managerialism’s old arguments in new, more morally compelling terms. However, the affinities and congruences between critical forces supposedly external to capitalism, (such as contemporary progressive identity politics) and the ideologies internal to capitalism should make us ask whether any of these languages, social movements, or trends truly exist outside of the capitalist system. New ideas and language rituals sweep through contemporary progressive-left circles according to the same logics of novelty and product replacement that characterize consumer capitalism. Formerly right-wing libertarian ideas like open borders, meanwhile, find new leases of life on the ostensible far-left.⁴⁰ And, as Marc James Léger points out (drawing on the work of Marie Moran), the way that “the concept of identity is deployed today is specific to the age of postwar consumer culture.”⁴¹ There may be no outside. We are all capitalists now, including (or perhaps even especially) anti-capitalists.

The Contradictions of “Inclusive Capitalism”

When capitalism’s representatives begin to speak in the same radical languages as those who have traditionally set themselves up in opposition to capitalism, this can have profoundly destabilising effects on observers. Like the operators of an obsolete radar set, capitalism’s left-wing critics risk losing their critical signal when they don’t acknowledge the role of cadres or capitalism’s abiding concern with the problem of its own legitimacy. They can end up hunting for the ghosts of capitalisms past rather than admit that capital is now to be found conducting its business (on the symbolic and representational levels at least) on a whole other set of frequencies.⁴²

For right-wing observers, who may have been entirely comfortable with how capitalism presented itself in its previous guises, capital’s turn towards equity, diversity, and inclusion has been similarly destabilising. Right-wing critics of “woke capitalism” evidently believe that the “new normal” can somehow be defeated using the techniques of right-wing populism. In episodes like 2023’s Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney controversy, anti-woke activists have mobilized the consumer boycott as a means of “turning back the clock,” not acknowledging that the brands they were formerly loyal to now operate in wholly different financial environments.⁴³ No less than some on the Left, and no matter how successful individual boycotts might be, these element of the Right are operating in an essentially nostalgic mode. They have emotionally attached themselves to a form of consumer capitalism that has not really existed in America since the War on Terror. At the same time, they misrecognize capital’s attempts to seek new markets and novel forms of corporate value by retreating into regressive, Cold War-style fantasies of “woke communism,” as though the C-suites of America’s largest corporations were now suddenly the sites of a new Bolshevik conspiracy.

It is important to acknowledge, in other words, that “inclusive capitalism” is still capitalism. Corporations are not solely interested in renewing their legitimacy with the public or mollifying their internal critics among the cadres (important as these concerns are). They also need to keep their brands up to date with current sensibilities, maintain or increase access to markets, and engage new audiences and consumers. In fact, the new inclusion policies of firms like Amazon Studios can be read in exactly these terms. Although, fitting the corporate mission to the moment, they present themselves in non-capitalistic, justice-oriented terms, these firms are fundamentally in the business of making sure that there are always fewer barriers to production and consumption. The point of these policies is to ensure (in principle at least) that Amazon accesses all possible talent streams and that all potential audiences are engaged. At the same time, these corporations are responding in quite self-interested ways to what they believe to be genuine market signals, such as what McKinsey terms the rise of the “inclusive consumer”—the 45% of Americans, “younger, female, and more racially diverse,” who told a survey firm in 2021 that “their social values now shape their shopping choices.”⁴⁴

New, ostensibly justice-oriented practices, like requiring diversity statements from prospective new hires in the progressive neoliberal university, meanwhile, simply become additional forms of audit culture. They represent an expansion of the existing repertoire of audit practices into new internal realms. Professional employees are now expected to display forms of “excellent” moral performance alongside all the other kinds of surveillant audit procedures and policies that the contemporary PMC workplace expects them to abide by. We could see this as a form of self-exploitation. Cadres internalize the always-accelerating dictates of audit culture and the perpetual pressures of workplace ideological conformity so that they become absorbed into the self and the personal profile. There, they express themselves in constantly evolving, anxiety-laden forms of etiquette or politeness—the self-disciplining imperatives to always “be kind,” “be a good person,” and check one’s privilege and language choices.

