Thursday, April 20, 2023

Hazony and Gottfried on wokeism and Marxism

Right-wingers often characterize wokeism as a kind of Marxism, and left-wingers routinely dismiss the characterization as a cheap smear that reflects ignorance of Marxist theory.  Who is right?  In his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony argues that there is indeed a significant link between wokeism and Marxism.  Paul Gottfried responds at Chronicles, arguing that the similarities between the two have been overstated.  Let’s take a look at their arguments.

It is important to emphasize at the outset that the question isn’t whether there are significant differences between wokeism on the one hand, and the ideas of Marx himself and the key Marxist thinkers who came after him on the other.  No one denies that there are.  The question is rather whether wokeism is best thought of as a species of Marxism, or at least whether the similarities are significant enough that the comparison with Marxism illuminates rather than obfuscates.

Here it is crucial to understand the relationship of both movements to liberalism.  The broad liberal tradition from Locke to Mill to Rawls is individualist, emphasizing as it does the rights and liberties of individuals, their basic equality, and their consent to being governed as a precondition of government’s legitimacy.  Hazony notes that the Marxist critique of liberalism emphasizes the inadequacy of this individualism to make sense of real political life.  For Marxism, liberalism is blind to human beings’ tendency to form social classes, and to the inherent tendency of one class to oppress another and to utilize the state for this purpose.

Wokeism, Hazony points out, takes over this central Marxist theme and simply replaces economic status with race, sex, sexual orientation, and the like as the keys to demarcating oppressed and oppressing classes.  Where the traditional Marxist focuses on the conflict between capitalists and the proletariat, the wokester speaks instead of “white supremacy” versus people of color, “patriarchy” versus women, “heteronormativity” versus LGBTQ, and so on.  But the emphasis on group identity rather than individualism carries over from Marxism and marks a break with liberalism.  Furthermore, Hazony points out, wokeism’s disdain for norms of rational discourse and inclination to cancel and censor opponents rather than engage their arguments differs from the liberal tradition’s idealization of free debate.

Gottfried acknowledges that all of this is true enough as far as it goes.  He also acknowledges that there is in the history of Marxism a precedent for wokeism’s turn to obsessing over race and sex rather than economic class – namely the “Critical Theory” of the Frankfurt School, as represented especially by the work of Herbert Marcuse.  All the same, he judges that Hazony and others overstate the connection between wokeism and Marxism, and fail to appreciate wokeism’s connection to liberalism.

For one thing, in the twentieth century, liberalism began to soften its individualism, with universal suffrage and the welfare state marking a turn in a strongly egalitarian direction.  In recent decades, and before wokeness took center stage, mainstream liberals had also already themselves become more intolerant of dissent and unwilling rationally to engage the arguments of their critics.  Though many liberals now complain of woke intolerance, the wokesters simply walked through a door that liberals had themselves opened.

For another thing, Marxists of a more old-fashioned stripe had no truck with the direction taken by the Frankfurt School, much less the obsessions of the wokesters.  Indeed, they could be as censorious of this direction as any social conservative.  Moreover, during the Cold War, communist countries were often as conservative on matters of sex and family as Western society, or indeed even more so.  Nor were communist societies prone, as wokeism is, to destroying loyalty to country or to a general nihilism.  Marxism also put a premium on science and rationality, at least in theory.

Then there is the fact that wokeism has allied itself to capitalism in a way Marxism could not.  Capitalists and corporations have not simply embraced wokeism out of fear but, Gottfried argues, have found it in their interests to embrace it.  For it is the poor and the working class rather than the rich who suffer from the idiocies of woke public policy, and corporations can absorb the costs of such policies whereas their smaller competitors are destroyed by them. 

Finally, while the narrative of oppressor and oppressed is indeed a feature of Marxism, it is also, Gottfried points out, a feature of the rhetoric of fascism and Nazism.  And in all three cases, he claims, what we have is a modern and secularized variation on the ancient biblical distinction between the righteous and those who persecute them.  So, that a narrative of oppression is central to wokeism does not suffice to make it in any interesting way Marxist, any more than these other views are Marxist.

Hence, Gottfried’s view is that in order to understand wokeism, it is more illuminating to study its origins in the breakdown of liberalism than to look for parallels with Marxism.

What should we think of all this?  I am myself inclined to what might be a middle ground position between Hazony and Gottfried, though perhaps the differences between us are more matters of semantics and emphasis than anything deeper than that.  On the one hand, when writing on these matters myself I have not characterized wokeism as a species of Marxism, but rather have merely noted that there are Marxist influences on wokeism and parallels between the views.  On the other hand, while Gottfried makes some important points, I think that the influences and parallels are more important and illuminating than he seems to allow.  I think he also overstates the differences.

For example, Gottfried contrasts Marxism’s notional commitment to science and reason with the irrationalism of wokeism.  But on the one hand, wokesters in general do not explicitly reject science and reason any more than old-fashioned Marxism did.  On the contrary, they typically claim that science supports their views (about gender, for example).  To be sure, these claims are bogus and the “science” pure ideology tarted up in pseudoscientific drag.  But the same thing was true of Marxist claims to scientific respectability.  (Lysenkoism, anyone?)

Moreover, though the Marxist theory of ideology was claimed to be part of a scientific account of social institutions, in practice its “hermeneutics of suspicion” tends to subvert rather than facilitate rational discourse.  Criticisms of Marxism get dismissed a priori as mere smokescreens for the vested interests of capitalists, just as criticisms of wokeism get dismissed a priori as mere smokescreens for racism, patriarchy, homophobia, etc.  Then there are the parallels many have noted between the mass hysteria of wokeism (manifested in Twitter mobs, cancel culture, and the riots of 2020) and Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

To be sure, the postmodernist influences on wokeism are a point in favor of Gottfried’s view that there is an important difference at least in theory between traditional Marxism and wokeism in their attitudes toward reason and science.  But the record of actual Marxist and woke practice (which Gottfried himself appeals to in making his case) supports the judgment that they are less far apart on this score than Gottfried supposes.

