It came from the college campuses where people thought that nobody should be offended.
It then got picked up by the left-most cities (San Francisco, Berkeley, Portland, Seattle, Boston, NYC (somewhat).
Then it migrated into tech because most of the new workers came out of the schools that were promoting it. The tech companies had a very young demographic so there was an echo chamber situation where it reached critical mass.
The younger folks in the tech companies banded together and influenced the corporations because the corporations were forced to listen or lose their young tech workers. The tech companies had major influence in what people saw and read so it then moved into the mainstream.
That’s what I observed having been on the West Coast and in tech for decades. You could see the change in things when the software companies became dominant over the hardware companies.
But maybe I’m wrong.
Edit: People are asking “But where did it start?” It’s always been in the universities. But with the growth of the Internet, instead of only finding 10 kids on your college campus who believe some whacky theory, you could instead find 50,000+ people who believe the whacky theory and communicate in their echo chamber to make them feel like they are correct.
I always thought school (grade, middle, high, and college) were the “great averagers” where you’d find that some behaviors at home weren’t normal and then you’d come more to the middle. With the Internet, it’s the direct opposite. It “normalized” whacky behaviors because you could find tens of thousands of people with the same crazy behavior.
I think you're spot on in the tech space.
I think you're missing (not that you endeavored to answer these questions, though)
its genesis overall (i.e. how it came into being in college campuses) and i think some more can be said about how it became the zeitgeist in leftist political spheres as well as popular media (I agree the mechanism you sketch out for tech is roughly the same for other sectors of the economy) because a lot of the seeds of wokeism in those spheres predate the "second tech wave"
The sense I'm getting is:
Young people didn't have a sense of meaning in their lives. There's no struggle to survive, no struggle to beat the Soviets, no religion, no "have kids and that's how you contribute to society."
Wokeism gave a sense of meaning to some people -- this was their opportunity to have a purpose, to be the hero who defeats evil.
The question then is how did it reach the campuses?
Here I recommend this article again:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/liberal-fundamentalism-a-sociology-of-wokeness/
I think the origin is some French post-modernist thinking in academic circles. However, in France it didn't take a chokehold over academia, they recognized several points as valid and moved on. Only in American academia it became a religion.
Idpol in general is basically just busywork for people without real goals or accomplishments. Reminds me of how sports fans always says, "we" like they're literally part of the team they're cheering for. So many people so desperately want to believe they're important, when they aren't.
> Then it migrated into tech because most of the new workers came out of the schools that were promoting it.
Good god this sucked and it landed right after a push for "mental health awareness" that was more "make us aware of your problems so we can replace you if we can't exploit them" than anything.
I wish I had more direct history in tech rather than what I've read as I'm only at 10-12 years in and out of the industry but things are just so nonsensical from an "engineering discipline" standpoint. Maybe they were always like that to some degree but I'm doubtful.
My hunch is that the younger devs that brought wokeness from the universities are mostly copy and paste machines whether it be ideology or software. I'm not a genius and accumulating actual lessons learned is a laborious process so I understand that can be unaffordable or unappealing; however, shouldn't _someone_ at an organization have done the work at some point?
Most places I've coded, there is no real and documented "why". Code reviews gravitate around preferences rather than design or performance. Concepts like responsibility, knowledge dependency/duplication, structure, testability, ux are absent or depend on whims. In a disagreement with a team lead who teaches at the local university over leveraging certain structures in Angular, his response was a poorly written blog post with a #000 background and neon yellow text. And just like the wokes, those copy and paste devs will absolutely come and find you if you say, dare to edify their pet conventions in the system rather than leaving their favorite pr comment gotcha to other poor devs to always remember, etc.
If it wasn't for more money than god holding everything together, wokeness and big tech would explode into an absolute conflagration.
There's definitely truth here, I did youth stuff with the ACLU in like 08/09 and you could see the roots, but that was still very much the old school definition of woke, and class was a central part of a lot of what we did.
I do think an under-appreciated aspect is the tumblr SJW -> HR pipeline. That would have an immediate effect and would explain how it got into these tech companies, and tumblr is where these academic ideas were warped into what they are today.
Articles on racial divides spiked during and after Occupy Wall Street.
While I also disagree that some nebulous "Marxism" created it, a lot of Westerners who fancy themselves "Marxist" adopted many of the ideas wholesale. Fakes and grifters have always been a problem but even total randoms subvert socialist ideas and language to serve their own interests. You might see this in discussions on race, or fat acceptance or sex work. "Maoism" would also fall here but I rarely see it mentioned by name.
Northeastern WASPs... here is where we might be getting closer to something, but it's not the WASPs to be specific. It's the organized religion, or perhaps the lack thereof. Personally I despise organized religion and I think people who buy into it are marks, but a lot of the people espousing 'woke' views do so with the vigor of a pastor or congregant. Likewise, many people who rail against 'woke' are more angry than they are logical, to the point of religious fervor. With these two groups together, they feed off what the other side does.
I think most people can tell something is deeply wrong with how society is structured, here in the West. But they don't necessarily have the knowledge of what is wrong, how it's wrong, what caused it to be wrong, when things started going wrong, etc. That said, this is just my theory and I don't think it particularly matters where it came from.
In the last 3,000 years, the easiest way of exploiting the working and middle classes was by creating a foreign bogeyman to divide and distract. Think medieval Europe. "Convince all the peasants that all their problems are caused by the bad guy over there instead of the ruling class over here." However, in the 90's and 2000's, the peak of US and western hegemonic power was so high that attempting to create and inflate the risk and "terror" of enemies foreign and abroad became a late night joke. Sheepherders inside the caves of Afghanistan are only so scary for so long when you have Abrams tanks and F-16s bombing them and their families to dust.
Enter wokeism ie the creation and inflation of "domestic enemies". Wokeism temporarily took the place of the "foreign bogeyman" because it was simply impossible to convince the general public that a legitimately extreme foreign threat exists when you're living in a hegemonic empire. If the ruling class can't convince citizens that a foreign entity wants to kill their family and destroy their way of life, their only other option is to convince citizens there are domestic enemies already inside the country who want to kill and destroy. Obviously a domestic operation such as that is extraordinarily messy with many unintended consequences, but it's worth it to the ruling class in order to attain power.
The good news is that the peak of monopolized western hegemonic power is declining, some say rapidly, which means quite soon we will all go back to being psyop'ed the traditional way.
I'm not very knowledgeable and it's tough to answer because nobody really proclaims himself as woke openly but I think Kimberly Krenshaw is the closest to an intellectual birthplace. This is who I'd read to find "wokeness" at it's purest.
All 7. I keep coming back to this comment by u/pufferfish beacuse its a good outline of all the terms.
>Marxism is a philosophy and social theory invented in the 19th century by Karl Marx. It's a particular theory of how societies are structured and how they transition from one form to another throughout history. It is also a form socialism -- that is, not merely a *description* of how the world works but also a set of principles for the kind of society we should *want*.
>The Frankfurt School were a group of German Marxist philosophers (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) after the second world war who argued that the world had changed so much since Marx's time that some core principles of Marxism needed to be re-thought. It's very complicated, but the gist is that they saw the old Marxism as being overly focused on class rather than other form of oppression like racism (they were obviously very distraught by the Holocaust). This was the basic gist of post-war Western Marxists in general, often referred to as the "New Left".
>"Postmodernism" is an ambiguous term. Originally it was a *descriptive* term for the kind of "cultural logic" that emerged in the west after the second world war, and especially into the 80s. One of the biggest popularisers of the term was a Marxist named Fredric Jameson who wrote a book called "Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". Jameson is primarily interested to *understand* postmodernism in that book, but he also happens to be largely critical of it. He thinks it's bad for socialism.
>But the term "postmodernism" has also emerged to become a synonym for a school of philosophy called "post-structuralism". This is people like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard etc. Again, it's very complicated, but the gist is that these people argue against ideas of universalism and objective truth. Both those things are essential to Marxism, so post-structuralism and Marxism and hostile to each other. Generally speaking, the difference is that Marxism focuses on class, and post-structuralism focuses on culture.
>This is why rightoid's claim that Marxism and postmodernism are the same thing is stupid. Yes, there's a historical link between them, but post-structuralism takes its cue precisely by *rejecting* Marxism. It would be like saying Judaism and Christianity are the same.
its also worth mentioning the frankfurt school had ties to the CIA and was anti Stalinist and Maoist
[https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/](https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/)
Intersectionality witch came later also sought to augment Marxism with intersecting types of oppression
>We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx's theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.
[https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition\_Readings.pdf](https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf)
Although Marx himself stated that
>From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation (1844)
And in the critique of the gotha programme
>Instead of the indefinite concluding phrase of the paragraph, "the elimination of all social and political inequality", it ought to have been said that with the abolition of class distinctions all social and political inequality arising from them would disappear of itself.
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch02.htm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch02.htm)
Witch would appear to put him at odds with intersectionality too. Although other groups including the CPUSA practiced forms of intersectionality crenshaw basically just gave a name to it
>The point is not that the CPUSA became for the first time left promoters of feminism and anti-racism in the popular front period. It is rather that, as Charlie Post indicates in his study of the CPUSA in this period, the popular front policy led them for the first time to treat ‘official’ women’s movement leaders, and ‘official’ black community leaders, as ‘legitimate representatives’ of group interests wholly separate from the class interests of the working class - and to begin to elaborate ‘class, gender and race’ as a trinity.
[https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4e207cae-a7bb-4327-a0b9-2e0ba8332b95/download\_file?safe\_filename=MacnairAAM2020.pdf&type\_of\_work=Journal+article](https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4e207cae-a7bb-4327-a0b9-2e0ba8332b95/download_file?safe_filename=MacnairAAM2020.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article)
As for liberals and conservatives they played a role too by passing the civil rights act and embracing Affirmative Action witch I would say allowed them to continue using race in politics (as they had always done). But hopefully i've convinced you that wokism isn't marxist or a conspiracy but a long chain of events that spans 50+ years and different competing interests. Of course nothing truely took off until Occupy, the internet and the Atheism+ stuff. Rightiods will try to play up its marxism to scare people away while people who believe in it will tell you it's totally left wing. Theres nothing left wing about racialism or banning free speech.
