Henry George: Progressive profit: how identity politics captured capitalism

Only power can restrain power in the culture war

Many have been shocked at the de-banking of Nigel Farage for what appear to be political reasons. Coutts Bank dumped him, according to internal documents, because the values he represented did not align with their corporate values of inclusion and equity. Those responsible have now suffered the consequences and been made to resign. Those who are outraged at such actions shouldn’t be: this is what happens when those that comprise the ruling class act according to their moral vision. This new order is the future unless the political will is summoned to push back.

The Coutts Bank/NatWest debacle points to deeper institutional and structural dynamics in our culture, economy, and politics than just “PC gone mad.” What drove the executives to act as they did represents the tip of a much deeper ideological iceberg.  A greater understanding of the institutional and structural dynamics that enabled, entrenched, and reinforced such ideology is needed. Culture isn’t upstream of politics; ideas don’t just float in the ether, affecting people’s actions by osmosis. They require structural force to implement and enact.

We need a fundamental description of how and why social, cultural, and political change actually happens. The “politics is downstream of culture” meme is evidence of what James Davison Hunter calls the idealist fallacy, whereby ideas change the world through sheer weight of numbers of adherents. Yet, this is not how deep, paradigmatic change happens. As Hunter argues:

“the key actor in history is not individual genius but rather a network of associations and the new institutions that are created out of those networks. And the ‘denser’ the network — that is, the more active and interactive the network — the more influential it becomes. This is where the stuff of culture and cultural change is produced.”

What the phenomenon of woke capital represents is a revolution from above. There is nothing conspiratorial here: it is simply the logic of how social, cultural, and political change happens. As Hunter goes on:

“the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.”

So, this being the case, how and why does something like woke capital, that de-banks people for supposedly transgressive political opinions, happen in today’s economy? Our modern economy is the legacy of what James Burnham termed the managerial revolution. From the early 20th century, there was a revolution in elite composition, organisation, and operation. Growing populations combined with industrial capitalism led to mass production, markets, and society. A new centralised elite was required to control and coordinate this new socio-economic and socio-political system.

New administrative structures that interwove government with the economy were created and grew. This produced what Burnham called a “separation of ownership and control”, creating a new class of corporate managers and state bureaucrats. Various labels are employed, but “expert” is one among many for the managerial class. These developments arose from the need to coordinate an increasingly complex material environment. While this system of management evolved post-war, from statist corporatism through neoliberalism, this is still the basic structural reality we operate within today.

We can see this system in operation with corporate structures like NatWest, almost 40 percent owned by the state following the 2008 financial crash. None of this should be surprising, even if its operation is outrageous to many. The existence of a ruling class, which as Italian elite theorists like Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels saw, is always an inevitability in any advanced society where a select few have the temperament and talent to rise to the top of the socio-political hierarchy. The problem comes when the “iron rule of oligarchy” follows its logic and the new elite will become divorced from those they claim to represent and serve, but cannot be easily ejected.

Institutional neutrality is a myth. The question is not whether a moral vision will be institutionalised, but what values and by whom. Wokeness represents the post-2008 political formula of our present ruling class, which required a new set of myths and symbols to secure and entrench its position following the 2008 financial crash, that revealed the limits of the previous neoliberal synthesis between a harder-edged corporate capitalism and a more liberatory social liberalism.

Woke capital is the synthesis that unites what would otherwise be a destabilising and unproductive potential class conflict. We can see this synthesis at work in the NatWest/Coutts Bank situation, where executives follow lower ranked employees in buying into the woke worldview and implementing it through the structures of the bank. The holistic nature of the ruling class and its value set is further seen in the close relationship between financial institutions like NatWest, and the journalistic institutions supposed to guard against them. Instead, each act in concord with the other, according to the logic of their class and the ideology that motivates them. 

Again, there’s nothing conspiratorial here: this is simply what social and cultural change, and the entrenching and implementation of a New Moral Order looks like. As Richard Pipes wrote, “rebellions happen; revolutions are made.” Conservatives must heed Burnham’s point that the use of power to enact one’s moral vision is inevitable, and that “only power restrains power.” Conservatives must act accordingly to use political power to push back against the power wielded by the networks, institutions, and structures of woke capital.

Henry George is a freelance writer and researcher based in the UK.