What are the origins of wokeness?
Seeking better understanding.
Providing you are not put off by the term Marxism and would like to understand where the widely popular and influential movement we now call wokeness originates from and why that matters — read on.
I promise to be as succinct and as straightforward as possible.
In essence, there are two main critiques:
The first compares wokeness to a religion or to a cult in that it has orthodoxy, heretics, original sin and alike. While this critique has quickly become fashionable, it remains vague about what makes wokeness distinct.
The second critique compares wokeness to the ideas of Karl Marx. The proponents of this argument position that wokeness fundamentally comes from the ideas of Karl Marx. The conspiracy theory argument is usually used to discredit this view.
However, a closer examination of the academic works clearly paves the road to Karl Marx.
Here is why:
At its core, Marxism is an ideology conceived in opposition to liberalism. In this context, liberalism is understood as the founding principle of western civilisation. Marxism critiques liberalism and presents itself as the alternative to it.
Liberalism is the ideology that essentially champions the individual’s freedom. Liberals believe in maximising personal rights curbed only by those restrictions necessary to ensure the physical safety of fellow humans.
Liberals want to maximise individual freedoms, including the freedom to think and speak for oneself, protest, have fair trials, own property, etc.
Liberalism was conceived as an attempt to form an ideology that represents the interest of everyone in a society.
As long as everyone had a certain amount of protected rights and freedom to voice their concerns, society, liberals believe, would, over time, become naturally better.
While they no doubt knew that this was likely to lead to all kinds of struggles, they believed it to be the best system that would, over time, ensure peace and progress for everyone.
Liberalism’s major critics say that it does not actively try to encourage its citizens to improve the conditions of the least well-off. Instead, it instils an — everyone for themselves mentality — and within that, some people become wildly successful while others struggle.
On that basis, it could be said that liberalism is excellent for laying down a base layer of human rights, but it also tends to create large power imbalances within society and does not actively encourage its citizens to do much about it, at least in any kind of expedient way.
As a result, other ideologies aiming to address this issue were born — namely Marxism.
Marxists believe liberalism is a protection mechanism for oppressive behaviour because, they say, freedom ends where oppression begins.
However, it must be clear that the freedom Karl Marx was concerned with was the freedom to own private property and the oppression he was concerned with was class oppression.
It is important to understand that the way Marxists frame oppression is very distinct.
Ordinarily, most people think of oppression as something that arises (or doesn’t) circumstantially and something everyone is theoretically capable of.
Hypothetically, depending on circumstances, everyone could be an oppressor in one moment but oppressed in the other.
We usually do not think of oppression as something one is either inherently guilty of or inherently exempt from.
Conversely, Marxism sees society as divided into two parts — the oppressed and the oppressors.
You are either in one group or the other, and what determines which group you fall into is based on your identity and, in Marx’s case — your class identity.
Karl Marx believed that the dynamics of oppression are ingrained into the nature of human society itself.
The only way to overcome this ingrained oppression is to fundamentally change society through revolution, followed by building a new society free from oppression.
To determine what kind of fundamental change society needs to rid itself of the oppression, it must first figure out what was being allowed to occur for the oppression to take place.
In Marx’s case, that was the freedom to own private property — the people who exercise this freedom to own private property, including the means of production, are necessarily the oppressors and the people who are not exercising that freedom (they don’t own the property) are necessary oppressed.
As long as the freedom to own private property exists, oppression will remain ingrained into society.
Marx thought that in order for the revolution to happen, people first need to awaken and see the nature of the oppression happening around them.
If they didn’t, if they remained blind to the oppression, they would then have false consciousness.
On the contrary, if they awakened and could see the true nature of the oppression around them, they would gain class consciousness.
He believed that a critical number of people needed to awaken to class consciousness would ensure that they are naturally motivated to band together in a collective of like-minded class-conscious people that will rise up and overthrow their oppressors to make a new utopian society in which freedom to own private property, especially means of productions, is abolished.
Accordingly, the economic implementation of Marxism, where the freedom to own private property, including means of production, is abolished, is known as communism.
