This week sees the World Economic Forum in Davos, in which many of the world’s richest and most powerful people gather to talk about solutions to pressing social problems — so long as, in the words of Anand Giridharadas, “the solutions never, ever threaten their own wealth and power.”

Davos is supposed to happen once a year, but you’d be forgiven for thinking every day is Davos now. Historically, progressives had speaking truth to power. In 2019 its equivalent is the power of selling truth to progressives. You could call it wokonomics.

More and more popular as a marketing strategy, wokonomics sells virtue to shift products. Its logic dictates that a section of the population will become evangelists for a brand when they see their cause represented in its advertising and, though it will enrage others, said objectors will provide free advertising by broadcasting their hatred online. Think: burned Nike sneakers and flushed Gillette razors.

As others have pointed out, in the U.S. in particular, self-identified liberals have captured a lot of the income in recent years. And so, though the electoral college ensures conservatives are overrepresented in politics, many brands can afford to take a progressive political stance (if only cosmetically). There has been a massive increase in news engagement globally too, and companies know this. As Dan Cullen-Shute, chief executive of ad agency Creature London told The Guardian: “We live in a world where brands think they need ‘purpose’. … Research shows that millennials want brands that do and mean something.” Because, I would add, in our increasingly self-conscious online lives, ergo we in turn “do and mean” something.

There are those of us, though, who support the movements these ads evoke, but are nonetheless wary of what the wokonomics trend says about corporatism’s latest iteration.

Show Us the Money

Warm words are cheap. The real test of whether a company is truly progressive is nearly always finance. As a fictional football player once said to Tom Cruise: Show me the money. Now, though, it is a real-life football player whose relationship to one of the world’s biggest (and historically ethically fraught) brands provides a perfect illustration of wokonomic contradiction.

For anyone who has been living under a rock, last summer Nike revealed that former star NFL player Colin Kaepernick would be the face of its 30-year anniversary Just Do It ad campaign. Alluding to Kaepernick’s “take a knee” protests against the killing of unarmed black men, for which he lost his career, the tagline ran: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Well, what’s the matter with that? For anyone who finds national anthem kneeling as a protest against police brutality pretty polite, nothing at first glance. The Nike campaign no doubt raised awareness of the issues, and if it convinced anyone that more needs to be done to address the fact that black men are twice as likely as whites to die during interactions with police, well, great. Plenty of people don’t share that view — hence the boycotts, burnings, and Trump tweets. At the time, many speculated about the sports giant’s profits taking a nosedive. I’d already written about corporate wokeness, and predicted a profit surge for Nike, which indeed followed.

So wokeness sells, yay. But how woke is Nike, really?

Recent reports indicate that while indeed improved since its sweatshop heyday, Nike still pays its workers around half of the living wage in the countries it produces in. And the list goes on. Attempting to optimize for wokeness, Pepsi was embarrassingly clumsy in its Kendall Jenner ad evoking Black Lives Matter protests, but even worse, around the same time, child labor and other exploitations were alleged within its supply chain. Then you have the case of Amazon, whose founder and world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, oh so generously donated to help Seattle homeless charities (and his own brand, of course) — after lobbying aggressively to kill a local tax designed to address the city’s homelessness crisis. And by “lobbying,” I mean Amazon halted construction on its new premises, and insinuated it could move all its people elsewhere. Terrified, Seattle politicians dropped the tax.

More than Corporate Hypocrisy

This is not simply a matter of corporate hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, both commercial and individual, is inevitable. We can criticize society but we have to live in it too, tweeting about suffering on smartphones made with copper mined by African children. Insisting on perfect consistency is one of the surest fire ways to ensure nothing ever improves. No, it’s about who we look towards to hold our social compass. How infantilized are we becoming, if we turn to the men who mine our data, to provide moral guidance?

Indeed, there is research suggesting that we increasingly rely on corporations in this way. While I have an issue or two with its methodology, it is interesting that the recent Edelman Trust Barometer study which surveys thousands of people, found three out of four respondents believe that CEOs should take the lead in social justice, and trust in employers beat trust in NGOs and government significantly. This, at a time when many sectors have seen a rise in casualization and precarious employment amidst wage stagnation, seems a little ironic. Not to mention naïve, to expect global corporations, whose primary raison d’être is the bottom line, to lead change and model morality for us. My Arc colleague Berny Belvedere recently put it this way: “Nothing represents the apex of capitalism better than giant corporations taking on the mantle and the burden of moral instruction.”

Our Social Contract

But if companies can “do better by doing good,” shouldn’t we encourage them? For instance, Microsoft’s recent announcement of a cash injection to build affordable housing in its native city will surely help many ordinary people in one of the most expensive areas of the United States. Yes. Great.

But.

All but the most dogmatic libertarian should agree that there are some things that government can do better than business and even philanthropy. Because government, in democratic societies at least, is accountable to the electorate, and crucially government doesn’t have to skim off the service funding to pay shareholders. Public services need funds, for which we need taxation. So here is the social contract: get rich, and pay your share toward the roads you and your taxed employees travel on every day.

In recent decades we’ve seen a wearing away of this social contract. So while it is probably indeed wise to encourage corporate virtue, a welcome should not serve as mental morphine. Of course there is a place for business in positive social change. But most often, business is its follower, not leader, and we’d be foolhardy to forget this.

It was not out of the kindness of his heart that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos recently raised U.S. warehouse employee wages. It was because of sustained pressure from people like Bernie Sanders and journalist James Bloodworth, who told the world about the company’s shameful working conditions. As the saying goes, power is not given, it must be taken. To acknowledge this is not “divisive” — it is pragmatic. Progressive politics has made the greatest strides when it thinks and speaks for the economic interests of the vast majority of people. This is what brought us the weekend, the right to vacation, and safety at work; all those things everyone cherishes whether they love or despise so-called lefties.

So let us not lie supine waiting for billionaires who answer to boards to look after our interests. By all means, buy the woke sneakers, encourage philanthropy. But join a union too. Corporations don’t speak truth to power, they are the power.