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I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside) about communism.
When I think how Marxism was gladly embraced by èlites in the West, and, after the fall of the URSS, the more anglocentric progressive one that took his side, it makes me think about the type of people that embrace it.
As Zagrebbi argue here https://salafisommelier.substack.com/p/a-robin-hanson-perspective-on-the Marxism is really the Platonic Realm of wordcellery!
All arguments, apart from being factually false, are reduced not on "policy" or "government", but on words, and how to define words, how to use words in a different manner, how words can be used in different ways, how different ideologies are different because "words" says so. A typical argument goes like this: "Communism is good because, unlike Fascism or whatever else, has a good objective. The objective is good because Communism say so. Different types of Communism are born from different interpretation of Communism, who are not all good (choose here if we are talking about Stalin, Social Democracy, Left Liberalism, Anarchism, Maoism etc) because they did not adhere to the ideal definition of Communism, and everyone who does not produce a good result has secretly bad objectives or it was a Fascist all along"
Obviously I am paraphrasing an hypotetical argument of an hypotetical communist, so I am really fighting against a non-entity here. But I saw enough debates that I could crystallise it in few phrases, and understand that the marxist galaxy today has been reduced to discussions about hypoteticals and fandoms, as if it was Fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own. Gone are the immense volumes of marxist economy or revolutionary action, in autistic dissertation on good end evil. Or maybe not, and I do not have enough knowledge of historical marxist politics, maybe they were like this all along, but I refuse to believe that communists won for decades using this kind of reasoning.
It is not surprising why Wokism had an evolutionary advantage on post-URSS marxism. All of this autism is pretty ick, it works on Reddit but not on real life, because every normal person can smell with a bullshit detector that this lines are actively trying to scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach. Wokism is better as an ideology because it refuses, partially, to play words. Patriarchy and Europeans are not evil because machiavellian people have tried to derail the progressive project, and our objective is to clean it arguing that, no, whoever did something bad was actively trying to sabotage the Real Meaning of Patriarchy. No, they are evil because of biology/social constructs and they deserve suffering. Autistic screeching and wordcelism do not play well with modern political coalition and the Schmittian Friend/Enemy distinction, and they also makes the women have the ick and the supporters smells like Redditors!
Do you have a concise definition for "wokism" that you can share?
To be clear why I'm asking, I know I can read through Marx to understand Marxism, and even more, through criticisms of his works and even political actions based on his ideas. But there is no equivalent for "woke". Without a solid set of works to reference, the invocation of "woke" becomes a catch-all strawman for de jour leftwing politics, similar to "chud", "bootlicking", etc. for de jour rightwing politics. Useful for flaming; completely useless for having dialogues grounded in reason.
Sorry this is low-effort, but the fact that woke has become a catch-all is a bit of a symptom of the style of discourse it describes. See Freddie de Boer on this effect. You're asking a fair question though.
Freddie's post sounds like ravings of exhaustion from having to fight a broad and deep set of ideological concepts that all have shared roots in 20th century social liberalism (feminism, civil rights, etc.), and his solution is to pigeonhole all those ideological concepts into a single overarching theory that can be attacked directly without having to get into the weeds and nuances of any individual ideology. But also, he says that it's not his responsibility to perform this abstraction, but that all of these separate ideologies must bring themselves under a single banner? For his convenience?
I don't see the appeal of his writing, either. This is the only snippet I've read, but I've stumbled across his name.
Edit: I've read more of his writing. This post seems to be written in an intentionally exasperated voice.
Who said it had to be a single theory? Freddie gave an example of teachers in California who want to make school anti-racist. What do we call that group? If you say CRT they will say it's an obscure legal theory not taught in high school, even when you read the supporting material and they straight-out say they are making policy decisions inspired by CRT.
There are several people out there who say there are not enough [insert non-white-male group here] in [industry, fictional story or type of art, etc.] and flat-out state that they are selecting for or wanting to select for said group. What is this group or idea called? Well it's certainly not "woke" because that word means nothing (yet somehow they know the meaning enough to parody it).
Whether all of these people have ever-so slightly different beliefs is irrelevant. The terms "Democrat" and "Republican" manage to lump enough concepts together to be useful as terms even if almost everyone in the set will disagree with at least one of the ideas/policies in the set.
