Is “woke” a new ideology?

“…who pollute our daily papers” is a lovely touch.

Seven characteristics, not four [six, but thanks for the correction CB]. There are few ideologies, or indeed concepts, that you could split into 7 elements and find that all of those parts were unique to them, with no-one else believing anything similar. It’s only the combination of those elements that is distinctive.

It seems to me, someone who prioritises ‘accuracy norms’ over ‘right side norms’ would likely be compelled to admit that there are actually differences between the Bennite faction of the 1970s UK Labour party and the left of the 2020s US Democrat party.

Feeling free to argue otherwise looks rather like a symptom of not sharing that priority.

Obviously, “woke” as appropriated by the right is just a label to apply to any discourse that doesn’t leave rich white cis guys as the ultimate arbiters of what matters. There’s no single consistent application so the question of accuracy doesn’t really apply. That having been said, all those elements seem good, useful, and well worth cultivating.

It is worth flagging the appropriation though. “Woke” is properly AAVE and not for white people to use without permission.

Echoing @Sophie Jane (5), there’s a degree to which we really shouldn’t take complaints about “woke”ism seriously. They aren’t made in good faith, and to the extent that they offer definitions of “woke”ism, they aren’t consistent.

As a white person with a generally positive opinion of “woke”ism–note: I don’t actively use the word myself, but I have a very rough working understanding of the term–I decided to put together my own responses to the six points before reading yours. It was an interesting exercise, so I thought I’d share the results below:

I don’t take O’Malley at his word about what the characteristics of “woke”ism are.

(identitarianism) …sure? There’s limits, but I think “listen to the oppressed” is a pretty basic and broadly held tenet. I agree with the OP’s response as well. One thing I’ll add is that the way I see this deference play out in practice is when a slick, highly trained orator is arguing with someone without that training. This seems to happen all the time when it comes to arguments about the rights of the oppressed, and the O’Malley types seem to assume that the highly trained orator should win the argument, and therefore we should believe their side. Which is, uh, bullshit.
(harm reduction over free speech) My response to this was a simple “yes”. I agree with the OP that this isn’t unique. It might also be worth noting how it’s not universal, or at least we can ask whose harm reduction might be prioritized over speech.
(totalising) I admit I didn’t understand this one, but I suspected that the “makes politics totalising” is totally independent of intersectionality. Having read the OP, I guess O’Malley is complaining about not being able to “divide and conquer” oppressed minorities due to wokeism? I suppose that’s accurate enough, and seems like a win to me.
(communitarian) I honestly don’t see what this has to do with “woke”ism as I understand it.
(skepticism about progress) A good thing, well earned and healthy. And yes, accurate of “woke”ism as I understand it. The OP makes the point very clearly, so I don’t have anything else to add here.
(right-side norms over accuracy norms) I have generally more patience for people who are trying to do the right thing even if they fuck it up, which is what I thought this meant. I don’t think that’s a property of “woke”ism though. Reading the OP, it looks like this is more about how much you care about lies or similar inaccuracies made in service of the Cause. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but again I don’t see what it has to do with “woke”ism.

A lot of this, on reflection, looks to me like projection from O’Malley. It’s a fun exercise to take it down, but I don’t think we should take this (or him) seriously.

“Woke” is properly AAVE and not for white people to use without permission.

How many AAVE speakers do I have to ask and does this also apply if I put it in quotation marks?

There’s a regular trope that goes something like “everything was fine and normal and admirable until some time after I turned 21 and noticed what was going on, when some identifiable group of people made a wrong turn, and they have to be stamped out or things will change.” This is just one more version. That it’s ignorant of history is par for the course.

One can ask the person using the term what they mean by it.

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/574045-in-andrew-warren-suspension-trial-gov-desantis-officials-answer-what-does-woke-mean/

‘It’s a slang term for activism, progressive activism.’
What does “woke” mean?

Chris –

I think you’re mostly correct in your analysis above, but its worth considering how epistemic deference and the prioritization of harm reduction interact in contemporary progressive communities.

There does seem to an acceptance of harm by assertion, at least when whomever is doing the asserting is seem as entitled to epistemic deference. For example, L’affair Tuvel comes to mind, where there was deference to assertions of “harm”, though the nature of the harm was, charitably, nebulous and ill-defined. A willingness to accept very expansive definitions of “harm” on their face, combined with an emphasis on harm reduction, leads to some sub-optimal behavior. I’m having a hard time coming up with a mainstream or right-wing analogue of this particular phenomena.

Separately, Sophie Jane @ 5: To whom do I apply for permission to use the word “woke”?

Great post, although potentially giving a silly argument more attention than it deserves.

There seems to be an increasing number of people who actually believe that “woke” is an ideology or a movement or even just a meaningful concept, which I find just weird.

Is there a significant number of people who call themselves woke and make that a central part of their identity, like “conservative”, “socialist”, or “classical liberal”? Not sure I ever met one. There are people who try to socially censure those who are nasty to vulnerable minorities, and then woke gets used to create a moral panic against them. But is there a problem with censuring bad people? Only if you are nasty to minorities yourself, I guess?

And what does woke even mean? It seems most commentators worried about “the woke mind virus” would struggle to articulate what it is without either strawmanning to such a ludicrous degree that it would make sense to nobody outside of their own cult (e.g., characterising wokeness as a deliberate attempt to destroy civilisation… somehow… and for some reason), or revealingly defining it as something innocuous, as recently done by a conservative politician in the USA, who when pressed finally came up with: the belief that there are injustices in society that should be fixed. I mean, yes, many people believe that, and also: duh regarding the existence of injustice; have you opened a newspaper recently? So, what is the problem with that belief?

Special mention to “Priority of harm reduction over free speech”, because that is central to the whole Twitter drama that is going on at the moment and has for a long time now been a moral panic on the right in at least the USA and the UK. Not adding anything new to the thread with this insight, but nobody is actually a free speech absolutist – nobody.

