You might have noticed that the new global corporate elites, especially those in the big tech sector and the large finance houses, who have become vastly wealthy through the exploitation of new technologies and globalization, are very moral people.
Not like those business tycoons of old, the evil Carnegies, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Fords and Rothschilds, the "robber barons" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an era known as the Gilded Age due to their profligate displays of wealth, execrated by the old Left for trampling underfoot the nascent labour movements around the world and generating unprecedented levels of inequality.
No, not at all, nothing like that. Our new super rich elites are most concerned about social justice, with just about all of them professing their commitment to implementing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in their corporations, with the creation of DEI bureaucracies nowadays pretty much mandatory.
And boy, do they mean it. Woe betide any employee of any of these entities who dares to express dissent from the reigning corporate ideology, especially its multifaceted "equity agenda".
You may recall the case of Google senior software engineer James Damore, peremptorily fired several years ago for writing an internal memo (actually solicited by management) that dared to suggest that gender disparities in software engineering might not be totally due to discrimination, but just might have something to do with evidence men and women have different preferences about the work they do.
Good grief—he even had the temerity to title his memo Google's Ideological Echo Chamber! Anyone would think he thought it permissible to have frank and robust internal discussions at Google.
Anyway he was set straight when Google's Vice President and Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Danielle Brown a statement that said of the memo:
… like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.
Wow—incorrect assumptions about gender. Fire that man immediately! A decision immediately backed by Google's CEO Sundar Pichai. That's how serious Google and just about all its corporate peers are about social justice. As Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has said we do need "tough conversations about tough topics", but questioning gender equity assumptions, that's a step too far. Even virtuous corporate giants acknowledge that free speech has limits.
Not to mention the massive corporate support for the Black Lives Matter movement, with Apple, Amazon and Facebook endorsing the movement and kicking in millions of dollars to support the unfinished racial justice agenda and help overcome the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
How progressive is that—corporations willing to endorse and get behind a movement founded by self-described "trained Marxists", albeit ones not averse to applying some of the funds to acquire multi-million dollar mansions for themselves.
But, hey, isn't that part of the equity agenda? Don't people of colour have the same right to splurge on conspicuous consumption as white people? Looks like the Marxist slogan "expropriate the expropriators" has been replaced by "share the wealth".
And anyway, as BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors pointed out, the controversy about her homes "has taken away from where the focus should be—ending white supremacy".
We even see big tech willing to take on state governments, as with Apple, Cisco, IBM, Google and Facebook and eighty others coming together to publicly express their disappointment with the North Carolina legislature for their discriminatory legislation concerning transgender access to bathrooms in the state. That took courage!
Incredibly, it might not be too much of a stretch to say the leaders of these corporate behemoths have actually joined the "Left". At least in its new and more enlightened form that stresses gender and racial justice and transgender rights over the old-left thinking that obsessed about challenging corporate power and ending gross social inequalities.
This, surely, represents the fulfilment of the Left's long-cherished dream of capturing the "commanding heights" of the capitalist economies—a cause for celebration for all progressives, if ever there was one!
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OK time to switch out of sarcasm mode. Time for a reality check, and an explanation for my cynicism.
I have just read a most astonishing and disturbing book, Red Handed by American author Peter Schweizer, recently released on Kindle and available in print format from 4 May.
The book provides a comprehensive picture of the success achieved by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in creating circles of influence in the top power centres of the United States.
Schweizer's work is an excellent companion volume to Clive Hamilton's two books about the CCP influence operations, especially its "united front" work, throughout the Western democracies.
His specific focus is one of the most important aspects of this activity—what the espionage world terms "elite capture".
This is a systematic attempt to suborn and compromise those at the very pinnacles of power in the democracies to facilitate the CCP's openly stated intention to become the global hegemon, unassailably dominant industrially, technologically, militarily—and in its ability to control and manipulate information flows globally.
The effort encompasses elites across the board—government at all levels (down to local government), politics, the media, higher education, sport—but with a particular emphasis on the most powerful corporations, particularly those in the tech and finance sectors.
Lenin is credited with coining the aphorism "the capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them". Actually, as Schweizer points out, there is little evidence that Lenin used those specific words.
However what he actually said is even more appropriate to current circumstances:
They [capitalists] will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide.
This is an apt description for what has eventuated under the "engagement" strategy pursued by the West over a period of decades—the investments in Chinese industry on terms demanded by the CCP, especially acquiescence to technology transfers, including military technology, facilitating access to world markets, including supporting accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), continuing to treat China as a developing economy, including special consideration under the climate accords as it goes on what a Yale study describes as a coal spree.
All this was done in the hope, vain as it turns out, that economic development would, in due course, lead to political liberalization as happened with the Asian tiger economies, South Korea and Taiwan that evolved from military dictatorships to vibrant democracies.
This view, possibly reasonable during the initial stages of China's rise (though the Tiananmen massacre should have been a wake-up call) became an article of faith that persisted long after its falsity should have been apparent, with key business leaders so invested both mentally and financially in the concept that it becomes impossible to abandon.
The key differentiator between the CCP regime and the Asian tigers is the role of ideology, which in turn dictated a very different governance model in China as compared to the tigers. A consistent error by Western elites has been the idea that with the partial marketization of the Chinese economy, ideology had been effectively sidelined.
