Not every social movement is equally amenable to a definition. The more top-down/theoretical/intellectual it is, and the less history it has, the more definable it is. Marxism in the immediate wake of Marx, for example, is easy to define: if you agreed with the empirical claims of Marx's writings and traversed more or less the same bridge from is to ought, you were a Marxist. On the other side of the spectrum, you have, say, early Vedism, with its decentralized networks of charismatic teachers, regionally delimited textual canons, abortive explorations of new spiritual/intellectual territory, and so on.
In general, successful top-down movements are more fractious than successful decentralized movements. Or at least, they're more likely to split on clearly defined intellectual lines. As the new movement acquires prestige, the pressure to maintain a united front against outside challengers weakens, and the internal "attention economy" becomes large enough to tempt intellectuals to carve out a niche for themselves within it by attacking or reformulating the orthodox tenets. One clue as to the nature of wokism is that its internal fractures don't look like this. On an intellectual level, there's barely any disagreement at all. Most infighting is along personal lines ("Are this person's sins bad enough to warrant cancellation?"), or "intersectional" lines ("Should Asians call the police/make a stink when they're mugged by black men?").
My tentative one-sentence understanding of wokism is that it's a vulgarization of strands of left-wing thought dating from the 60's and 70's, (including CRT). In turn, what differentiated that era of leftism from the popular Civil Rights Movement was its institutional base in academia, which insulated it from both the particularism inherent to real-world politics and from the low level of abstraction demanded by popular movements. I haven't studied CRT in any depth, so this is a weak point of my argument, but loosely speaking I think what happened is that it replaced the concrete grievances of the CRM with a quasi-metaphysics of oppression, with new jargon to match (e.g., demonizing "whiteness" and "patriarchy" instead of "white people" and "men").
The dominant/marginalized, oppressor/oppressed dyads were raised to a higher level of abstraction in three ways. First, whites/men/straights were made into categorical oppressors, so that in no situation could e.g. black people be said to be oppressing white people, even where the dictionary definition of "oppression" would strenuously disagree. Second, with the aforementioned exceptions, any disparity between groups defined in opposition to one another was held to be reducible to oppression (by definition). For example, if deaf people have a communication disadvantage vis-a-vis hearing people, it's because society has made a decision not to accommodate them, which is oppression. Third, and related to the previous two, oppression was transformed from something that is done to something that is -- the animating spirit of Western civilization. Nothing is untainted by it. No branch of government, corporation, small business, or seemingly innocuous interaction between two members of the oppressor/oppressed classes has ever been totally free of oppression. There may have been some attempts in the past to fix this state of affairs, and they were laudable, but paradoxically, they were also completely ineffectual: oppression is alive and well. In fact, the need to combat it is (permanently) more urgent than ever.
Fast-forward to ca. 2012. Proto-woke has virtually taken over academia, old-school racism is dead, the highest office in the land is occupied by a fellow traveler, university attendance is higher than ever, and social media has appeared on the scene. The time is ripe for the left's intellectual capital to be cashed in for political capital, and for them to go on the offensive. The doctrinal innovations of the academic left are distilled into a few slogans, like "Racism = Power + Privilege" (i.e., you are racist if and only if you are white), which are opportunistically weaponized against political enemies, and abused for petty reasons like earning victimhood points/attention in order to increase one's social status, or settling personal scores. The energy of the movement is sustained by bringing down high-profile targets, which in principle can be any representative of the "mainstream" (anything normal), even if (in non-woke terms) politically inert, or any person, organization or symbol that stands athwart progress. The academic jargon is imported into corpo-speak to help put a respectable face on tribalistic malice -- e.g., any anti-white policy can be defended in the name of "prioritizing underserved/historically marginalized communities" or whatever. Markers of tribal identity emerge, like blue hair and that childlike, anodyne style of art. Encouraged by the stipulated universality of "oppression", new groups clamor for protected class status, using woke jargon to make their case to varying degrees of success. Not every wokester can, or has to, advocate for every protected class equally -- for the most part, they advocate for their own, if they belong to one -- but they almost uniformly signal at least lukewarm support for each other's causes as they come up, and borrow legitimacy from a shared verbal and philosophical pool. Woke-internal conflict is rare relative to the size and effectiveness of the movement; when it occurs, it's largely reactive, prompted by news stories that pit one protected class against another. Despite wokism's immense reach, its conflicts are mainly litigated outside the public eye. Such conflict as happens has a low intellectual caliber, because no framework was previously developed for managing disputes between protected classes, and it's too late to develop one that won't immediately succumb to the Schmittian hurlyburly -- on an abstract level, it's just "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable wall?" The woke recipe for critique, its philosophical core, is reduced to cartoonish simplicity, while its real-world ramifications are determined by historical/political/biological/cognitive contingency -- as seen in the reactions to transgenderism vs. transracialism, and the irrelevance of "theory" thereto. (I'm sure there was some theorizing post hoc, but by this time wokeness had outgrown its dependence on theory.) Etc. etc. etc. In short, the thing that came to be called wokeness metamorphosed into a fully-fledged mass movement. "Defining" woke is a category error, because it became messy upon contact with the real world. It's like trying to define a person.