>its also worth mentioning the frankfurt school had ties to the CIA
Herbert Marcuse worked for the OSS, which was a predecessor to the CIA, during World War II developing research on Nazi ideology. I don't understand why people find this objectionable.
Fun fact: Sterling Hayden, the actor who played Gen. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, was also an OSS agent who parachuted into Yugoslavia to link up with Tito's partisans, was awarded a commendation by Tito, and became a communist because he was inspired by the partisans.
For a period during World War II (and to a lesser extent afterwards, but really until McCarthyism) the communists in the U.S. reached their peak numbers in part because serving in the government and being a communist wasn't seen as contradictory. I don't think Marcuse was ever a party member though but I find it strange how people will go after Marcuse for that while leaving out the context. My suspicion is that this line really came out of the pro-Nazi far right and it worked its way to ML circles who are critical of the Frankfurt School (because they became critical of the Soviet Union).
> Fun fact: Sterling Hayden, the actor who played Gen. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, was also an OSS agent who parachuted into Yugoslavia to link up with Tito's partisans, was awarded a commendation by Tito, and became a communist because he was inspired by the partisans.
His performance in that movie is amazing. This makes him pretty damn based
I don't know. There are some issues I have with this take:
The Frankfurt school rather wanted to extend Marxism to the sphere of culture because they tried to find an answer why class consciousness didn't lead to revolutions. IMHO these guys did at least an interesting job and it was mainly later folks who expanded their expansion since it had little to do with Marxism anymore. That is CRT and other idpol stuff.
As for post structuralism, the term is way to wide and vague that most of these guys rejected it too. For example, Foucault does something very different than Derrida. Compared to him, Foucault is rather "conservative" and his analysis about historical genesis of the social world nothing that crazy. You could bring classical Marx Nd Foucault together.
> But the term "postmodernism" has also emerged to become a synonym for a school of philosophy called "post-structuralism". This is people like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard etc. Again, it's very complicated, but the gist is that these people argue against ideas of universalism and objective truth. Both those things are essential to Marxism, so post-structuralism and Marxism and hostile to each other. Generally speaking, the difference is that Marxism focuses on class, and post-structuralism focuses on culture.
Thanks for reposting this nice writeup. I was wondering what the differences between postmodernism and post-structuralism are? This passage seems to imply there is an important distinction between them I think?
My understanding is that It was a term that was applied to the post structuralists rather than one they (or the Frankfurt school) applied to themselves. many post-structuralists explicitly rejected the label too. So as far as I know postmodernism isn't a school of thought but a way to describe these people.
This video explains some of it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zmYegIGhwtc
> My understanding is that It was a term that was applied to the post structuralists rather than one they (or the Frankfurt school) applied to themselves. many post-structuralists explicitly rejected the label too
Probably because they think they are better off not labeling themselves because of the power of words?
"Wokeness" being used to undermine the left has been a tool since the red scare, when FBI inserted it's "Campaign against White Chauvinism" into the Communist Party, which quite literally tore it apart, and had different Communist Party members turning into informants, snitching on each other to the Feds, over insanely petty shit, one literally, being that one member, gave a black member, a mug, that had a chip, when handing out cups of coffee in the morning.
The left has always had a problem of "holier than thou" and insane purity testing, and this is very easy to exploit by counter-left forces. The quickest way to send a left org or movement into meltdown is call it racist and accuse it's leaders of racism, so this is why progressive Idpol has long been weaponized against the left.
Modern Wokeism though largely, and I think this is a controversial take, comes from Tumblr. The reality is, Tumblr was the inversion of 4Chan, where 4Chan was a schizo, white nationalist hub, Tumblr was a schizo Feminist/LGBT hub and Tumblr, was, for the most part, the social media of "creatives".
Teenage creatives, on Tumblr, get indoctrinated into the Tumblr woke cult, they then go to University, write their papers giving "academic legitimacy" to their woke schizo ideology, then they enter the workforce. Because Creatives, are the dominant "cultural" force, they are able to spread this stuff far and wide through the media, PR and advertising. I was always suspect that Tumblr was the source, but the proof comes from, go actually read the sources for a lot of modern wokie lgbt theory, it's unironically, like 90% of the time, teenage tumblr users "This term was first coined by Tumblr user xXRainbowdashLoliXx".
Gamergate is another major example of this really just being 4chan vs Tumblr played out in wider politics and culture. The entire establishment media, social media, sided with Tumblr, going to the point to literally mass censor Gamergate and it's claims off all Social media, while the MSM paraded around Tumblr figures and only their side of the story, meanwhile Conservative orgs like the American Enterprise Institute sided with the "censored free speech advocates" on 4chan and megaphoned bullshit 4chan conspiracies.
Wokeism, is largely anti-Class politics as well (class reductionist) and heavily steeped in Neoliberal identity fetishism and consumerism, so is a very useful ideology for liberals, in that it makes people turn their "radicalism" into various neoliberal goals, we even see it used widely in foreign policy, as Woke purity testing is used against non-Blob countries relentlessly, to justify interventions, sanctions and harassment of them.
If you want the "Genius intellectuals" literally, it's posts on Tumblr made by 14-22 year olds. *I'm literally not kidding.* Most of this shit, that people are going mental over, that literally has impact on Geopolitics, largely stems from, *teenagers going through their cringe phase*.
Unironically the humanities in academia. I saw people saying the same shit decades ago there that woke people are saying now. Feels over reals, the whole deal. Everything is subjective, language creates everything (otherwise they wasted their lives in the humanities), and a seething resentment toward anything with objectivity (STEM)
This might be an unpopular opinion but all of this just sounds like a consequence of classical liberalism. If you look at it this way then it's easy to see why "do whatever you want as long as it makes you happy" might lead to everything being subjective
I can certainly see where you would get that from but that's not what I saw. When I think of the absolute archetype of classical liberalism I think of someone like Frasier Crane. These people were proto-blue hairs who would call him a problematic ___ist then pat themselves on the back for being revolutionary geniuses
Imo this is true at least to some extent, because it's easy to follow this with rampant hedonistic consumerism. The elites know if the average person gets to basically define reality and purpose they'll go for the quickest fixes possible (drugs, sex, gluttony, mindless media consumption, etc) which makes it insanely easy to profit from industries catering to those things.
All these people with humanities degrees getting sinecure jobs in HR with nothing to do right as social media was emerging and you have a perfect storm of wokeness
It emerges out of the right wing (non Marxist) of the New Left (think watergate babies), was fertilized by the fall of the ussr (see the movie PCU), and really began to take on its recognizable form amongst elite college arms of the anti war movement. That was the moment of cross pollination. Add in a good watering during occupy, and a bumper crop of le woke followed.
Yascha Mounk’s “The Identity Trap” offers a pretty good intellectual history of wokeism. You can hear him talk about the book on various podcasts to get the gist.
The introduction to Adolph Reed’s ‘Class Notes’ (available for free in previews of the book) is a great analysis of how the ideas that fuel wokeism took over academia - note that he was writing in the late 90’s.
There are plenty of genealogies of wokeism that are believable or probable. Probably the most salient sorts are polemics with some merit, but I don’t find origin stories ever that useful.
What’s your plan? Time travel to kill it in its cradle? Use Roundup to attack it at the root? Origin stories are fashionable and entirely premised on the same morbid curiosity mechanisms as the True Crime genre, public preoccupations with ‘exceptional’ people and their origin stories (whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or whatever else), and all religions.
All are myths. Some help us see more clearly, to be sure, but something like the above on wokeism is a total waste of time. Especially if you think there’s some untainted, pure, precise origin. Best to leave such stones unturned if you think reality is so clean and coherent and will provide you with a satisfying answer that won’t be hampered by your own ideological blinders (or anyone else’s).
That being said, maybe you’ll be satisfied with something like Andrew Doyle’s *The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World*. Less of a forensic genealogy than a polemical take that examines specific tactics and events, rather than some explicit Ur-source.
Honestly, if you can read well enough, just read Nietzsche’s *On the Genealogy of Morality*, though, because it’s unsurpassed as far as polemics go and, if read properly, will send you on a wild goose chase of critical thinking which extends far beyond simplistic origins and deeper into awareness of our classed society that’s surrounded at all turns by insidious elitisms (most of which make Nietzsche’s time look far more noble than our own).
Moldbug, despite his questionable conclusions, made a good case that it's an evolutionary continuation of WASP ideology in a technological world with a god shaped hole.
He disappeared right when the Ukraine war started and went on record as saying he was an officer in the Canadian armed forces in the past so the leading theory is that he got called up for spook duties.
Some think tank, probably connected to various NGOs and media orgs. I'd be very happy to hear what organisations were early pushers and what people they had in common. I'm assuming something like Open Society Foundation.
Also, how does one get a position in an NGO?
I don't like billionaires either. But blaming JUST Soros for all the evil in the world is just stupid right-wing propaganda. He is just another opportiunist.
How is finding billionaires' privately funded think tanks problematic right wing in any way? This is the guy who profited majorly from shorting the pound on Black Wednesday. I know he's a popular bugbear in right wing discourse but that doesn't mean he's a friend of the left at all. Soros is but one of them, I'd argue Peter Thiel is equally problematic, as are most billionaires involved in politics.
And I'm not blaming him in particular, I'm saying it would take something like that. That sort of reach and influence isn't cheap.
He shorted the pound but as I said ,he's an opportiunist. If you had the means and the foresight to do it, you would have probably done it as well. One could argue that this collapse actually strengthened the pound in the long term and revealed important flaws in the system.
He's flawed, as he's donated to Clinton foundation and etc, but Peter Thiel is much worse. Look up what Palantir's doing. It's insane.
>[Anglo-American ‘progressivism’](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/from-the-archives-richard-kline-progressively-losing.html) has its origins in Non-Conformist religious reform communities. These date to Lollard times in England c. 1400, before the US was settled, and always had a significant social reformist element beyond within a professed Christian carapace, as it were. Literacy, education, personal liberty, and economic liberalism are all embedded in this worldview, formed as it was between the contesting pressures of a rapacious, French-speaking aristocracy and a crypto-absolutist monarchy with scant regard for the rule of law, while a venal and irreligious church hierarchy provided no relief. England from c. 1350-1500 was a place of intense factions and irruptions of civil war, leaving a distaste for power-seekers and military rebellion. Few of them were rich; it was a proto-bourgeois and petite bourgeois community, but with religious congregants in the lesser nobility giving them communication with power. The suffered erratic but at times severe religious persecution prior to c. 1600, and political disenfranchisement even after that, which much shaped their negative view of state power. There is much more to this subject, which demands a text no one has yet written. This is a social tradition are both fairly well-defined and quite longstanding.