Beyond the individual workplace, a new, multi-billion dollar DEI/EDI industry is burgeoning, one that, in accordance with the way the new spirit of capitalism operates, takes “‘already-existing’ things whose legitimacy is guaranteed” (in this case, progressive moral commitments) and gives them “a new twist by combining them with the exigency of capital accumulation.”⁴⁵ The contemporary market phenomenon of the ESG rating is another example of this same process, whereby environmental concerns are mirrored by capital and then “sold back” in the form of new financial products.⁴⁶

There are, however, risks involved for corporations in pursuing the “inclusive consumer” and following every shifting mood of their internal cadres. While it is, perhaps, unlikely to ever be repeated on the same scale, the Bud Light boycott does illustrate the potential financial costs involved for firms that appear to lose touch with the sensibilities of their core markets. The specific “profile” or emotional repertoire of cadres—their anxieties, fantasies, sensibilities, and ideological idiosyncrasies—are not generally speaking those of the wider public.⁴⁷ Institutions that lose sense of that distinction, responding to the anxious internal signals of their cadres in the belief that they reflect sentiments in the world at large, can find themselves alienating their external stakeholders and audiences. Ingesting too much of the radical ethos can mean that brands and institutions end up mirroring some of the more off-putting qualities that have long plagued radical left-wing movements.⁴⁸ Lecturing and sloganeering, dogmatism, and a subcultural contempt for ordinary people are not compatible with the long-term interests of brands and institutions that rely on the patronage of broad consumer or audience bases for their survival. Rather than substantial new audiences being engaged by these postures and sentiments, existing audiences may simply cease turning up.

There are also some wider and perhaps even more compelling contradictions in play between the forces of inclusion and those of financialisation, as well as the old imperatives of securing efficiencies and exploiting labour. The ambitious new inclusion policies at Amazon Studios, for instance, have no effect on how business is conducted elsewhere at Amazon. A recent report by Oxfam shows that, despite rhetoric from the firm about its supposedly “compassionate” managerial culture, American Amazon workers are routinely subjected to humiliatingly invasive forms of workplace surveillance and discipline, including a strict policy limiting bathroom breaks during “crunch periods” that has led to many of Amazon US’s distribution and warehouse workers developing urinary tract infections.⁴⁹

Similarly, and despite the sometimes radically egalitarian rhetoric involved, many staff within the creative arts and industries are finding that their work sites are diversifying at just the point at which many are beginning to disappear altogether. In film and television production, ownership changes and financialisation are increasingly making the sorts of personnel transformations that Amazon Studios wants to introduce moot. As Daniel Bessner has recently written,

The new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms—[have] not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They [are] stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house—threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves.⁵⁰

The business models of the asset-management and private-equity firms that now own much of the industry involve cutting their corporate assets down to the bone so that returns can be delivered to shareholders and the assets themselves can eventually be sold-on at a profit. For film and TV writers working in the studio system under this ownership regime, the result is a continual erosion of working conditions until the work itself eventually dries up for all but the most senior and well-connected staff.

As Bessner observes, “the precarity created by this new regime seems to have had a disastrous effect on efforts to diversify writers’ rooms.” One studio head told Bessner that there had been a general consensus during the 2010s that writers from more diverse backgrounds were needed in the industry. However, in practice, the equation of “equity” with a sort of class-blind, prestige-worshipping liberal progressivism had ensured that it was “the black or Latino person who went to Harvard” who was the one being hired. There were no appreciable numbers of new writers coming through from poor, working-class, or even state-university backgrounds. Now, he told Bessner, “writers’ rooms are more diverse just in time for there not to be any writers’ rooms anymore.”⁵¹

