Stakeholder Nazism

If historical parallels to be made at all, sometimes they have little to do with communism

In his 1946 essay, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”, George Orwell wrote the following:

“Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of ‘managers’. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centers in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.”

In giving the famed American political theorist’s work a closer look, Orwell came to the conclusion that Burnham was not only skeptical of Utopias—an understandable impulse—but saw that the only way nations would govern themselves in the postwar period was to embrace the coming managerial revolution. As Orwell explained, “A ruling class which recognized that its real aim was to stay in power would also recognize that it would be more likely to succeed if it served the common good, and might avoid stiffening into a hereditary aristocracy.” This ruling class, Burnham believed, would be a revolving door of suitable men, “so that the ablest men may always be at the top and a new class of power-hungry malcontents cannot come into being,” as Orwell put it.

Orwell paired his analysis of Burnham’s The Machiavellians with an analysis of Burnham’s other, earlier famous work from 1940, The Managerial Revolution, in which, among many things, Burnham praised Nazi Germany’s “efficiency” compared to the capitalist democracies of France and Great Britain (even going so far as to write that Germany “inspires in millions of persons a fanatical loyalty” and that “this […] never accompanies decadence”). Left deliberately in plain sight among Burnham’s observations is the implication that because, as Orwell puts it, “Capitalism is doomed, and Socialism is a dream”, the only answer is for us to accept that what Burnham called the “managerial state” is inevitable, and therefore take an amoral eye to politics and do what is effective to manage the shift.

This managerial state—which the paleoconservative (and wrongly tarred as “alt right” since he’s, you know, a Jew whose family escaped the Holocaust) philosopher Paul Gottfried once amusingly described as a “series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit, and it maintains its power by pointing its finger accusingly at antiliberals”—is indeed anti-democratic, as Burnham posited, but also, again, an inevitability. This is why his thesis proposed that, per Orwell, “the drift towards totalitarianism is irresistible and must not be fought against, though it may be guided.” To simplify things again, it is a profoundly cynical and even anti-ideological framing of the world, presuming, like any elitist both within the managerial state and without, that the people are mere sheep and have no capacity for true self-governance.

The entire essay written by Orwell is worth a read (especially one of the footnotes, which reads “It is difficult to think of any politician who has lived to be eighty and still been regarded as a success”), so I encourage you to do so. Because among many things, Orwell recognized that this type of thinking—managerial thinking, that is—was probably here to stay as what he called a “negative prophecy.” Orwell, being a man of massive talent and as plain spoken and consistent of an intellect that ever was in the English speaking world, had what so few journalists of today claim to possess but never seem to demonstrate: moral clarity.

Because, as appealing as James Burnham’s supposedly pragmatic view of human affairs and organization can be to a cynic like Orwell (or, you know, yours truly), there’s something profoundly dark about it that hasn’t really crystallized into focus until over eight decades after Burnham made his claims. Orwell certainly saw it and he was a contemporary of Burnham’s, but he was George Orwell; there was very little that escaped his notice, as best I can tell. And I do want to note that I am indeed a fan of sorts of Burnham’s; I can’t not appreciate a supposedly non-ideological and completely pragmatic view of human affairs, especially when it turns out to be (or at least appear) completely correct. But there’s one thing that I also can’t not get stuck on: and that’s the notion of inevitability.

When considering what Burnham was claiming and more importantly, how he claimed it, it’s not entirely clear that he saw this shift toward this managerial state as a bad thing; as Orwell notes about Burnham, “there is a note of unmistakable relish over the cruelty and wickedness of the processes that are being discussed.” Burnham may indeed have seen the disintegration of true capitalism into managerialism and his works may indeed have sounded some necessary alarms especially in paleoconservative and libertarian circles, but it’s important to point out that when you claim that your observations are of a force that is inevitable, that it is more likely that you’re hedging your bets and are looking for a justification for the flex of ultimate power. After all, as Orwell observed, “it is clear that Burnham is fascinated by the spectacle of power.” Burnham may indeed have presented himself as a mere truth teller simply stating the facts as he saw them, but nothing—especially not sociopolitical forces and economic forces—is “inevitable.” Just because something is predictable, it doesn’t mean in the slightest that it is inevitable. This is why, even though to my mind there is more evidence than not to refute the concept of inevitability in general, I think there’s also a moral reason to be made suspicious of claims of inevitability. This is because when something is believed to be inevitable, anything done to oppose it must be seen as invalid, which is pretty convenient for the person calling it “inevitable” and pretty inconvenient for those who might have questions. Burnham’s fatalistic vision of the world, however correct in its assessment, means that totalitarianism must be seen as acceptable and that any skepticism or opposition to it is therefore naive or, if we’re to go to the logical conclusion, dangerous. This is what makes it so unfortunate—tragic, even—that his diagnosis was right on the money.

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In case you can’t tell, Schwab is on the right side of this photo

Much has been made of Klaus Schwab lately. How he looks like a legit supervillain, made all the more apparent by his thick German accent. That his World Economic Forum “plans” to make it so that by 2030 “we will own nothing and be happy” (this was less a prescription as much as it was just a prediction, but the fear it’s generated and continues to generate is understandable). That he and his organization seemingly want nothing less than world domination and that they will accomplish this by implementing their big and spooky “Great Reset.”

I have less than little interest in magnifying or debunking any of these claims in depth because we’d be here all day and I’d probably manage to piss off more people than I usually do, either for being naive or for being a fear-mongering shill akin to Alex Jones. I just don’t have much of an opinion the supposedly evil German man’s nefarious plans that really just sound like stuff anyone who’s played the Deus Ex video game series has been interested in for almost two decades. I do, however, have a bit more interest in the ideological implications in the economic system for which he’s been advocating in recent years.

The World Economic Forum’s site dedicated to its Great Reset project has the following text:

“There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis.”

That sounds relatively benign. But there is one thing—really just one word in total—at which we should be raising our collective eyebrow. And that is “stakeholders.” Stakeholders, broadly speaking, are indeed those who have a stake in whether a company or organization succeeds or fails. However, what was once considered a stakeholder—i.e. a specific person or group who is invested in a company’s performance—is no longer what is now considered to be a stakeholder, at least not the kind Klaus Schwab and the WEF are talking about and not the kind that many companies are increasingly referring to when they talk about stakeholders. It’s become a much (much) broader term and it certainly no longer refers to that dinosaur, the shareholder.

A stakeholder is, in essence, you. And me. And everyone else around us. There are certainly those who profit directly off of the gains made by these global megacorporations through owning stock—and those are indeed stakeholders by any broad definition of the term—but now, in an effort to let the disaffected public know that we’re all in this together, the most important stakeholder is your average Joe or Jane citizen of the world. Because if this company which makes electric cars or that company which provides a social media platform fails, so do we all. But more importantly, if those companies, as a whole, succeed, so do we all.