The same thing is true where the other differences Gottfried describes are concerned.  Yes, during the Cold War, communist countries were far more socially conservative than any wokester could tolerate.  But that was in spite of Marxist theory, not because of it.  Engels, after all, famously attacked the traditional family and the bourgeois moral order.  And Marxist theory emphasized international worker solidarity over national loyalties, even if this is not how things worked out in practice.  Even the alliance between corporations and wokeism finds a parallel in actual Marxist practice, in the Chinese Communist Party’s adoption of capitalist means to socialist ends. 

Then there is the fact that woke theorists explicitly acknowledge the Marxist tradition as among the influences on them.  For example, Critical Race Theorists acknowledge such influence, especially that of Antonio Gramsci (even if there are, of course, also differences with Marxism).  And Gottfried himself acknowledges the parallels between wokeism and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School.

These points do not entail that wokeism is a child of Marxism, exactly, but that does not mean it is not a relation of some other sort – a brother or a cousin, say.  And noting family relations of those kinds can be illuminating too.  Eric Voegelin famously argued that Marxism, National Socialism, and other modern political ideologies are best understood as variations on Gnosticism.  I have argued elsewhere that wokeness, too, is best understood as a kind of Gnosticism.  And I have also argued that the parallels between woke ideas about race and National Socialism are no less striking or disturbing than their parallels with Marxism.  That does not mean that wokeism just is a kind of National Socialism, any more than it just is a kind of Marxism.  It is its own thing, not quite the same as either of those noxious worldviews.  But it is no less irrational, and potentially just as dangerous.

Further reading:

How to define “wokeness”

Countering disinformation about Critical Race Theory

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors

Woke Ideology Is a Psychological Disorder

Socialism versus the Family

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx

All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory

57 comments:

  1. @ Ed Feser,

    Yes they are all forms of gnosticism, ultimately, irrational and dangerous. The fecundity of these various ideologies is a direct consequence of their irrationality. It's easy to come up with new fighting ideas if they don't have to make any sense.

    Tom Cohoe

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  2. I think in many ways one could argue that, if Marxism is dialectical materialism, much of what gets called wokeism is a form of 'dialectical idealism'. It's definitely not a form of Marxism itself, because in general it seems to have a mind-boggling disregard of infrastructure, economic, organizational, or otherwise, which it replaces with a kind of economy of symbolisms. But you can also translate a genealogical connection between the two by way of standpoint theory -- Marx to Beauvoir to feminist standpoint theory, which then diversifies into various branches and modifications, and one can find at least many of the ideas so developed in common woke arguments, although often in a crudely simplified form.

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    1. If we regard Marxism and wokeism as religions—and that case can certainly be made—then I'd say that wokeism is a sect of Marxism, with the kinds of doctrinal shifts one sees in such splits.

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    2. "It's definitely not a form of Marxism itself, because in general it seems to have a mind-boggling disregard of infrastructure, economic, organizational, or otherwise, which it replaces with a kind of economy of symbolisms."

      Whether one's mind is boggled or not by certain acts of disregard is a function of one's own economy of idea(l)s as it relates to that proposed in those perhaps mind-boggling acts. My sense is that Marxist 'dialectical materialism' is just as mind-boggling in its disregard for certain kinds of infrastructure, economic, organizational, human, spiritual, etc., which it too replaces, no less than wokeism, with a kind of economy of symbolisms, with the same kind of divorce (lack of dialectical exchange and rational integration) between modes of symbolisms ('materialistic' and 'idealistic') as one is apt to find in Marxism and liberalism. IOW, perhaps Marxism is just as in thrall to a lavish construction of symbolisms ('materialistic' ones), just as unconstrained by empirical reality checks (including the great traditions of human wisdom), as wokeism. And ironically both are more unconstrained by reality than 'dialectical idealism,' insofar as, fundamentally, the ontological and dialectical primacy of idea over matter (posited by idealism) is essentially correct.

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  3. "Hence, Gottfried’s view is that in order to understand wokeism, it is more illuminating to study its origins in the breakdown of liberalism than to look for parallels with Marxism."

    This is correct, and you are committed to liberalism my friend.

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  4. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"

    "Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. "

    Equity is Marxism, or perhaps Marxism is Equity.

    But is it bad, or good, or both depending on circumstances?

    Is altruism good or bad?

    Maybe personal altruism is a virtue, but government enforced altruism is evil? But if all government enforced altruism is evil the ER would be free to turn away the indigent, as all our government social safety nets would have to be eliminated.

    Irrespective of value judgements regarding Marxism, Equity is equivalent to the above Marxist ideal.

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    1. @ All,

      sd posts quite a mixture of undefined terms, vaguely defined terms, and unwarranted implications disguised as questions, resulting in a mixed up statement about "government social safety nets". The only clear thing is his nod to the enforced leveling ideology defined, not by Marx, but by regimes that defined Marxism by adopting it as their official constitutional law, all of them murderous of their own pacific citizens on a vast scale.

      "Wrongthink" in such leveling regimes leads to government murder of "wrongthinkers". In sd's case religion and belief in God are wrongthink, so his post about equity and fairness and the rest of his false BS cannot in any way be a guide to truth.

      Unfortunately, as part of what he has expressed as an unfulfilled desire is the elimination of religion, so ...

