Last week during the Super Bowl, the company 84 Lumber released an ad depicting the journey of a Mexican mother and daughter to the United States. In the ad, we see the duo manage to get through the hardships of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, only to be stopped at the end by Trump's wall.
It's a powerful ad, though it becomes significantly less powerful when you find out that the 84 Lumber CEO is a Trump supporter. So the question becomes, why would a company with a CEO that supports Trump make such an ad? Easy. It's because activism sells.
84 Lumber is certainly not the first company to pick up on this fact. Recently, we've seen a wave of "activism" from corporations, such as the wave of vaguely anti-Trump ads during the Superbowl, Starbucks's vow to hire 10,000 refugees. There's also Google and Microsoft's opposition to the Muslim ban.
Most of the time, corporate activism is extremely superficial. For instance, Google and Microsoft both made big donations to Trump's campaign. The Muslim ban was a centerpiece of Trump's campaign during the election, so Google and Microsoft's apparent horror at it now is incredibly disingenuous.
Liberals like to argue that corporate activism sometimes actually does have a concrete impact on the lives of marginalized people. But even if we accept this, we still need to be very wary of it.
Neoliberalism often tries to define itself as a sort of "cool" version of capitalism. Instead of stuffy old white men in boardrooms, we get Mark Zuckerburg and Tim Cook. Instead of a boring 9 to 5 schedule, we get things like Uber, where workers can determine their own hours (though it also means workers don't get benefits). But just because neoliberalism has the appearance of being more fun than traditional capitalism, it isn't any less oppressive.
When corporations engage in activism, they aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They're doing it to define themselves as the "good capitalists." But there is no such thing.
In the end, corporate activism seeks to support the neoliberal structures that keep them in power. At the end of the 84 Lumber ad, we see a message that says, "The will to succeed will always be welcome here." The implicit message is that we should welcome immigrants, not for humanitarian reasons, but because they have the potential to be good workers.
We similarly see this in Microsoft and Google's objections to the Muslim ban. In their briefs filed in court, they argue that their companies rely on immigrants for their workforce. Again, Muslims are welcome not because they are human beings, but because they have the potential to become cogs in the capitalist machine.
Yes, sometimes corporate activism might result in tangible benefits. But we have to remember what their true intentions are.