Sounds pretty amazing when you put it that way, right? Utopian even, if only in a kinda sorta mundane way. “We’re all in this together,” kind of rhetoric. Especially given the sheer economic damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic and many nations’ attempts to stop its spread. And Klaus Schwab has a name for this brave new world of capitalism; it just so happened to be the name of the book he co-wrote with Peter Vanham, published, funny enough, on America’s supposed new Day That Will Live in Infamy, January 6th, 2021. That name is “stakeholder capitalism.” This type of system is, as former bio-pharmaceutical CEO Vivek Ramaswamy describes it, “the idea that companies should serve not just their shareholders, but also other societal interests.” (Emphasis added.) Again, this doesn’t really sound all that bad. But Ramaswamy—whose incredible book Woke Inc. should be required reading to anyone concerned about corporate power in the 21st century, and from which I’ve drawn a lot of material for this essay—makes a pretty bold claim that stakeholder capitalism is not only just annoying and even socially divisive over trivial B.S.—with Nike implying that you’re racist unless you buy their shoes, Gillette implying that you’re sexist unless you buy their shaving cream, Disney daring you to question their casting decisions to boost their properties’ profiles in the media, et cetera—but that it “poisons democracy.”

In an era where everyone and their mom seems to be wringing their hands over the state of democracy, this could (and for a lot of folks probably does) simply fade into the morass of performative civic panic. However, I think of all the things that truly, systemically threaten democracy, something like stakeholder capitalism might take the top spot, over, say, the CHAZ/CHOP autonomous zone in Seattle in 2020 or the Capitol Riot in 2021. Stakeholder capitalism certainly carries with it quite a bit of baggage and, despite its advocates’ protestations of its benevolence, it is hardly as selfless, or in the interest of taking any meaningful social responsibility, as it’s been billed. Conversely, as Ramaswamy proclaims, it’s “citizens, not corporate chiefs, [who] should tackle social issues.” There’s a reason for this, and that’s something I’ve written about already: self-interest. And while I do believe that everyone has and is largely guided by self-interest, some forms of self-interest are not like the others. Namely, the self-interest of giant corporations and those who both found them and, more importantly, those who manage them, when they tackle social issues, is nothing like the self-interest that motivates you or I when we tackle social issues. Because when you run a corporation, your only two manifestations of self-interest are indeed detrimental to anything resembling democracy: and that is profit and, as it’s becoming increasingly the case, power. To understand this, we don’t have to look very hard since it’s integral to the actual gestation and birth of stakeholder capitalism.

While Schwab and Vanham’s vision was framed as a response to the economic challenges created by COVID-19 (i.e. the disrupted supply chain, the lockdowns, et cetera), the truth is that stakeholder capitalism—the kind that Ramaswamy and others are warning us about—had its first spasms of life around the time James Burnham was entertaining his own musings about the coming managerial revolution, just slightly before. The basic idea of stakeholder capitalism—that public policy would be taken into account and balanced by a managerial class working within public companies—was first laid out in the 1932 book, The Modern Corporation, and Private Property by Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, but it didn’t find as much widespread implementation and support for over seven decades. That is, until after the 21st century’s first major financial crash and its fallout: what we generally call 2007-2009’s Great Recession.

In Woke Inc., Ramaswamy points to several actions taken by America’s mega-banks—think Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America—in the wake of their bailouts in 2009. After the crash and subsequent recession, Americans—especially older millennials like me who were just leaving college—had very little love for financial institutions in general, to the point where even the IRS had higher approval ratings than the Federal Reserve. This was evidenced not just by polls, but by the growing “revolt of the public,” to use Martin Gurri’s incredibly useful term. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement exploded onto the scene and while it’s tempting, especially for conservatives and even libertarians, to identify it as the moment that “socialism became cool,” I believe what it really showed us was the idea that financial accountability had “become cool.” In other words, for all the crunchy hippies sitting around Zuccotti Park espousing the language of Karl Marx, the palpable rage directed at these financial institutions had more to do with simply hating them for still existing while so many Americans still suffered and notions of millennial upward mobility became (and remain) increasingly mythic.

According to Ramaswamy, the mistake many people make is to think that these institutions weren’t paying attention. That doesn’t mean that they cared, per se, but they were paying attention. They began to realize that they needed to gain the public’s trust again, even if that meant saying things that would have been unspeakable or have you laughed out of a boardroom in the salad days of the 1980s and 1990s. Greed was indeed still good to these people, but they realized they needed to stop saying it out loud and instead, make it clear to the American people that they had learned the error of their ways. They were making changes. They had taken so much from America to become as massively wealthy as they were (taxpayer-funded bailouts included); now it was time to give back! But how? “Well, what forces threaten civilization?” they asked. Terrorism was still a relatively hot topic, but post-9/11 fears were starting to be on the back foot and there were rumblings online and in academia that even talking about the threat of jihadism would tar you as an Islamophobe (little did they know how right they would be only four years later when it became “problematic” to stand in solidarity with slaughtered cartoonists). Plus, no one really wants to hear their bank talking about terrorism (especially when those among you were allegedly profiting off of it).

The first break came from Al Gore, whose 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth was only five years old and still had some cultural cache. After all, climate change—despite still producing strangely heated debates for something that should transcend politics (but didn’t, thanks largely to, well, Al Gore)—was clearly an ongoing issue and renewable energy was a good investment. This provided financial institutions—and later other massive corporations, especially in Silicon Valley—with a cause célèbre, something to point to as being far, far more important than big shorts, or homeowner loans, or other boring “finance bro” things. The public may not have a great grasp on what financial institutions even do, but they certainly understand, you know, the end of the world! And better still, they understand what it means when you have the means—money, that is—to do something about it. Enter net zero emissions, sustainable indexes, decarbonization benchmarks, and so on.

But, despite trying to lean into financial incentives to protect Earth’s environment seeming like a laudable enough goal, this wouldn’t be enough. After all, the internet—and namely social media—was in hyperdrive, connecting everyone and becoming the primary way people shared the news. And in the end, environmental causes never really caused much traffic. So while corporate America could indeed point to all of their achievements in the realm of taking climate change seriously, no one outside of that bubble really cared all that much. The 2010s had really begun in earnest and people had moved onto other things (while still possessing a not-insignificant amount of animus for banks and other large corporations). As the middle of the decade rolled around, people on the internet really seemed animated by one thing: women. Or rather, the lack of women, namely in positions of power, including in the corporate world. The era of “Lean In Feminism” had begun. And this is where “Fearless Girl” enters the picture.

Everyone who paid attention knows who Fearless Girl is—the bronze statue of the little girl facing down the staple bronze statue of the charging bull in the middle of Wall Street. While it was never stated out loud, the implicit narrative surrounding Fearless Girl was that this artist Kristen Visbal wanted to make a Statement about Wall Street, that it represented the essence of toxic masculinity that infested not just the business world, but perhaps Capitalism itself. It was a powerful, intersectional message. Especially considering the fact that “Fearless Girl” wasn’t just an artistic Statement—it was a piece commissioned by State Street Global Advisors, an investment strategy firm with assets in the literal trillions of dollars. Not exactly who you’d expect footing the bill for a feminist, perhaps even anti-capitalist artistic statement.