      BEWARE

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

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  5. When you compare woke with the ideology that woke has replaced (or is replacing), then the differences are - in essence - Marxist. What they are replacing I would call the ‘liberal consensus’, but in the US you use the term ‘liberal’ in a very different way. However I don’t know what Americans call the general agreement that people should, for example, have equal opportunities in society irrelevant of their inherited characteristics such as race, sex etc, so I will just use ‘liberal’!

    When you contrast them in this way, the ‘liberal’ ideal is perhaps best summed up by Martin Luther King’s dream. More than just the “contents of his character”, there is an explicitly assumed meritocracy: your skills, knowledge, effort and general competence determine how successful you are. In addition, society provides a minimum safety net for those at the other end of these ‘scales’. The vision is one that is colourblind, gender-blind etc; opportunity is open to all, and all divisions or disadvantage by inherited characteristics are explicitly rejected in law.

    The big difference with woke ideologies is that they don’t believe that this ‘liberal’ ideology is achieving it’s stated aim fast enough (which is perhaps a fair point in some parts). The key assumption however is that it’s not enough to remove the prejudices and advantages that some groups had in the past, you need to destroy all the effects of past privilege. It’s not enough to give two kids with different sexes or different skin colour the same opportunity, you need to sacrifice something of the opportunities of one in order to redress the history. Those whose groups had historic benefits must be punished and brought down. Which is of course classic Marxism.

    Because modern society has dodgy nominalist assumptions, it doesn’t really understand why ideologies like these will always cause harm and ultimately fail. We have become completely blind to the reality of telos. The telos of the old ‘liberal’ ideal is an essentially Christian one, a vision of all people having equal dignity before God. It’s a positive vision of equality. The telos of the new woke ideologies, like Marxism, is of destruction. The explicit focus - the vision - is about bringing one or more groups down. It’s not about individuals, it’s a collectivist perspective of groups (again, a Marxist perspective). Of course the assumption is that when you bring these groups down and favour those groups who were disenfranchised, that it will ultimately balance out as an equal society. But this is a massive assumption based on nominalism and it’s children, such as utilitarianism. Time and again we see that the reality of a telos of destruction is a corrosion of the whole. But you don’t need to accept any arguments based on ideology or philosophy, you can just read some Orwell, who deftly points out the inherent bad thinking by analogy. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” was intended to highlight the way new hierarchies form under Marxist-like ideologies, but of course could easily be repurposed for the inherent absurdity of woke ideology.

    The ironic thing is that these ideologies come out of universities that were founded by the Church, and separated from the Church in order to follow “evidence based reason”, to be freed from the fetters of “faith”. However where is the evidence that these ideologies work? It’s all speculation, speculation based on ideologies like Marxism that have been shown to fail, and to corrode the evolved and innately protective structure of the societies they have hijacked. Essentially they are treating society as the petri dish for sociology experiments.

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    1. Very well said.

      "Those whose groups had historic benefits must be punished and brought down. Which is of course classic Marxism."

      You clearly captured the most sinister, dangerous and immoral aspect of these collectivist ideologies: sacrificing the rights of individual innocent persons for the alleged good of the group. It's rather astonishing that after the atrocities of the 20th century, we still have to confront such horrible socio-political views where the human person becomes a mean towards an end.

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  6. Wokeism is the conclusion of liberal premises, as Donoso Cortes pointed out about socialism in his Essay. It's a development of liberalism, not of marxism, the similarities with marxism being due to the fact that they are consequences of the same liberal "problematic".

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  7. In my internet-nobody opinion, Marxism proper has two main components: the first is Marx's critique of capital and labor, the second is Marx's proposed solution for a better economic system. (Technically, you might say that there is actually a third component, which is Marx's prediction of the inevitably of said "better" economic system, but since that part has been obviously falsified, most actual Marxists don't seem keen on insisting that believing in that prediction dogmatically is a necessary part of Marxism).

    When comparing ideologies under the woke umbrella to Marxism, it seems undeniable that they fit the first criteria. Gender theorists, after all, explicitly call what they're doing as a Marxist critique of gender. So to argue that they're not doing something at least adjacent to or derivative from Marxism seems just clearly intellectually dishonest.

    That being said, the second main part of Marxism doesn't seem to be what the woke crowd is doing or pushing for. It's not even clear to me that there is a proper analogue to gender or race when it comes to the Marxist position of the worker taking control of the means of production. We can say that a private company like Disney or Budweiser has "gone woke" but to say that a private company has "gone Marxist" seems just like a contradiction in terms. For a company to go Marxist, they'd basically have to completely shut down and turn their control over to the government.

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    1. But non-private entities certainly can "go Marxist" or "go woke", and have done so. Certainly many schools and universities have gone woke since 2000. After, one might suggest, having "gone Marxist" at least in large part, if not 100%, in the period leading up to about the year 2000. They definitely were teaching Marxism, but beyond that they were teaching revolution, teaching and pursuing the destruction of cultural norms, etc.

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  8. I've come to the conclusion it is highly Hegelian (which is a form of gnosticism). I think most of the post marxist stuff: neo marx, post moderns, and the like simply stress the Hegelian side over the pure Marxist side. Gottfried and others miss the point when they bring up Puritans or Rousseau, as they tend to be broadly in the same epsitemological school and lineage. John Dewey and other highly progressive turn of the century American thinkers were highly influenced by Hegel as well, which is obviously going to have a multiplier effect by the time postmoderns or marcuse start to pass on their ideas. These ideas should all very much be in the same camp just as much as Judaism, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, mainline Protestantism, and Islam could all be seen as Abrahamic and of the same lineage with a similar anthropology vs pagans, gnostics, or others.

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  9. WCB

    Wokeism is an empty buzzword to scare people from the right.

