Feb 28, 2023·edited Feb 28, 2023Liked by Woke Watch Canada
Thanks for the primer, which I needed because I find Woke ideas so repellent, I find them difficult to read.
My view is that the process you have outlined is commensurate with the rise of working class/religious constituencies who drove the rise of Trump. Wokeism and the civilizational/racial and sexual narratives it brought in its wake were a two pronged counter attack, where minorities were social justice trumps.
The twin pillars of this counter-attack were to go after the cultural/historical and the mainstream reproductive/familial roots of the enemy, delegitimize that enemy and destroy it through control of the architecture of social discourse and the social institutions that mediate it, and do it without necessarily having to get a democratic majority onside to get it done.
The once liberal hegemons quickly morphed into neo-clerical autocrats who moved from reasoned debate to oracular dogma and magical thinking, that rendered all opposition as heresy.
The result is a unique form of totalitarian governance that will almost inevitably lead to civil war if it isn't stopped, because the price of failing to do that will be total, in a game where the stakes are so enormous, no one can afford to lose.
This is an amazing resource on the dangers of intersectionality-in-practice. Thank you for shining a light! It is important that we name these toxic race ideologies and encourage critical thinking about them in every sphere. My recent contribution to this effort an essay on Race Ideology-in-Practice: Racial Equity in American Learning Environments may be found at: https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/race-ideology-in-practice
Very helpful summary and insights, thank you! Speaking of the pushback on gender identity theory in the UK, I was just reading Material Girls by British academic Kathleen Stock who was canceled for asserting that men are not women. She describes Standpoint Epistemology as a term that "originally comes from Marxism and the idea that oppressed people can have insight into two perspectives or ‘standpoints’ at once – their own and their oppressors’ – whereas oppressors can have only one perspective (their own)." Marx was not focused on race or gender of course, but given that so much of wokeness is derived from Marxism, I wonder if we're underestimating the socialist cultural revolution happening under our noses.
Eastman-Nagle: Your comment above appears to blame the the emergence of woke on the "rise of working class/religious constituencies" --- how twisted is it that a "former" Marxist could come to blame social depravity on the RISE of the working class? --- however, and on the contrary, it is absolutely not the "working class" which has driven perverted and dementated social ideology, rather it is the intellectuals, especially Marxist and Marxian intellectuals like you. Like former you, I mean.
As for the essay above I believe it will be useful for readers here. As a caveat, in this case an important one, stand point theory does not originate with the feminists rather they have adapted it from the Marxist intellectual György Lukács. I take this from Michael Rectenwald's book "Springtime for Snowflakes" pages 73-75:
"Sharon introduced the Frankfurt School by beginning with Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the early Hungarian Soviet literary critic and Marxist philosopher, György Lukács. In his book, History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács introduced a form of epistemology that has had an outsized impact ever since, serving as a source for postmodern theory and social justice. The social justice notion that each person has their own truth based on their particular type of subordination can be traced to Lukács. He argued that the unique position of the working class within the social order and the relations of production provide the proletariat with a privileged vantage-point for discerning objective truth and called the theory “proletarian standpoint epistemology.” Lukács argued that reality under capitalism is a single objective reality. But the proletarian has a peculiar relationship to objective reality. The objective world strikes the proletarian differently than it does the capitalist. Like the capitalist, the proletarian is a self-conscious subject. However, unlike the capitalist, the proletarian is also a commodity, an object for sale on the market. The proletarian’s consciousness of the commodification of his selfhood contradicts his experience as living subject, a person with a subjective existence. The proletariat’s “self-consciousness of the commodity” (that is himself) explains the working class’s antagonism toward capitalism as Lukács saw it. While the proletariat fully grasps the contradiction of its self-conscious commodification, the class can only come to terms with the contradiction by upending and abolishing existing conditions.
In The Science Question in Feminism (1986), Sandra Harding adopted Lukács’s proletarian standpoint epistemology and adapted it to feminism. Relegated to the caretaking of men, children, and themselves, women experience a deepened and unified sense of “hand, heart, and head” activity, and thus appreciate a deepened “sensuous, concrete, relational” access to the world. Their particular standpoint accords them an enhanced cognitive and perceptual grasp of objectivity."
As an additional caveat, I would extend the concept of "intersectionality" back much before Crenshaw although she popularized the term itself. It is nothing but a neologism for the brand of identity politics which had been pushed by black feminists for many decades before Crenshaw came along (see the extract from my piece A Moral Chimera below). Note: black feminism is basically a fusion of black nationalism and Marxism in terms of its ideology.
"The ideology of black feminism differs from mainstream feminism in one obvious and constantly reiterated detail – black feminists are concerned about being black while simultaneously being women. McDuffie relates that the early “triple oppression” thesis (the prototype of intersectional theory), which holds that black women are oppressed on account of their race, gender and class, was originally argued by black feminists who alleged that the communist party of the USA itself (ironically!) left black women “marginalized” and “unattended.” In the mid-1900s, black feminist Claudia Jones would help to popularize the triple oppression thesis in American black feminist circles (that is, prior to her deportation for communist agitation in 1955).[35] In the 1960s, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist and a Marxist organization, was the first to use and popularize the concept of identity politics and they are credited with having coined the term “identity politics.” The metaphor of the “intersection,” and “intersectional theory” (which holds that black women are doubly oppressed because they are black and female), are merely neologisms created by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 — this is simply the same black feminist and Marxist ideology rehashed with a trendy metaphor (the intersection), not, as is often supposed, a novel and innovative postmodern theory."
Thanks for the primer, which I needed because I find Woke ideas so repellent, I find them difficult to read.