And then 2020 happened. While COVID-19 had indeed thrown the largest monkey wrench into the global economy since the financial crisis of 2007-2009, it wouldn’t be until late May in 2020, when a man named George Floyd was, at the least, assassinated via extreme negligence by the Minneapolis Police Department, that corporate America would catch its next and, arguably, biggest break. While cities like Minneapolis were being torched and looted, while people were getting killed in altercations, while supporters of the protests continued (and still continue to this day) to pretend that there was no relation between their actions and the riots (despite reality revealing the craven dishonesty of such claims), corporate America jumped into action. Everyone—from Amazon to Popeye’s Chicken—began a desperate scramble to show America’s black population that “no, we love you the most,” doing everything from “highlighting black creators” to openly and very (very) loudly celebrating Juneteenth. All as if that had anything to do with police misconduct and brutality or even, hell, as if it would make George Floyd spring back to life and start singing “Free at last.”

This kind of corporate pandering had already been happening off and on for the past half decade as Black Lives Matter continued to gain ground (and as the founders of the eponymous organization continued to gain houses), with various companies trying their hand at showing solidarity, usually with, to put it mildly, baffling results. But George Floyd’s death was a different catalyst. While the video itself is objectively horrible to watch, there was nothing particularly novel about what had happened—literally the same thing had happened to Tony Timpa only four years earlier, also captured on film eventually available for the public to see, with the public seeming to simply say “meh.” The point is that what made Floyd’s killing unique was the reaction it provoked, far stronger and vicious than had ever occurred before.

One could make the argument that this was just one killing too many, and that may be true, but it strikes me as a little naive to completely discount the nearly three months of unprecedented lockdown and perpetual uncertainty regarding a novel virus that America had experienced; the public was literally pent up and afraid and this gave them an excuse to release in what ultimately became deemed a socially acceptable way. And again, this is something corporate America had noticed—in the midst of their social justice turn (which only intensified after the riots happened in Kenosha later in 2020, where Kyle Rittenhouse became unfortunately infamous), they made sure to celebrate their essential workers (if not lecture other companies for not doing enough). Meanwhile, profits were better than ever for many companies engaging in such theater, especially Silicon Valley giants like Amazon.

And here we are in 2022. All of these causes that were taken up by corporate America remain here to this day, made systemized by diversity training initiatives; environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESGs); and supposed efforts to help poor people of color get loans on new homes (which isn’t what they’re actually doing, but they’re essentially saying they are). You would think that the overused adage, “Go woke, go broke” would apply here and it makes a sort of intuitive sense; the problem is that companies are going woke because that helps them, ultimately, avoid going broke. Because remember: just one decade ago, corporate America was the bad guys. Sure, plenty of people still hate them now, both on the left and the right. The hatred for big business isn’t even that far from where it was in 2011, and yet: there is no more vibrant Occupy movement or something akin to it, garnering coverage akin to, well, the mostly positive coverage of the protests of 2020 (that had nothing to do with lockdowns at least).

This is something corporate America not only notices, but does everything it can to engender. They do this by making their continued promises to pursue higher goals, goals beyond “merely” seeking profit, by making it clear—whether it’s through net zero emissions benchmarks, appointing female CEOs, or highlighting black creators—that they’re no longer the forces that completely wrecked millennials’ futures and made us distrust any notion of the “American Dream”; they are now accountable and they are accountable to all of us. We’re all in this together, after all. And yet, we have eyes to see and ears to hear. And it’s pretty telling that these companies are pursuing almost every social cause under the sun…except the ones that matter most and the one that largely everyone in Zuccotti Park in 2011 agreed upon. Financial accountability. Class accountability. Wage accountability. Profit-seeking accountability. The reason corporate America has made its pivots without making these pivots should be obvious now, but I’ll boil this down by paraphrasing Vivek Ramaswamy’s succinct analysis: By saying that they are accountable to everyone, they are, in effect, accountable to no one.

That, ladies and gentlemen (brothers and sisters, comrades and friends) is the essence of stakeholder capitalism and why it’s a nefariously brilliant profit-seeking venture. But what about how it works as a form of power?

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Claiming that people pursue power for its own sake is a hard thing for a cynic like me to fully grasp because, frankly, it’s a hard thing for someone like me—a modern—to believe; we live in a post-imperial, post-colonial, “post-history” period of time (stuff I don’t consciously believe, but you better believe I was raised to believe by post-Cold War American culture). Hence, my dissonance. So I must remind myself that power can be an endgame in and of itself, at least for some people. My way of doing that is looking at why people seek power and presuming that true megalomania and narcissism are more outliers than commonplace. There has indeed been a lot of research conducted regarding the motivations for seeking power, and as it turns out, not a lot of it—at least not primarily—has to do with gaining material wealth. Now, this often goes hand in hand with power—that’s just how the cookie crumbles—but ultimately, research conducted by Cislak, Cichocka, Wojcik, and Frankowska (2018) suggests that the desire for power is rooted in two causes:

1. To control others’ behavior

2. To exercise control over one’s own autonomy and self-determination (Emphasis added)

The first reason for seeking power—controlling others’ behavior (and, by extension, thoughts—i.e. the logical conclusion of controlling behavior)—is seen by most Americans and Westerners in general as self-evidently toxic, and even morally wrong. The second reason, however, is a harder nut to crack because, on the face of it, garnering power to gain control over your own fate is, in essence, what the American myth surrounds. However, when we start to examine this motivation and apply what I’m oh-so-humbly calling the Von Sternberg Law of Deep-Seated and Perpetual Self-Interest, we start to realize that because this need to control one’s own autonomy doesn’t really contain a moral quality unless it relates to an objectively measured restraint upon one’s own autonomy—such as being literally enslaved—that this can take some pretty dark turns. Especially, as it turns out, if it becomes involved in the management of others. This is where the professional managerial class comes into play.

Much has been written and said about the so-called professional managerial class, both from the right and from the left. Vivek Ramaswamy dedicates an entire chapter to this class in Woke Inc. and has spoken of it in interviews. This term carries a lot of weight—and indeed has its detractors and those who might think the notion of such a class is a loaded one—and is increasingly invoked in sociopolitical discourses of the 21st century; it even saw a bit of a resurgence on the left when one of the term’s coiners—Barbara Ehrenreich—died on September 1st, 2022.