There are those who recognise that every freedom has to have limits where it starts harming others, in this case meaning that freedom of speech does not include incitement to violence, bullying, or fraud. And then there are those who constantly shout how much they are in favour of absolute freedom of speech and then immediately oppress others’ speech the moment they have the opportunity to do so and/or realise that others’ speech annoys them, e.g., because they are little snowflakes who can’t stand if somebody makes fun of them or because they believe that while bullying feminists or gays is okay, disrespecting our national history is absolutely not okay and must be stamped out.

afeman @13 is correct. “woke” just means “aware”, more precisely “aware that are systemic injustices in American society”, most notably racial injustices. That’s the proposition, corresponding to point 5 “scepticism about progress” that most offends Republicans. As well as using “woke” as a pejorative, they’ve mobilised against “critical race theory” which, in the political context means the same thing.

The majority of white Americans support the far-right Republican party, a fact which goes to show that the “woke” are on to something.

The “listen to legitimate concerns” and “listen to women” arguments have to do with understanding the preferences of affected groups, particularly members who may not be represented in general discourse. It is completely different from the “lived experience”/”standpoint” theory idea which is a theory of knowledge, not a theory of statistical representativeness.

No reasonable person thinks that, e.g., a young black man would not have interesting thoughts on his interaction with police which may be difficult to otherwise acquire. No reasonable person, however, also thinks that a older black professional woman has access to that exact knowledge by dint of being black. Nor do they think that the young black man’s experience should trump disinterested data (e.g., to know whether young black man are pulled over at disproportionate rates, or Asians are discriminated against in college admissions, or whether a certain molecule has beneficial properties at treating headaches is a question where the identity of the investigator is wholly irrelevant). The argument against “wokeism” in this context is their denial of the previous parenthetical, not their argument that people may differ in their preferences or skills.

Kevin @21
“No reasonable person thinks that, e.g., a young black man would not have interesting thoughts on his interaction with police which may be difficult to otherwise acquire. No reasonable person, however, also thinks that an older black professional woman has access to that exact knowledge by dint of being black.”

If I have misunderstood the point you’re trying to make, I apologize. If I have misunderstood it, it’s because you’re using “exact” in a stronger sense than I think is useful.

That said, I’ve heard older Black professional women who had interesting thoughts on their interaction with police that may be difficult to otherwise acquire. It’s worth taking a look at Kimberlé Crenshaw’s TED talk on intersectionality, which is focused on Black women’s interactions with police.

And, of course, there’s the data.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/05/14/policingwomen/

I’m old enough to experience a bit of déjà vu with respect to this whole issue of “wokeism” (which, to be clear, I am 100% down with).

In my early, semi-hippie days (Memphis, and MSU, of early 1970s), there was a thing called “consciousness raising”, or “raised consciousness”. We all had it, or thought we did. Some of us strove earnestly to actually achieve it.

As near as I can tell, wokeism and raised consciousness are not that dissimilar. Wokeism might be a good deal more specific, and might be somewhat more inward looking (I know I can’t be aware of every aspect of individual autonomy and social relations, but I am determined to be as open as I can to a fuller understanding), while the idea and practice of consciousness raising was rather more general and outward looking (The War is wrong, capitalism is evil, the United States produces as much evil in the world as does the USSR, hatred and bigotry are endemic diseases of the American middle class, etc.)

In its outward looking perspective on the world, the raised consciousness of the 1960s and early 1970s, was considerably lacking in self-examination. Misogyny (however unconscious) in particular, was endemic in the movement. Yeah, it was mostly a guy thing (well, not John and Yoko, at least!).

I wonder if wokeism doesn’t need to look outward a little more? The ideology* of wokeness is wonderful so far as this old liberal is concerned; but maybe we wokeists need to develop a unified theory that combines intersectional identitarianism with an ideology of political and social justice.

*Wokeism involves ideas aimed at achieving certain sociopolitical goals so, yes, it’s an ideology, and (in this particular case, at least) that’s a good thing

I’d like to address the “who gets to use the word” question head-on. This is directed mostly in response to @Kevin 22, but also to @engels 9 and @GG 15.

As I see it, this is a straightforward case of cultural appropriation. As such it’s not that there’s any law against white people saying “woke”. However there’s a moral obligation on us to not trample all over someone else’s culture while doing so.

As far as I understand its original meaning, woke is also a term that one can’t really properly claim for oneself. Compare to “nice guy” for a more familiar example. As a general rule, someone who claims to be a “nice guy” is actually an asshole. Moreover, a guy calling another guy a “nice guy” is not really convincing. It’s not the same red flag that calling yourself a nice guy is, but it does not (and should not!) carry much weight. I believe the same dynamic is in play when it comes to the original meaning of woke. A white person calling themselves woke is nearabout the opposite of woke. A white person calling anything or anyone else woke is pretty useless. Under its original meaning, as best I understand the term, reasonable advice for a white person would simply be: don’t say that.

Ok, but this isn’t just about the original meaning. I claimed this is straightforward cultural appropriation and I meant that. I think (I hope) we all agree that it’s not ok to steal others’ stuff. Cultural Appropriation gets controversial because superficially it lacks the most important trait of stealing. After we’ve appropriated someone’s cultural artifact(s), they still have them too. Except that’s the case only in the most superficial sense. Yes, “woke” is a word. Anyone can say a word. Free speech rah rah rah. But it’s not good when someone has a word with a definition in their dialect of English and we go and take over the word to the point where we change the definition and they can’t use theirs anymore because if they say the word everyone hears our new version instead. Which is what is happening to “woke”.

See, for example, @engels 14, who has stated plainly that as far as they’re concerned, we have no valid definition until an institution they’ve selected weighs in.

With this context, let’s take a second look at @Kevin 22’s analysis:

(1 – identitarian deference) Identitarian deference is one hell of a loaded way to describe identifying a term is part of a specific cultural heritage. I’m not going to say you’re wrong, precisely, but this framing seems misleading and unhelpful. We can talk about how much respect is due a culture around their heritage, but saying “identitarian deference” feels very much like a cheater’s way to claim someone is on the “too much respect” side of the line without actually engaging with the question honestly.

(2 – harm reduction and free speech) The comment isn’t talking about harm reduction…

(3 – totalising) Chris may be progressive, but I wouldn’t call the comment sections on this blog progressive. Heterogeneous I would grant. More importantly, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. Is making a critique of a statement by someone “on your side” what totalising means? If so, since that’s a thing we should always encourage, isn’t totalising a good thing? Is the issue that you think wokeism doesn’t allow for any idea diversity within progressivism? If so, I would hope you have more compelling evidence than a brief written critique. I geniunely don’t understand this bullet point.