    Being woke as far as becoming aware of oppression, unfairness, et al long, long predate Marx. Some choice examples were the English Ranters, Diggers who rebelled at the oppresive England of nobles and overbearing CoE. John Lilburne established the concept all men had God given rights. We had fighting slavery, and rights of kings long before Marx.
    The French revolution was pretty woke. Fights for the end of Jim Crow a segregation did not need Marx.

    What we have here is an obvious case of "framing". Falsely claiming being woke is marxism, radical extreme leftism et al Well poisoning. This stuff has been pouring forth from media like Fox News for years.

    The T-shirt I need. "If you aren't,woke you are just a joke."

    WCB

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    1. Beautiful!

      First, a claim that "Wokeism" is merely "empty buzzword", and then lots of evidence that it has a rather clear meaning, and thus is not "empty".

      Also, Marxists obviously do claim that French revolution or Diggers are related to them, being some sort of "proto-Marxist". And they are unlikely to be content with "Fights for the end of Jim Crow a segregation did not need Marx.".

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  10. I suggest reading the Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce, especially his book of essays The Age of Secularization, to better understand what's happening today, and to see why both essays by Hazony and Gottfried look disjointed and suffer from extending the old ways of looking at liberalism and Marxism to today's very different capitalism and liberalism. A good introduction to Del Noce is the surprisingly objective page on Wikipedia. Probably like Soviet censors, they don't see him as a danger.

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    1. Yes, WCB and SturdustPsyche ("equity", hah) comment are a worthless potpourry of imprecisions, but many here are using the category "marxism" without a real understanding of it, of his currents, etc; and without the proper categories there cannot be any philosophical discussion of value. Del Noce gives an eccellent contribution to such an understanding, from both a philosophical and catholic point of view. But the best books on the subject are "il problema dell'ateismo" (The problem of atheism) and "il suicidio della rivoluzione" (The suicide of revolution), this last one essencial in understanding fairly and deeply Antonio Gramsci. I have no idea, though, whether those books were translated in english.

      Anyway i do know that in english there is another very useful book, Kolakowski's "Main currents of marxism".

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    2. Thank you, Alam, for giving us a "true understanding of Marxism."

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    3. Alam, The Problem of Atheism is in English, not the other one. My point wasn't about understanding Marxism per se, but how it dissolved, while two of its principles, atheism and relativism, were absorbed by the West, and how the constituencies of Western leftist parties changed since 1960, so they are now "socialists without workers" and spokesmen for the bourgeois oligarchies in power.

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    4. I understand, but i think that studying the phenomenon in his philosophical, political and historical terms is preliminary to understanding the various processes of almost dissolution and of transformation. And for this, i think, an adequate knowledge of marxist theories, categories and history is necessary. I find it necessary, at least. Besides, i do think that atheism and materialism were not simply "marxist trojan horses" absorbed by the west, but that they are the "natural" metaphysics and ideology of, well, capitalism as an unfettered system; and that various post- and neo-marxist thinkers, having dismissed the class struggle viewpoint, surely contributed to the actual form of that ideology but that they neither introduced it nor were alone in that contribution.

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    5. I think it would also be fruitful to actually read Herbert Marcuse and his opinions about the economy. critical theorist like him do in fact, talk about the economy at great lengths, and how it affects culture in the broader sense. Based off of some of the comments that Feser makes, it doesn’t really seem like he’s finished a page from Marcuse’s most notable work, One-Dimensional Man.

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    6. What happens here, i think, is that there are thinkers whose thinking is more complex of the influence of the same thinking. For example, while i think there is much to criticize in Marcuse thinking, there are also useful things (you can see this in the book MacIntyre dedicated to him; in spite of some of MacIntyre criticisms, in the long term, Marcuse was rights, or at least partially right, about various things, especially when he criticizes capitalism and wrong in many others, especially in his "constructive" side). So the thinking of Marcuse is, from a philosophical point of view, something with which having a confrontation could be useful, even while not agreeing with his premises or with the whole of his analysis, at least to answer differently to problems that he may have correctly identified, at least partially; another thing is the influence of his thinking on "woke" though and this must be studied and understood in partial separation from the first analysis; partial because if this influence can be traced there is something in his thought that lent itself to it; but in separation because his thought must be confronted also in his own terms, not only in relation with his partial influence on other thoughts.

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  11. To go with what I said before, to read Hume's critique of the Puritans one can see why one could see why someone might not wish to call it Marxist, but I think that misses the point. The Puritans Hume pointed to and Hegelain leftists are cut from the same cloth. Also important, once any of that came into contact with Marx/Hegel it took on hat distinct framework. Some of the more extreme theologies of the time even tended to have a tripate age Father Son, and Spirit: of which they represented the antinomial and liberating age of the Spirit (true Christianity hey may have called it). One could say that post Hegel the gnostic-like element became more sociological and material than overtly religious and Christian. Even there though, in the American context, where there are very few outright atheists, most modern "spiritualities" tend to have this kind of worldview. So yeah , I think calling it "Marxist" works well enough in so much as it refers to a broader perspective of an age old theology that had a fundamental transformation in the mid 19th century . To say it isn't Marxist may show that the critic is missing that point and showing a bit too narrow and literal a view.