So we know that this supposed class with its storied history shares a lot of support from both the left and right, if only by radicals and class-conscious folks. But what is it? Well, as the Ehrenreichs would have it, it essentially refers to middle class workers—white collar types—usually equipped with college educations who, through their professions—usually in media, academia, and, increasingly, technology—influence society in various subtle and, at times, not so subtle ways. This has been observed and described in various ways over the subsequent years. As Saagar Enjeti has observed, class now no longer simply refers to how much money you have in the bank, but rather, how many credentials you can flex as an “expert.” More reactionary figures like Curtis Yarvin have been onto this divide for years now, with Yarvin referring to this PMC, as its known in shorthand, as being part of “the Cathedral”—a term he’s apparently largely abandoned thanks to most of us peons on Twitter overusing it; many others have turned to the somehow more cringe “Regime” terminology, but that’s a different story for a different long-winded Substack post. The PMC is made up of the kind of people Christopher Lasch would have called “the elites” possessed with the same psychological quality described by Jose Ortega y Gasset as being that of “the mass man” (the latter of whom, perhaps tellingly, fetishizes equality rather than prioritizes it, to paraphrase the excellent Philosophize This! host Stephen West).

However, I think Vivek Ramaswamy puts it best when he describes the PMC as “the invisible fourth leg of the stool” of corporate America (with the three primary legs being the founders, investors, and direct employees). This fourth class is bound to the job of making sure founders, investors, and employees are all “on the same page.” And this, according to Ramaswamy, usually ends up being made manifest through a political lens as informed by the system of stakeholder capitalism. But what I want to do is to veer away from these more straightforward definitions of the so-called “PMC” and take a closer look at what they are not and examine how that relates to the desire to accumulate power—something that applies both to the PMC of today and the historical PMC.

The first thing that the PMC is not is a group of passionate fighters against inequality, despite that being exactly how—through the veneer of and policies made to benefit stakeholder capitalism—they present themselves. They are, as University of California—Irvine professor Catherine Liu puts it in her excellent book Virtue Hoarders, a class who “loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation.” They are, in other words, the perfect foot-soldiers for stakeholder capitalism. Remember: Marx hurts the bottom line. Diversity, equity, and inclusion does not (if used correctly, of course).

The next thing the PMC is not is truly secular. At this point, this is well-covered territory—namely that modern social justice, “wokeness”, or whatever else you want to call it is indeed a religion (and as Vivek Ramaswamy suggests—correctly, in my view—should be legally treated as such). However, pinning non-secularity to a specific class is something a little more unique because it really helps define who one means when they start talking about “the woke” (or “the Regime”…or “the Cathedral”…or who the hell ever). And to further this point, Liu explains in her analysis that, like those Christian charlatans waving around their prosperity gospels, the PMC do indeed “find salvation, like most Protestants, in material and earthly success.” The PMC is, in essence, a religious institution, with its more radical representations who gather on the streets with signs acting as their sort of Opus Dei.

Finally, and perhaps most damningly, the PMC is not is a class of people with much skill in creating things. As Vivek Ramaswamy puts it in Woke Inc., these are the people—this class—that, true to their name, manage companies, while the more creative people are the ones who found them. This statement, as broad as it may sound, is true in almost every sector that you can imagine. Tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook all have armies of PMC members, of course, but so do multinational banks—these largely and most obviously manifest in the HR departments, but by no means are they limited. The university system’s always bloated and increasingly bloating administrations are another great example of the PMC—they are not the educators themselves, nor are they the researchers. Less obvious examples include the publishing industry that keeps the gates safe from the multitudes of unpublished writers all looking for their big break; the agencies and management companies that ink deals for actors—both big and small—and who, quite literally, manage their clients’ image (especially on the higher end of things); the record labels that produce and “handle” their client musicians; and so on. In essence, these are the people who, barring creative talent of their own, make sure those who have creative talent (and those who consume the fruits of it) are “managed”; in their salaries, expectations, or otherwise.

This might sound like the garden variety “those who can’t write, teach how to write,” or even the “hedge fund bros don’t even MAKE things” kind of cliche(s)—and in a way, I suppose this is the same kind of criticism—but in reality, the PMC is simply a class filled with snobbish consumers who see themselves as being the real transgressors, all while merely engaging in crude sociocultural masochism that’s been deemed Correct and Righteous from on high (when it is, in fact, just another manifestation of consumer culture). As Liu observes, “In the evolution of the PMC, antagonism against mainstream culture and ordinary people were mixed up with its smug sense of subcultural superiority”; this could be seen in the academy—and now in PMC-dominated progressive society more broadly—as “the academic fetish for the transgression of ‘norms’”. If you, say, like and promote the 1619 Project, it’s less likely because you thought through its analyses and conclusions and compared them to other, perhaps previously celebrated works of history, and more likely that you thought it was “telling hard truths,” and going against the grain of mainstream “hwite history” (deliberate spelling there), thereby securing your place as a transgressor (despite never really transgressing anything except perhaps showing up fifteen minutes past nine AM a couple of times). In other words, having and expressing taste that’s merely seen—especially within one’s own social circle—as counter-intuitive, is enough to fill the hole that more creative types tend to fill with their own creations, whether it’s a company, a research paper, a book, an album, or a performance.

We know what the PMC essentially are and, hopefully, we’ve mapped out what they are not. In short, according to the theorists I’ve cited at least, they are a class of people that manage our day-to-day culture backed by credentials and “expertise” who aren’t particularly interested in equality, have supplanted traditional faith and individualism for a new pseudo-secular institution of one, and who really don’t have very much creative talent to begin with. And looking at what this class of people are and are not, it hopefully becomes even clearer why power can become a means to an end with them, especially if we consider reason number two that people seek power—To exercise control over one’s own autonomy and self-determination. Because, as Vivek Ramaswamy points out, this class of people, while certainly capable of becoming relatively well-off, are not going to become rich. If that was their end goal, they wouldn’t be in these positions in the various sectors in which they populate. So, in the event of enrichment of wealth being out of the question, how else does one enrich themselves? If you said “power”, then you have indeed been paying attention (no small feat with this beast of an essay, I know).

It is reasonable to assume that many who make up this class pursue power for power’s own sake, and that deep down, many—perhaps most—of them exercise that power for its own sake. But in effect, that is typically not what they’re doing. They are the enforcers—the foot soldiers, as I put it earlier—of stakeholder capitalism. Because remember: in stakeholder capitalism, the pursuit of profit “merely” for the sake of shareholders (instead of stakeholders), naked and open to the world, is no longer acceptable. Now, reputation is king. And the PMC is primed and ready to make sure—through the social and ideological causes championed by the multi-billion (trillion?) dollar companies willing to play in the stakeholder capitalism pool—that these companies’ and organizations’ reputations are laundered to a fine sheen. As Vivek Ramaswamy puts it, “To successfully merge business with politics, managerial elites must control both”; explaining further, this “play for power” comes from their professional job security, which is bolstered more by social stature and reputation than mere money—and in the 21st century, this can only be bolstered by expressing their ideological concerns. The important bit to keep in mind is that when you see “cancel culture” at work, it’s either usually being spearheaded by members of the PMC (namely in the media), or the effort to “cancel” someone is eventually going to be enforced by the PMC. An example of scenario one is Taylor Lorenz going after LibsOfTikTok, while an example of scenario two is Google’s internal team firing James Damore for the infamous “Google memo.”