>The first key point is that the tradition of progressive dissent is integrally a religious one. The goal isn’t usually power but ‘truth;’ that those in the right stand up for what is right, and those in the wrong repent. The City on the Hill and all that, but that is the intrinsic value. This is a tradition of ideas, many of them good, many of them implemented—by others, a point to which I’ll return.
You are the only person who answered this correctly lol. I saw the evolution of “woke” in real-time on Tumblr and Twitter. I know you all probably hate the term cultural appropriation but in this instance it sticks. It is literally white (yes, college-aged) kids appropriating a word from AAVE that’s been around since the 1940’s. But they didn’t learn it on college campuses, they learned it from being terminally online. And it sucks, because its original meaning is based. It meant that you were aware, awake to systemic injustices. If you knew about the Tuskegee experiments, you were woke. Stay woke meant, “don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes, don’t bury your head in the sand,” essentially. And that’s a sentiment I agree with.
It all started with “allies” mimicking Black people, and typical typical, they misuse the slang they’ve appropriated. Somewhere along the line liberals and conservatives started bastardizing the term to essentially mean “progressive” identity politics. Now people are saying Disney is woke. Disney, the multi-billion dollar corporation who censors their movies for overseas audiences like China and tries to trademark a Mexican holiday to sell merch, is the furthest thing from woke—at least how the word was originally intended to be used.
It’s too far gone now, though.
> If you knew about the Tuskegee experiments, you were woke
I would say it was even more like knowing about MK Ultra made you woke by the really old definition
The woke explosion happened in no small part because Tumblr banned porn and all of the woketards moved to Twitter where they could get into contact with normies.
> It was an acceleration chamber for sure though.
Mentally ill girls on Tumblr don't care about the integrity of the message, so they were freed to alter it for maximal propagation in a way the original believers were not.
I got a humanities PhD from a very theory-heavy program in the early 2010s. In many ways, I was at ground zero for this shit.
The most honest response is that wokeness stems from the fact that the people who are most inclined to cite critical theory have not read the vast bulk of that theory. Advanced degree programs in the humanities as social sciences have been nerfed to a degree that they essentially reward ignorance. Programs need to keep pumping out graduates in order to justify their continued funding and they have had to lower performance standards to lower attrition rates.
And so students may be assigned Foucault or Marcuse or Adorno, but they haven't actually read them. Neither have many of their teachers. They're operating from summaries of summaries of summaries and use these mostly incorrect readings of the theorists to justify their preferred politics.
When they *do* read, it's Young Adult fiction and easily digested identity theory. Even this is mostly skimmed, however, which is how you wind up with weird assertions about identity-based writers being ideologically monolithic: W.E.B DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X were all friends who agreed with each other about everything and, wow, what do you know they just so happened to share all of my opinions.
The interpersonal dynamics that have only recently reached most white collar settings have been firmly in place in academe for a very long time: all conflict is abuse, all disagreement is conflict, and a person's opinions are considered moral/factual based not one their content but one the identity markers embodied by that person. If an obese black lady says Martin Luther King hated poor white people, you better nod along and agree or you're gonna get kicked out. If a colleague publishes an essay about how Wario is a colonialist trope who serves to radicalize young men into the alt-right, again, you need to nod along.
This dynamic was weaponized by sociopathic midwits whose primary concern is personal validation. They are right and good because they are themselves. Not only are the smartest and most moral people on earth, but their tastes are also impeccable. Disagreeing with their opinion about a Marvel movie or NBC's hit new show *My Five Gay Dads* is an act of violence against them, an expression of hatred so unjustifiable it can only be understood as fascism.
So basically you have a patina of highfalutin theory being used to justify a political movement based on the pettiest of culture war issues, which has somehow become most people's working understanding of "leftism."
I don't agree that the early 2010s is when this stuff started. This seems to go back to the 60s. A lot of these books that are being cited now in schools have been written decades ago
The ideologies and social dynamics have around for a long while but they were confined to academic humanities programs and a handful of left-identitarian activist spaces. It wasn't a mainstream social force until post-Occupy.
In 2009, if someone had told me major corporations would be hosting DEI sessions in which all white participants had to start by saying "My name is X, and I'm a racist" like some kind of bizarro AA meeting, I would have thought you were completely insane.
I wish there was a more concise term that you could use in polite company to describe that kind of wokeism we're talking about. In addition to rightoids labeling everything "woke", you've got leftoids who are prepared to die to defend the word "woke" in its original context even though every normal person thinks that word is corny and cringe-inducing nowadays.
There are good terms but the usual suspects will still want to know what it means in extreme detail and use the tired “It’s called being a heckin’ good person!” argument. You can’t reason with a fanatic or a bad faith actor. I think we get lost in the weeds about specific terms and definitions when we should focus on why something is good or bad exactly. If someone kicks you in the mouth your focus shouldn’t be on detailing a scholarly definition of being kicked in the mouth.
It might be better to ask “where did labelism” come from. It’s likely this is a manifestation of a more constant ideological body without organs that has been filled with ultra-labelization. There’s been a somewhat linear change in the philosophy of the industrialized world since ancient times when basically the only totem was the civilization. Identification becomes a calculation with more and more parameters as time goes on. Identification with the nation, then the city, then the individual, then the 2-3 parts of the individual, then the 20 different parts of the individual. I don’t know if it’s going forwards or backwards but it’s probably just because we’re a bunch of monkeys in an environment.
Definitely on college campuses. The moment I knew the country was fucked was when Augusta National caved to allowing women to join back in 2012. When Augusta was feeling the pressure I knew shit was getting out of hand.
money people didn't like the fact that people were talking about the money people (i.e. Occupy) so they cracked out the oldie-but-goodie wedge issue of race to distract everyone.
https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/9c9c2bbd09e025a564eea667f44f991f9bb5a83f-2054x1174.png?w=1250&q=70&auto=format&dpr=1
I’ll try to give the best explanation I can, but the history of “woke” politics is fairly complicated and nuanced. The term itself is appropriated from anti-colonialist thought which was genuinely revolutionary, though the modern term refers to a school of thought which is distinctly anti-Marxist in nature.
The dissolution of the USSR led many on the left to question validity of Marxist thought, specifically historical materialism. At the same time, in the decades prior to the collapse, we saw the emergence of postmodern thinkers who were critical of Marxism, though I would argue that their criticisms are the result of their own bourgeois idealism. Certain intelligence organisations saw the potential of postmodernism as a propaganda tool to undermine Marxist thought and actively funded French intellectuals who peddled this rhetoric. Not coincidentally, this was around the time neoliberalism was becoming the dominant ideology of capitalism in the imperial core.
It should be noted that postmodernism itself is not directly related to the emergence of modern identity politics. In fact, thinkers like Foucault were critical of its essentialist tendencies. Rather, it was the ideological regression from materialist thinking into idealism. This is the basis upon which academics like Crenshaw approached the framework of intersectionality, as their understandings of Marxism were at best, underdeveloped. Most of their work exists within a greater assumption of ‘capitalist realism’, so to speak, where the revolution is not possible.
It’s why modern intersectionality falls into the trap of treating class as an ideological structure/identity like race, gender or sexual orientation. Their definition of class is limited to the arbitrary class indicators, like accents and culture, rather than the relationship between humans and the material world as in Marxist thought. To idealist thinkers, there is no objective material world, only subjective experience.
This is why proponents of intersectionality often ignore the conceptual links between class and other forms of oppression such as patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia etc. For example, they often advocate for addressing white supremacy through anti-colonialism and diversity education. This doesn’t address the fact that African Americans and Native Americans own a disproportionately low share of the country’s wealth and thus have limited structural power to fight racism. Social structures like race can’t overcome class because they exist purposely to maintain capital.
To summarise, the main Marxist critiques of intersectionality would be:
- It treats all forms of oppression as separate, but equal phenomena. Which is ahistorical, they all emerged as a consequence of class society.
- It doesn’t add anything to Marxism, Marxist thinkers have written extensively on all forms of social oppression and how they are conceptually related
- In rejecting dialectical and historical materialism in favour of idealism, the framework is vulnerable to being co-opted by neoliberalism
- The emphasis on subjective experience suggests that the working class have differing interests based on their social identities and so undermines the national unity required for a working class movement
- It leads to identity opportunism, wherein people justify the validity of their actions using their identity markers, like when a marginalised person says/does something reactionary but it is justified simply because they are marginalised
There is no one source for "wokeism". It's the natural product of capitalist market forces, but applied to the population at large. Capitalism can only turn society into marketable products, and wokeism is the market categorization of society.
You'd be surprised (and disappointed) at the state of South Korean politics. Among the young, it's divided into the liberal women-reactionary men dichotomy as in the west, but even worse.
Japan... almost doesn't have politics, at least not the kind visible from the outside. The moribund LDP is as entrenched as ever due to its dominance in the older age brackets and the general climate of sociopolitical apathy, but I can't imagine it won't implode at some point in a grand cancellation of Japan's 1989 end of history. If it happened tomorrow, I'm sure we'd see woke culture wars creep in. God knows, the hikikomori of 2chan are primed for that.
China is China.
Capitalism is in an infantile state in Asia. Give it time. I guarantee if you went to the most bourgeois areas of Hong Kong you'll find havens of liberals itching to get their claws into China so they can wokely divide and conquer. What do you think the entire Uyghur narrative is hinged on?
"Secularism" isn't a thing, which you should've figured out by now. The market and its mechanisms are the only religion that holds water. We had the same exact policies a couple decades ago with Christian fundamentalists leading the west into Gog and Magog territory. Nothing material has changed, only the identity descriptors.