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    1. I do not agree; even if i were to accept the "gnostic" reading, i think that precision in applying categories is warranted. Let's use "woke" as a field embracing political and ideological positions like Critical Race Theory and Queer theory. Hegel system was a glorification of reason, with a very complex system of logics, while "wokes" most certainly have not such elements to be euphemistic. Yes they may appeal to "science", as they are part of the progressive traditionafter all, but they can also speak of the oppressive etnocentrism of mathematics the second later; now, i think there is a connection with Hegel, but not vague, more precise, through Marcuse (this was treated by Alasdair MacIntyre in "Marcuse: an exposition") who re-read his philosophy in his "criticist" view. But there is no necessary connection from Hegel to "wokes"; for example a marxist philosopher that had a deep philosophical relationship with Hegel's though is Gyorgy Lukacs, whose thinking is deeply different, and i would say incompatible, with "woke". Calling "wokes" "hegelian" "marxist with the hegelian side ampliphied" is as an error, i would say; there are relationships but mediated and connected with many other roots, like Foucault "nietzscheanism" (that is precisly anti-hegelian) and must be studied in their passages and from a theoretical point of view, because as systems they can go from not indentical but compatible enough to substantially different.

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    1. So? The charge that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln does not sound different than the charge that you, InfiniteLite, shot Pope Francis. The difference is that one charge is true, and the other is not.

      Trust a nominalist to focus on the words and completely ignore the realities that they represent.

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    2. As much as I have read of ancient works in and around Socrates and Plato and their adversaries, I have not read that Socrates' adversaries claimed that Socrates was using anti-reason techniques like "shrieking" to "make the weaker argument appear the stronger". They certainly were claiming that Socrates was corrupting the youth, but it was not actually toward atheism, rather toward non-polytheism, which (to them) appeared to be impious, (but then, worship of any gods but their own approved ones would have appeared impious to them). It's not really much of a parallel, frankly.

      The idea that the woke are not intending to destroy the former culture contradicts their own claims. They say they want to bring down such social constructs as "assigned" gender, patriarchy, and racism, and since (they say) our culture has these embedded in it, then their own conclusion is that to that extent our culture must be eradicated.

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    4. I don't have any problem with the idea that sometimes you have to knock down what was there to build something worth having, sure. But let's keep clear that destroying what was there before in order to rebuild is, in fact destroying.

      Whether the already-existing culture should be destroyed in order to bring to birth a radically different culture is a different issue than whether destroying the already-existing culture is destructive. In my mind, you can justify many, many organic changes (i.e. alterations) to a culture far more easily than destroying it to put in place a radically different one. It would be extremely hard to justify destroying a culture that is not per se, intrinsically and gravely disordered, (rather than altering it to improve it). Certainly it is impossible to justify doing so when the proposed alternative is intrinsically gravely disordered.

      Then you have the additional question of whether those who prefer the culture now in place to the proposed alternative culture might have a right of retaining their own culture over having a new one imposed on them: those who advocate for relativism in cultural comparison would be hard-pressed to come up with a coherent basis for forcing a people to give up their existing culture and accept a new one.

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    5. In my mind, you can justify many, many organic changes (i.e. alterations) to a culture far more easily than destroying it to put in place a radically different one.

      In programming, the reverse is true: it's usually much easier to rebuild a software project or an operating system from scratch than it is to "maintain and mutate" so to speak.

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    6. “In programming, the reverse is true: it's usually much easier to rebuild a software project or an operating system from scratch than it is to "maintain and mutate" so to speak.”

      That’s assuming an equivalence between software and ideology. Even more so, it seems to be assuming an equivalence between logical gate operations and humans? If so that’s definitely a problem.

      In the Marxist ideology, once everyone is equal then everyone is supposed to be keen to give their best to work and contribute towards the common good. But over time a large proportion end up doing the minimum they can get away with.

      In the UK there was pretty high levels of general support for combatting climate change. Now we have “Just Stop Oil” protestors closing roads and causing disruption because our aggressive targets are not aggressive enough. The result of the more aggressive ideology appears to be a general movement against all actions to combat climate change. Time will tell whether this is a real and significant change of views, but most social theories that rely on what you could reasonably expect to happen, often they have the opposite effect in the long term.

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    7. Very true: I have done exactly that when faced with multiple changes to an old program. Shove the old one in the trash, and start fresh.

      But people are not software programs on a computer, nor are societies of people. People are inherently noble and valuable, and are not to be shoved in the trash. A culture, embedded in a society for a long time, cannot be trashed without severely damaging people.

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    9. @infinitelight. That all sounds a bit like Charlie Sheen’s “Tiger Blood” psychotic episode.

      I just watched the end of a series on Netflix called “The Diplomat”, which was pretty good, and so I looked for something similar and found “True Lies” on Disney. However the latter was absolute crap, beyond bad. The people making it presumably hoped they were making something equivalent to The Diplomat, but they simply did not have the ability. This is all capitalism really is, and turning it into some kind of religion is just weird. A sign of immaturity.

      Equally, democracy is weird. Most people are not capable of great understanding. However the people who are capable of great understanding are easily corrupted by power. So we’re left with the wisdom of ignorant crowds as a break glass solution. Benevolent and wise dictators as kings and queens would be far better, but no one has found a way to ensure benevolence. So we have democracy and capitalism as necessary frameworks that need to be controlled by limits, transparency and legislation to ensure sustainability and fairness to all creatures and environments. It’s not complicated ideology, it’s the only sane option when men and women are not reliably ordered.

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  13. Interesting post and discussion. I’m not an expert on ‘wokeism’, but my impression is that it is more a development within the liberal tradition that borrows from Marxism rather than a break from the liberal tradition. And in general, I think many of the developments of modern liberalism that are often regarded as a rejection of individualism can be viewed as enabling a more radical form of individualism:

    [Summarizing Gottfried] [L]iberalism began to soften its individualism, with universal suffrage and the welfare state marking a turn in a strongly egalitarian direction. … [/i]

    It seems to me that modern liberalism’s egalitarianism is not contrary to its individualism but a natural implication of it: because liberalism’s commitment to individual freedom cannot refer to any standard outside itself – to do so would be to presuppose a conception of the good that is not consented to and thus would violate the individual’s freedom – it has no way of judging one man’s conception of the good superior to another’s. Therefore, different conceptions of the good must be regarded as each equally valid for an individual to pursue.