So…what is all this? What does this have to do with history? Well, as it turns out, quite a bit, and if I’m being fair, it’s likely something about which the practitioners of stakeholder capitalism are completely oblivious. When you pull apart this “new capitalism” and look at its constituent parts, a familiar picture begins to form. And unfortunately, many of the people who today seem to be wise to the dangers of stakeholder capitalism are making a monumentally superficial and possibly dire mistake.

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On September 28th, 2021, the conservative-leaning Washington Times posted an opinion piece called “Stakeholder capitalism is communism in disguise”. Right from the jump, the author claims that the effort to replace shareholder capitalism with stakeholder capitalism is “a fancy disguised way of saying the World Economic Forum is rapidly pushing to replace capitalism with communism.” In making their case, the author continues to use commitments to causes and policies like Black Lives Matter, vaccination mandates for COVID-19, and even environmental regulations as evidence of a communist agenda (neglecting to explain what any of those have to do with a dictatorship of the proletariat, communal control of industry and natural resources, and, you know, an abolishment of money altogether). The one thing the author gets right is to point out that via stakeholder capitalism, free markets—as we understand them—would be “no more.” But beyond that, it’s your stereotypical, uncreative conservative fever dream that just feels like a pathetic appeal to 1950s Red Scare nostalgia (and at least back then, the anti-communists who knew what was happening in Stalin’s Russia and, by extension parts of Hollywood, had a point, despite their awful and heavy-handed approach).

Other tiresome, increasingly irrelevant figures have made similar claims about stakeholder capitalism being all about indoctrinating the West with socialism/communism/Marxism, and in the end, they all fall into the same trap: in correctly diagnosing stakeholder capitalism as being opposed to classic, amoral shareholder capitalism, they become distracted by the fact that the causes championed by the “stakeholders” in this form of capitalism are “left wing.” They may sometimes have the right idea—use historical precedent to try and explain why stakeholder capitalism has problems and may even be nefarious—but it won’t do to make comparisons that are off the mark. And comparing stakeholder capitalism to communism, in this case, simply won’t do indeed. Just because communism is left wing and the ideology—such as it is—espoused by companies who engage in stakeholder capitalism is ostensibly left wing too, that doesn’t mean they’re the same or that stakeholder capitalism is a “Trojan horse”. Ultimately, that is intellectually lazy and superficial (and that’s being charitable). Remember what George Orwell wrote with regard to his analysis of James Burnham’s work: “Capitalism is disappearing, but socialism is not replacing it.”

So the question we must now ask is this: if we’re to look at history for comparisons, where should we look?

In May of 1937, Adolf Hitler declared the following:

“I tell German industry for example, ‘You have to produce such and such now.’ I then return to this in the Four-Year Plan. If German industry were to answer me, ‘We are not able to,’ then I would say to it, ‘Fine, then I will take that over myself, but it must be done.’ But if industry tells me, ‘We will do that,’ then I am very glad that I do not need to take that on.”

This quote was dug up and used by preeminent German libertarian scholar and, however dubious of an honor it is to be called this, “Hitler expert,” Rainer Zitelmann, both in an article written for the Mises Institute as well as a new book published in 2022. Zitelmann’s political orientation might cause some readers to recoil and even tune out, but it’s important first point out that he is not one of those libertarians who likes to claim that “Hitler was actually a leftist” or anything so crude; rejecting political labels is, per Zitelmann, important to actually understanding Hitler and the Nazis and their relationship to economics, not to mention ideology. Were the social values espoused by Hitler and many of the other Nazi elites like Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg by pretty much any estimate “conservative” by today’s standards?

Well…sort of. In terms of, say, gender roles? There was premium placed on Nazi women being homemakers. Very conservative by today’s standards. But in terms of, say, environment? Hitler, as well as many of the more esoteric Nazi ideologists like Heinrich Himmler, were advocates of animal rights and preservation of natural environments. Not exactly “conservative” by today’s standards. These contradictions—among many others, including my personal favorite, i.e. a simultaneous rejection of Christianity but also a profound interest in spirituality, at least by many of the Nazi elites not named Hitler—help us both understand why the left-right dynamic doesn’t help us here but also to help us understand not just National Socialist economics but also how it, if it wasn’t obvious by now, relates to modern, 21st century stakeholder capitalism, if only in intellectually interesting ways.

The first thing worth mentioning when it comes to the Nazis and economics is that they were, under Fuhrerprinzip (or “leadership principle”), acting, at all times at the behest of Hitler, regardless of their different interpretations of National Socialism. They all had their peccadilloes, to be sure, but they all adhered to Hitler’s vision. And Hitler’s vision was, for lack of a better term, very radical: his hatred of Jews was part and parcel with European racism of the time, as was the ultimate “solution” to such hatred in terms of the technology used to carry it out, but his economic vision was radical in ways that held more in common with the views of guys like Vladimir Lenin. At his core, Hitler hated capitalism. Not profit, and not corporate interests necessarily; but capitalism as it existed at the time—something to which he tethered the Jews, like he did with everything. This included Bolshevism, which he, according to Zitelmann, was more afraid of than capitalism, since it was the only counter to capitalism that had any chance of succeeding and outpacing him and his racist vision of the world.

Hitler and the Nazis, unlike socialists and communists, did not believe in the abolishment of private property or placing the means of production in the hands of the proletariat—things that are kinda sorta required to be a socialist or, for that matter, a hardcore leftist. Hitler had no problem with corporations—and powerful ones at that—as long as they did what he dictated. Hitler believed in the primacy of politics, in that the state would essentially let the private sector do what it wanted—unlike socialist and communist systems where things would be purely nationalized—but also, if he so desired, would make the things he and his regime wanted when they wanted. This allowed the private sector to remain ostensibly private, while everything remained at the behest of Fuhrerprinzip. If there’s any contemporary government that essentially shares this methodology, it’s the People’s Republic of China (though they manage to have even less on-the-ground regulation than either Nazi Germany or the United States…until of course they decide that they do on a whim).

This flexing of state power over the private sector—and eventually in many cases in the private sector—is the first historical key. The second historical key is something a little subtler and likely far more controversial to impugn or even suggest: that it wasn’t just the state dictating commerce, but rather, ideology. Hitler indeed believed in the primacy of politics, but to believe in Hitler was to believe in an ideology. Many companies played fast and loose with loyalty as opportunists—Zitelmann points out that many of them donated to both the Nazi Party and other political parties in the lead-up to the Nazi seizure of power to hedge their bets. But once Hitler was in power, very little protest erupted from the German corporate class. The Nazis’ racialist ideology became the prime mover of German politics, culture, and capital as the years went on.

