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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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While one can easily situate wokeness in a lineage with historic leftist/progressive movements, I think nineties political correctness (with its fixation on identity politics organised around race, sex and sexuality) has so much overlap with the wokeness of 2010s that it's fair to consider it a recurrence of the exact same ideology rather than an offshoot.

Yeah, but I'm saying the 90's were themselves a recurrence. For example, this:

Instead, the task for socialist feminists is to develop a cultural marxism that can adequately explain the intricate interactions of the oppressions of race, class, and sex; a cultural marxism that helps give a clearer articulation of our various voices: feminist, black, chicano, Native American, Asian, male, female, gay, lesbian, heterosexual; a cultural marxism which understands human needs-family, ritual, religion, sex, fun, insanity, pain, fear and so on.

Was written in the 80's, and the obsession with identity seems to already have been in place, and the author was not the one who came up with the idea either.

In the other comment you put forward a hypothetical of Nazism being defeated, but not condemned in the same way we do it now. I think one of the effects of that would be what we're seeing here - the ideas periodically resurfacing under a new coat of paint, and the old iterations being forgotten.

That's a fair point. Which leads me to wonder – what's the absolute earliest ideological movement which could be characterised as "woke" in a way people in the 2010s would recognise as such?

The easy mode answer is for wokes to list off Martin Luther King, the abolition of slavery, Mary Wollstonecraft etc. I'm looking for the hard mode answer.

Given the mix of Constitutionalism and Christian Dominionism that motivated both MLK and John Brown I feel like both of their movements read more as "far-right" than "proto-woke".

To invoke God while claiming that people ought to be judged by the content of their character rather than racial or class traits is to explicitly reject intersectionalism and pretty much everything the modern secular left stands for.

Years ago I read an article arguing that the "content of their character" thing, while a memorable turn of phrase, was not really representative of MLK's true beliefs and he did believe that, in the absence of racial discrimination, the ethnic composition of an organisation would be reflective of its host country. Therefore, we ultimately have MLK to thank for affirmative action and DEI. In that sense he was certainly proto-woke, far more so than Lincoln.

And who was that article written by?

I need to dig it out. This definitely isn't the article I was thinking of, but it includes the following quote from King:

... whenever the issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner.

From the passage above I infer that King believed some kind of preferential hiring (i.e. affirmative action) was necessary until achievement gaps had been closed.

An early example of an insufferable SJW twat wielding real power was Danish physician, philosopher and regent Johann Friedrich Struensee (1737–1772).

The defining feature of woke is the Omnicause, so third wave feminism is the obvious thing to point to.

Right, there’s black supremacists who believe in woke narratives about race, not woke because of their views of women/palestine/the concept of gender. Theres TERFs, actual feminists, not woke because of their beliefs about sex/gender and because they don’t care about Palestine or race. Etc, etc.

07mk upthread mentionned the French Revolution as something people sometimes mistakenly compare to woke, but I think there's definitely significant parallels; a liberation movement (so a "noble" cause, har har har) that devolved into purity spirals and witch hunts. You have the same obsession with redefining the language to erase the traces of the past. I, of course, don't need to be told, I'm just a decent human being who celebrates "holidays" in early Nivôse.

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