(4 – communitarian) This one’s in your head. Asking for permission does not imply asking a group. I’ve implied above that I don’t think there is a practical way for a white person to use the original version correctly, and I don’t think we should participate in its being taken over by another definition. So per me, there is no one who can broadly speaking give you permission. But if you’re in conversation with a specific Black person they could certainly tell you they don’t mind you using the term around them. (Actual example of identitarian deference: They’re way closer to this one than I am, so I would defer to their judgment.)

(5 – skeptical of progress) I hope–I really truly hope–that once I point out you’ve equated “progress” with “cultural appropriation” you’ll agree that that seems kinda bad. I don’t think anyone’s saying that only the original coiners can use the term. But several of us are saying that this is an AAVE term and that people who are not members of the African American community should be very careful about using it, if we do so at all.

(6 – right sided norms vs accuracy norms) I hope I’ve demonstrated that the question of accuracy is very much not a one-sided thing, and the cultural appropriation is extremely relevant to accuracy as well as to morality.

@Kevin Six for six! No even ChatGPT could pull this off.

You may perhaps have missed the part where I said all those things were good, useful, and worth cultivating?

Cady @ 30 has it right: it is all about manipulating emotion in C.L. Stevenson’s classic sense of that term. Anything goes to achieve an outcome, and reason has nothing to do with it. FOX Twitter FB Instagram TikTok the medium is that message of emotivism.

PC does have a meaning though (something like managerial dogmatism focused on speech codes) and the term was originally coined by the left before it was weaponised by the right. One way of viewing wokism (in the prevalent, not the original sense) is as a post-Taylorist update: less pedantic and formal, more entrepreneurial and dressed down.

One of the most illuminating thing I read about modern day politics is “The Authoritarians”, a study in social psychology by Bob Atlemayer in what he calls “Right Wing Authoritarian” personality (by which he eans authoritarian followers, not authoritarian leaders).

One of the most defining parts of it is the fact that RWA’s moral beliefs are strongly shaped by being part of one specific group, outside of which they basically cannot see.
This leads to various knee-jerk, emotive responses (at best of my understanding).
This is a style of thought that is typical of the right, both in my opinion and in Atlemayer’s studies.

However, specifically on internet (I don’t know how things work in in-person interactions), it seems to me that some leftists also show these same traits of knee-jerk emotive response and unability of seeing things from the perspective of people outside their group (that is not the same thing of agreeing with other people).

This is in my opinion what conservatives lament about “wokes”, and to a limited degree I think they are right, although in reality the phenomenon is stronger on the right, they just don’t see it.

The reason they non see it is that it is disguised by tradition: for example there are many people who have knee-jerk reactions on abortion, both in one sense and in the other; but people who are knee-jerk pro-choice are explicit and are perceived as “woke”, whereas people who are knee-jerk anti-choice often are religious so they knee-jerkedness is somewhat “explained” by their religiousness.

This is what I meant with my comment at 2.

I think it is important to distinguish the merits of the culture wars (e.g. abortion) and arguments about the accepted means (e.g. deplatforming, making huge anti-choice crowds in front of places that practice abortion etc.).

I think that “woke” is mere something about the means than the merits, even though conservatives themselves can’t see it (because they use the same and worse means).

Well, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not have an entry for “woke” but Wikipedia does:

“Woke (/?wo?k/ WOHK) is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.”

What’s notably absent from here is the concern for economic injustices per se, as these – you know – may affect white persons as well.

To me woke has a lot of good things: There is no doubt that institutional racism against AA is ubiquitous in the US and that there is a lot of sexism as well, and, contra De Santis, these should be fought against. Whether these can be combated by speaking only tangentially about economic classes, well, that remains to be seen. You can e.g. be woke and a) be (rightfully IMHO) concerned about the social inclusion of marginalized communities; and b) also be employed by an organization that, de facto, contributes to the economic marginalization of the more vulnerable members of the society (marginalized communities being a strict subset of this larger set).

If you are confused about this, let me try to clarify with an example: If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, she planned to nominate Howard Schultz – Starbucks’ famous CEO – to be Secretary of Labor. “Howard Schultz has been taking anti-union actions at Starbucks since the late 1980s” (wiki). Sure enough, if you go to Starbucks’ website now, you will find a “Culture and Values” section and an “Inclusion & Diversity” section (again, good things for me, just to be clear).

Whether woke in this sense is a new ideology or not, I am not sure. It sure seems a curious one to me though.

@36 perhaps I should differentiate. Political ideas are necessarily muddy and confused, that I’ll grant. But the thing about terms like “Woke” and “SJW” is that their actual usage is completely divorced from any meaningful definition offered, and that’s by design.

Like, compare how socialists talk about “socialism” to how right-wing pundits talk about “socialism”. Both terms are broad and muddy and you can have spirited debates on what you’re talking about, but in one case, there’s actually the goal of coming together to talk about something meaningful. In the other, the intent is to load up a term with as much negative affect as possible, then use that term as broadly as possible to describe things you want to smear.

This is why the definition of “woke” offered by opponents is so wildly inconsistent with both other definitions and its actual use. Note how, when talking about “woke” in a legal sense, the definition offered by DeSantis’s administration is completely and utterly divorced from the definition offered in the article linked in the OP.

Is there something here that people are gesturing towards? Maybe – but I don’t think talking about “wokeness” helps us find what that is, any more than I think you can have a useful discussion about attitudes in online forums in 2015 by talking about “SJWs”.

“Woke (/?wo?k/ WOHK) is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.”

What’s notably absent from here is the concern for economic injustices per se, as these – you know – may affect white persons as well.

Yes, economic injustices affect white people. So does sexism. What’s your point?

If you are confused about this, let me try to clarify with an example …

Your example obfuscates instead of clarifying.

Everything is an example of something, but what is this supposed to be an example of? It could be an example of Hillary Clinton having a plan that was a bad idea, but what does that have to do with wokeness?