    Moreover, egalitarian policies are thought to enable personal autonomy rather than to hinder it: classical liberalism still allows some ‘accidents of birth’ to matter: whether you are born into a poor or rich family, for example, can influence what options are available to you. Many forms of classical liberalism also allow discrimination by non-governmental actors that hinder people's freedom. Modern liberal egalitarian policies are therefore an attempt to empower personal autonomy for those who would otherwise have more obstacles in their way.

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  14. [Summarizing Harzony]: [T]he emphasis on group identity rather than individualism carries over from Marxism and marks a break with liberalism. ...

    Here too I would say that the group identify favored by ‘woke’ liberalism is more in service of individualism than it is a rejection of it: the collective identity permitted to favored minorities is only a tool to further the ultimate goal of radical individual autonomy by destroying any collective identity that the dominant majority and culture might have. Consider: what is the justification given for the existence of a collective identity on the part of some ‘victim’ minority? The justification is not fundamentally so that its members can preserve their own culture and honor their ancestors (even if that is sometimes also encouraged); rather, the justification is their very status as members of an ‘oppressed’ class: their collective identity is needed to challenge and subvert the white racism of the oppressor class, because this white racism is an obstacle to the freedom and equality of individuals belonging to minority groups. In fact, the very existence of such oppressed classes is often regarded as having been entirely socially constructed for the purposes of exploitation by the white oppressor class. The rationale given for the legitimacy of collective identities for favored minorities is almost entirely a negative one.

    Wokeness pays lip service to the preservation of minority cultures, all while destroying them with its universal acid.

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  15. Agree that, (1) the argument is mainly over semantics and thus not very interesting, and (2) many wokesters are fairly accused of a kind of Gnostic elitism.

    I'm not sure what to do with this one:

    "For it is the poor and the working class rather than the rich who suffer from the idiocies of woke public policy, and corporations can absorb the costs of such policies whereas their smaller competitors are destroyed by them."

    I don't know how to draw a line from "woke policies" to suffering poor. Because identity politics takes power away from Jacobin-style class politics?

    My critique of Gottfried's essay:

    https://knowthesystem.org/literary-intellectuals-and-wokeism/

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  16. Hazony is not much help in the ideological mess of the modern West, being just one more ideologue himself. His conservative ideological approach does not apply natural law to society. He talks about the Bible, but only as a "rule" for society, which can "interpret" this rule as it sees fit. Other societies will have other rules, of course. Just the romanticism side of the inter-Enlightenment debate. When will Catholics and Christians in general stop dialoguing with this stuff? The "modern" West (and Conservatism, in particular) did not appear till Aquinas, Suarez and Bellarmine were silenced, in the late seventeenth-century. There is nothing new under our modern sun, only the silence of these doctors whose social doctrine is no longer heard.

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    1. Miguel, Do you see post enlightenment "right wing conservatives" and "leftist liberals" as having some of the same fundamental premises? If so, what are these? You mentioned in another post their joint rejection of natural law. In this, they seem to exalt an irrational will. For conservatives, it is the will of the individual. For leftists, it is a collective will of the group. Yet, neither are seeking to root the ordering of a society in laws of nature. To do so is to prioritize truth as having a binding force over the human will which undermines voluntarism. (It also undermines the nominalism that undergirds modernity).

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    2. Michael, I think Left and Right: ideologies share secularism. For "religious" Conservatism, religion is a means to achieve a temporal end. As for religious dogmas, Conservatism is profoundly sceptical.

      The Conservatism of Burke and de Maistre, which is what the ideology is all about, is anti-individual, in fact. Individuality itself (not just individualism) is the source of evil for them. Somehow, societies are the voice of God, and free of original sin, but only as long as they allow themselves to be determined by contingencies, rather than will or intelligence (thereby dismissing true religion). In de Maistre and Scruton, the notion of individual personality and soul is seriously questioned.

      Conservatism is like socialism, and unlike liberalism, in its belief that society must be determined by history. Conservatism aims to produce "better" human nature on earth. As with Kant, "perfection" can only be in the "species", not the individual. The afterlife is not relevant to civil society in all these authors. But for St. Thomas, Suarez and Bellarmine, the afterlives of society's individuals is the ultimate end of society, to which its proper ends should be subordinated. Conservatism can't work out what to do with natural law, because its authors believe this law relates to man's present condition (all iconic conservative spokesmen, when they spoke of "natural man", referred to him in Hobbesian terms as a brute), not his nature per se. At the back of their minds is a refusal to accept original sin; they think humanity has always been in its present state. Society, by building a new nature", is a kind of temporal salvation for them. Its all in their writings. Why are Christians so easily mislead by people who use religious vocabulary while reinventing its meaning? Two centuries of seduction by the Enlightenment's romanticist, conservative sirens...

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    3. @Miguel Cervantes

      Society, by building a new nature", is a kind of temporal salvation for them.

      Temporal salvation is not nothing. You need temporal freedom from evil and security against violence if you want to increase your odds of procuring the graces necessary for eternal salvation.

      If you are an American and a Christian, you should pray that Jesus institutes a gun ban. He is a higher authority than the second amendment.

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    4. Really? I mean really?

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    5. InfiniteLite, the point is that making "temporal salvation" the sole end of civil society is incompatible with the faith. Nobody, rich or poor, can achieve it, let alone Burke or Kant's "species".

