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Beautiful rhetoric. Still: no, «wokeness» is substantially different from «Marxism», The Thing you oppose and which had been partially incarnated in their shapes predates both, and it is far from obvious that you will accomplish anything of worth with this line of argument.
You are approaching this instrumentally, starting from your own intents and purposes rather than essences of things. Wokes are «similar people», they are posing danger to your values that's of a nature similar to the Marxist menace, and their own chosen labels are not nearly as toxic as «Marxism» or «Communism», so you do what they do with Fascism and every right-wing movement and idea they want to see dead, spreading the reputation-killing poison wide – and thin. It may work to an extent, with audiences already receptive to overarching critique of left-wing ideologies; but really this is a tactic for the side that has the higher ground and can dictate terms of engagement.
Leftism is vast; one doesn't have to be a «doctrinaire Marxist» to appreciate this fact. It's more of an intellectual ecosystem than a doctrine, or an entire class, like «Mammalia» (I wonder: if reptiles had class consciousness, would they assume that foxes and hares are on the same side?) and most elements of the ecosystem are more concerned with internecine sectarian conflicts than with an organized front against aliens. Leftists are aware of having even more irreconcilable external enemies, of course, and constantly seek to form a united front, with varying success. Sometimes, the combination of those drives causes the entire system to evolve and reinvent itself. When they deprioritize Marxism, it is natural to suspect this to be a tactically expedient, insincere rebranding. But when your allies scream that Marxism is dead and this new Thing is not it – you'd do well to check if you aren't tilting at windmills, while the giant, having shed its skin, is safely plundering the town behind your back.
The Thing has always had two morphs – the more populist and the more esoteric, Wycliffe's brand of proto-socialism and Cathars, Conjuration des Égaux and mainline Jacobinism. In the last century Marxism, too, had explicitly diverged into two very distinct schools, loosely speaking, Lenininst (Bolshevik, Stalinist, Maoist, whatever) and Trotskyist (the real structure is far more complex, with the Anarchist tradition, Western clubs etc. participating in the horizontal meme transfer). The former has seized much of the globe (and a sliver of its wealth) though the combination of brutally enforced party discipline centered around personalist leadership, severe political-military fusion, appeal to the lower classes and unlimited opportunism. Its last significant bastion is the People's Republic of China. The latter has spread, rhyzome-like, through the intellectual classes of the developed world. They are so different as to make the common moniker of Marxism inapt; and all evidence one needs to see this is the fact that America with its violent immune reaction to Communism proved to be a fertile soil for rapidly speciating Ivory Tower doctrinaires. Wokeness is a product of their unholy aggregation on the basis of American identity politics and race issues; and while obnoxious, it's an inherently crumbly substance – little in common with the steel edifice of Bolshevism that proved to be the apex predator in the competitive world of 20th century totalitarian systems.
Crucially, though, I think you are wrong about the potential of wokeness. It is a diminished strain, not in some moral sense but in the sense of its motive power. It promises no salvation and doesn't have alluring intellectual content. It's a slightly more respectable elaboration of anarkiddies: shock troops and unwitting expendables of The Thing. Like an inactivated vaccine, it is unlikely to kill the host by itself, and indeed may inoculate the body politic instead. It's a historical tangent, a red herring.
The problem with attacking Wokeness as Marxism is that not only is Marxism dead in the West, but Wokeness may be discarded just as well, and the Thing, ever protean, will again reform behind your back, even appropriating convenient parts of your rhetoric and sounds of your voice.
This is why I think more people should read Shafarevich's Socialist Phenomenon and learn to see The Thing as such.
In a more conspiratorial/whimsical mood, 2 years ago [revisited]:
One day I should translate the whole piece, and do it well.
I think that Wokeism and Marxism are both branches of Progressivism, which is the ideology of the Enlightenment. I maintain that as long as Progressives are still explicitly basing their worldview on Marx, it's silly to pretend that they're not doing so. Whether pointing this out will accomplish anything... well, let's see, shall we? If Wokes insist on loudly associating themselves with one of the worst ideologies the world has ever seen, why not hammer them for it?
Am I?
The Enlightenment: "Through reason, we know how to solve all our problems. Therefore, unsolved or imperfectly-solved problems are the fault of specific people with names and addresses."
Marxism: additional detail about who the specific bad people are, how to identify them, organizational tactics for overthrowing them.
Wokeism: As Marx, with some of the specific detail about classes swapped around.
...For now, and less every day, I think. But that leads into disagreements in how the two of us assess the current situation and the likely trajectory of the future. If I've understood you correctly, you think an anglo Globohomo singleton is the likely outcome, while I think the West abruptly deconstructing itself is more likely. Much of that disagreement comes down to questions of the sources and nature of social fragility that are probably not appropriate here. "Cheer up, Judgement Day is closer than you think," to put it flippantly.
