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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.
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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