      If you live in one of those ghettos in the most advanced countries of the West, you will know that the inexistence of firearms will provide you with no security whatsoever. Even a kitchen knife can ruin one's day, as those Jihadi nutjobs prove frequently.

      The state banning guns is not a huge issue, apart from symbolism and a rallying cause for the left. Guns will not defend a population that already accepts a civil culture that kills them before they are born, and mutilates them as adolescents. Soldiering means discipline, obeying, and knowing what to fight for (guns come last), all completely lacking in right wing political culture today. The traditional West from late antiquity restricted the possession of all weapons. The right to arms for all is not a universal right in the Catholic world. Citizen militias might do when there is nothing else, but the most long-lasting countries in history were those with the best developed armies. Any tribe not protected by inaccessibility or diseased tropical climate etc was a gonner every time it came up against it.

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    6. @Miguel Cervantes

      Guns will not defend a population that already accepts a civil culture that kills them before they are born, and mutilates them as adolescents.

      No, the mass shootings are not a divine punishment for having partial state-by-state legalization of abortion. The Soviet Union, Japan, and China all had or have much higher per capita abortion rates than the USA but none of them experienced a mass shooting problem.

      And surely if the higher power judging the United States is just, then He would have seen that we partially reintroduced bans on abortion, and thus proportionately reduced the rate of mass shootings.

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    7. Well if you insist mass shootings are a divine punishment for the US, that's up to you.

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  17. The more interesting question is how "Wokeism" came to be ascendant in the West, particularly in America. Communism became the unquestionable state ideology in the USSR, which was at times totalitarian. What did the Soviet system seek to achieve under Marxist-Leninism, using the totalitarian state? Certainly the USSR was a brutal regime, but as Gottfried points out Marxist-Leninism was not nearly as anti-human as Wokeism and while it denied the validity of certain economic relationships it did not attack basic human nature the way Woke ideology does by stripping away the very definitions of human identity and asserting myriad paraphelias and mental disorders as somehow legitimate. Marxism did not seek to dismantle foundational relationships beyond class. What is it about 20th century American society that proved such fertile ground for Wokeism, and how did it come to dominate the Left and thus all of American culture? Was the Cold War the triumph of the Christian West over Atheistic Communism, or was it something else entirely?

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    1. Yes, i think those are right questions and it is why i think studying Del Noce and other thinkers who saw this is a necessity. I do think it was something else entirely, namely, the triumph of unfettered capitalism and his shedding of the temporary alliance with Christianity (the Christian-bourgeois phase), since it is materialism the "natural" metaphysics of capitalism in his unfettered form, in which everything is converted in goods, values moving through space. In this view there is no need of agreeing with marxism as a system, or even feeling something different from hostility to it, to see how it has served historically during the XX century as a "katechon" to the unfolding of unfettered capitalism. Now, if this is in some form true, one can see how the not-so-Christian West, more precisely unfettered capitalism, subsumed in the process of his unfolding elements created in '68 and the '70s, in the "extreme left" and "critical marxist" field, from "Critical theory" to post-structuralism, ecc. Because the process of "unfolding" was also an anthropologic transformation from "classic bourgeois" capitalism to so called "neo-liberist phase". Now, this needs an essay, or various essays, so i would like to suggest also another book, "The new spirit of capitalism" of Luc Boltanski e Ève Chiapello that traces this process rather well; again, one has not to agree with their point of view to peruse and use their work.

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    2. TB: That's why you should read Del Noce.

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  18. I'd like to point out that in the past two weeks Pope Francis has condemned Gender Ideology and Abortion in very severe terms twice in a row. The first during that sit down and most recently during an address he gave. Self admittedly, I tend to follow only right wing figures who I trust and who uphold orthodoxy. Given the typical characterisation of him in these circles, I almost find it suprising when I see stern and unequivocal statements on such issues. I do feel though at times we are very polarised. There are obviously lots of issues with this papacy but how much of it is due to Pope Francis himself and how much of it is due to people falsely using the Pope as cover for their own ideological whims remains to be determined, for example in that sit down, the Pope seemed quite firm and aware of everything, the way in which he made it clear that accompanying a woman and justifying abortion are two different things does give one the impression that people are lying when they say Pope Francis told me this or that. Hence, I also think when the Pope makes unequivocal statements condemning what should be condemned, we should prop it up in order to counter the lies that are being spread. Also recently when Pope Francis was hospitalized many of the commentators I followed only retweeted the news without really offering any prayer for his well being. At the end of the day we are catholic, at times, we may not be too fond of the Pope but we should always be charitable at the very least with respect to matters of health and well being. That's my two cents.

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  19. I’m surprised there was no mention of Puritanism here. I think it’s difficult to deny that Marxism is at least the uncle of wokism. However it would seem wrong to ignore auntie Puritan. Sabine Hossenfelder yesterday released a video on the current science behind trans. It’s a fairly ‘impartial’ account that ignores any moral or philosophical questions, and looks at the problem (the disease of gender dysphoria) in terms of published scientific research. However unsurprisingly, the responses include many scientists outraged that Sabine has dared to even try to be impartial on the subject. This absolute and complete rejection of anything that even remotely questions the ‘new ideology’ is automatically seen as “cis” ignorance or even “cis” aggression. If you replace “cis” (or the equivalent in other areas of woke) with “popery”, the woke narrative seems to me to have clear similarities with the Puritans (Calvinists etc).

    Was Calvin the original ‘canceller’ ? Maybe wokism takes it’s intellectual tactics from Marxism, and has influences from the likes of Foucault and Derrida, but is ultimately driven by reformation assumptions and culture?