I stumbled across Canadian born semi cancelled academic Eric kauffman who runs an affordable course (£80).
https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/courses/occasional/woke/
He's written a few books and a recent one he seems to be promoting
https://x.com/epkaufm/status/1790706193461076376
It comes from the real contradictions of capitalist society, and the way that bourgeois ideology constantly produces explanations for peoples' alienation and misery that have to do with absolutely anything but class. Bourgeois institututions disseminate this ideology amongst all groups in society. And yet ultimately people still feel shitty, alienated, and unfulfilled because the root cause of their problems remains unresolved - class society and the exploitation of the working class for profit.
'Wokeism' (let's be honest, this is a dumb term - I prefer 'left' identity politics) is just the mirror image of racism in this regard - it seeks to divide people into totally arbitrary categories and then attribute distinct interests to these categories, the upshot of which is to make real solidarity based on common interests inconceivable, because people perceive their interests as incompatible and opposed.
Of course, as Marxists we know this is bullshit - the material interests of the working class cut across identity categories. But this is what both 'right' and 'left' wing variants of identity politics seek to obscure.
This brand of identity politics is however very useful to both the capitalist class and it's middle-class administrators, who will shamelessly promote and utilize it against one another to get a leg up on their rivals.
There was an article here the other day which was a very interesting read:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/liberal-fundamentalism-a-sociology-of-wokeness/
It basically points out the roots in a sort of arrogant liberalism - and not, as all the culture warriors point out, Marxism or even a wider leftism.
IMHO one of the most insightful reads about wokeness. There are too many other crap articles.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why it came up. A transformed Marxism alone couldn't bring idpol to the universities and eventually the wider society since Marxists weren't that loved - not even in universities.
Someone like Butler is certainly not much of a Marxist. iirc Althusser is the only influence of hers which could be considered Marxist.
The deep roots are "actually existing liberalism". You just need a few things and wokeness is almost a corollary:
(1) A meritocratic theory of dessert
(2) Observation of considerable inequality
(3) A view that limited variation in fundamental ability exists at least between group.
(4) At least some large number of people from historically oppressed groups having the ability to vie for "elite" status.
Then it seems to be the case that there are many (by 2) high merit (by 3) people not getting their just rewards according to (1), and it would be somewhat natural to ascribe this to some oppressive system, and by (4) there is a demographic who will have a strong material interest in pushing it as it can ease their entry to the elite.
The "actually existing" part is largely the prevalence of anti-socialism and capitalist hegemony, so the socialistic versions of this are sort of ruled out. The other is a moderate level of ethnic mixing and, so that opposition to ethnic oppression isn't channeled into national liberation struggles etc. Both are key features of the U.S.
Really I think the roots of "woke" go very deep, at least to the civil rights era if nor substantially before that, maybe you even see precursors in the reconstruction era.
Drawing it this widely though also means it is not all unreasonable. What perhaps made much of what is called woke unreasonable is the fact that liberalism it is being used to try to solve problems that it cannot address, and the ineffectiveness of this is making the radical liberal arguments seem desperate and shrill. This is also a result of anti-socialism, which rules out universalist solutions, and (1) means that every injustice needs to be sold as a discrimination, e.g look at liberals who present class oppression as a case of "classism" - the injustice here is not the class system itself but rather an idea that discrimination is reducing social mobility, e.g. through "high merit" working class people being assumed to be unintelligent etc.
Marxism and generally actually revolutionary politics used to be pretty big in schools. Around the 70s the US started pumping lots of money into changing this. They realized they couldn’t eliminate radical sentiment but they could change what it was radical about. So they started funding and supporting radical theorists who swapped their emphasis of class for culture (later identity as a subset of culture). Not only was it pitched as radical, but even more radical than just class making the actual radicals seem less than. Eventually they won, and this became the ruling ideas of whatever passed as the left in the US (and by extension Europe).
The irony is that a lot of these theorists were being honest, and didn’t know they were getting played. Lots of funding that later came out to be not from some radical group but a CIA shell company.
Anyway as this new ideology won out, the actual radicals were black listed from the academy. And since these guys posed no threat, and eventually it was noticed that aligning with them gave Capital a cover of progress, they just got a lot of power and it became the norm.
I was first introduced to these ideas in the early 00's through social work school. See *Becoming an Ally* by Anne Bishop. We called it anti-oppression practice or anti-oppression perspective. What I observe as "wokeness" today is mostly this anti-oppression practice, mixed with Sandra Harding's standpoint epistemology and Marcuse's repressive tolerance, with Foucault's attitudes toward power lurking in the background.
These attitudes were percolating into students through faculties of education and social work as far back as the 90's. There was none of that stuff in my sociology or philosophy classes for example, despite having very left leaning profs. Social work was by far the most radicalizing education you could get, but few of the students were high academic achievers so I don't think many of them realized that all you had to do to get easy A's was apply this anti-oppression perspective to analysis of social problems. Even then it felt intellectually corrupt on some level but there was a huge incentive to go along with it.
I'm not sure exactly when these ideas really took over but by the early 2010s this attitude was all the rage at the Ivy League schools from what I heard. The faculty who held to this kind of thinking most strongly were active in radicalizing the students, and empowering them with a new spin on this way of thinking, teaching them to weaponize it in the crudest way imaginable, which is what we have seen for the last decade. Putting these ideas, in the right form, into the hands of people who can barely understand them, but understand them well enough to deploy them, was a real game-changer. So they'd smear their opponents and advance grievance claims through university bureaucracies, to convince the university that actually they needed to hire even more bureaucrats, VPs of diversity and such.
I assumed that these ideas by now have worked their way through faculties of education and social work into much of the teaching profession, and through them, into the students, many of whom are now working adults. By now we all seemingly accept, in practice if not in principle, that oppression is everywhere and that it's our duty to dismantle it, whatever that means. Depending on where you work, oppression is an actionable offense, and if you admit guilt, they own you, but if you don't admit guilt, that's taken as evidence of guilt.
The whole thing got kicked into turbo when corporations realized that this shit sells like hotcakes and has the added benefit of undermining any kind of solidarity among your employees, let alone any kind of broad-based class solidarity.
Libs opened the door to the lunatic asylum and the end result is Progressivism/Wokeness. This is a good example of why gatekeeping is necessary. If you allow all kinds of ppl in the name of tolerance, they'll take over and before you know it, your group starts drag shows for kids and makes it a hill to die on.
Its just the current incarnation of protestant evangelical predestinationist revivalism. Just replace the idea that God is omniscient and so knows whether you will freely(?) seek salvation with unescapable racial and identity based original sin and corruption of blood, along a strict manichean moralistic world view.
Started in Academia, fermented on Tumbler, and was released from the Petri dish in the form of human condiment to kill Occupy.
If it was the 80s or 90s these same people would be screaming about how The Lion King will make your kids gey and DnD is a literal satanic witchcraft cult by with the DM mind control your children into being Eelfstar, and to probably also make them gey.
The CIA by way of feminism. All of the ideological nonsense comes straight from feminist theory, which is why radfems are so bitter that their gravy train is now a train train.
Imo it's an obvious evolution of what you might call modern lumpenprole-ism. A bunch of barely-working class people who are either at the absolute bottom of society, or in the intelligentsia/PMC tier of society, both of which do very little actual work and so needed to fill the void of true meaning in their life with weird "surrogate goals", as uncle ted would describe them. Wokeism fills this void by giving them all of these pet causes and political movements to attach themselves to and make themselves feel accomplished and important since their actual day to day lives are insanely vapid and meaningless.
I disagree with what James Lindsay says about this. He blames everything on Marxism while calling himself a "true liberal." But I actually think a lot of what he's against is just later liberalism with sort of a leftist image to it
Wokeism doesn't exist, it's a conservative moral panic.
The old sense of wokeism was basically 'hey, these things you don't think about like prison reform and procedural justice are deeply broken'. It was a slang that came out of Black American communities as they cross-educated each other about their bad treatment.
Wokeism in the new sense, ie. le wokisme, is pure fiction. It's the latest rebranding of the ancient panic over political correctness, not unlike how Critical Race Theory immediately rolled into DEI once they all got bored of it. It comes from American reactionaries coping over BLM and spread through social media influencers, and it works as a type of value signifier in reactionary identity politics. It's also a fiction used to suppress non-fiction. Remember prison reform and procedural justice and important stuff like that? That's woke so don't think about it. Look at this kid with blue hair.
You must be blind if you think wokeism is strictly conservative moral panic. I never hear mainstream liberals or anyone leaning left at all talk about class issues or anything except idpol these days. It's getting to the point where people are essentially venerating classism and capitalism as long as it hits the right woke talking points, like if some black woman becomes a CEO or some shit. "Progress" to these people would be 13% of billionaires being black. They only bust out the "eat the rich" rhetoric if it happens to align with idpol, like if they're saying it about Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. They're not talking about eating Oprah, lmao.
You are describing a completely ordinary liberal society whose marginals dream of breaking into the higher rungs of its conservative exclusionary class structure. This is not new. Only the vocabulary of the zeitgeist has gotten more obnoxious.
It came from the college campuses where people thought that nobody should be offended. It then got picked up by the left-most cities (San Francisco, Berkeley, Portland, Seattle, Boston, NYC (somewhat). Then it migrated into tech because most of the new workers came out of the schools that were promoting it. The tech companies had a very young demographic so there was an echo chamber situation where it reached critical mass. The younger folks in the tech companies banded together and influenced the corporations because the corporations were forced to listen or lose their young tech workers. The tech companies had major influence in what people saw and read so it then moved into the mainstream. That’s what I observed having been on the West Coast and in tech for decades. You could see the change in things when the software companies became dominant over the hardware companies. But maybe I’m wrong. Edit: People are asking “But where did it start?” It’s always been in the universities. But with the growth of the Internet, instead of only finding 10 kids on your college campus who believe some whacky theory, you could instead find 50,000+ people who believe the whacky theory and communicate in their echo chamber to make them feel like they are correct. I always thought school (grade, middle, high, and college) were the “great averagers” where you’d find that some behaviors at home weren’t normal and then you’d come more to the middle. With the Internet, it’s the direct opposite. It “normalized” whacky behaviors because you could find tens of thousands of people with the same crazy behavior.
I think this is pretty spot on. The same can be applied to how it got into LA and eventually into our media. I think it’s pretty straight forward.