The idea that people who are members of certain groups have insights about being a member is not (hopefully) controversial. But some seem to want to claim that members have special, more reliable insights into the causes and solutions visa a via their oppression/marginalization.

They ‘seem to want to claim’, do they? But are they actually making some such claim, or are they being misinterpreted?

What’s striking about that is even twenty-years ago the lefty-Marx inspired view would have been the opposite of that. Being oppressed and marginalized distorts your viewpoint.

Everybody’s viewpoint is affected by their experience. Experience of being disadvantaged affects viewpoints; so does experience of being advantaged. There’s no good reason why disadvantage should be considered more distorting in its effects than advantage; we might reasonably consider both effects as by their nature distorting, or neither. One thing we can be sure of is that all perceptions are partial.

That, and the way some Very Online activists turned it into an epistemic version of Top Trumps using UScentric status categories

I do agree both with Soru that important political concepts tend to become vague through contestation and with Cady that the right-wing use of “woke” is hopelessly confused but I think in many cases the ideas are themselves confused. A good example is “intersectionality” in its academic use which doesn’t really seem to mean anything at this point other than “please approve my grant application”.

Sashas@27:
At the risk of being reductionist, you’re advocating for a(n identitarian) prescriptivist understanding of language. It’s not how language works. It strangely seems to ignore that dialects are distinct from each other even as it fiercely advocates for strict prescriptivist preservation of dialects. Woke did not cease to mean awake in SAE when it began to mean politically aware in AAVE. Likewise, it did not cease to mean politically aware in AAVE when SAE started using it to mean politically aware (and also to mean awake), nor did it do so when SAE started using it to mean politically correct (and also politically aware, and also awake). Language is ambiguous, and dialects are very frequently highly ambiguous amongst each other. This is absolutely normal, and trying to police this is 1) ignoring how language changes naturally within and between dialects, 2) fairly transparent education and class bias, and as such 3) a hierarchically-motivated sociopolitical power play meant to cement certain (typically academic) perspectives into an immutable place of privilege as the only legitimate arbiter of language’s meaning (and acceptable and unacceptable changes therein*).

I’d also add that it’s disingenuous to claim the previous comment was not about harm reduction. Highlighting cultural appropriation is implicitly advocating for harm reduction. You yourself argued that using woke and having its meaning change “steals” it and prevents dialect speakers from being able to use it. How is this not a call to reduce the negative effects of a behavior?

*There’s some grim irony to be seen in the consistency with which post-structuralist movements and their descendents seek to re-create the definitive sorts of hierarchical epistemological orthodoxies that those movements rebelled against.

What’s notably absent from here is the concern for economic injustices per se, as these – you know – may affect white persons as well.

Yes, economic injustices affect white people. So does sexism. What’s your point?

I think the point is that woke involves a much greater attention to injustices of discrimination than to injustices of exploitation. A manager at, say, Goldman Sachs can without contradiction be woke; she can’t without contradiction be a socialist.

And if you’ve never seen standpoint epistemology deployed in the “race and gender top trumps” way I was referring to you have lived a very fortunate life and should probably Check Your Privilege.

I think the point is that woke involves a much greater attention to injustices of discrimination than to injustices of exploitation.

If it were in fact the case that being alert to injustices of discrimination made people less concerned about injustices of exploitation, that might be a relevant point, but there’s no basis for thinking that it is the case, and therefore no basis for considering the point relevant.

36: “I made an attempt to compile a comprehensive list of political concepts that have ‘a consistent, agreed-upon meaning that is largely consistent through its use’. But I gave up after being unable to find a first entry.”

O’Malley: “So at risk of being wildly unscientific, I think with a lot of “woke” stuff, you know it when you see it.” Again, stuff like this doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Whoops, you said intersectionality. I still think it’s different because that tends to see oppression as a matter of interlocking factors, which focuses attention on people who have multiple memberships of recognised oppressed groups. Anyway I wasn’t attempting to define intersectionality in a single sarcastic aside, or to claim it can’t encompass lots of other dimensions besides race and gender, although ime it often doesn’t and this is true of Crenshaw’s original article iirc. (Class as it features as an ascriptive characteristic in intersectional analyses is basically opposed to any Marxist conception imo.)

I get that young people are interested in intersectionality and I have nothing against young people. Young people have in the recent past been interested in blue jeans and rock music. I have nothing against blue jeans or rock music. I think the radicalism of each of these American exports can be questioned though.

What’s the evidence that people who are interested in intersectionality aren’t interested in homelessness? I’ve seen plenty of evidence to the contrary. What the new versions of leftism aren’t interested in are ordinary workers …

What’s the evidence that this is true? I think I’ve encountered evidence to the contrary (although perhaps not plenty of it).

As with a recent other discussion here, I am utterly perplexed at the characterisation of woke by some contributors. The closest I can get from my own lived experience is that there are indeed some people who argue for special insights from indigenous knowledge that are somehow inaccessible to Western/white science or maybe even Western/white people in general, and that beliefs of all communities are equally valid or, in practice, that indigenous beliefs are more valid than Western/white ones.

(I always wonder how that works; if an indigenous community has found out that, say, a certain plant works as an antiseptic, how would a white scientist not be able to figure out the same? Are they seriously arguing that “the great spirit turned three sisters into these three hills” is deep ancestral wisdom but that “the holy grail was hidden in this hill” is okay to laugh off as superstition because it is Western/white (in this case, French) superstition? And if an indigenous culture has beliefs that we would today call discriminatory and bigoted in our culture, are they nonetheless unassailable truth in that culture?)

There indeed are people who at the very least strongly imply that only Western/white cultures can invade/colonise other cultures, mismanage land, and drive megafauna to extinction, but that non-white cultures could never do any of these things. But the point is, even these people, who I know at least do exist, are very few and have no significant influence over public discourse. They just aren’t relevant outside of some extremely niche parts of the humanities in a handful of countries.

And I certainly have never met or even read anybody who argues that a homeless white guy is privileged compared to Michelle Obama. Where are these people? And how much do they currently influence policy compared to, say, people who are transphobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, or who quite simply despise the poor?