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  20. "Woke" is a marketing term that started on leftist social media and got picked up by conservatives as a slur. I think the modern left is best described in the terms provided by Augusto del Noce--a totally "bourgeois" society where individuals are fully alienated from others and defined by the ways in which they self-actualization their desires, the trans movement being the culmination of this thinking. However, due to the way political alliances and patronage systems work, a lot of the people who get called "woke" are really moderate black nationalists who think the problems in the black community can be solved with aggressive affirmative action, looser policing and sentencing of criminals, and reperations (as opposed to the NOI creating the Republic of New Afrika in hardcore black nationalism). BLM activists also usually believe in LGBT stuff, but that's just what left wing activists under 40 believe today. There isn't some "woke" ideological system connecting together the racial ideas and the sexual/cultural ideas, its just that given how the political alliances have shaken out, the left wing black nationalists and the gays are on the same side. Kind of like how the conservative movement is made up for foreign policy neocons, economic libertarians, and religious conservatives, even if there is no direct logical connection between these three schools of thought.

    The Black socialist Toure Reed wrote a book discussing Oscar Handlin's ideas of "ethno-pluralism". For Handlin, racism is bad, and racial groups should integrate, but groups should also retain their district identities, and indeed usually benefit by ethnic civil society organizations. The idea that businesses benefit by having workers from different ethnic backgrounds who see the world differently ("diversity is our strength"), comes from this. I think this explains much "woke" thinking --"diversity is our strength, but also the Blacks and the Asians and the Chicanos each need to their separate safe spaces". Mix this with basic lefty Howard Zinn history and you get the racial side of wokeness. As a socialist, Reed claims ethnic identity is unimportant, and argues that the problems that beset lower class blacks (and poor whites) are mostly economic and could be solved by a New Deal on Steroids--BLM is just a big distraction from economic issues by the hated neoliberals.

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    1. Good comment. "Wokeism" is the ideology of the new capitalist system, of the "technological society" according to Del Noce, which is the same as globalism in the Western world. That's why practically all public and private institutions had a conversion. The left and BLM are just spokesmen, although they don't know it.

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  21. I thought the core thing about Marxism is the labor theory of surplus value. I understand that many economists oppose a labor theory of value, substituting a market-drive theory, sc. that value is just a function of what buyers will pay. Still, even John Locke talked about how labor created value, and the value belongs to the laborer. Locke uses the example of an "Indian" who picks berries. Whose berries are they? The Indian's, because his was the labor. As I remember, Locke did not inject a notion of a lord who owned by grant of a king the land on which the berries grew.

    So can't the Marxist agenda be tied to workers' gaining the ability to dispose of the value that their labor creates? What's so bad about that?

    You may reply, well, the workers didn't own the machinery/inventory/land etc. Yet, their labor issued in an increase of value. If workers can determine how to distribute that value - e.g. to support aging parents - why is that bad?

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    1. See? That's why i say that one must study those arguments in detail. What is wrong that workers have ownership of the value they create? Nothing, if this is how the question is asked, but the point here isn't a problem of "equity" but of anthropological and analytic categories. The social (collective) ownership of the means of production is a staple of socialism. Marxist theory of Value is both a philosophical anthropology and a category of analysis of economic process inside the "criticism of political economy." There is a vast literature about value theory, the transformation of values in prices, and many other things. Locke is one step in the formation of those categories of modernity, an important step but one step only nonetheless; considering just the history of "value", it goes from the "physiocrates" (that hadn't this category explicitly) to Smith, Ricardo and Marx, the it goes much further; this is traced very well in a french book by Louis Dumont, "Homo Aequalis". And inside marxism there was the development of various currents about these themes, the role of hegelo-marxist dialectics, and many others. One of the most interesting contributions, for me, to these studies, is that of Claudio Napoleoni, a marxist economist that confronted the work of Sraffa to the point of investigating the philosophical basis of his discipline, opening to the thought of Heidegger and Emanuele Severino. But anyway, one must understand properly these categories to judge them, to accept at least in part their analytic value or reject it, etc. Again, one can think "i am for equity, what is the matter?" the matter is, this has nothing to do with "equity" ("equity" in these general terms means nothing), but with understanding the philosophical bases and analytical power of these theories and to confront the problems they pose: is the labor theory of value in its marxist form a good tool of analysis of capitalist society? Of human society as a whole? What vision of the human being it provides? What role it has in the vision of the whole, in the building of a marxist vision of the world at large (from Marx, to Engels philosophical work, to Lenin, etc.)? Must be integrated with other perspectives? Can it? Etc. Again, Del Noce does a very good presentation of marxist philosophical anthropology.

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    2. I have no problem with saying labor adds value, as long as you temper it with the addition of "certain", as in "certain labor adds value". That's because some labor doesn't add value: if kid A spends 10 years learning to play the violin, and kid B spends 10 years experimenting with scraping a spoon on cement, I am willing to spend some money on listening to a concert by A, and not for B. The fact that B spent as much labor on his effort is ONLY relevant if someone wants what he produces. Thus demand (i.e. the economic aspect of desire) also colors value. And: while labor cannot produce value independently of demand, demand can provide value independently of labor: if a banana falls into my hand because it is ripe and I am standing under the banana tree, my desire to eat it can exist without any labor being expended.

      The issue of what the laborer works upon is connected to the above issues, but is distinct from them. Whether the laborer works upon something that is already his through prior means, or works on something that is someone else's through prior actions, or works on something that is nobody's prior to his working on it, logically allows for 3 different results with respect to the allocation of the value after his work is done on it.

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  22. I hope everyone has seen James Lindsay's podcast lectures on his Youtube channel New Discourses. He has argued that both Marxism and Wokism are forms of Gnosticism. The Youtube channel TIKhistory has also shown how Nazism and all other types of socialism are actually Gnostic in their nature.

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