My view is that the process you have outlined is commensurate with the rise of working class/religious constituencies who drove the rise of Trump. Wokeism and the civilizational/racial and sexual narratives it brought in its wake were a two pronged counter attack, where minorities were social justice trumps.
The twin pillars of this counter-attack were to go after the cultural/historical and the mainstream reproductive/familial roots of the enemy, delegitimize that enemy and destroy it through control of the architecture of social discourse and the social institutions that mediate it, and do it without necessarily having to get a democratic majority onside to get it done.
The once liberal hegemons quickly morphed into neo-clerical autocrats who moved from reasoned debate to oracular dogma and magical thinking, that rendered all opposition as heresy.
The result is a unique form of totalitarian governance that will almost inevitably lead to civil war if it isn't stopped, because the price of failing to do that will be total, in a game where the stakes are so enormous, no one can afford to lose.
This is an amazing resource on the dangers of intersectionality-in-practice. Thank you for shining a light! It is important that we name these toxic race ideologies and encourage critical thinking about them in every sphere. My recent contribution to this effort an essay on Race Ideology-in-Practice: Racial Equity in American Learning Environments may be found at: https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/race-ideology-in-practice
Very helpful summary and insights, thank you! Speaking of the pushback on gender identity theory in the UK, I was just reading Material Girls by British academic Kathleen Stock who was canceled for asserting that men are not women. She describes Standpoint Epistemology as a term that "originally comes from Marxism and the idea that oppressed people can have insight into two perspectives or ‘standpoints’ at once – their own and their oppressors’ – whereas oppressors can have only one perspective (their own)." Marx was not focused on race or gender of course, but given that so much of wokeness is derived from Marxism, I wonder if we're underestimating the socialist cultural revolution happening under our noses.
"Gosh Toto, it sure looks like we are not in Kansas anymore"---Dorothy Gale, Wizard of Oz, 1939
Excellent summary, thank you!!
Eastman-Nagle: Your comment above appears to blame the the emergence of woke on the "rise of working class/religious constituencies" --- how twisted is it that a "former" Marxist could come to blame social depravity on the RISE of the working class? --- however, and on the contrary, it is absolutely not the "working class" which has driven perverted and dementated social ideology, rather it is the intellectuals, especially Marxist and Marxian intellectuals like you. Like former you, I mean.
As for the essay above I believe it will be useful for readers here. As a caveat, in this case an important one, stand point theory does not originate with the feminists rather they have adapted it from the Marxist intellectual György Lukács. I take this from Michael Rectenwald's book "Springtime for Snowflakes" pages 73-75:
"Sharon introduced the Frankfurt School by beginning with Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the early Hungarian Soviet literary critic and Marxist philosopher, György Lukács. In his book, History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács introduced a form of epistemology that has had an outsized impact ever since, serving as a source for postmodern theory and social justice. The social justice notion that each person has their own truth based on their particular type of subordination can be traced to Lukács. He argued that the unique position of the working class within the social order and the relations of production provide the proletariat with a privileged vantage-point for discerning objective truth and called the theory “proletarian standpoint epistemology.” Lukács argued that reality under capitalism is a single objective reality. But the proletarian has a peculiar relationship to objective reality. The objective world strikes the proletarian differently than it does the capitalist. Like the capitalist, the proletarian is a self-conscious subject. However, unlike the capitalist, the proletarian is also a commodity, an object for sale on the market. The proletarian’s consciousness of the commodification of his selfhood contradicts his experience as living subject, a person with a subjective existence. The proletariat’s “self-consciousness of the commodity” (that is himself) explains the working class’s antagonism toward capitalism as Lukács saw it. While the proletariat fully grasps the contradiction of its self-conscious commodification, the class can only come to terms with the contradiction by upending and abolishing existing conditions.
In The Science Question in Feminism (1986), Sandra Harding adopted Lukács’s proletarian standpoint epistemology and adapted it to feminism. Relegated to the caretaking of men, children, and themselves, women experience a deepened and unified sense of “hand, heart, and head” activity, and thus appreciate a deepened “sensuous, concrete, relational” access to the world. Their particular standpoint accords them an enhanced cognitive and perceptual grasp of objectivity."
As an additional caveat, I would extend the concept of "intersectionality" back much before Crenshaw although she popularized the term itself. It is nothing but a neologism for the brand of identity politics which had been pushed by black feminists for many decades before Crenshaw came along (see the extract from my piece A Moral Chimera below). Note: black feminism is basically a fusion of black nationalism and Marxism in terms of its ideology.
From: https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/a-moral-chimera
"The ideology of black feminism differs from mainstream feminism in one obvious and constantly reiterated detail – black feminists are concerned about being black while simultaneously being women. McDuffie relates that the early “triple oppression” thesis (the prototype of intersectional theory), which holds that black women are oppressed on account of their race, gender and class, was originally argued by black feminists who alleged that the communist party of the USA itself (ironically!) left black women “marginalized” and “unattended.” In the mid-1900s, black feminist Claudia Jones would help to popularize the triple oppression thesis in American black feminist circles (that is, prior to her deportation for communist agitation in 1955).[35] In the 1960s, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist and a Marxist organization, was the first to use and popularize the concept of identity politics and they are credited with having coined the term “identity politics.” The metaphor of the “intersection,” and “intersectional theory” (which holds that black women are doubly oppressed because they are black and female), are merely neologisms created by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 — this is simply the same black feminist and Marxist ideology rehashed with a trendy metaphor (the intersection), not, as is often supposed, a novel and innovative postmodern theory."