This is why you had BMW and Volkswagen not only producing cars for the new regime and its people—oftentimes using slave labor—but doing so because car ownership was part of the Nazis vision of Volksgemeinschaft (Hitler’s word for the “People’s Community”, always making sure to leave little doubt as to who belonged in such a community and who did not). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in its explanation of the Nazis’ relationship to Volkswagen, quoted propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ 1942 proclamation that Germany’s future would have “a happy people in a country full of blossoming beauty, traversed by the silver ribbons of wide roads, which are open to the modest car for the small man.” Ideology determining the course of production and thus, commerce. There is, of course, the darker implementation of corporate power within the Nazi state. Volkswagen and BMW did, as mentioned previously, engage in slave labor (including of children), but other German companies—including some still in business today—have direct links to the slaughter of the Jews.

Hitler and his Volkswagen

The infamous chemical producer I.G. Farben (which was liquidated in 2012, for what it’s worth) not only employed slave labor from camps that included Auschwitz, but had a subsidiary that produced Zyklon B, the chemical used to gas millions of Jews to death. In addition, the Bayer group (yes, that Bayer) took part in human experimentation at the Auschwitz and Mauthausen concentration camps, namely in the women’s camps, where inmates were deliberately infected with tuberculosis and diphtheria and given various early versions of drug treatments, resulting in over half of those infected with TB dying. I.G. Farben was put on trial in 1947 by American lawyers and, despite all 13 defendants being convicted, all were given early release. I.G. Farben was, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, among the companies whose owners were telegrammed by Herman Goering in 1933 to meet with the soon-to-be-Fuhrer who famously told the gathered industrialists that “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.” Making sure to let them know that he was by no means a communist trying to nationalize their industries, he also said something crucial and something that would turn out to be true (and that should yet again disabuse any eager right winger to believe that he was a leftist): he said that he would abolish labor unions. If you’re not aware, industrialists have a heightened risk of dying from nonstop, spastic orgasms on the spot at those words.

The pursuit of profit was always at the forefront of these companies’ minds—that’s what it means to run a company, after all. But it would be a mistake to think that they were not also committed ideologues. One of the other early corporate adopters of Nazism was the head of leading German weapons manufacturer Krupp, Gustav Krupp (whose family had been running the company since the 16th century), was a dedicated Nazi even before Hitler’s seizure of power. According to a 1949 report by the still pre-pubescent United Nations, “[Gustav Krupp] played an important part in bringing to Hitler’s support other leading industrialists and through the medium of the Krupp firm [had] from time to time made large scale contributions to the [Nazi] Party Treasury.” Again, it must be stated: ideology determining the course of production and thus, commerce. It was, in many ways, the perfect marriage of corporate and state power.

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So with all that said, how did all of that relate to modern-day stakeholder capitalism? Many readers no doubt can see some of the parallels with their own eyes, but there are likely some hiccups cropping up here and there when looking at both systems in parallel and possibly even a complete rejection of the entire premise of this piece.

One might point out that Nazism was radically opposed to capitalism, while stakeholder capitalism is merely a more “socially responsible” form of capitalism; that’s the first potential issue. The second issue is that there’s also quite a bit of irony regarding the importance of the so-called professional managerial class as the “foot soldiers” of stakeholder capitalism because, when it came down to it, Hitler would have seen the class that makes up the PMC today—the educated bureaucracy, the media, et cetera—as being decadent and worthy of destruction, despite the fact that they are indeed the (soft) enforcers of the very kind of capitalism that he’d be fine with as long as he was in control! As for the final potential issue with this comparison, one might also point out that maybe stakeholder capitalism is simply the best way forward for our species, especially if you zoom out enough and look at many of the cultural/societal problems facing the world in the next 100 years.

To address the first seeming contradiction present in the comparison we’ve been playing with—that Nazism was radically opposed to capitalism while stakeholder capitalism is merely a more “socially responsible” form of capitalism—it’s important to first remember that this distinction, when talking about capitalism, does not matter. The Nazis used state power to encourage and sometimes coerce cooperation from their corporate class, and this class had very little trouble being convinced—because they were already ideologically committed to using their corporate power for ideological ends—they needed no convincing to inject ideology into commerce. To put it bluntly, many modern stakeholder capitalists are also injecting ideology into commerce in a way that simply hasn’t resembled any other economic system in any meaningful way…except the one that existed under Nazism. The restrictions in place in the National Socialist economy under the watchful eye of the Fuhrer may have been far more extreme than anything we see now but an incentive to change your business practices as informed by an ideology can be either a soft incentive (like, say, higher taxes) or a hard incentive (like, say, your family being killed and you being thrown into a concentration camp), and still be motivated by the same thing: the primacy of politics. In practice, it’s certainly different, but in the end, both methods of incentive are the same. As Rainer Zitelmann has observed, the Nazis not only restricted how you operated business but restricting into what you can put capital to begin with. Despite there being an obvious qualitative difference between being told to produce poison gas and being told that you need to have X number of women of color on your corporate board, if that doesn’t sound like the same principle as ESGs or DEI—ideological concerns informing business decisions rather than profit-driven ones—then I don’t know what else does.

To address the second seeming issue regarding Hitler’s disdain for his generation’s version of the professional managerial class—the educated bourgeoisie—it’s important to first acknowledge that this is indeed true: they would be among those he had lined up against the wall during the Night of Long Knives, if not sooner. But if you think that Hitler and his inner circle would have completely demolished the PMC and effectively abolished it forever, then you haven’t encountered the love a lot of Nazis had with bureaucracy. Hitler himself was not a fan of bureaucracy—this was one of the reasons he so admired Stalin, or at least the power Stalin wielded—but he wasn’t so naïve that he thought he could achieve his vision without a bureaucracy. This is why so much can be (and has been) written about the bureaucracy in place under the National Socialists. While it can certainly be said that one reason Hitler never wanted his name anywhere close to official documents related to the slaughter of the Jews (instead letting his pseudo-vague rhetoric suggest it), it’s also reasonable to at least speculate that he was aware of the amount of bureaucracy involved in such a project; to him, he just wanted things done, but he was pragmatic enough to realize things just weren’t that simple. This is why he had more bookish figures like Heinrich Himmler manage “over a vast ideological and bureaucratic empire […] both inside and outside the Third Reich”, as described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. What this suggests is that despite Hitler’s hatred of bureaucracy—and his likely hatred of anything representing it, a so-called professional managerial class—what he would have done is essentially create his own PMC. As Vivek Ramaswamy points out more than once in Woke Inc.—as do many other commentators and writers—the PMC is dangerous to democracy in that it’s hostile towards those values. …and do we remember what Adolf Hitler thought about democracy?

