Today, socialists and others on the far left often complain about “woke capitalism”, the ease with which profit-seeking corporations embrace culturally progressive ideas and symbols about things such as race, gender, and sexuality. These critiques miss the forest for the trees. Yes, corporations engage in a lot of cheap and superficial virtue signalling, but capitalism’s happy co-existence with progressive cultural norms is one of its most under-appreciated factors. It only seems sinister if you assume that capitalism itself is always where the real exploitation resides, which is the kind of view one can only take seriously in societies where arbitrary identity-based exploitation and discrimination have largely withered away.