Freddie is saying that it doesn't matter if they deny that they have a banner. If you're all standing really close to each other doing very similar things, you will be treated as a group even if you didn't come as a group. The exasperation is people are tired of the game where if you critique the idea they say, "What idea? I'm not suggesting anything other than being a decent person and teaching history!"
Freddie's title:
I guess maybe I'm being uncharitable by interpreting this as "Please associate with each other as a cohesive, organized political movement so I can attack the principles of your group rather than deal with the 17-headed hydra that is contemporary social liberalism". Maybe I shouldn't have use the term "single theory".
You and Freddie both are painting contemporary social liberalism as a monolith, with the implication that it's a coordinated effort with offices and political committees. Maybe there's a reason that it's so hard to wrangle these disparate movements together (and why they seem to cannibalize through debates on intersectionality):
This, but unironically.
Cherry on top:
I've actually seen the pendulum swing way harder in the past couple of years, with many more complaints of too many non-white male characters. It seems to be the consultants, focus groups, and corporate America that are guiding these decisions - not some National Wokism political action committee.
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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If we must say that there's 17 heads and name each of them, that's at least in the direction of what Freddie and I are saying. The complaint is that first they deny that there's anything there, then that it's a hydra, then that the hydra is good. And of course once the conversation is over they will return to acting like the people who cried hydra are responding to literally nothing. If people see sky blue and cyan and aquamarine together, they're going to call it blue. Ain't nobody got time to go one-by-one with 100,000 ever-so-slight variations on a theme, and if you demand they must they will simply refuse. Republicans have been successful in painting the progressive left as obnoxious, and young men are swinging right despite having many left-wing views.
No, the issue is that you think these are requirements. Central coordination is not required; the only thing that's required is reasonably definable goal that a noteworthy amount of people would agree with and are or would cooperate towards. Many movements don't have leaders, or if they do most of their own members probably couldn't identify them. Was GamerGate a movement? Tea Party? 99%ers? BLM? Are all of those words useless and should be dispensed with?
Well yes, the artists (generally left leaning) started doing it, and people noticed. Said artists will happily admit in a friendly environment that it was a conscious decision to increase representation - the idea that people empathize more with their in-group and this is a good thing (except for white men).
In other words, college-educated people.
I mean, all of these are deeply different examples of movements that can't really be compared, apples-to-apples:
The reason I bring those up is that I do judge those "movements" based on more than just "what they're about". The actual structure of the movement is just as important. That's why we care about grassroots movements more than ones bankrolled by PACs - we at least believe that the former represents the will of the electorate, where as the latter is just astroturfing.
Is the implication here that anyone with a college education is woke? I have a laundry list of counterexamples... My point is that profit-driven individuals and organizations probably overcalibrated to what they thought would sell to their target demographics, rather than some conspiratorial effort to inject woke ideology into our economy. I mean, the opposite probably happened in the 20th century where a certain concept of masculinity was sold to the masses, and we ended up with a John Wayne generation despite all evidence pointing to John Wayne being a pretty poor role model no matter your political tendencies.
GamerGate: Leaderless movement where some Republican strategist came along after it started and made some remarks suggesting he wanted to capitalize on it for political gain, which the left ran with to claim him as a mastermind of a Twitter mob. Side note: I like to compare this to claiming Putin controlled BLM because he supposedly had some trolls online try to fan it to increase fragmentation in America.
Tea Party: Fair that I don't remember how much central planning, but to my recollection there was no leader, more comparable to current Trump protests where they say they're protesting on X date, please come.
BLM: My point in this was that said group that co-opted it was irrelevant to it being a movement.
The will of the electorate is what I'm talking about. If you can define a "will" and a group that possesses that will, you have a group that you can discuss. Leaders are irrelevant for this purpose. BLM is a group with demands, and I can support or rebut its ideas because they are definable enough to discuss. If BLM came along and said, "We're not a group because we came here independently and we're not trying to do anything (this claim is only made when trying to dodge criticism)" then people are free to call bullshit. If they don't want to be named that doesn't stop anyone from coming up with a name for them. If that name sticks then the lesson here is to get better at PR rather than whining that you should be uniquely immune to needing PR. Control the message or you will be controlled by it.
No, the implication is that it's disproportionate. The consultants and the marketers believed that their view was correct (primarily morally and secondarily financially, and the former biases to believe the latter) and BLM in particular gave them the opportunity to sell it to their bosses as profitable. Again, conspiracy and coordination are not required, merely enough people doing a similar thing at a similar time.
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