Much of the pandemic-period discourse on “inclusive capitalism” (or the paths that might lead beyond capitalism) has been fundamentally nostalgic in nature. Critics of “woke capitalism” on the political right have acted as though they could eliminate the new, “inclusive” or therapeutic tendencies within corporations and institutions and return them to some idealized moment in the past (a “2006 of the mind,” perhaps). However, “disciplining” woke capital, beyond the introduction of the occasional symbolic piece of legislation like Florida’s ultimately unsuccessful “Stop-WOKE Act,” seems unfeasible in practice—as though whole “structures of feeling” distributed among entire classes of professional-managerial employees could somehow be abolished by fiat.⁵²

On the left, some of the discourse during the pandemic that predicted an impending “emancipation” from capitalism operated on a similarly ideal level. Attempts to refound industries, workplaces, and institutions on new, cadre-ish ethoses of care, “kindness,” or “wellbeing” belie the environment in which those workplaces and institutions now exist, one increasingly defined by the kinds of ownership-concentration, financialization, and rationalization trends currently gutting the American film and television business, as well as the return of inflation and the end of the period of historically low interest rates. The more favourable economic and labour conditions of the past, likewise, cannot be wished back into being by “resolutions,” “statements of solidarity,” or collective workplace sentiments, no matter how deeply and genuinely felt. The result of these external economic transformations is not simply a return to the status quo ante before the pandemic, but the significant acceleration of certain monopolizing trends that existed before the pandemic. The answer to Giorgio Agamben’s COVID-period question, “where are we now?”, then, seems to be: “further away than ever.”⁵³

1. Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World (London: OR Books, 2020), 3, 39, 41, and 103.

2. Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic! 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 188-9; 116.

3. Mark Featherstone, “Žižek’s Pandemic: On Utopian Realism and the Spirit of Communism,” Cultural Politics 17, no. 1 (2021): 132-3.

4. Geoff Shullenberger, “The Revenge of the Hyperreal: The Simulation of Crisis and Contemporary Left Politics,” in COVID-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear, edited by Elena Louisa Lange and Geoff Shullenberger (London: Routledge, 2024).

5. For a vivid example, see Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (London: Verso, 2021).

6. Cf. Lisa Suckert, “The Coronavirus and the Temporal Order of Capitalism: Sociological Observations and the Wisdom of a Children’s Book,” The Sociological Review 69, no. 6 (2021): 1174.

7. Chase Peterson-Withorn, “Nearly 500 People Became Billionaires During The Pandemic Year,” Forbes Magazine (6 April 2021).

8. Anna Cooban, “Billionaires added $5 trillion to their fortunes during the pandemic,” CNN (16 January 2022).

9. Earl Fitzhugh, JP Julien, Nick Noel, and Shelley Stewart, “It’s time for a new approach to racial equity,” McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility, 2 December 2020.

10. Megan Armstrong, Eathyn Edwards, and Duwain Pinder, “Corporate commitments to racial justice: An update,” McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility, 21 February 2023. McKinsey’s methodology tracked all companies that had appeared in the Fortune 1000 list between 2020 and 2022 (including those that subsequently dropped out), hence the numerical overhang.

11. Armstrong, Edwards, and Pinder, “Corporate commitments to racial justice: An update.”

12. Fitzhugh, Julien, Noel, and Stewart, “It’s time for a new approach to racial equity.”

13. Kari Paul, “Real Change or Symbolism? What Silicon Valley Is—and Isn’t—Doing to Support Black Lives Matter,” Guardian (12 July 2020). Gale Academic OneFile.

14. “Incognito Activism: Josh Emden Interviews Daze Aghaji,” IPPR Progressive Review 27, no. 2 (2020): 176-8.

15. Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (London: Allen Lane, 2023), 83-96. See also Katherine Dee, “Tumblr Transformed American Politics,” The American Conservative (11 August 2021).

16. “Incognito Activism,” 176.

17. For the latest in an extremely long line of contributions all making the point that the PMC is not really “a class,” see D. W. Livingstone, “The PMC Is Not a New Class,” Jacobin Magazine (27 April 2024).

18. Cf. Jag Bhalla, “Our Deformed Professional Class,” Sublation Magazine (10 April 2024).

19. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2018), 62-3.

20. Lisa M. Fairfax, “Stakeholderism, Corporate Purpose, and Credible Commitment,” Virginia Law Review 108, no. 5 (2022): 1185-6.

21. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 28.

22. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 28.

23. On “reality tests,” see Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 30-2.

24. On the degree to which COVID modelling and reporting in the early pandemic period came to focus on the issue of racial disparities in death and infection rates, see Merlin Chowkwanyun and Adolph L. Reed, “Racial Health Disparities and Covid-19—Caution and Context,” New England Journal of Medicine 383, no. 3 (2020): 201-3.

25. In fact, we can speculate that the moral force of “value for money” and “efficiency” as normative concepts was significantly undermined by the post-2008 bank bailouts, the quantitative easing policies of the 2010s, and then the massive transfers overseas of “military aid” that have typified the early 2020s.

26. See Cris Shores and Susan Wright, “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education,” in Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, edited by Marilyn Strathern (London: Routledge, 2000), 62.

27. Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, translated by Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 6.

28. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 20.

29. See Tyler Austin Harper, “The Church of Human Resources,” Jacobin Magazine (15 April 2024).

30. “Amazon Studios Releases Inclusion Policy and Playbook to Strengthen Ongoing Commitment to Diverse and Equitable Representation” (press release), Contify Retail News, 16 June 2021. Gale OneFile: News.

31. See Richard Harper, “The Social Organization of the IMF’s Mission Work: An Examination of International Auditing,” in Audit Cultures, edited by Marilyn Strathern, 47.

32. Cf. Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2023).

33. For a critique of the politics of intersectionality as taken up by the progressive left during the 2016 and 2020 American presidential elections, see Marc James Léger, Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2023), 158-61.

34. John R. Searle, The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 23; 45-8.

35. Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, translated by Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 97.

36. See Darel E. Paul, “The Puzzle of Woke Capital,” American Affairs 6, no. 3 (2022): 143.

37. Cf. Ryan Grim, “Elephant in the Zoom,” The Intercept (13 June 2022).

38. Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (New York: Public Affairs, 2020), 178-9.

39. Shores and Wright, “Coercive Accountability,” 62-3.

40. See Angela Nagle, “The Left Case against Open Borders,” American Affairs 2, no. 4 (2018): 17-30.

41. Léger, Bernie Bros Gone Woke, 109.

42. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 27; 34-5.

43. On the Bud Light episode, see Owen Myers, “‘Panic and Rash Decision-Making’: Ex-Bud Light Staff on One of the Biggest Boycotts in US History,” Guardian (19 September 2023), Gale OneFile: News; and Gabe Lacques, “Bud Light Gets Back to Basics After Controversy,” USA Today (8 February 2024). Gale OneFile: News.

44. Pamela Brown, Tiffany Burns, Tyler Harris, Charlotte Lucas, and Israe Zizaoui, “The Rise of the Inclusive Consumer,” McKinsey & Company (8 February 2022).

45. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 20. For pertinent comments on the recent growth of the DEI industry, see Catherine Liu, “Cucked by Capitalism,” CLiuAnon (20 February 2024).

46. See, for instance, Natalia Semenova and Lars G. Hassel, “Private Engagement by Nordic Institutional Investors on Environmental, Social and Governance Risks in Global Companies,” Corporate Governance International Review 27 (2019): 144-61, and Ron Ivey, “Society Inc.: The Perils and Opportunities of ESG Investing,” American Affairs 6, no. 1 (2022): 3-17.

47. Of course, we could also ask why cadres see certain crises and events as urgent “reality tests” for capitalism and their institutions and not others, and why (likewise) their employers respond eagerly to some forms of cadre moral petitioning and not others.

48. See Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

49. Alex N. Press, “Big Brother Is Watching Amazon and Walmart Warehouse Workers,” Jacobin Magazine (11 April 2024).

50. Daniel Bessner, “The Life and Death of Hollywood,” Harper’s Magazine (May 2024).

51. Bessner, “The Life and Death of Hollywood.”

52. Cf. Paul, “Puzzle of Woke Capital,” 143-6.

53. Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, translated by Valeria Dani (London: Eris, 2021).