The Capitalism of DEI

Until last November, the former US Secretary of Defense was General Lloyd Austin, a Black military veteran who commanded troops in multiple campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and earned the Silver Star for valour, as well as five Defense Distinguished Service Medals. He has been replaced in the new administration by former Major and FOX News host Pete Hegseth, who declared on a podcast last November, “Any general, any admiral, whatever, with a connection to DEI or ‘woke shit’ has got to go.”

Oh, are we talking merit, Pete? General Austin never texted US military plans to a reporter and violated the Espionage Act in a shocking security lapse last month. As CNN political analyst Bakari Sellers tweeted, “People argue about DEI and lack of qualifications, then rave about Pete Hegseth being placed over the most powerful military in the world. Watching mediocrity being rewarded is the hallmark of the Trump Administration.”

This security debacle seems to sum up everything my colleague Jefferson Darrell has eloquently written against the misinformation around diversity and inclusion initiatives but I’d like to add one more I’ve been hearing on Hegseth’s preferred podcasts: the academic-sounding but deeply silly notion that DEI is a stealth operation for Marxism. Once just the rantings of fringe cranks like James Lindsay (who also insists that schoolteachers are part of a conspiracy to turn children LGBTQ+) “The Marxist Roots of DEI” notion has made its way onto serious op-ed pages written by “education reformers” and is now parroted in the comments of any pro-diversity LinkedIn post. DEI, Lindsay insists, “is a justification not for inclusion as most people understand it, but for censorship and purges, just like in any Communist state.” That sounds very dramatic but it’s also completely wrong.

Even Russia hasn’t been Communist for decades now, people

To very briefly recap, Karl Marx, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, believed that our capitalist society consists of basically two kinds of people in direct conflict with each other: owners of capital and the workers they employ. Owners make their fortunes by exploiting the labour of the workers and will take and take until eventually their greed collapses the system and the workers rise up in revolution. DEI opponents believe that’s what’s now happening, that creating equity in organizations is fostering the beginnings of an uprising against the historically straight white male owners, but again they are wrong.

Equity initiatives do nothing to censor or purge those in power, they work on sharing opportunities and smoothing career paths for talented yet marginalized people, something Karl Marx and Communists actually had zero interest in. He had nothing to say about race or gender or ability, seeing those discussions as distractions from the “real” issue of the class divide, and modern leftists often critique DEI as harshly as conservatives do. Creating space for Black women on corporate boards, for instance, does not bring down the power structure, they argue, only adds new faces to it. DEI, they insist, is an obstacle to the workers’ revolution. Undeterred by such facts, critics on the right have pivoted to the idea of “cultural Marxism” which, as progressive podcaster David Pakman explains below, is just not a real thing either.

So no, DEI is not Marxism (“cultural" or otherwise) and it is not Communism. It’s specifically about spreading capitalism in new directions. During the very birth of America in 1776, Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, one of the bibles of capitalism, and in that book, he created DEI. Okay, not exactly, but he identified “the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of society” as an essential fixed capital, with education and human development equally essential in cultivating it for every citizen. Today we call this “human capital,” something measurable and improvable. Canada adopted this viewpoint back in 1984 when Justice Rosalie Abella ushered in the Employment Equity Act and decidedly non-Communist corporations like Apple understand the value of developing human capital.

At Breakfast Culture, we’ve worked with companies to improve employee productivity and morale, we’ve shared the McKinsey studies outlining how diversity and inclusion have improved profits and we predicted the plummeting stock prices and retail sales for Target following their loud abandonment of DEI amid the Trump administration’s attacks. Critics keep talking about merit but Trump’s disastrous administration proves that hiring people from the same FOX News talent pool does not yield good results. The lack of merit there is exactly the problem DEI programs address and watching this new government dismantle American progress, unravel the business landscape and tank the global economy seems the exact opposite of conservative capitalist theory to us up here in Canada but hey, what do we know about the economy?

It may be disappointing for leftists and conservatives alike to hear but DEI is not part of the Marxist uprising, it’s capitalism at its most productive. People love to quote Adam Smith about free markets but ignore his warnings that capitalism was never meant to be about making six men wealthier than gods. He wrote:

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable…A nation is not made wealthy by the childish accumulation of shiny metals, but enriched by the economic prosperity of its people.”

This is what diversity, equity and inclusion does. Want to learn more about how to benchmark and measure your Human Capital & Culture Initiatives? Visit www.BreakfastCulture.ca and/or book a talk with Jefferson Darrell at https://calendly.com/jefferson7/30min. Let’s unlock your whole team’s potential together. 

Let's Break Some Eggs!

– scott dagostino, JEDI Consultant, Breakfast Culture™ Inc.