Cracking the Code of Stakeholder Capitalism: A Selection from Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc. (2021)
“Authoritarian nations understand the weaknesses of America’s new stakeholder model far better than America does and ruthlessly leverage their stakeholder status to selectively determine which causes the woke capitalists throw their weight behind. The NBA can put ‘Black Lives Matter’ on all its courts because the CCP isn’t threatened by that message. But the Communist Party would never allow the NBA or any of its employees to breathe a word in support of Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the Uighurs. . . .
Casting decisions, content, dialogue, and plotlines are increasingly edited to appease censors in Beijing. The sequel to Top Gun, expected to be released in 2021, provides an illustrative example. In the original film, Tom Cruise wears a leather bomber jacket that belonged to his late father. The jacket has patches from his dad’s US Navy tours and includes flags from allies including Taiwan and Japan. For the sequel, those politically problematic flags were removed from the jacket. So much for being a maverick. . . .
The more we go woke, the easier it becomes for countries like China to co-opt woke methods to serve their own ends. Consider one product of wokeness on college campuses in recent years: the emergence of ‘trigger warnings’ to students before being exposed to ideas that may challenge their presuppositions on social questions like race, gender, or climate change. It turns out that China took note of the effectiveness of this woke movement. In 2020, based on a new Chinese law, top universities including Harvard and Princeton have begun to label certain courses with a warning label if they teach any material that China may consider sensitive. . . .
China and Saudi Arabia have cracked the code of stakeholder capitalism. They’ve realized a simple truth, the same one I learned years ago during my summer at Goldman Sachs: whoever has the gold makes the rules. But it used to be that those rules were limited to financial transactions. Thanks to woke capitalism, the rules of morality itself are now up for sale. You won’t find a bigger, more powerful stakeholder than a wealthy authoritarian government, and they’re always ready to buy your silence. Under the old shareholder model, American corporations might still prostrate themselves at the feet of dictators to make a buck. But they wouldn’t get to come out of it smelling like a rose. We’d all see them as the money grubbers they were and judge them accordingly. But stakeholder capitalism gives us the worst of both worlds: woke capitalists in America get to make money with their dictator buddies abroad and act like they’re saving the world back home.”—Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (2021)