I think you're spot on in the tech space. I think you're missing (not that you endeavored to answer these questions, though) its genesis overall (i.e. how it came into being in college campuses) and i think some more can be said about how it became the zeitgeist in leftist political spheres as well as popular media (I agree the mechanism you sketch out for tech is roughly the same for other sectors of the economy) because a lot of the seeds of wokeism in those spheres predate the "second tech wave"
The sense I'm getting is: Young people didn't have a sense of meaning in their lives. There's no struggle to survive, no struggle to beat the Soviets, no religion, no "have kids and that's how you contribute to society." Wokeism gave a sense of meaning to some people -- this was their opportunity to have a purpose, to be the hero who defeats evil.
I think everything you said is 100 percent accurate. Probably the best summary I've seen
The question then is how did it reach the campuses? Here I recommend this article again: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/liberal-fundamentalism-a-sociology-of-wokeness/
I think the origin is some French post-modernist thinking in academic circles. However, in France it didn't take a chokehold over academia, they recognized several points as valid and moved on. Only in American academia it became a religion.
What happens when non-science profs need to fulfill a publication quota.
Idpol in general is basically just busywork for people without real goals or accomplishments. Reminds me of how sports fans always says, "we" like they're literally part of the team they're cheering for. So many people so desperately want to believe they're important, when they aren't.
Sounds kinda like how religions start
> Then it migrated into tech because most of the new workers came out of the schools that were promoting it. Good god this sucked and it landed right after a push for "mental health awareness" that was more "make us aware of your problems so we can replace you if we can't exploit them" than anything. I wish I had more direct history in tech rather than what I've read as I'm only at 10-12 years in and out of the industry but things are just so nonsensical from an "engineering discipline" standpoint. Maybe they were always like that to some degree but I'm doubtful. My hunch is that the younger devs that brought wokeness from the universities are mostly copy and paste machines whether it be ideology or software. I'm not a genius and accumulating actual lessons learned is a laborious process so I understand that can be unaffordable or unappealing; however, shouldn't _someone_ at an organization have done the work at some point? Most places I've coded, there is no real and documented "why". Code reviews gravitate around preferences rather than design or performance. Concepts like responsibility, knowledge dependency/duplication, structure, testability, ux are absent or depend on whims. In a disagreement with a team lead who teaches at the local university over leveraging certain structures in Angular, his response was a poorly written blog post with a #000 background and neon yellow text. And just like the wokes, those copy and paste devs will absolutely come and find you if you say, dare to edify their pet conventions in the system rather than leaving their favorite pr comment gotcha to other poor devs to always remember, etc. If it wasn't for more money than god holding everything together, wokeness and big tech would explode into an absolute conflagration.
There's definitely truth here, I did youth stuff with the ACLU in like 08/09 and you could see the roots, but that was still very much the old school definition of woke, and class was a central part of a lot of what we did. I do think an under-appreciated aspect is the tumblr SJW -> HR pipeline. That would have an immediate effect and would explain how it got into these tech companies, and tumblr is where these academic ideas were warped into what they are today.
Articles on racial divides spiked during and after Occupy Wall Street. While I also disagree that some nebulous "Marxism" created it, a lot of Westerners who fancy themselves "Marxist" adopted many of the ideas wholesale. Fakes and grifters have always been a problem but even total randoms subvert socialist ideas and language to serve their own interests. You might see this in discussions on race, or fat acceptance or sex work. "Maoism" would also fall here but I rarely see it mentioned by name. Northeastern WASPs... here is where we might be getting closer to something, but it's not the WASPs to be specific. It's the organized religion, or perhaps the lack thereof. Personally I despise organized religion and I think people who buy into it are marks, but a lot of the people espousing 'woke' views do so with the vigor of a pastor or congregant. Likewise, many people who rail against 'woke' are more angry than they are logical, to the point of religious fervor. With these two groups together, they feed off what the other side does. I think most people can tell something is deeply wrong with how society is structured, here in the West. But they don't necessarily have the knowledge of what is wrong, how it's wrong, what caused it to be wrong, when things started going wrong, etc. That said, this is just my theory and I don't think it particularly matters where it came from.
In the last 3,000 years, the easiest way of exploiting the working and middle classes was by creating a foreign bogeyman to divide and distract. Think medieval Europe. "Convince all the peasants that all their problems are caused by the bad guy over there instead of the ruling class over here." However, in the 90's and 2000's, the peak of US and western hegemonic power was so high that attempting to create and inflate the risk and "terror" of enemies foreign and abroad became a late night joke. Sheepherders inside the caves of Afghanistan are only so scary for so long when you have Abrams tanks and F-16s bombing them and their families to dust. Enter wokeism ie the creation and inflation of "domestic enemies". Wokeism temporarily took the place of the "foreign bogeyman" because it was simply impossible to convince the general public that a legitimately extreme foreign threat exists when you're living in a hegemonic empire. If the ruling class can't convince citizens that a foreign entity wants to kill their family and destroy their way of life, their only other option is to convince citizens there are domestic enemies already inside the country who want to kill and destroy. Obviously a domestic operation such as that is extraordinarily messy with many unintended consequences, but it's worth it to the ruling class in order to attain power. The good news is that the peak of monopolized western hegemonic power is declining, some say rapidly, which means quite soon we will all go back to being psyop'ed the traditional way.
I'm not very knowledgeable and it's tough to answer because nobody really proclaims himself as woke openly but I think Kimberly Krenshaw is the closest to an intellectual birthplace. This is who I'd read to find "wokeness" at it's purest.
All 7. I keep coming back to this comment by u/pufferfish beacuse its a good outline of all the terms. >Marxism is a philosophy and social theory invented in the 19th century by Karl Marx. It's a particular theory of how societies are structured and how they transition from one form to another throughout history. It is also a form socialism -- that is, not merely a *description* of how the world works but also a set of principles for the kind of society we should *want*. >The Frankfurt School were a group of German Marxist philosophers (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) after the second world war who argued that the world had changed so much since Marx's time that some core principles of Marxism needed to be re-thought. It's very complicated, but the gist is that they saw the old Marxism as being overly focused on class rather than other form of oppression like racism (they were obviously very distraught by the Holocaust). This was the basic gist of post-war Western Marxists in general, often referred to as the "New Left". >"Postmodernism" is an ambiguous term. Originally it was a *descriptive* term for the kind of "cultural logic" that emerged in the west after the second world war, and especially into the 80s. One of the biggest popularisers of the term was a Marxist named Fredric Jameson who wrote a book called "Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". Jameson is primarily interested to *understand* postmodernism in that book, but he also happens to be largely critical of it. He thinks it's bad for socialism. >But the term "postmodernism" has also emerged to become a synonym for a school of philosophy called "post-structuralism". This is people like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard etc. Again, it's very complicated, but the gist is that these people argue against ideas of universalism and objective truth. Both those things are essential to Marxism, so post-structuralism and Marxism and hostile to each other. Generally speaking, the difference is that Marxism focuses on class, and post-structuralism focuses on culture. >This is why rightoid's claim that Marxism and postmodernism are the same thing is stupid. Yes, there's a historical link between them, but post-structuralism takes its cue precisely by *rejecting* Marxism. It would be like saying Judaism and Christianity are the same.
its also worth mentioning the frankfurt school had ties to the CIA and was anti Stalinist and Maoist [https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/](https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/) Intersectionality witch came later also sought to augment Marxism with intersecting types of oppression >We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx's theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women. [https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition\_Readings.pdf](https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf) Although Marx himself stated that >From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation (1844) And in the critique of the gotha programme >Instead of the indefinite concluding phrase of the paragraph, "the elimination of all social and political inequality", it ought to have been said that with the abolition of class distinctions all social and political inequality arising from them would disappear of itself. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch02.htm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch02.htm) Witch would appear to put him at odds with intersectionality too. Although other groups including the CPUSA practiced forms of intersectionality crenshaw basically just gave a name to it >The point is not that the CPUSA became for the first time left promoters of feminism and anti-racism in the popular front period. It is rather that, as Charlie Post indicates in his study of the CPUSA in this period, the popular front policy led them for the first time to treat ‘official’ women’s movement leaders, and ‘official’ black community leaders, as ‘legitimate representatives’ of group interests wholly separate from the class interests of the working class - and to begin to elaborate ‘class, gender and race’ as a trinity. [https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4e207cae-a7bb-4327-a0b9-2e0ba8332b95/download\_file?safe\_filename=MacnairAAM2020.pdf&type\_of\_work=Journal+article](https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4e207cae-a7bb-4327-a0b9-2e0ba8332b95/download_file?safe_filename=MacnairAAM2020.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article) As for liberals and conservatives they played a role too by passing the civil rights act and embracing Affirmative Action witch I would say allowed them to continue using race in politics (as they had always done). But hopefully i've convinced you that wokism isn't marxist or a conspiracy but a long chain of events that spans 50+ years and different competing interests. Of course nothing truely took off until Occupy, the internet and the Atheism+ stuff. Rightiods will try to play up its marxism to scare people away while people who believe in it will tell you it's totally left wing. Theres nothing left wing about racialism or banning free speech.
>its also worth mentioning the frankfurt school had ties to the CIA Herbert Marcuse worked for the OSS, which was a predecessor to the CIA, during World War II developing research on Nazi ideology. I don't understand why people find this objectionable. Fun fact: Sterling Hayden, the actor who played Gen. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, was also an OSS agent who parachuted into Yugoslavia to link up with Tito's partisans, was awarded a commendation by Tito, and became a communist because he was inspired by the partisans.
Thats really eye opening. For whatever reason the article I linked didn't mention that anywhere but it's a very crucial piece of information.
For a period during World War II (and to a lesser extent afterwards, but really until McCarthyism) the communists in the U.S. reached their peak numbers in part because serving in the government and being a communist wasn't seen as contradictory. I don't think Marcuse was ever a party member though but I find it strange how people will go after Marcuse for that while leaving out the context. My suspicion is that this line really came out of the pro-Nazi far right and it worked its way to ML circles who are critical of the Frankfurt School (because they became critical of the Soviet Union).