The point of intersectionality, as the name implies, is that class, race and gender all intersect as aspects of oppression and injustice

What a unique and brilliant idea!

I thought the fight to name one of these as the Top Trump (to use Engels’ term) had run out of steam in the 1970s

What other fights ran out of steam in the 1970s?

class, race and gender all intersect

????Class ????is???? not???? an???? individual???? ascriptive ????characteristic ????

Subjective impression from the commenting margins: the current moderation system (you don’t know if your comments will appear or if they will be retrospectively released in a big lump) stacks the deck against opinions outside the OPs’ left-liberal range rather more than in the past

@John Q 58

“The point of intersectionality, as the name implies, is that class, race and gender all intersect as aspects of oppression and injustice.”

I completely agree, and this is a problem for many leftist traditions, both in theory and in practice, see e.g. the treatment of LGBT individuals in Cuba. Engels et al., instead of being snarky about it, should just take a deep breath and own up to it.

Still, that’s not the end of the story. If you have multiple societal ills, you can choose to fight them all at once, one more than the other etc. I am only familiar with the US. It is striking when you get the list of who you should be inclusive toward, that class (SES, whatever one wants to call it) is sometimes omitted, or at the end of the list. This is in a society with stark and persistent material inequalities.

Then you get comments like the ones from J-D that tells you Howard Schultz as Secretary of Labor was just a bug, not a feature, or like J, not that one that claims that ordinary workers are making out just fine within the system as it exists. To make these statements one has to have missed completely what is going on. For example, Amazon is also fighting unions tooth and nail, and who is leading the charge? Jay Carney, former Press Secretary of the Yes We can President under which, to quote from Jacobin, “Between 2007 and 2016, the average wealth of the bottom 99 percent dropped by $4,500. Over the same period, the average wealth of the top 1 percent rose by $4.9 million. This drop hit the housing wealth of African Americans particularly hard. Outside of home equity, black wealth recovered its 2007 level by 2016. But average black home equity was still $16,700 lower.” Or one has just to remember the famous quip by Chuck Schumer that losing blue-collar Democrat would be just fine in 2016. I could go on the whole day with examples like these where, in the practice of Democrats’ politics, class as a consideration was demoted.

So, Engels should not be snarky, but those who insist on class when discussing woke issues have a point too. And even if one thinks they do not have a point on the merit, they still have a strategic point: to pass laws, one has to win elections and to be able to get the votes from lower class individuals – whites included – could be useful too (especially as this was happening until few years ago). Fortunately, I believe the current President (who I truly wished had run in 2016) seems to get this and so maybe we will be able to fight all these injustices at the same time. But it is far from a given.

I submitted a response to J-D’s comment over 24 hours ago, and I definitely have something to say in response to John Q. But the one I submitted yesterday hasn’t been posted so I’m not sure it’s worth writing another. Would be helpful to know, however, if you’re just backed up or if I’m out of line and you don’t intend to post it.

Walter Michaels 64: “Every time we worry about raced or gendered economic inequalities, we are worrying about discrimination instead of exploitation.”

So slavery as it historically existed in the US would count as discrimination not exploitation? This is just the most obvious example to show how inadequate the understanding of racism and sexism as “merely discrimination” is. It suggests that the author hasn’t thought much about the issues.

The mention of mythical Goldman Sachs managers whenever racism and sexism are mentioned is telling. It’s a recurring theme in a certain pseudo-marxist discourse the purpose of which is to trivialize white supremacy and patriarchy as minor issues, or secondary contradictions, compared to capitalism.

Every time we worry about raced or gendered economic inequalities, we are worrying about discrimination instead of exploitation.

Every time we do anything at all, the activity takes up effort and attention which could have been used for something else. Every time I do push-ups I am doing push-ups instead of doing sit-ups. It would be ludicrous to suggest that every bit of my effort and attention should be devoted to worrying about exploitation to the exclusion of all other activities.

If you think we live in a world where people are as committed to eliminating businesses like Goldman Sachs as they are to making sure that women and people of color have a chance to succeed in them, well, your experience has been very different from mine.

In my experience of the world, lots of people aren’t committed to eliminating businesses like Goldman Sachs, but also lots of people aren’t committed to making sure that women and people of colour have a chance to succeed in them. If you think you have a sufficient evidentiary base to make a reliable quantitative comparison between the two, the sensible response is to believe that you are kidding yourself until you show your working.

It is striking when you get the list of who you should be inclusive toward, that class (SES, whatever one wants to call it) is sometimes omitted, or at the end of the list. This is in a society with stark and persistent material inequalities.

Yes, this is my experience of intersectionality. But the crucial point is that for Marxists class does not mean socioeconomic status and is not an individual ascription. So as WBM says you can not incorporate class, as properly understood by Marxists, into an intersectional-type anti-discrimination agenda. Since the woke liberals who are attributing the disagreement to racism/sexism on the part of Marxists do not seem to appreciate this basic point it might be tempting to recommend they take a reading break to learn about the fundamentals of Marxism but that would be… snarky.

To TM: “ordinary workers” is meant to exclude people who buy houses and send their kids to college on factory workers’ pay and have decent health insurance from their employers, who live in white neighborhoods with “good” (meaning white) schools. I’m surprised there’s any debate here over whether those people are or should be the focus of the current Left. Description is not endorsement; dogmatically ignoring people who by definition can’t possibly have real problems is not something I’m emotionally invested in.

It’s interesting to imagine what a supposedly “socialist” world where those people were in charge would look like, but I’ll left Real True Leftists speak for themselves.

Then you get comments like the ones from J-D that tells you Howard Schultz as Secretary of Labor was just a bug, not a feature …

‘Plausible but unconfirmed reports that Hillary Clinton was considering the possibility of nominating Howard Schultz as Secretary of Labor’ is not synonymous with ‘Howard Schultz as Secretary of Labor’, but that’s by the way. It’s somewhat more relevant that I did not tell anybody that it was just a bug, not a feature: I did not use those words, it is not the meaning I intended to communicate, I didn’t even think anything like that.

