Global Standard Time: Swatch, homocapitalism and the corporate state

Steven Tucker

July 27, 2023 1 Reaction

Pride and Prejudice

You may reasonably think trying to sell gay watches to Muslims is as futile a task as trying to sell them clocks with pork sausages for hands: yet there may also be a certain hidden commercial logic to the seemingly self-defeating actions of corporatist cogs like Swatch. The so-called “gay dollar” is worth trillions globally nowadays, and selling virtue-signallers hi-vis wearable signs to don so they can feel good about themselves in public is a lucrative business. If you examine the website for Swatch’s rainbow-powered “Love Is Love” range, it is obvious how shallow and preening these items are – ideally designed, you might say, to appeal to their intended customers.

Billed as being “bold and vibrant”, the “PROUDLY RED” Swatch is a “scarlet starlet”, just like the Whore of Babylon. Its “PROUDLY YELLOW” sister-product is both “the bright and radiant centre of the Pride flag and the perfect colour to encapsulate the positive life-giving centre of our solar system”: wearing it can make you feel the indispensable homosexual hinge-point around which the entire universe revolves too. Swatch can clearly make easy cash from appealing to certain people’s innate sense of superior moral vanity – or “pride”, perhaps.

If marketing watches to gays like this was just a simple commercial decision upon Swatch’s behalf, though, then enriched shareholders could reasonably say it was entirely justifiable. Presumably some people do actually buy them, after all.

But there is a clear problem: Muslim Malays, by and large, don’t want to buy gay timepieces. Ideally, manufacturers would seek to create products which appeal to all demographics, even diametrically opposed ones – some people prefer cold snacks to hot ones, so a baker’s shop will sell both cold pies and warm pies. But you can’t really imagine a jewellery store in 2023 selling rival pro-gay watches and anti-gay watches for different consumers from different aisles in order to maximise profits.

Explicitly seeking to appeal to one side of this consumer divide will only result in you alienating the other one, reducing potential income, as shown with Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney. How to solve this? In the same way as the corporate state has “solved” the problem of how best to organise society in a wider sense: by forcibly merging the two previously opposing sides together into one seamless whole.

According to Swatch’s website, “Two rainbow loops [on the watches’ straps] bring the colours together to celebrate the unity and diversity that make our society – and Swatch – so strong.”  But these are pure antonyms. To describe something as being united and diverse – homogeneous and heterogeneous, identical and different, conformist and independent – simultaneously is a paradox. Mystical concepts like the Holy Trinity might possess such contradictory qualities, but how can a humble wristwatch?

Consumer camps

Swatch could try selling pro-gay products in the West, and anti-gay ones in the Islamic world, but these two competing products would surely undermine one another in the eyes of the two opposed consumer blocs. Far better to try and forcibly unite everyone on Earth into one superficially diverse global corporatist ummah, in which relatively trivial things like national dress and cuisine are retained, but more significant differences in morals and religion are flattened out entirely. Then, Swatch could sell queer quartzes to everyone, godless Westerners and defanged Malay Muslims alike!

The term “homocapitalism” has been coined in recent years to describe such trends, with critics coming from both conservative right and progressive left. From the left comes academic Rahul Rao’s influential 2015 paper “Global Homocapitalism”, which described how Western-dominated global NGOs like the World Bank were denying loans to poorer countries in Africa and Asia unless their governments agreed to toe the agreed line on promoting gay rights, under the Davos-friendly rubric of “diversity and inclusion”.

Such decisions are meant to be made on financial grounds only, but as Rao showed, bodies like the Bank produced dubious statistics purporting to demonstrate that, for example, domestic prejudice against LGBTQ people was costing the Indian economy as much as 1.7% of its rightful GDP in 2012 alone.

Hence, homosexuals are explicitly hymned as being an economic benefit for any nation lucky enough to possess them. World Bank statistics suggested Western lesbians earn 9% more than their straight counterparts. Hence, remove anti-lesbian prejudice across Hindu and Muslim India, and boost your domestic sapphic wage-packets likewise, the economists said. But as Rao demonstrated, this is based on various false assumptions.

The traditional extended Western family unit in the West has increasingly collapsed, whereas in India it has not. Hence, Western lesbians tend to form DINKY (Double Income, No Kids Yet) units, whose elderly parents will be farmed out to retirement homes should they grow too frail. In India, however, even if lesbians suddenly acquired the legal right to marry, the traditional extended family structure still remains much more intact there, meaning one of the two wives would probably still have to stay at home to look after aged relatives or other family members’ kids anyway.

Hence, no increased DINKY incomes for them: unless, of course, the promotion of homosexuality becomes simply a disguised proxy for transforming Indian society into a replica of the West’s own prevailing 21st-century socioeconomic structure for the sole benefit of easing the wheels of business for multinational companies like Swatch ...    

Synchronise your watches

From the right, meanwhile, we have the views of conservative US academic Patrick J. Deneen, author of the popular 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed. As he noted way back in 2014, many corporations were at that early point in the current rainbow jihad leveraging their economic might to threaten any US States who threatened to ban the practice of gay marriage, which had not yet then been forcibly legalised America-wide by the Supreme Court.

Why? Many firms argued not being gay-friendly was bad for business, as it made such people feel unwelcome locally, potentially leading to firms based in non-compliant States missing out on talented workers who happened not to be born straight. Yet this does rather ignore the fact that States legalising gay marriage might have made conservative Christians or Muslims feel unwelcome there also, thereby causing them to miss out on their labour instead. As with Swatch and the multinational record-companies who promote The 1975, a choice had to be made about which consumers or employees to appeal to: and, once again, the gays were chosen over their opponents. Why?

According to Deneen, it was all a logical development of free-market capitalism, which sought to create atomised individuals, free of the limiting binds of tradition, as the ideal consumers: religious persons might not be motivated by accumulating ever-more unnecessary stuff, like colourful show-off wristwatches or new CDs by mediocre rock bands, but rootless, shallow consumers, free of the traditional bonds of religion, community and family, might well do so.

So, the economically constraining organisation of the family itself had to be destroyed in the name of profit; transforming the institution of marriage into a mere act of consumer choice, based primarily upon the notion of personal sexual fulfilment, was a great way to do so. Hence, preaches today’s woke corporate state, marry whomever you want to, even a member of the same sex like your nearest fellow rock group bandmate, and act like a consumer even in your private life.

For Deneen, agents of corporatism seek to transform human beings into endlessly interchangeable fungible goods, creating “a thoroughly mobile society devoted to personal satisfaction, composed of individuals whose relationships are fungible and who have no strong relationship to place, history, or the generations stretching between the past and the future.” In other words, a world in which gay rainbow watches can be sold to the willing, mindless, utterly deracinated consumer in Kuala Lumpur every bit as efficiently as they can to his identical commercial twin in San Francisco.  

Sadly, just like many of their watches, Swatch & Co’s intended brave new corporatist world of tomorrow is not a wind-up. 

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Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His next, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, will be published in summer 2023.

Image: Swatch website