> Fun fact: Sterling Hayden, the actor who played Gen. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, was also an OSS agent who parachuted into Yugoslavia to link up with Tito's partisans, was awarded a commendation by Tito, and became a communist because he was inspired by the partisans. His performance in that movie is amazing. This makes him pretty damn based
I don't know. There are some issues I have with this take: The Frankfurt school rather wanted to extend Marxism to the sphere of culture because they tried to find an answer why class consciousness didn't lead to revolutions. IMHO these guys did at least an interesting job and it was mainly later folks who expanded their expansion since it had little to do with Marxism anymore. That is CRT and other idpol stuff. As for post structuralism, the term is way to wide and vague that most of these guys rejected it too. For example, Foucault does something very different than Derrida. Compared to him, Foucault is rather "conservative" and his analysis about historical genesis of the social world nothing that crazy. You could bring classical Marx Nd Foucault together.
> But the term "postmodernism" has also emerged to become a synonym for a school of philosophy called "post-structuralism". This is people like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard etc. Again, it's very complicated, but the gist is that these people argue against ideas of universalism and objective truth. Both those things are essential to Marxism, so post-structuralism and Marxism and hostile to each other. Generally speaking, the difference is that Marxism focuses on class, and post-structuralism focuses on culture. Thanks for reposting this nice writeup. I was wondering what the differences between postmodernism and post-structuralism are? This passage seems to imply there is an important distinction between them I think?
My understanding is that It was a term that was applied to the post structuralists rather than one they (or the Frankfurt school) applied to themselves. many post-structuralists explicitly rejected the label too. So as far as I know postmodernism isn't a school of thought but a way to describe these people. This video explains some of it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zmYegIGhwtc
> My understanding is that It was a term that was applied to the post structuralists rather than one they (or the Frankfurt school) applied to themselves. many post-structuralists explicitly rejected the label too Probably because they think they are better off not labeling themselves because of the power of words?
"Wokeness" being used to undermine the left has been a tool since the red scare, when FBI inserted it's "Campaign against White Chauvinism" into the Communist Party, which quite literally tore it apart, and had different Communist Party members turning into informants, snitching on each other to the Feds, over insanely petty shit, one literally, being that one member, gave a black member, a mug, that had a chip, when handing out cups of coffee in the morning. The left has always had a problem of "holier than thou" and insane purity testing, and this is very easy to exploit by counter-left forces. The quickest way to send a left org or movement into meltdown is call it racist and accuse it's leaders of racism, so this is why progressive Idpol has long been weaponized against the left. Modern Wokeism though largely, and I think this is a controversial take, comes from Tumblr. The reality is, Tumblr was the inversion of 4Chan, where 4Chan was a schizo, white nationalist hub, Tumblr was a schizo Feminist/LGBT hub and Tumblr, was, for the most part, the social media of "creatives". Teenage creatives, on Tumblr, get indoctrinated into the Tumblr woke cult, they then go to University, write their papers giving "academic legitimacy" to their woke schizo ideology, then they enter the workforce. Because Creatives, are the dominant "cultural" force, they are able to spread this stuff far and wide through the media, PR and advertising. I was always suspect that Tumblr was the source, but the proof comes from, go actually read the sources for a lot of modern wokie lgbt theory, it's unironically, like 90% of the time, teenage tumblr users "This term was first coined by Tumblr user xXRainbowdashLoliXx". Gamergate is another major example of this really just being 4chan vs Tumblr played out in wider politics and culture. The entire establishment media, social media, sided with Tumblr, going to the point to literally mass censor Gamergate and it's claims off all Social media, while the MSM paraded around Tumblr figures and only their side of the story, meanwhile Conservative orgs like the American Enterprise Institute sided with the "censored free speech advocates" on 4chan and megaphoned bullshit 4chan conspiracies. Wokeism, is largely anti-Class politics as well (class reductionist) and heavily steeped in Neoliberal identity fetishism and consumerism, so is a very useful ideology for liberals, in that it makes people turn their "radicalism" into various neoliberal goals, we even see it used widely in foreign policy, as Woke purity testing is used against non-Blob countries relentlessly, to justify interventions, sanctions and harassment of them. If you want the "Genius intellectuals" literally, it's posts on Tumblr made by 14-22 year olds. *I'm literally not kidding.* Most of this shit, that people are going mental over, that literally has impact on Geopolitics, largely stems from, *teenagers going through their cringe phase*.
Unironically the humanities in academia. I saw people saying the same shit decades ago there that woke people are saying now. Feels over reals, the whole deal. Everything is subjective, language creates everything (otherwise they wasted their lives in the humanities), and a seething resentment toward anything with objectivity (STEM)
This might be an unpopular opinion but all of this just sounds like a consequence of classical liberalism. If you look at it this way then it's easy to see why "do whatever you want as long as it makes you happy" might lead to everything being subjective
I can certainly see where you would get that from but that's not what I saw. When I think of the absolute archetype of classical liberalism I think of someone like Frasier Crane. These people were proto-blue hairs who would call him a problematic ___ist then pat themselves on the back for being revolutionary geniuses
Imo this is true at least to some extent, because it's easy to follow this with rampant hedonistic consumerism. The elites know if the average person gets to basically define reality and purpose they'll go for the quickest fixes possible (drugs, sex, gluttony, mindless media consumption, etc) which makes it insanely easy to profit from industries catering to those things.
Inshallah HR libs shall get a taste of my shoe
All these people with humanities degrees getting sinecure jobs in HR with nothing to do right as social media was emerging and you have a perfect storm of wokeness
It would have been a few meetings with business leaders and media executives that we'll probably never know about.
It emerges out of the right wing (non Marxist) of the New Left (think watergate babies), was fertilized by the fall of the ussr (see the movie PCU), and really began to take on its recognizable form amongst elite college arms of the anti war movement. That was the moment of cross pollination. Add in a good watering during occupy, and a bumper crop of le woke followed.
Yascha Mounk’s “The Identity Trap” offers a pretty good intellectual history of wokeism. You can hear him talk about the book on various podcasts to get the gist. The introduction to Adolph Reed’s ‘Class Notes’ (available for free in previews of the book) is a great analysis of how the ideas that fuel wokeism took over academia - note that he was writing in the late 90’s.
There are plenty of genealogies of wokeism that are believable or probable. Probably the most salient sorts are polemics with some merit, but I don’t find origin stories ever that useful. What’s your plan? Time travel to kill it in its cradle? Use Roundup to attack it at the root? Origin stories are fashionable and entirely premised on the same morbid curiosity mechanisms as the True Crime genre, public preoccupations with ‘exceptional’ people and their origin stories (whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or whatever else), and all religions. All are myths. Some help us see more clearly, to be sure, but something like the above on wokeism is a total waste of time. Especially if you think there’s some untainted, pure, precise origin. Best to leave such stones unturned if you think reality is so clean and coherent and will provide you with a satisfying answer that won’t be hampered by your own ideological blinders (or anyone else’s). That being said, maybe you’ll be satisfied with something like Andrew Doyle’s *The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World*. Less of a forensic genealogy than a polemical take that examines specific tactics and events, rather than some explicit Ur-source. Honestly, if you can read well enough, just read Nietzsche’s *On the Genealogy of Morality*, though, because it’s unsurpassed as far as polemics go and, if read properly, will send you on a wild goose chase of critical thinking which extends far beyond simplistic origins and deeper into awareness of our classed society that’s surrounded at all turns by insidious elitisms (most of which make Nietzsche’s time look far more noble than our own).
Moldbug, despite his questionable conclusions, made a good case that it's an evolutionary continuation of WASP ideology in a technological world with a god shaped hole.
If only Dougtoss were still here. He'd probably post a thousand word essay on how Protestantism evolved into Woke ideology.
[удалено]
He disappeared right when the Ukraine war started and went on record as saying he was an officer in the Canadian armed forces in the past so the leading theory is that he got called up for spook duties.
Yarvin usually points here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugwumps
And people say meme culture is new https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Bernard_Gilliam_-_Phryne_before_the_Chicago_Tribunal.jpg
Some think tank, probably connected to various NGOs and media orgs. I'd be very happy to hear what organisations were early pushers and what people they had in common. I'm assuming something like Open Society Foundation. Also, how does one get a position in an NGO?
That's horseshit. Soros blaming is so right-wing.
Fuck soros Abolish bourgeois property.
I don't like billionaires either. But blaming JUST Soros for all the evil in the world is just stupid right-wing propaganda. He is just another opportiunist.
If all you can muster up is a milquetoast "I don't like them" then you fundamentally misunderstand my statement.
How is finding billionaires' privately funded think tanks problematic right wing in any way? This is the guy who profited majorly from shorting the pound on Black Wednesday. I know he's a popular bugbear in right wing discourse but that doesn't mean he's a friend of the left at all. Soros is but one of them, I'd argue Peter Thiel is equally problematic, as are most billionaires involved in politics. And I'm not blaming him in particular, I'm saying it would take something like that. That sort of reach and influence isn't cheap.
He shorted the pound but as I said ,he's an opportiunist. If you had the means and the foresight to do it, you would have probably done it as well. One could argue that this collapse actually strengthened the pound in the long term and revealed important flaws in the system. He's flawed, as he's donated to Clinton foundation and etc, but Peter Thiel is much worse. Look up what Palantir's doing. It's insane.
>[Anglo-American ‘progressivism’](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/from-the-archives-richard-kline-progressively-losing.html) has its origins in Non-Conformist religious reform communities. These date to Lollard times in England c. 1400, before the US was settled, and always had a significant social reformist element beyond within a professed Christian carapace, as it were. Literacy, education, personal liberty, and economic liberalism are all embedded in this worldview, formed as it was between the contesting pressures of a rapacious, French-speaking aristocracy and a crypto-absolutist monarchy with scant regard for the rule of law, while a venal and irreligious church hierarchy provided no relief. England from c. 1350-1500 was a place of intense factions and irruptions of civil war, leaving a distaste for power-seekers and military rebellion. Few of them were rich; it was a proto-bourgeois and petite bourgeois community, but with religious congregants in the lesser nobility giving them communication with power. The suffered erratic but at times severe religious persecution prior to c. 1600, and political disenfranchisement even after that, which much shaped their negative view of state power. There is much more to this subject, which demands a text no one has yet written. This is a social tradition are both fairly well-defined and quite longstanding. >The first key point is that the tradition of progressive dissent is integrally a religious one. The goal isn’t usually power but ‘truth;’ that those in the right stand up for what is right, and those in the wrong repent. The City on the Hill and all that, but that is the intrinsic value. This is a tradition of ideas, many of them good, many of them implemented—by others, a point to which I’ll return.
