Cadre Capitalism
Discussion
Paroxysms:
"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.24 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.25 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. 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.27 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.28 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.29 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.”
(https://paroxysms.substack.com/p/the-2020-moment-and-the-new-spirit?)