To be clear, I don't think that, say, their abandonment of the Proletariat is a tactical, temporary move. They really have ditched large sections of Marxist theory for good. What they haven't ditched are the parts that reliably produce huge mountains of skulls in the specific way Marxism does: year-zero revolution, the tyranny of "reason", its inevitable breeding of corruption and finally the desperate, inevitable search for "wreckers".
This is good advice, but are these specific people even my allies? The "Right" has no shortage of thralls to the Enlightenment, adherents to Reaganism, tax hawks, those deeply concerned about the deficit or the Dow-Jones to the exclusion of all else, to gesture at one loose axis. The Right likewise is an ecosystem, and one of the current challenges is what one's values and priorities should be, and how one organizes an effective coalition around them. What's the Giant, and what's the city? What must be fought, and what can be sacrificed? The economic model is the primary difference between Marxism and Wokism, and economics is, to me, one of the least interesting and important issues in play.
...How much of this difference is simply down to the nature of a pre-revolutionary mass? Is this terribly different from what Bolshevism's precursors looked like, in the years well before open warfare forged the movement into what it became? You've posted excerpts talking about how the early anarchic murderers were greeted with open, sympathetic arms by the Russian elites at the time, how their "critique" of Russian society was swallowed whole by the educated and the thoughtful. Suppose some variance in actual leadership; had the Russian government embraced the moderate end of the revolutionaries and zealously attempted to reshape society according to their dictates, how might things have gone?
If Trotsky had purged Stalin, do you think things would have gone significantly differently?
People used to think swarming locusts were a different species from normal grasshoppers. Then we discovered that they're the same critter, and environmental conditions trigger a complete behavioral and even physical transformation.
If I'm understanding your taxonomy correctly, western intellectuals like, say, Chomsky would be examples of what you label the "Troskyist" branch. Only, Chomsky and his set did in fact carry water for multiple contemporaneous Leninist implementations, Cambodia and Vietnam among them, well past the point where such support was a source of acute embarrassment. This same class was backing Chavez in Venezuela as recently as the late 2000s. It seems that we've got a group that's willing to shoot people in their own country, and a group that's willing to support shooting people in a different country until it looks so obviously bad that it starts threatening their good name in their own country, where such shooting is obviously impractical. It's not obvious to me that these people are actually different in any important way. And sure, such people are very unlikely to actually implement the shooting in their own country, or to long survive such shooting. But they observably maintain cordial relations with what appear to me to be the actual proto-lenins and -stalins. Who's to say they aren't simply the Bukharins of a later age?
...So you think that Wokeism is a small tentacle of the Thing, and I think it's something more approaching a head or an arm. How much of this disagreement is over definitions? BLM is pretty obviously spent as a movement, but I think we'd agree that the Thing is more dominant than it was a few years ago, despite BLM's precipitous decline. So what is the core of the Thing, in your view? What is its essential form and nature, from which the morphs spring? Mine is the description of the Enlightenment delivered above. I think Enlightenment ideology requires a social gradient to operate, with class conflict being its method of operation. Do you see that description as sheddable skin?
I hold that we cannot solve all our problems, that some misfortunes must be accepted, even embraced. I do not think this is a voice that the Thing can productively mimic, not as a tradeoff made with other peoples' lives, but as a tradeoff made in my own life. ...Perhaps this description is not sufficient, but I remain confident that for those that understand it, differences are evident almost immediately.
Soon, one hopes.
Wokism, Marxism, and Progressivism are all collectivist ideologies. The Enlightenment was very much individualist in contrast. Perhaps if Progressivism’s collectivism were replaced with individualism, we might have something resembling Enlightenment. But without this substitution, I reject the descendent relation.
The French Revolution seems pretty collectivist, and it, its progenitors and descendents alike all seem to have considered themselves staunch disciples of the Enlightenment. Nor were American Enlightenment titans like Jefferson able to reliably identify heresy in advance. So on what basis do you claim individualism as the distinguishing mark of the Enlightenment tradition?
I often come across people willing to explain why, by their personal standards, this or that ideology is excluded from their understanding of the Enlightenment. What I'm looking at is an explanation that would satisfy Progressives themselves. My whole argument is that people regularly arrive at Progressive ideology through engagement with Enlightenment ideals. I'll readily agree that not all people do, but Progressivism itself certainly seems to have arisen in this way, as Progressives themselves will tell you.
Compared to what? Where's the individual under Louis XVI? He has no vote, no gun, no power. Universal suffrage is the most individualist concept there is.
And people arrived at enlightenment ideology through engagement with christian ideals. You attempt to clear a high bar before claiming that wokism and marxism are related, then you revert to the thinnest, most circumstancial and superficial similarities for also condemning the Enlightenment. By this extremely loose standard, every ideology, even, presumably, yours, can be tarred.