However this is false, and as some scholars have pointed out ideology continues to play a central part in the thinking and decisions of the party leadership, but with a few twists that enable "socialism with Chinese characteristics" to accommodate seeming contradictions.
As described in the book The Party by Richard MacGregor, the CCP has managed to create a hybrid society that combines capitalist economics with a Leninist governance structure, the key features of which would be familiar to someone teleported from Stalin's Soviet Union. The expected nexus between liberal economics and liberal politics has been well and truly broken.
Unlike the Cold War, China under the CCP is a genuine peer competitor to the US and the democratic world more generally in terms of economic clout, scientific and technological capacity. In fact, it is on track to become the world's largest economy in a few years (it already is, according to the purchasing power parity adjusted measure of GDP).
Huge investments are being made in cutting edge technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing with the intention of dominating these fields, with China consistently outpacing the US in producing STEM graduates since the mid-2000s.
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Now that the scales of delusion have fallen from the eyes of most people and governments, the CCP regime, increasingly acting in concert with Putin's Russia, is now generally recognized as the democratic world's most formidable geopolitical adversary.
It is a serial human rights violator responsible, among many other atrocities, for the largest mass incarceration of an ethno-religious minority since the fall of the Third Reich.
It is bent on pursuing a raft of ridiculous irredentist claims against a string of neighbouring states by military means if necessary, and on using force if necessary to subdue and absorb the thriving democracy of Taiwan—a standing refutation to the claim that authoritarian governance is ingrained in Chinese culture and necessary for economic advancement.
Schweizer's book paints a comprehensive and profoundly disturbing picture of a US and Western elite collaboration in the CCP's global dominance project.
As well as the big corporates, it involves political figures of all persuasions, influential political families (the Biden and Bush clans), current and former Cabinet level figures, including Henry Kissinger, universities and think tanks, and key figures in media and entertainment. When was the last time you saw a Hollywood film about repression in China?
Take the tech sector. In the area of artificial intelligence, one of the keys to future technological dominance, Google, Microsoft and Intel have all set up research centres in China, including some working directly on military applications. In fact, the CCP regime's doctrine of "civil military fusion" requires that all results of civilian research be made available to the military. This from companies that have exhibited a pronounced reluctance to collaborate on military research for the US government.
A few of innumerable examples from the book. Take Google:
The very real prospect of benefiting the Chinese military has not deterred Google. In 2018, the tech giant announced that it was going to fund research in artificial intelligence at China’s Tsinghua University. The school, often called “China’s MIT,” is a tech-heavy institution with close ties to the Chinese military. What kind of university is Tsinghua? The school is intimately involved in the development of military tools that will be pointed against Beijing’s rivals, including the United States.
…or Microsoft:
The relationship between Microsoft and Beijing improved. By 2010, Microsoft had taken another step in its tightening association with the Chinese government. The company set up a research laboratory in China to work on artificial intelligence (AI) with a Chinese military university, an essential area of research that would have huge implications for the economy and on the battlefield. Microsoft even started taking in interns from the People’s Liberation Army at its Asian research facility.
Microsoft worked with the Beijing regime in other ways. The company allowed the PLA to access communications on Skype, the company’s online videoconferencing platform. Communist officials were monitoring chats that might include organizing protests or other activities that might displease the regime. When asked about it, Microsoft simply said, “Skype’s mission is to break down barriers to communications and enable conversations worldwide.”
…or Cisco:
Cisco Systems has been a regular partner with the Chinese military-industrial complex. The company has a long history of working with the Chinese Public Security Ministry, providing the technological tools to develop the PoliceNet as well as upgrade their “Golden Shield” surveillance database project (and its subset web-filtering project—the “Great Firewall”). Golden Shield is a decades-long ambitious program to create an “all-encompassing surveillance network” to monitor the Chinese people.
…or Twitter's selective approach to censorship:
Regardless, Dorsey has continued his courtship of Beijing. He has granted Chinese government entities a wide latitude on Twitter—wider than he has given U.S.-based users, including former president Donald J. Trump. When Chinese party officials accused the U.S. military of being behind the coronavirus in Wuhan, Dorsey defended the decision to leave the tweet up for two months with no label as to its lack of veracity. Likewise, when Chinese officials went on Twitter to deny Uighur abuse, they were not removed. More than that, Twitter promoted tweets by the state-run Global Times furthering the propaganda.
For these corporations mercenary concerns clearly trump morality. So virtuous! But by Schweizer's account it seems to go beyond that, with a preparedness to defend the CCP governance system and fawning admiration for Xi Jinping. Consider this account:
In 2015, the CEOs of America’s largest tech companies gathered at Microsoft’s glass and steel headquarters just outside of Seattle. The leaders from Amazon, Airbnb, Apple, and Facebook were all present to welcome a very special guest. For President Xi, the visit to Seattle was a stopover; he was en route to meetings with President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. The purpose of visiting Seattle first was to cultivate Beijing’s relationship with America’s tech titans. The Technorati waited patiently for his arrival. When he entered the room, the titans of Silicon Valley were thunderstruck.
“Did you feel the room shake?” asked Apple CEO Tim Cook.
I wonder if Cook to the opportunity to ask Xi about some burning human rights issues like, say, bathroom arrangements in China?