But the critical point is neither of those: you referred to the (potential) nomination as a clarifying example, and the crux of my response was to point out (I am now trying to express my point in new words) that the effect was not clarifying but rather the opposite until you link up the chain of reasoning by completing this sentence: ‘Hillary Clinton’s planned nomination of Howard Schultz is/was an example of …’

If somebody said ‘Hillary Clinton’s planned nomination of Howard Schultz is/was an example of wokeness’, then I could immediately recognise the statement as false. It wasn’t and isn’t an example of wokeness. But I know that’s not what you wrote. I guess you meant something else. But what? There’s an indefinitely large number of ways the sentence could end. In your new comment you write:

I could go on the whole day with examples like these where, in the practice of Democrats’ politics, class as a consideration was demoted.

Well, if that’s what you meant, sure, Hillary Clinton’s planned nomination of Howard Schultz was an example of class being demoted as a consideration in the practice of Democrats’ politics. What does that have to do with wokeness, though? The history of the Democratic Party is full of examples of class being demoted as a consideration. That was true long before anybody talked about wokeness. In that specific respect (consideration of class), the Democratic Party hasn’t got worse since people started talking about wokeness, it’s got better. If you consider that now it’s still bad on those issues, you may be right, but it’s not because of wokeness.

@Engels 81. Thanks for the engagement. I do not want to argue about what Marxism truly means but that’s not my point, at least in the exchange with you. My point is similar to TM’s one above @77: progressives should not treat white supremacy and patriarchy as minor issues.

Take HRC, as her case is paradigmatic. I think she was a terrible candidate but during her campaign she was also on the receiving end of a lot of odious misogyny. If some women empathized with that, and rallied around her, that’s likely because they had experienced that in their lives as well. And, to the extent that this additional awareness of patriarchy encourages more women, and men, to fight against the current gendered system (think of MeToo e.g.), to me that’s undeniably a good thing.

Sure, one could say that HRC was oppressed as a woman but was also, class-wise, among the oppressors (in the same way we can say that a lower class white man is oppressed economically but likely enjoys some advantages in virtue of being white and a man). There can indeed be multiple dimensions of oppression. If you want, we can even rank them (and here everyone will have their own subjective weights). But the point stands that misogyny is wrong and a progressive should be glad when it is opposed.

And, yes, one can also add that more material equality would alleviate some of the oppression that women endure. But that’s not enough, as women get harassed – and raped – in, say, Denmark too.

But of course the main issue of this thread is to what extent a concern about, say, sexism, risks obscuring concerns about economic deprivation. As I have argued above, I think this is a valid concern. But the response to this should not be downplaying the relevance of sexism (or racism etc.).

@Chris 76: thanks for keeping the comments open. Commenting on this site can indeed be hard at times but this is still my favorite blog after so many years and I appreciate you, John, and the others who keep it running.

The point being made is that the focus on non-discrimination – which is completely compatible with neoliberal managerial ideology and indeed with neoliberalism itself – has come at the expense of a working class politics, which is not at all compatible with neoliberalism.

If that’s the point being made, then the allegation is clear enough, but what’s the evidence to support it?

No doubt I haven’t thought about the issues in ways that will satisfy you but Adolph Reed and I have written about them in ways that may at least be relevant. https://nonsite.org/the-trouble-with-disparity/

Somebody posted a link to that article here two years ago and I responded as follows:

The authors of that article have constructed an elaborate argument for the conclusion that anti-racism is not necessary and not admirable, and then embedded in one early paragraph an assertion that anti-racism is admirable and necessary.

What is the explanation for this dishonesty?

It is impossible to maintain honestly that

antiracism is both admirable and necessary

at the same time as maintaining that

antiracism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it

and

antiracism and antidiscrimination of all kinds would validate rather than undermine the stratification of wealth in American society

and

antiracist politics rejects universal programs of social-democratic redistribution in favor of what is ultimately a racial trickle-down approach

and that

antiracism as a politics is an artifact and engine of neoliberalism

and

It does a better job legitimizing market-based principles of social justice than increasing racial equality.

and that

contemporary antiracism presumes the Thatcherite ideological victory

and

the emptiness of antiracism as a political agenda

If you genuinely believe that antiracism is empty, how can you also genuinely believe that it is admirable and necessary? Answer: you can’t.

engels 81: “you can not incorporate class, as properly understood by Marxists, into an intersectional-type anti-discrimination agenda”

I don’t see why a Marxian account of class would be incompatible with recognizing racism and sexism as systems of domination of their own, interdependent but not subsumable under capitalism.

Racism and sexism/patriarchy aren’t merely “discrimination” and any leftist agenda (whether intersectional, woke, Marxist or whatever) that fails to recognize this is doomed to fail. As an example take the hottest topic of the current US: the denial of reproductive rights to women is not understandable as discrimination, and neither as economic exploitation (although it certainly has economic consequences).

Regarding racism, I have pointed to slavery above and am accused of offering a “straw man” (84). “Shouldn’t progressives be focused on the poor regardless of the causal history of how they became poor?” What this ahistorical approach overlooks is the extent to which the white working class was, and is, complicit in maintaining white supremacy as a system, which cannot be reduced to “individual black people being discriminated against by individual white people for mysterious reasons”.

Yes she was a figurehead for lots of (white) middle class American women (and men) who arguably were. The same was true of Trump. Unfortunately in both cases those supporters were at best sadly confused about the structure of the social world and at worst dangerously deluded bigots.

The comments seem to be pretty much done. MisterMr@88 pretty clearly showed how false ideas about how the economy works underlie the debate. Excellent comment! The term “wokism” is a pejorative but crazy ideas are a real thing. People who are leery of some of the nonsense associated with the targets of reactionaries can genuinely be reluctant to endorse weird notions without being allies of the right.

J-D@89 pretty clearly shows how equivocating between antiracism as a moral posture of egalitarianism and a serious politics that addresses “who gets what?” (which is to say, questions of property,) serve to obscure the true issues. It all gets reduced to moral indignation. The fact that a non-class based approach to fighting racism etc. has been the norm, significantly in the Reconstruction period and the Fifties/Sixties and failed completely doesn’t matter. The woman question wasn’t solved by woman suffrage either. Persisting in moral suasion to cure the depraved souls of racists and misogynists guaranteed to fail again seems to me to raise questions of ultimate intent. I suspect this is a proof that in the end class is more important than race or gender, which is why the extended quote in the next comment was so deeply resented.