The Enlightenment does believe that societies can be improved, true, and that the sky is blue. There end the similarities with Marxism/Wokism. It does not view every interaction through the oppressed/oppressor lens, nor require the upending of society, nor defend genocide.
Compared to the ancien régime. It seems obvious to me that a tyranny actively attempting to root out and destroy anything not identical to itself is more collectivist than a sclerotic monarchy.
That was indeed the theory, was it not? But what was the result? Did the "individual" have vote, gun, power under the Reign of Terror, or did those accrue to the Committee of Public Safety and its thugs? Did he have them under Napoleon? Likewise, I'm given to understand that the USSR had "universal suffrage".
This is the distinction between sequence and descent, though. The Enlightenment was explicitly a departure from the Christian tradition. Most of its branches outright repudiated Christianity, and explicitly embraced atheism, the supremacy and sufficiency of human reason, and the overthrow of tradition and superstition.
The Enlightenment attempted to supplant Christianity, in the same way Christianity supplanted Paganism. That it has not entirely succeeded is, in my view, entirely down to the disastrous results it delivers with monotonous regularity. Those results were held at bay in the anglosphere, where the local forms of Christianity resisted effectively for a century or two longer than elsewhere, but now that it's reaching its full flower even in the anglosphere, its results begin to take hold here as well.
Belief in the supremacy of human reason and the infinite perfectibility of man are not thin, circumstantial, or superficial similarities. They're two of the three ingredients for the best-known recipe for giant piles of skulls, and they're two of the core tenants of Enlightenment ideology. The final ingredient is class warfare, which appears to spontaneously arise from these two unless it is actively prevented.
I rather doubt it. I think the history of Christian societies stacks up quite favorably to anything the Enlightenment has produced.
The Enlightenment holds that Human reason can solve all our problems. The corollary which pops up over and over again is that if problems aren't getting solved, it must be someone's fault, since our reason is infallible. This does in fact lead to the oppressed/oppressor lens, the upending of society and genocide.
I get that moderates, liberals and old-fashioned conservatives have a great deal of reflexive affection for the Enlightenment. I get that it's a core part of our secular religion. I still maintain that the Progressives have a strong claim to be its true heirs, and that in any case its predictions have been falsified. Where we are is where we were always going to be, because this is where the Enlightenment leads.
I don't see the connection with individualism/collectivism. You appear to classify those regimes on their boringness.
He did get it. And well, one of the corollaries of his newfound powers early on was that his political career might end with his head in a basket. With great power comes great responsibility.
Napoleon was popular for a long time, even in neighbouring countries. He was more of a presidential figure, ruling with the consent of the people.
But I'm not here to judge the common man's taste for war and occasionally chopping off heads, just pointing out that he was far more powerful than he had been.
Charitably considered, those beliefs are trivially true. Why do we even bother discussing anything if faith is supreme? Do you believe man has achieved a state of imperfectibility?
I disagree, on the weight of evidence of improving indicators a la Better angels of our nature. You always write these blanket reactionary condemnations, but what's your model christian society ? Theodosian Rome, pre-civil war England, mid 19th century papal state?
Do you see the difference between the two accusations ? Marxism/wokism share the same talking points. Then when you get to the enlightenment, you inject your own reasoning and say it somehow leads to those talking points. "In fact", the latter is a far more tenuous connection, and I, enlightenment acolyte, reject your conclusions.
Prior to the Revolution, France recognized three estates. Post revolution, it recognized one, The People, The Public, and was ruled by dictators wielding power in the public's name. When a "committee of public safety" dictates the correct way to for all citizens to think and act, and begins jailing or executing anyone who steps out of line, is this not collectivism, in the "opposite of individualism" sense?
Did he get it in the Soviet Union as well? If not, how was the Soviet Revolution materially different from the French Revolution? It seems obvious that by your argument, the average Russian was more powerful under the USSR, and quite possibly richer as well. Is this the claim?
How? Would you mind elaborating, particularly on what you see as a charitable interpretation of the Enlightenment's claims would be?
Was the French revolution individualist or collectivist? As the old Soviet joke says: "it depends on who you are".
For example, if you were worker, you had to be strict individualist, you had to stand proudly alone, negotiating with your fellow individual (who just happened to own factory, mine or estate while you were penniless loser) as one equal citizen with another.
Or else.
As different as sun and moon.
If we are talking about material interests, Russian revolution was about collectivization of land, factories and all means of production.
French revolution was about distribution of means of production (mostly land at the time) to trustworthy private owners.
If you want to compare it to something from modern time, it was more like post-1991 great capitalist revolution (with more colorful pageantry).
(translation courtesy to Google, so you do not have click the button yourself)
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That utopia can be achieved, on earth, by human hands.
If this is the end state, immanentizing the eschaton, etc. Nothing is off the table. Most disagreements seem to be on the method.
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