In contrast, the economic implementation of liberalism, where the freedom to own private property, including means of production, remains, is known as capitalism.
It must be acknowledged that Marxism was attractive to many, including, at one time, yours truly, as it is easy to subscribe to an ideology that wants to end oppression and human suffering.
Unfortunately, history has shown us that every attempt to implement Marxism thus far ended in disaster for human rights, inflicting tyranny, death, censorship and famine on millions in the 20th century.
Some 100 million people lost their lives to it.
Sadly, the people who suffered the worst were the working class people, the oppressed Marxists promised to liberate.
Having said that, I would be amiss to not acknowledge that Marx’s analysis and critique of liberalism and capitalism were and remain robust and credible.
This is why they remained attractive to many inspired by him who refuse to believe that the disasters of trying to implement Marxism should be enough deterrent to attempting to adapt Marxism to their own political environments.
This practice of not taking the teachings of Karl Marx literally but instead adapting them to new environments is called neo-Marxism, even though the neo-Marxists do not call themselves that, as they prefer calling themselves plain Marxists.
The movement that prompted this post — wokeness — resulted from serial adaptations of Marxism, as the following three-step process shows.
The three steps:
Step One — Expanding into the realm of culture
The first step was to expand Marx’s ideas, which were at the time almost entirely about class, into the realm of culture.
The first major influence for this step came from an Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci who, in the early 1900s, argued that elites control culture and that control over culture gives them dominating influence over the public, making the public complicit with whatever agenda the elites have for them.
As a result, in a liberal capitalist society, elites within that society can use culture to brainwash the public into not questioning that society, and that’s why the revolutions that Marx predicted have not been happening.
To rectify that, Marxists need to influence the culture and then use that influence to educate the public that, once educated, will rise and revolution will ensue.
The incorporation of Marxism into culture is called Cultural Marxism. If you are sceptical about that term, please type it into google scholar to see the results for yourselves — it is a term academics have been using for a long time.
Cultural Marxism was further expanded by the work of The Frankfurt School. The school consisted mostly of neo-Marxists who hoped for a socialist revolution in Germany and developed a form of social critique known as critical theory.
Two other important and, at the time, hugely influential works are the book The Authoritarian Personality which aimed to redefine authoritarianism, and an essay, Repressive Tolerance, in which Herbert Marcuse wrote:
What is proclaimed and practices as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression… Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movement from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.
To achieve that, Marcuse advocated, if necessary, use of violence because: Non-violence is normally not only preached to but exacted from the weak — it is a necessity rather than a virtue, and normally it does not seriously harm the case of the strong.
So this was basically an early intellectual version of the Antifa handbook and also a broad intellectual justification for the censorship of the right by the people on the left while labelling it progressive.
It might be hard for us today to imagine that these academic works exerted so much influence on reality, but their authors were very popular at the time, especially at universities. These authors were superstar intellectuals, and their work was widely read and discussed.
Lastly the paper Traditional and Critical Theory, written by Max Horkheimer, explains that critical theorists, unlike traditional theories, in their examination and interpretation of the world have their political goals in mind. That planted seeds for the death of objectivity in academia and provided justification for people to work in academia as political agents.
The paper defines the goals academics should be working towards as: The Marxist categories of class, exploitation, surplus value, profit, pauperization, and breakdown are elements in a conceptual whole, and the meaning of this whole is to be sought not in preservation of the contemporary society but in its transformation into the right kind of society… a state of affairs in which there will be no exploitation or oppression.
Step Two — Cultural Marxist framework becomes adopted by identity politics movements
The second step started in the 60s with the resurgence of interest in Marx, especially among young people and the activism broadly referred to as the new left.
The leader of the new left is mostly thought to be Marcuse, who wrote the mentioned repressive tolerance paper.
It was the time the critical race theory was developed, which took critical theory and integrated it into a racial framework.
Critical race theory presumes that unfavourable differences in group outcomes come from racial oppression and, as a solution, aims to end racial oppression with a broader goal of wanting to end all forms of oppression.
