Some time ago, I pondered just how and why the woke left and the mega-rich corporations had ended up getting so deeply into bed with one another.
As I wrote, the nouveau-riche billionaires of the technocratic class are all graduates of deep-dyed leftist colleges. But, while thoroughly steeped in woke orthodoxy, they’re not about to abandon the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.
Besides, every Marxist utopia, from the Soviet Union to Xi’s China, has ended up as rigidly stratified as Tsarist Russia: a vast mass of peasants supporting a Nomenklatura as jealously guarding their privilege as a feudal monarch.
The race-baiting racket of Black Lives Matter is no different.
BLM has been embraced by big businesses of practically every sector. Last summer, companies fell over each other to advertise their BLM-friendliness. Whether it was McDonald’s changing its name temporarily on social media to ‘Amplifying Black Voices’ or the CEO of JPMorgan Chase ‘taking the knee’ in front of an open bank vault, BLM and big business became best buddies.
And when big corporates open up their wallets to a cause, their money has to end up somewhere.
Mostly in the bank accounts of the Ebony Elite, it seems.
Last week, the Dirt, a blog focusing on property owned by celebrities, revealed that Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, had recently bought a $1.4million compound a short drive from Malibu. As the New York Post pointed out, this followed a string of property purchases, including four high-end homes, worth at least $3.2million (Khan-Cullors was reportedly also eyeing up a place in an elite enclave of the Bahamas, but it is not known if she bought it).
Khan-Cullors, remember, is a self-proclaimed “trained Marxist”. She is obviously determined to be a black Princeling.
Now many (including some BLM fellow travellers) have looked at her property purchases and have branded her a sellout. But the relationship between BLM and big capital has always been mutually reinforcing, so we should not be surprised by Khan-Cullors’ fortunes.
Rather than a threat, big business has embraced BLM as an opportunity. Beside the branding boost of being seen to be righteously woke, as exhibited by the annual proliferation of rainbow badging on every commercial product imaginable, corporations use their right-on posturing as a shield for their most-unwoke practices, whether it’s Amazon taking a knee at the same time as it lobbies against labour laws, or Disney holding “gay days” at Anaheim while profiting from genocide in Xinjiang.
BLM is just the latest gambit in the ruling classes’ divide-and-rule.
Perhaps what is most useful to the capitalists in these ‘anti-racist’ campaigns is their relentless attempts to re-racialise society. The Coca-Colas and the Nikes of the world are very keen on highlighting the racial differences between working people at every opportunity. According to leaked emails, insiders at Amazon-owned Whole Foods consider the ‘racial diversity’ of its workers in each branch an important metric in determining how likely they are to form unions.
The left relentlessly demonised Ray Kroc for his implacable opposition to unionisation in McDonalds. The wokesters of Whole Foods make Kroc look Joe Hill.
Campaigns for ‘racial awareness’ seem almost perfectly designed to foreground apparent differences between their employees, to pit the ‘privileged’ against the ‘oppressed’ among the workforce, to downplay their common interests as workers. The potential for racism in the workplace – whether overt or in the form of microaggressions – has also given management much more authority to monitor workers’ interpersonal relationships, and even their private lives and political activities (particularly on social media). Race has always been relied on by elites to divide and manage people. But where they once drew on racist tropes, now they draw on ‘anti-racism’.
That one of the co-founders of BLM is earning a fortune and amassing a property empire is not a bug but a feature of elite-driven racial politics. Black Lives Matter is the best thing to happen to capitalism in years.
Spiked Online
The black nomenklatura are capitalising to the tune of tens of millions.
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