The above paragraph is meant to characterize "classical wokism", b. ca. 2012, d. 2024. (To be honest, I'm not sure how well it describes its heirs in 2025 since it's so much less visible now (unless you have an account on Bluesky, which I don't).) As time goes on, the ideas and organizational forms of the left will continue to change in ways that defy easy definition.
p
Not every social movement is equally amenable to a definition. The more top-down/theoretical/intellectual it is, and the less history it has, the more definable it is. Marxism in the immediate wake of Marx, for example, is easy to define: if you agreed with the empirical claims of Marx's writings and traversed more or less the same bridge from is to ought, you were a Marxist. On the other side of the spectrum, you have, say, early Vedism, with its decentralized networks of charismatic teachers, regionally delimited textual canons, abortive explorations of new spiritual/intellectual territory, and so on.
In general, successful top-down movements are more fractious than successful decentralized movements. Or at least, they're more likely to split on clearly defined intellectual lines. As the new movement acquires prestige, the pressure to maintain a united front against outside challengers weakens, and the internal "attention economy" becomes large enough to tempt intellectuals to carve out a niche for themselves within it by attacking or reformulating the orthodox tenets. One clue as to the nature of wokism is that its internal fractures don't look like this. On an intellectual level, there's barely any disagreement at all. Most infighting is along personal lines ("Are this person's sins bad enough to warrant cancellation?"), or "intersectional" lines ("Should Asians call the police/make a stink when they're mugged by black men?").
My tentative one-sentence understanding of wokism is that it's a vulgarization of strands of left-wing thought dating from the 60's and 70's, (including CRT). In turn, what differentiated that era of leftism from the popular Civil Rights Movement was its institutional base in academia, which insulated it from both the particularism inherent to real-world politics and from the low level of abstraction demanded by popular movements. I haven't studied CRT in any depth, so this is a weak point of my argument, but loosely speaking I think what happened is that it replaced the concrete grievances of the CRM with a quasi-metaphysics of oppression, with new jargon to match (e.g., demonizing "whiteness" and "patriarchy" instead of "white people" and "men").
The dominant/marginalized, oppressor/oppressed dyads were raised to a higher level of abstraction in three ways. First, whites/men/straights were made into categorical oppressors, so that in no situation could e.g. black people be said to be oppressing white people, even where the dictionary definition of "oppression" would strenuously disagree. Second, with the aforementioned exceptions, any disparity between groups defined in opposition to one another was held to be reducible to oppression (by definition). For example, if deaf people have a communication disadvantage vis-a-vis hearing people, it's because society has made a decision not to accommodate them, which is oppression. Third, and related to the previous two, oppression was transformed from something that is done to something that is -- the animating spirit of Western civilization. Nothing is untainted by it. No branch of government, corporation, small business, or seemingly innocuous interaction between two members of the oppressor/oppressed classes has ever been totally free of oppression. There may have been some attempts in the past to fix this state of affairs, and they were laudable, but paradoxically, they were also completely ineffectual: oppression is alive and well. In fact, the need to combat it is (permanently) more urgent than ever.
Fast-forward to ca. 2012. Proto-woke has virtually taken over academia, old-school racism is dead, the highest office in the land is occupied by a fellow traveler, university attendance is higher than ever, and social media has appeared on the scene. The time is ripe for the left's intellectual capital to be cashed in for political capital, and for them to go on the offensive. The doctrinal innovations of the academic left are distilled into a few slogans, like "Racism = Power + Privilege" (i.e., you are racist if and only if you are white), which are opportunistically weaponized against political enemies, and abused for petty reasons like earning victimhood points/attention in order to increase one's social status, or settling personal scores. The energy of the movement is sustained by bringing down high-profile targets, which in principle can be any representative of the "mainstream" (anything normal), even if (in non-woke terms) politically inert, or any person, organization or symbol that stands athwart progress. The academic jargon is imported into corpo-speak to help put a respectable face on tribalistic malice -- e.g., any anti-white policy can be defended in the name of "prioritizing underserved/historically marginalized communities" or whatever. Markers of tribal identity emerge, like blue hair and that childlike, anodyne style of art. Encouraged by the stipulated universality of "oppression", new groups clamor for protected class status, using woke jargon to make their case to varying degrees of success. Not every wokester can, or has to, advocate for every protected class equally -- for the most part, they advocate for their own, if they belong to one -- but they almost uniformly signal at least lukewarm support for each other's causes as they come up, and borrow legitimacy from a shared verbal and philosophical pool. Woke-internal conflict is rare relative to the size and effectiveness of the movement; when it occurs, it's largely reactive, prompted by news stories that pit one protected class against another. Despite wokism's immense reach, its conflicts are mainly litigated outside the public eye. Such conflict as happens has a low intellectual caliber, because no framework was previously developed for managing disputes between protected classes, and it's too late to develop one that won't immediately succumb to the Schmittian hurlyburly -- on an abstract level, it's just "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable wall?" The woke recipe for critique, its philosophical core, is reduced to cartoonish simplicity, while its real-world ramifications are determined by historical/political/biological/cognitive contingency -- as seen in the reactions to transgenderism vs. transracialism, and the irrelevance of "theory" thereto. (I'm sure there was some theorizing post hoc, but by this time wokeness had outgrown its dependence on theory.) Etc. etc. etc. In short, the thing that came to be called wokeness metamorphosed into a fully-fledged mass movement. "Defining" woke is a category error, because it became messy upon contact with the real world. It's like trying to define a person.
The above paragraph is meant to characterize "classical wokism", b. ca. 2012, d. 2024. (To be honest, I'm not sure how well it describes its heirs in 2025 since it's so much less visible now (unless you have an account on Bluesky, which I don't).) As time goes on, the ideas and organizational forms of the left will continue to change in ways that defy easy definition.
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