Around the same time, second-wave feminism arrived, positioning itself as an alternative to the more liberal first-wave that came before it.
The Marxist contribution to the second wave of feminism was the adaptation of Marx’s idea of the proletariat breaking free from their chains and seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie, to women breaking free from the shackles that men have put on them and empowering each other to rise up and smash the patriarchy.
The gay liberation front was also taking place. While many saw it as an opportunity to get respect and visibility for gay people, the manifestos that came out of it also had an explicit Marxist flavour. They called for various forms of solidarity and collective actions against systemic oppression like straight supremacy.
By that time, however, Marxism had been adapted so many times that Marx’s teachings were pretty watered down; only the basic dynamic remained.
In Marx’s writing, the power dynamics in liberal capitalist society necessarily means the bourgeoisie are the oppressors, and the proletariat are oppressed.
In critical race theory, the power dynamics in white western society necessarily means white people are the oppressors, and non-white people are oppressed.
In feminism, it became the power dynamics in a patriarchal society where men are necessary oppressors and women are oppressed.
In queer theory, it became the power dynamics in the heteronormative society, where straight people are necessarily the oppressors, and non-straight people are oppressed.
At the same time, the distinct convergence of agreement that the problem is the system itself was taking place too. Therefore, the solution to the problem was found in solidarity, collective action and spreading consciousness of the nature of systemic oppression. Once a critical number of people achieve that consciousness, they will rise up, revolutionize the system, and attain liberation.
Step Three — Bringing all the movements together and introducing intersectionality.
The third step was to tie all the movements together by introducing intersectionality while erasing Karl Marx’s name but keeping his language of liberation and systemic oppression.
This happened in later 80s and early 90s with Mapping The Margins by Kimberlé Crenshaw being the landmark paper which introduced intersectionality and is basically a rallying call for people to unite and recognise each other’s various forms of oppression.
While unclear whether it was a conscious PR strategy to drop Marx’s name to have a chance of popularising the movement, or perhaps Marx had been adapted and around for so long that his ideas were just so ingrained in the movement that they were not even consciously referencing him anymore. Either way that was the time when the name Karl Marx started disappearing at least from the published academic works.
While his name was no longer mentioned, his ideas of dividing society into oppressed and oppressors based on identity remained and the work that came out of it is considered the origin of what we now think of as wokeness.
That woke people’s ideology remains firmly based on the teachings of Karl Marx and the academic work mentioned is not only obvious but appears to be an open secret that no one is supposed to talk about, except for an occasional slip up that: we actually do have an ideological frame, we are trained Marxists.
It is perhaps that the name Karl Marx carries so much stigma that people have learned not to say his name, but in the same time writers and activists are talking about systemic oppression and how to achieve liberation from it by triggering an awakening of critical consciousness.
To be woke means to be awakened to critical consciousness. As the name says.
So what was the point of all this?
The understanding that wokeness is fundamentally rooted in Marxism will hopefully help you (and me) to better understand the movement and why they frame the problems and solutions the way they do.
In addition, it has been my experience that even the people who consider themselves most woke are largely unaware of the origins and ideological framework of the movement they belong to and are passionate about.
The wokeness, like any other Marxist organisation, positions itself as being the will of people who need to be listened to it the most. It means that anyone who criticised the movement or any aspect of it, whether from the inside or the outside, is inevitably going to be singled out as someone going against the will of the people and that creates the natural pressure against the criticism both internal and external.
As history has shown us more than once — banning any kind of criticism is dangerous.
Sources:
Economic And Philosophical Manuscripts — Karl Marx
Capital — Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx & Frederick Engels
Marx’s Concept Of Man — Erich Fromm
Marxism — Thomas Sowell
Liberalism — Ludwig Von Mises
On Liberty — John Stuart Mill
The Prison Notebooks — Antonio Gramsci
Traditional And Critical Theory — Max Horkheimer
Towards A New Manifesto — Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno
One Dimensional Man — Herbert Marcuse
Repressive Tolerance — Herbert Marcuse
Words That Wound — Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw
Mapping The Margins — Kimberlé Crenshaw