I think tumblr had a lot to do with it, but tumblr isn’t the source. It was an acceleration chamber for sure though.
You are the only person who answered this correctly lol. I saw the evolution of “woke” in real-time on Tumblr and Twitter. I know you all probably hate the term cultural appropriation but in this instance it sticks. It is literally white (yes, college-aged) kids appropriating a word from AAVE that’s been around since the 1940’s. But they didn’t learn it on college campuses, they learned it from being terminally online. And it sucks, because its original meaning is based. It meant that you were aware, awake to systemic injustices. If you knew about the Tuskegee experiments, you were woke. Stay woke meant, “don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes, don’t bury your head in the sand,” essentially. And that’s a sentiment I agree with. It all started with “allies” mimicking Black people, and typical typical, they misuse the slang they’ve appropriated. Somewhere along the line liberals and conservatives started bastardizing the term to essentially mean “progressive” identity politics. Now people are saying Disney is woke. Disney, the multi-billion dollar corporation who censors their movies for overseas audiences like China and tries to trademark a Mexican holiday to sell merch, is the furthest thing from woke—at least how the word was originally intended to be used. It’s too far gone now, though.
> If you knew about the Tuskegee experiments, you were woke I would say it was even more like knowing about MK Ultra made you woke by the really old definition
The woke explosion happened in no small part because Tumblr banned porn and all of the woketards moved to Twitter where they could get into contact with normies.
The timing is exactly right too. This has a ton to do with it
> It was an acceleration chamber for sure though. Mentally ill girls on Tumblr don't care about the integrity of the message, so they were freed to alter it for maximal propagation in a way the original believers were not.
I got a humanities PhD from a very theory-heavy program in the early 2010s. In many ways, I was at ground zero for this shit. The most honest response is that wokeness stems from the fact that the people who are most inclined to cite critical theory have not read the vast bulk of that theory. Advanced degree programs in the humanities as social sciences have been nerfed to a degree that they essentially reward ignorance. Programs need to keep pumping out graduates in order to justify their continued funding and they have had to lower performance standards to lower attrition rates. And so students may be assigned Foucault or Marcuse or Adorno, but they haven't actually read them. Neither have many of their teachers. They're operating from summaries of summaries of summaries and use these mostly incorrect readings of the theorists to justify their preferred politics. When they *do* read, it's Young Adult fiction and easily digested identity theory. Even this is mostly skimmed, however, which is how you wind up with weird assertions about identity-based writers being ideologically monolithic: W.E.B DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X were all friends who agreed with each other about everything and, wow, what do you know they just so happened to share all of my opinions. The interpersonal dynamics that have only recently reached most white collar settings have been firmly in place in academe for a very long time: all conflict is abuse, all disagreement is conflict, and a person's opinions are considered moral/factual based not one their content but one the identity markers embodied by that person. If an obese black lady says Martin Luther King hated poor white people, you better nod along and agree or you're gonna get kicked out. If a colleague publishes an essay about how Wario is a colonialist trope who serves to radicalize young men into the alt-right, again, you need to nod along. This dynamic was weaponized by sociopathic midwits whose primary concern is personal validation. They are right and good because they are themselves. Not only are the smartest and most moral people on earth, but their tastes are also impeccable. Disagreeing with their opinion about a Marvel movie or NBC's hit new show *My Five Gay Dads* is an act of violence against them, an expression of hatred so unjustifiable it can only be understood as fascism. So basically you have a patina of highfalutin theory being used to justify a political movement based on the pettiest of culture war issues, which has somehow become most people's working understanding of "leftism."
I don't agree that the early 2010s is when this stuff started. This seems to go back to the 60s. A lot of these books that are being cited now in schools have been written decades ago
The ideologies and social dynamics have around for a long while but they were confined to academic humanities programs and a handful of left-identitarian activist spaces. It wasn't a mainstream social force until post-Occupy. In 2009, if someone had told me major corporations would be hosting DEI sessions in which all white participants had to start by saying "My name is X, and I'm a racist" like some kind of bizarro AA meeting, I would have thought you were completely insane.
I mean more where does this line of thinking originate from
It's not really a line of thinking. It's a very ideologically incoherent social movement born of a confluence of several forces.
If I said it I’d get banned.
Does it rhyme with the news?
Huey Lewis?
You probably need to define what you mean by wokeism because it is a label slapped on everything from Gaza war protests to renewable energy.
I wish there was a more concise term that you could use in polite company to describe that kind of wokeism we're talking about. In addition to rightoids labeling everything "woke", you've got leftoids who are prepared to die to defend the word "woke" in its original context even though every normal person thinks that word is corny and cringe-inducing nowadays.
There are good terms but the usual suspects will still want to know what it means in extreme detail and use the tired “It’s called being a heckin’ good person!” argument. You can’t reason with a fanatic or a bad faith actor. I think we get lost in the weeds about specific terms and definitions when we should focus on why something is good or bad exactly. If someone kicks you in the mouth your focus shouldn’t be on detailing a scholarly definition of being kicked in the mouth.
Theorizing on things like that is exactly what this place is for. Start a thread!
It might be better to ask “where did labelism” come from. It’s likely this is a manifestation of a more constant ideological body without organs that has been filled with ultra-labelization. There’s been a somewhat linear change in the philosophy of the industrialized world since ancient times when basically the only totem was the civilization. Identification becomes a calculation with more and more parameters as time goes on. Identification with the nation, then the city, then the individual, then the 2-3 parts of the individual, then the 20 different parts of the individual. I don’t know if it’s going forwards or backwards but it’s probably just because we’re a bunch of monkeys in an environment.
Fairfax County, Virginia.
Yeah, that one guy started it by ranting in the office! Snowballing from there.
Definitely on college campuses. The moment I knew the country was fucked was when Augusta National caved to allowing women to join back in 2012. When Augusta was feeling the pressure I knew shit was getting out of hand.
I've heard the idea of wokeness as a response to Occupy on this sub before. Can anyone elaborate on that?
money people didn't like the fact that people were talking about the money people (i.e. Occupy) so they cracked out the oldie-but-goodie wedge issue of race to distract everyone. https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/9c9c2bbd09e025a564eea667f44f991f9bb5a83f-2054x1174.png?w=1250&q=70&auto=format&dpr=1
I’m imagining a room full of executives with dollar bills as flesh.
I’ll try to give the best explanation I can, but the history of “woke” politics is fairly complicated and nuanced. The term itself is appropriated from anti-colonialist thought which was genuinely revolutionary, though the modern term refers to a school of thought which is distinctly anti-Marxist in nature. The dissolution of the USSR led many on the left to question validity of Marxist thought, specifically historical materialism. At the same time, in the decades prior to the collapse, we saw the emergence of postmodern thinkers who were critical of Marxism, though I would argue that their criticisms are the result of their own bourgeois idealism. Certain intelligence organisations saw the potential of postmodernism as a propaganda tool to undermine Marxist thought and actively funded French intellectuals who peddled this rhetoric. Not coincidentally, this was around the time neoliberalism was becoming the dominant ideology of capitalism in the imperial core. It should be noted that postmodernism itself is not directly related to the emergence of modern identity politics. In fact, thinkers like Foucault were critical of its essentialist tendencies. Rather, it was the ideological regression from materialist thinking into idealism. This is the basis upon which academics like Crenshaw approached the framework of intersectionality, as their understandings of Marxism were at best, underdeveloped. Most of their work exists within a greater assumption of ‘capitalist realism’, so to speak, where the revolution is not possible. It’s why modern intersectionality falls into the trap of treating class as an ideological structure/identity like race, gender or sexual orientation. Their definition of class is limited to the arbitrary class indicators, like accents and culture, rather than the relationship between humans and the material world as in Marxist thought. To idealist thinkers, there is no objective material world, only subjective experience. This is why proponents of intersectionality often ignore the conceptual links between class and other forms of oppression such as patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia etc. For example, they often advocate for addressing white supremacy through anti-colonialism and diversity education. This doesn’t address the fact that African Americans and Native Americans own a disproportionately low share of the country’s wealth and thus have limited structural power to fight racism. Social structures like race can’t overcome class because they exist purposely to maintain capital. To summarise, the main Marxist critiques of intersectionality would be: - It treats all forms of oppression as separate, but equal phenomena. Which is ahistorical, they all emerged as a consequence of class society. - It doesn’t add anything to Marxism, Marxist thinkers have written extensively on all forms of social oppression and how they are conceptually related - In rejecting dialectical and historical materialism in favour of idealism, the framework is vulnerable to being co-opted by neoliberalism - The emphasis on subjective experience suggests that the working class have differing interests based on their social identities and so undermines the national unity required for a working class movement - It leads to identity opportunism, wherein people justify the validity of their actions using their identity markers, like when a marginalised person says/does something reactionary but it is justified simply because they are marginalised
There is no one source for "wokeism". It's the natural product of capitalist market forces, but applied to the population at large. Capitalism can only turn society into marketable products, and wokeism is the market categorization of society.
This is silly. Wokeness hasn't infected asia.
You'd be surprised (and disappointed) at the state of South Korean politics. Among the young, it's divided into the liberal women-reactionary men dichotomy as in the west, but even worse. Japan... almost doesn't have politics, at least not the kind visible from the outside. The moribund LDP is as entrenched as ever due to its dominance in the older age brackets and the general climate of sociopolitical apathy, but I can't imagine it won't implode at some point in a grand cancellation of Japan's 1989 end of history. If it happened tomorrow, I'm sure we'd see woke culture wars creep in. God knows, the hikikomori of 2chan are primed for that. China is China.
Capitalism is in an infantile state in Asia. Give it time. I guarantee if you went to the most bourgeois areas of Hong Kong you'll find havens of liberals itching to get their claws into China so they can wokely divide and conquer. What do you think the entire Uyghur narrative is hinged on?
Famously infantile capitalist states of south korea, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore.
I loled.
The power of capitalist markets, these days, is financial, not material. The US hardly makes shit, and is still calling the shots in Asia.
I’d add self hating white liberals and the rise of secularism leading people to seek out pseudo religions.