TM@90 affirms that racism and sexism are “systems of domination of their own, interdependent but not subsumable under capitalism.” This is incompatible with Marxism because it posits transhistorical universal social phenomena with no material basis, i.e., metaphysical forces. This is actually not only incompatible with Marxism but sense.

The incompetence of it all is highlighted by the nonsense at the end where TM first claims “the white working class was, and is, complicit in maintaining white supremacy as a system…” This is a claim white workers conspire with the white bourgeoisie to create and defend white supremacy which is not an economic or even material phenomenon for…some reason. Then TM doubles down by claiming this commitment to the white supremacist conspiracy is a collective phenomenon, an abstract political principle held by white workers regardless. The implication is white workers are as a group the enemy, which puts paid to intersectionality as a coherent concept.

One extra point may be useful? Sex and race are not characteristics that can be amended. Anyone who thinks that attacking the characters of unenlightened people can check (as in, restrain) their privilege are wrong. But class can be amended by changing property relations in a society. The bourgeoisie can be liquidated by taking their property. This is the way forward. Changing manners when you change the way of life works is much easier and much more likely to make a difference. Insulting others may be performative but it doesn’t change anything. Indeed, the notion that sexism and racism are metaphysical and eternal overlaps with the reactionary notion they are something like human nature or the will of God or whatever.

To J-D (89)

What’s the evidence? Start with the anti-racist and diversity commitments of every major American corporation. (Since I started with Goldman, take a look at those awards: https://www.goldmansachs.com/about-us/people-and-leadership/awards-and-rankings/diversity-and-inclusion/ impressive!) Match those commitments to the complete lack of anti-capitalist commitments (of course) and note the fact that economic inequality has been increasing for half a century. (Goldman’s profits “slumped” last quarter to a mere $3.07 billion.) Add to that American liberalism’s comparative insouciance in the face of those numbers, plus, for all the fans of intersectionality, the praise of its inventor for the way in which “every corporation worth its salt is saying something about structural racism and anti-blackness.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/us/politics/bernie-sanders-protests.html

As for the accusation of “dishonesty.” It’s right that that people shouldn’t act on racial prejudice. But today a politics anchored in anti-discrimination reinforces rather than challenges the fundament inequalities of American society (that’s its emptiness as a left political agenda). So yes, we should oppose racism and sexism but no we shouldn’t make it the center of our politics. Perhaps that position is mistaken but I don’t even see how it’s incoherent, much less “dishonest.”

To TM (91)

I don’t know what the quotes around ”black people being discriminated against by individual white people for mysterious reason” mean but the whole point of the work done by historians like Judith Stein, Barbara Fields and others is that white supremacy developed out of a set of economic demands – as Fields says, no one brought slaves to America because they were prejudiced against them — and that it’s functioned to facilitate the exploitation of both the black and the white working class. The “ahistorical” part is just the denial that the history of how people have been harmed is relevant to either the recognition of that harm or its removal. Here’s why.

It’s uncontroversial that slavery and Jim Crow produced current disparities. Insofar as liberalism’s desire to remedy those disparities depends on that history, it’s because the remedy is understood as returning to people what they ought to have had. The critique of that position is that the right to housing or medical care or an education doesn’t depend on the causal account of how you were deprived of those things. It doesn’t matter whether your great- grandparents were Jim Crowed out of the mortgage market or whether their union was busted or whether they profligately spent all their money on wine, women and song – you deserve housing, health care, an education. Indeed, today it’s the historicism involved in privileging certain causal accounts over others that turns the desire to minimize the gap between rich and poor into the desire to minimize the gap between Black and White. (Note that by doing the first you make an impact on the second but that by doing the second you leave the first unchanged — get the proportions right and you have the same inequality we have now only with different skin colors.)

I don’t see why a Marxian account of class would be incompatible with recognizing racism and sexism as systems of domination of their own, interdependent but not subsumable under capitalism.

It isn’t, but as this is an incredibly obvious idea that occurred to zillions of people around the world long before Kimberley Crenshaw ever enrolled at Harvard Law School, it can not be what “intersectionality” means I think.

take the hottest topic of the current US: the denial of reproductive rights to women is not understandable as discrimination

You’re right and I never said otherwise. How do you think über-liberal USA’s record on abortion compares with the intersectionally-challenged communist countries and “leftist traditions” which Tom is demanding “own up” to their sexism btw?

Perhaps “woke” is just another term for liberalism.

I think wokism may be something liberalism is evolving into in post- social media America. Right-wingers are right to point out that it is in significant ways illiberal but wrong to say it is “left”. It reflects a fracturing of liberalism’s traditional middle class base into petty rentiers and petty mandarins (with the former tending market liberal/Trumpoid).

Stephen Johnson’s comment reminds me that the first point above is constestable. But whether such pluralism is strictly speaking consistent with Marxism or not it has been extremely common on the self-described Marxist left and in academic social science long before “intersectionality” became an ubiquitous buzzword. So what’s going on?

“I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t know, I’d like to get through Christmas first.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/24/rishi-sunak-rebuked-over-excruciating-exchange-with-homeless-man

“People feel like their speech is stifled and if you feel like your speech is stifled then almost by definition it is. ”

This is a perfect summary of anti-woke thinking. It’s not enough to be free to speak, you have to be listened to, with respectful approval. The Harpers letter, the Intellectual Dark Web, Elon Musk all make this clear

People feel like their speech is stifled and if you feel like your speech is stifled then almost by definition it is.

If it’s almost the case that it’s true by definition, then it’s not the case that it’s true by definition, in just the same way that a person who almost broke a record did not break the record. Sometimes people feel like their speech is stifled and it is; sometimes people feel like their speech is stifled and it isn’t. If you haven’t seen Barry Deutsch’s ‘I Have Been Silenced!’ cartoon (easily found online), it’s worth a look.

… at the margin it loses votes and helps genuinely bad people gain and hold power.