And to address the third seeming issue—that stakeholder capitalism may indeed be the best way forward for the Western world—I can break, if only for a moment, the critical tone, and admit that maybe it’s true: maybe we do need a firm, guiding hand to save our species and steer the ship at least until we all become placed in the perfect democracy that can only come about with nanotechnology and a benevolent artificial intelligence administering it all. But that’s just not where we are and, frankly, there’s no evidence that that’s where we would be heading if we just placed blind trust in massive corporations to judge what is moral and immoral, both on macro and, ultimately, on micro scales. In the end, the reason anyone who says they care about democracy should be skeptical of stakeholder capitalism is for the same reason they likely balked at the ruling of Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, the ruling that, in the democratic process, effectively treated corporations as individual entities, i.e. “people.”

There can—and should—be a debate about how much financial influence corporations should have over electoral politics (especially considering that there’s reason to be skeptical that campaign finance actually matters all that much to electoral victories). But the real tragedy found within Citizens United was the fact that the amount in donations doesn’t have to be transparent is truly heinous in terms of letting the public be informed on who bankrolls whom—by its very nature, it’s anti-democratic, something noted by many commentators back when the ruling was made. And while the amount of campaign spending is not a guarantee of success, the fact that it’s been obvious for over a decade that corporate money matters more than that of individual donors, should help, at least in part, explain the revolt of the public against democratic institutions that made people like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders so appealing to so many millions of people.

So let’s tie all this together.

Let’s start with the perversion of capitalism. Modern stakeholder capitalism starts when a company’s CEO decides to use company platform to solve a social problem; as Vivek Ramaswamy points out, this usually leads to bad business decisions that then result in negative externalities that are, ultimately, bad for democracy—namely, ideologically driven business decisions—either made cynically to take anti-business pressure off their backs or because they truly believe that their financial power gives them social responsibility to solve the world’s problems—that end up injecting money into social causes and thus are used to influence the democratic process and therefore erode the public’s faith in democratic institutions. German corporations were all too happy to support the new National Socialist regime—either cynically to avoid the anti-capitalist wrath of the Nazis or because they truly believed that their financial power gave them a social responsibility to help the Nazis solve their “problems”—and they ended up injecting money into the Nazis’ pet social causes, which involved up to the experimentation upon and murder of other human beings.

And what about the use of a professional managerial class? Modern stakeholder capitalists make use of this class of educated, loyal, and ambitious mid-level managers to enforce their pursuit of their sociopolitical vision, both within the companies themselves, which they directly control, and outside of them through indirect apparatuses like the media, who, thanks to the static nature of academia (static, that is, except for the always-climbing tuition rates, but that’s another long-winded story), are staffed mostly by people of a single ideological persuasion that just so happens to be in both stakeholder capitalists’ best financial interests (tax break incentives, good press and prestige and subsequent higher profit margins, et cetera) and the internal PMC’s love of power and influence. The Nazis, while led by a man who hated bureaucracy, made extensive use of bureaucracy to achieve his vision, stuffed with educated, loyal, and ambitious individuals who, quite literally, enforced Hitler’s pursuit of his sociopolitical vision, both inside Germany and, as the Second World War continued, increasingly outside of it with military-backed force. Perhaps coincidentally, members of the modern corporate PMC and the bureaucracy of the Nazis tend to be very uncreative, mediocre people who simply want to feel powerful and forgo the responsibility of having power by just following orders. While the Nazi bureaucracy embodied what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” as represented by Adolf Eichmann thanks purely to its murderous nature, both the members of the Nazi bureaucracy and those of the modern corporate PMC in the West strike me as similar to each other in one crucial way: shockingly banal.

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According to LA Review of Books contributors Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe in their excellent 2016 piece that deals with these very questions and historical parallels, “We are already living in our very own, cruel 21st-century Supermanagerial Reich.” It’s a compelling piece that manages to be far more concise and prescient than anything I wrote here but it helps amplify the things I’m talking about and show that I’m hardly alone in making them. But what they and I are not doing is making a clear-cut, 1:1 comparison. Because when you ask, “Is modern stakeholder capitalism just Nazism?”, the answer is a resounding no. This “corporate wokeness,” as some might call it, is not Nazism. It’s certainly, obviously, something else entirely thanks to the social goals pursued by both camps. Stakeholder capitalism isn’t anything other than itself; it isn’t “the same” as Nazism (or communism, despite what superficial/hysterical conservatives would have you believe) because nothing is “the same” as those things.

Stakeholder capitalism is obviously softer in every way to the brutal 20th century ideologies that succeeded in massacring the most amount of people in the shortest amount of time in human history; that should go without saying (but here I am saying it, lest you want to accuse me of being hyperbolic). This, objectively speaking, makes stakeholder capitalism far less terrifying (and I wouldn’t even call it “terrifying” at all, but that’s just me and your mileage may certainly vary). Until stakeholder capitalists start, I dunno, harvesting the organs of children in order to create life-extending serums that they only intend to give to “marginalized groups” for some reason, I’m not particularly scared of them.

But there is one—perhaps significant, perhaps not—important shared quality that transcends all the other interesting parallels I’ve been providing in this essay: and that is an overall hostility toward democracy. And why would that not be shared by the Nazis and modern day corporations? Democracy is messy. Democracy doesn’t allow you to just do what you want when you want to do it. Democracy is an incremental process, where “one step forward, two steps back” is the norm. It’s frustrating, especially given our limited lifespan, but also given how imminent most problems can feel (especially when we let ideals dictate our behavior).

Despite everything I’ve said and cited, I don’t believe capitalism is inherently at odds with democracy—I just believe that it is inherently at odds with social causes and especially moral crusades. It doesn’t matter if a corporation uses social causes and moral crusades to achieve greater profits or if it really is a power play, or if a totalitarian state uses corporate power in order to pursue social causes and moral crusades—it is all the same anti-democratic perversion. You see, I’m with the excellent comedian and podcaster Andrew Heaton where he explains that he doesn’t see political philosophies as notches on a ruler moving from left to right; rather, they’re more overlapping ripples in a pond. This is why National Socialism is hard to pin down for a lot of folks (and no, not just because of the cynical use of the word “socialism”); it explains why terms like “socialism” or “fascism” mean very little to me, especially on this subject. It’s also why this compare/contrast analysis I’ve been doing of stakeholder capitalism and National Socialism might be hard for some people to stomach.

But stomached it must be if you deign to say you care about democracy. Because there are plenty of people with plenty of different beliefs that can be classified as right wing, left wing, or even simply “realist,” all of whom it can be said have a pretty dim view of democracy. If you like democracy, then you shouldn’t like any of this: certainly not Nazism (duh), but certainly not stakeholder capitalism either.