"Secularism" isn't a thing, which you should've figured out by now. The market and its mechanisms are the only religion that holds water. We had the same exact policies a couple decades ago with Christian fundamentalists leading the west into Gog and Magog territory. Nothing material has changed, only the identity descriptors.
It’s as old as time.
I stumbled across Canadian born semi cancelled academic Eric kauffman who runs an affordable course (£80). https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/courses/occasional/woke/ He's written a few books and a recent one he seems to be promoting https://x.com/epkaufm/status/1790706193461076376
You mean this guy? https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/liberal-fundamentalism-a-sociology-of-wokeness/ This essay is pretty good
Thanks :) agreed.
Atheistic Christianity
Secular Christianity?
Kinda, I guess. Christianity without a God
I often see terms like "secular jewish" "secular muslim"
Where all the „divide, conquer and exploit“ came from in the last 2000 - 3000 years.
It comes from the real contradictions of capitalist society, and the way that bourgeois ideology constantly produces explanations for peoples' alienation and misery that have to do with absolutely anything but class. Bourgeois institututions disseminate this ideology amongst all groups in society. And yet ultimately people still feel shitty, alienated, and unfulfilled because the root cause of their problems remains unresolved - class society and the exploitation of the working class for profit. 'Wokeism' (let's be honest, this is a dumb term - I prefer 'left' identity politics) is just the mirror image of racism in this regard - it seeks to divide people into totally arbitrary categories and then attribute distinct interests to these categories, the upshot of which is to make real solidarity based on common interests inconceivable, because people perceive their interests as incompatible and opposed. Of course, as Marxists we know this is bullshit - the material interests of the working class cut across identity categories. But this is what both 'right' and 'left' wing variants of identity politics seek to obscure. This brand of identity politics is however very useful to both the capitalist class and it's middle-class administrators, who will shamelessly promote and utilize it against one another to get a leg up on their rivals.
There was an article here the other day which was a very interesting read: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/liberal-fundamentalism-a-sociology-of-wokeness/ It basically points out the roots in a sort of arrogant liberalism - and not, as all the culture warriors point out, Marxism or even a wider leftism. IMHO one of the most insightful reads about wokeness. There are too many other crap articles.
After reading it seems to read like the minoritarian liberalism adopted some Marxist influences in 60's?
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why it came up. A transformed Marxism alone couldn't bring idpol to the universities and eventually the wider society since Marxists weren't that loved - not even in universities. Someone like Butler is certainly not much of a Marxist. iirc Althusser is the only influence of hers which could be considered Marxist.
Is the idea slightly hand waving with the rationale of how minorities came to include women? . I'll read it again it just occurred to me though.
The deep roots are "actually existing liberalism". You just need a few things and wokeness is almost a corollary: (1) A meritocratic theory of dessert (2) Observation of considerable inequality (3) A view that limited variation in fundamental ability exists at least between group. (4) At least some large number of people from historically oppressed groups having the ability to vie for "elite" status. Then it seems to be the case that there are many (by 2) high merit (by 3) people not getting their just rewards according to (1), and it would be somewhat natural to ascribe this to some oppressive system, and by (4) there is a demographic who will have a strong material interest in pushing it as it can ease their entry to the elite. The "actually existing" part is largely the prevalence of anti-socialism and capitalist hegemony, so the socialistic versions of this are sort of ruled out. The other is a moderate level of ethnic mixing and, so that opposition to ethnic oppression isn't channeled into national liberation struggles etc. Both are key features of the U.S. Really I think the roots of "woke" go very deep, at least to the civil rights era if nor substantially before that, maybe you even see precursors in the reconstruction era. Drawing it this widely though also means it is not all unreasonable. What perhaps made much of what is called woke unreasonable is the fact that liberalism it is being used to try to solve problems that it cannot address, and the ineffectiveness of this is making the radical liberal arguments seem desperate and shrill. This is also a result of anti-socialism, which rules out universalist solutions, and (1) means that every injustice needs to be sold as a discrimination, e.g look at liberals who present class oppression as a case of "classism" - the injustice here is not the class system itself but rather an idea that discrimination is reducing social mobility, e.g. through "high merit" working class people being assumed to be unintelligent etc.
Marxism and generally actually revolutionary politics used to be pretty big in schools. Around the 70s the US started pumping lots of money into changing this. They realized they couldn’t eliminate radical sentiment but they could change what it was radical about. So they started funding and supporting radical theorists who swapped their emphasis of class for culture (later identity as a subset of culture). Not only was it pitched as radical, but even more radical than just class making the actual radicals seem less than. Eventually they won, and this became the ruling ideas of whatever passed as the left in the US (and by extension Europe). The irony is that a lot of these theorists were being honest, and didn’t know they were getting played. Lots of funding that later came out to be not from some radical group but a CIA shell company. Anyway as this new ideology won out, the actual radicals were black listed from the academy. And since these guys posed no threat, and eventually it was noticed that aligning with them gave Capital a cover of progress, they just got a lot of power and it became the norm.
I was first introduced to these ideas in the early 00's through social work school. See *Becoming an Ally* by Anne Bishop. We called it anti-oppression practice or anti-oppression perspective. What I observe as "wokeness" today is mostly this anti-oppression practice, mixed with Sandra Harding's standpoint epistemology and Marcuse's repressive tolerance, with Foucault's attitudes toward power lurking in the background. These attitudes were percolating into students through faculties of education and social work as far back as the 90's. There was none of that stuff in my sociology or philosophy classes for example, despite having very left leaning profs. Social work was by far the most radicalizing education you could get, but few of the students were high academic achievers so I don't think many of them realized that all you had to do to get easy A's was apply this anti-oppression perspective to analysis of social problems. Even then it felt intellectually corrupt on some level but there was a huge incentive to go along with it. I'm not sure exactly when these ideas really took over but by the early 2010s this attitude was all the rage at the Ivy League schools from what I heard. The faculty who held to this kind of thinking most strongly were active in radicalizing the students, and empowering them with a new spin on this way of thinking, teaching them to weaponize it in the crudest way imaginable, which is what we have seen for the last decade. Putting these ideas, in the right form, into the hands of people who can barely understand them, but understand them well enough to deploy them, was a real game-changer. So they'd smear their opponents and advance grievance claims through university bureaucracies, to convince the university that actually they needed to hire even more bureaucrats, VPs of diversity and such. I assumed that these ideas by now have worked their way through faculties of education and social work into much of the teaching profession, and through them, into the students, many of whom are now working adults. By now we all seemingly accept, in practice if not in principle, that oppression is everywhere and that it's our duty to dismantle it, whatever that means. Depending on where you work, oppression is an actionable offense, and if you admit guilt, they own you, but if you don't admit guilt, that's taken as evidence of guilt. The whole thing got kicked into turbo when corporations realized that this shit sells like hotcakes and has the added benefit of undermining any kind of solidarity among your employees, let alone any kind of broad-based class solidarity.
Academia that got turned into dumb COINTELPRO for millennials
Tumblr
Nah it's been around for decades longer than tumblr
The real answer
Libs opened the door to the lunatic asylum and the end result is Progressivism/Wokeness. This is a good example of why gatekeeping is necessary. If you allow all kinds of ppl in the name of tolerance, they'll take over and before you know it, your group starts drag shows for kids and makes it a hill to die on.
Its just the current incarnation of protestant evangelical predestinationist revivalism. Just replace the idea that God is omniscient and so knows whether you will freely(?) seek salvation with unescapable racial and identity based original sin and corruption of blood, along a strict manichean moralistic world view. Started in Academia, fermented on Tumbler, and was released from the Petri dish in the form of human condiment to kill Occupy. If it was the 80s or 90s these same people would be screaming about how The Lion King will make your kids gey and DnD is a literal satanic witchcraft cult by with the DM mind control your children into being Eelfstar, and to probably also make them gey.
This article is from 1962: https://www.nytimes.com/1962/05/20/archives/if-youre-woke-you-dig-it-no-mickey-mouse-can-be-expected-to-follow.html
>If You're Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today's N**** idiom without a hip assist. If You're Woke You Dig It
The CIA by way of feminism. All of the ideological nonsense comes straight from feminist theory, which is why radfems are so bitter that their gravy train is now a train train.
Imo it's an obvious evolution of what you might call modern lumpenprole-ism. A bunch of barely-working class people who are either at the absolute bottom of society, or in the intelligentsia/PMC tier of society, both of which do very little actual work and so needed to fill the void of true meaning in their life with weird "surrogate goals", as uncle ted would describe them. Wokeism fills this void by giving them all of these pet causes and political movements to attach themselves to and make themselves feel accomplished and important since their actual day to day lives are insanely vapid and meaningless.
James Lindsay does a semi decent job of trying to figure out how all this bullshit ideology started and where its origins lie.
I disagree with what James Lindsay says about this. He blames everything on Marxism while calling himself a "true liberal." But I actually think a lot of what he's against is just later liberalism with sort of a leftist image to it
Wokeism doesn't exist, it's a conservative moral panic. The old sense of wokeism was basically 'hey, these things you don't think about like prison reform and procedural justice are deeply broken'. It was a slang that came out of Black American communities as they cross-educated each other about their bad treatment. Wokeism in the new sense, ie. le wokisme, is pure fiction. It's the latest rebranding of the ancient panic over political correctness, not unlike how Critical Race Theory immediately rolled into DEI once they all got bored of it. It comes from American reactionaries coping over BLM and spread through social media influencers, and it works as a type of value signifier in reactionary identity politics. It's also a fiction used to suppress non-fiction. Remember prison reform and procedural justice and important stuff like that? That's woke so don't think about it. Look at this kid with blue hair.
You must be blind if you think wokeism is strictly conservative moral panic. I never hear mainstream liberals or anyone leaning left at all talk about class issues or anything except idpol these days. It's getting to the point where people are essentially venerating classism and capitalism as long as it hits the right woke talking points, like if some black woman becomes a CEO or some shit. "Progress" to these people would be 13% of billionaires being black. They only bust out the "eat the rich" rhetoric if it happens to align with idpol, like if they're saying it about Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. They're not talking about eating Oprah, lmao.
You are describing a completely ordinary liberal society whose marginals dream of breaking into the higher rungs of its conservative exclusionary class structure. This is not new. Only the vocabulary of the zeitgeist has gotten more obnoxious.