I have not observed this myself, and the multiplication of instances of people asserting that it has occurred while giving no details of any examples makes the accounts less plausible, not more.

engels@101 “So what’s going on?” The reference to the contestable first point is unclear—whose first point? But the context of “self-described Marxist left” and “academic social science” suggests engels and others do think there is both a metaphysical pluralism in which racism and sexism and non-class systems of domination are instantiated throughout history and a Marxist critique of capitalism. (It’s unclear how the general opinion that capitalism works better than anything else fits in.)

So, I read this question as “How can self-described leftists claiming to be Marxists ignore the example of the other Engels in Anti-Duhring?” If I’ve misunderstood the question, the rest is tl;dr.

I’d suggest self-described Marxist left is leftist in the same sense in which Herr Duhring was a leftist and that they are pluralists for roughly the same kinds of reasons. A consistent materialism is still an unfinished project and errors, confusions, eclecticism will persist, as will obscurantism and fraud.

Further very likely they are “Marxist” because at this period of history “Marx” is promoted as an alternative to his successors in the movement, especially that part labeled Communist. They are “Marxist” to say they are not Leninist or Bolshevik or Trotskyist or Maoist or Stalinist or pretty much anything that can’t be imagined as originating in the bowels of the British Museum. They are I suspect the kind of people who realize some of the demands in the Communist Manifesto don’t sound so extreme today.

(Yes the real Marx was the pupil of grubby German artisans in the League of the Just and of French activists and of English Chartists and trade unionists—but the image of Marx sitting in the reading room devising the socio-politico-economic ethical theory a la libertarians like von Mises seems to be irresistible.)

I’m too removed from the university to speak much about the current popularity of acknowledging Marx in the social sciences. Given the powerful desire to redefine “class” as SES, it seems to me very much a clique thing.

@100

In my jaded middle age, I’ve concluded that “X actually makes things worse” means …

Currently it’s one of my comments which is numbered 100. Is that the one you were responding to? I’m not clear on that, because I didn’t use the expression ‘makes things worse’ in my comment and I also didn’t quote anybody else doing so. In general, I’m having difficulty relating your comment to mine. This is easily explained, though, if it wasn’t my comment you were responding to. I know the numbering sequence isn’t always stable.

J-D

I largely agree with you @100 that “at the expense of” doesn’t make sense, especially as applied to corporate politics or the mythical black female stockbroker. I was criticizing a tendency I share, to assume that if I parse others’ words I’ll figure out their belief system. If that’s not what you were doing, I apologize for using your post as an example. I don’t think class-first leftists oppose identity thinking for the reason that they think it comes at the expense of a focus on class. “At the expense of” seems rhetorical. They just think the right way of thinking is class-based.

Engels 99: “How do you think über-liberal USA’s record on abortion compares with the intersectionally-challenged communist countries”

The terms you are using make no sense to me. Regarding communist countries, we could talk about Stalin’s and Ceaucescu’s abortion bans but what’s the point?

The quote @110 cited by engels doesn’t appeal to my tastes. It seems to me easier to say that identity politics/intersectionality/wokism, whatever you want to call it, is committed to achieving agency, inclusion and representation. The thing is, these reforms are not liberation. Most women, most blacks, most people period are not going to become the masters of society. Agency, inclusion and representation for the few will not liberate the many. That’s just social mobility, something the US has been dedicated to for the largest part of its history—all projects to create an openly acknowledged establishment have always failed. This social formation is a propertied society and it is ruled of course by the owners.

In practice the US ruling class has always been open to merit, which of course is largely measured by property and income. (This is not because of generosity of spirit, it’s because the material basis in social life for a landed aristocracy etc. was never established, despite the occasional efforts.)

The indignation that there aren’t enough black billionaires or imperialist warmonger women presidents is not righteous. That’s like Hilary Clinton thinking Giorgia Meloni’s ascension is a good thing because it breaks a glass ceiling for women. Clarence Thomas undoubtedly has great power but he is in no way an agent or representative of black people, and his power is not inclusive of black people.

By the way, if as most proponents of this kind of thinking seem to claim, racism and sexism (aka patriarchy) predate capitalism, then these social phenomena cannot be interdependent. The implicit notion is that if capitalism can be cured of racism and sexism then we really will have achieved the final society, where anybody’s money, white or black, male or female, cis or trans, is as good as anybody else’s money. And freedom is still the power to buy anything (you can afford) and do what you want with your property. But freedom will still depend on how much property and money you have.

Pluralism in social theory is a euphemism. The neutral term is eclecticism. But ultimately I think it is nothing more than a reactionary skepticism that refuses to acknowledge the unity of the material world (which does include people, not souls.) Perhaps the word, syncretism, the blending of religious ideas in a mythology designed to support the status quo, if only by quietly hiding out from any struggle against it, would be the more just term.

Also not an endorsement but here’s the opening to Heinrich’s widely read Introduction to Capital, from 2004:

Contemporary societies are traversed by a variety of relations of dom ination and oppression that are expressed in various forms. We find asymmetrical gender relations, racist discrimination, enormous differ ences of property ownership with corresponding differences in social influence, anti-Semitic stereotypes, and discrimination against certain types of sexual orientation. There has been much debate concerning the connection between these relations of domination, and particularly concerning the question as to whether one of them is more fundamen tal than the others. If relations of domination and exploitation rooted in the economy are placed in the foreground in the following account, then it is not because they are the only relevant relations of domination. However, one cannot simultaneously address all such relations of dom ination. Marx’s critique of political economy is primarily concerned with the economic structures of capitalist society, and for that reason they are placed at the center of the present work. But one should not succumb to the illusion that with an analysis of the fundamentals of the capitalist mode ofproduction that everything decisive has already been said about capitalist societies.

engels’s quote at 116 seems to say: In the old days Western feminists and Black activists allowed the “broader struggle” (which by definition involves white male factory workers) to take precedence (for reasons that are not stated) but no longer do, and that’s why the worker’s struggle should treat them as the enemy.

The quote at 118 seems to say: There are lots of kinds of oppression, but we are only concerned about economic oppression, and moreover only expressions of capitalism that take place in specifically economic settings for specifically economic reasons, not for any deep reason, but pretty much only because we think Marx is important.

Those are recognitions of a kind, I suppose. Do they concede more to people with other priorities than something like “I believe in the unity of the material world and you should too”? Not obviously.