George Orwell wrote in his essay about James Burnham, “That a man of Burnham’s gifts should have been able for a while to think of Nazism as something rather admirable, something that could and probably would build up a workable and durable social order shows, what damage is done to the sense of reality by the cultivation of what is now called ‘realism’.” I could just as easily say about so many people who, despite their protestations about their love of democracy, that those of such conviction and supposed patriotism and appreciation of our institutions should have been, for a while, to think of the purveyors of stakeholder capitalism as something rather admirable—taking responsibility after causing so much hurt in 2008, after all!—shows what damage is done to our democratic institutions by the cultivation of and dedication to the pursuit of so-called “social justice.”

So, ah…what do we do about all this?

This is the question that has been asked of me by a handful of people who, admirably, don’t want me (or anyone) to settle for saying “this is how and why things suck now.” I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I wanted to just end this thing with the stinger with which I ended the last section (it was pretty good, wasn’t it?), but I’ve become convinced that this isn’t fair. I know, according to pedants on the internet at least, history guys aren’t supposed to pontificate about current events, much less on what could be done to make the future better. We’re supposed to imply what the right thing to do in the future is by invoking the past; we’re supposed to play footsie with the present by tacitly suggesting the old cliche that “oh, well, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly does rhyme, doesn’t it?”; we’re supposed to avoid something so unseemly and undignified as daring to suggest what those who might be concerned with such things might do to rectify (or at least minimize negative effects of) the situation laid out.

Well, that’s why I’m not a real historian.

Stakeholder capitalism, it must first be said, doesn’t really know any ideology—hopefully the parallels I’ve made with Nazism have demonstrated that. It may be that stakeholder capitalism today, right now, is the root of all “corporate wokeness,” but keep in mind: this could just as easily apply to what many would see as “right wing causes” (e.g. pro-life abstinence-only education, keeping drugs illegal, et cetera). It obviously is not applied to those things, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be; if there was enough of a cultural value shift to incentivize most companies to adopt these values on behalf of their stakeholders, you better believe they’d follow that shift.

I’ve previously written about how a number of those, primarily on what could be called “the right,” pushing back against things like critical race theory or other such culture war bugaboos are not allies worth having in the long term if one values individual agency and liberty. I’ve also pointed out how individuals like J.D. Vance have openly spoken about how their vision of fixing the ideological capture of the administrative state is to essentially replace it with loyal ideologues (namely, an administrative coup). This kind of “solution” is just more of the same zero sum political brinkmanship that leads to civil collapse; always has, always will. Whether knowingly or not, this is just logical politics practiced by disciples of James Burnham’s description of the managerial state being inevitable—as was the case with Hitler, there may be a true, deep-seated contempt for the professional managerial class and its cultural stranglehold in its defense of stakeholder capitalism, but that contempt has little to do with mere destruction or principled restructuring to these people: it’s about a transfer of fortune.

Therefore, the first (and probably simplest) solution to the problem that is the influence of stakeholder capitalism over our democratic process is to simply not vote for these kinds of people, those who would ignorantly say things like “stakeholder capitalism is a Trojan horse for socialism/communism/Marxism”; it’s superficial, cynical, ahistorical, and/or really just your typical stupid conservative Red Scare BS. Instead, trust those who lay out plans to disrupt the influence of the administrative state without expanding it or restaffing it; whether that means “repeal and replace” or completely abolish, I’ll allow that to be a future debate. But if you care about eliminating this anti-democratic influence on us, don’t fall for the people who simply provide a compelling diagnosis for why you’re so pissed off.

We can also just wait. In Forbes, Steve Denning wrote back in early 2020 about how stakeholder capitalism is actually bound to fail. He pointed out that the stakeholder capitalism offers “unviable guidance on what is ‘true north’ for a corporation” and that “it’s likely to fail for this very reason.” On top of it all, Denning argues, “If big business systematically shortchanges stakeholders other than shareholders, the stock market may soar in the short term but the decades-long diversion of business income to shareholders results stagnating incomes for most of the population.” This isn’t necessarily the best option, at least on its own, because if simply left to fester like this, there’s no telling how much actual damage will be done to our sociopolitical culture. As Denning also points out, “Inequality consequently increases, with risks that populist leaders will emerge and the political consensus holding capitalism in place will unravel.” We’ve already seen some previews of this and while I do think the populists of today are probably among the best at pointing out just where the hell we’ve been going wrong, I don’t want them to get their hands on power. They don’t have a good track record (including here in the United States). Simply sitting back and waiting won’t do. However, it’s good to know that time is likely not the stakeholder capitalist’s friend.

The next important thing to remember is that despite everything, corporations will never change: they exist for the sake of profit because they can only exist if they have profit. Granted, I just spent however long explaining that it’s not all about money for them—that it’s about power—but power isn’t very useful if no one is paying you. Corporations who engage in stakeholder capitalism, ultimately, do care about money and here’s the good news: no one forces you to use their products or services. Any attempt to make you think you need any corporation is just advertising. This becomes difficult when you’re talking about the Amazon’s of the world, but there are alternatives—both online and within brick and mortar locations. Vivek Ramaswamy points out, correctly, that not all motives in life are financial—most aren’t, in fact—and in the end that may the hardest pill to swallow about this solution: greed is one of the few things that can protect us from the social ruin and likelihood of secured anti-democratic authoritarianism more possible, if not likely. If the impulse toward greed is threatened, that—hopefully—is all it will take for a shift to occur within these companies staffed by mediocre people trying to save the world. Teach them that it’s not their job to do so, and if they want it to be, they can find a new job.

Similar to this, another thing people can do is to simply reject institutions that are infected with this type of thinking as best as one can in one’s everyday life. Academia, in transforming itself into a corporate model with the most naked induction of managerial elites into its halls, is actually shooting itself in the foot by bloating their own overhead costs for no reason except to sustain the managerial class and therefore making tuition increasingly unaffordable. In a way, they’re doing society’s work for us, especially if it becomes clear that the only people who benefit from college are indeed those elites that run them.

When it comes down to it, though, this is the hardest thing to do, but required in order to accomplish anything else: learn to let go of cowardice. Because here’s something really scary: you can’t simply dismantle the managerial state, because it’s essentially become a societal value. However, you can defang it and use institutional processes independent of management to prevent its tendrils from hooking into everything. Government changes last and for all of its problems and corruption and compromised relationships, it still is beholden to the people. And if the people at least relearn to at least feel like they can indeed push back against agendas and causes that are simply being done to line the pockets of billionaires and give smug condescending managers a bunch of social clout, they will do so. Vivek Ramaswamy recommends making use of the justice system—this is good advice. Many states—including California—have made it illegal to discriminate based on political orientation. Push for legislation like that in your state if you don’t have that protection. Put yourself out there. If you get ostracized by friends over it, then they weren’t your friends.

In the end, just stop complaining. We’ve endured over a decade of almost non-stop sociopolitical complaint seemingly for its own sake. We don’t need any more complainers. They’re exactly upon whom the professional managerial class preys. In the end, it is they who prop up an economic system whose likeness hasn’t been recognizable since Adolf Hitler put a bullet through his head.