Please Stop Believing the Woke Uncritically When They Claim to be Marxists/Socialists

Part One of Three

Photo by Maximilian Scheffler on Unsplash

I frequently hear from people on the right or centre of the political spectrum who insist that Critical Social Justice (woke) activists are Marxists. Some will concede that they may be using a variation on Marxism rather than the original definition because they have moved the primary oppressed/oppressor narrative from socio-economic class to identity, but they are still clearly using the same framework and concepts and they do ultimately seek a socialist state. Most commonly, when I ask what the evidence for this is, I am referred to examples of prominent figures or groups saying or otherwise indicating that they are Marxists.

While I very much support the principle of charity and having a default position of accepting that people believe what they say they believe, I think this may be stretching the bounds of credulity a little too far. CSJ advocates do frequently claim to be Marxists or socialists or communists, but they also claim to be proponents of social justice and their critics generally have little difficulty in saying that they do not believe that what they do represents social justice at all. CSJs will also often claim or imply that they support free speech - “hate speech is not free speech”, “free speech does not give anyone the right to a platform”, “free speech does not include protection from consequences.” Nevertheless, their critics typically have no problem with pointing out that supporters of the principle of free speech protect people’s rights to speak freely, and the abundance of examples that Critical Social Justice does precisely the opposite.

Why, then, are so many people in the centre and on the right willing to accept uncritically that wokeism is Marxism despite the mountain of evidence that it is a thoroughly capitalist endeavour, largely funded by wealthy corporations and elite universities which opt for subjecting their workers or students to mandatory unconscious mind retraining rather than doing anything to pay workers better, make tuition more affordable or enable upward mobility for the working class? Largely, I think this is because people trying to get their heads around a contradictory and counterintuitive movement like Critical Social Justice and who are offered a much simpler framework like Marxism to read it through will accept this in a good-faith attempt to make sense of the problem. However, I also think part of this comes down to a theory of mind error and that this is revealed in the language used. The people who tend to make this claim think that being a Marxist is an unambiguously bad thing, and so believe that anybody who admits to being a Marxist must actually be one. This is the language they tend to use, “These prominent figures admitted to being Marxists.” We use the term ‘admit’ when we think someone is disclosing something shameful. But CSJ advocates don’t think that being a Marxist is shameful and instead see it as a credential to shore up their claims to being a radical leftist movement speaking truth to power. These claims are somewhat shaky, to say the least, due to their positions of power within mainstream institutions.

Therefore, CSJ activists don’t see themselves as admitting their Marxism or socialism, but as proclaiming it. That does not make their proclamation true and something that should be accepted at face value any more than their claims to further the causes of social justice or their claims not to be undermining freedom of belief and speech, academic freedom, artistic freedom or the pursuit of scientific discovery. We should require evidence that the beliefs, values and goals of Critical Social Justice activists claiming to be Marxists or socialists do actually align with the beliefs, values and goals of Marxists or socialists. While it may be tempting for anyone who believes that a statement of commitment to an ideology which has, in practice, resulted in corrupt authoritarian regimes and millions of deaths should, in itself, be enough to disqualify anyone from being taken seriously or given positions of power, we should still not just accept that statement as true when there are good grounds to doubt it. Defeating any authoritarian ideology requires understanding it as it really is.

Meanwhile, people who think well of Marxism or socialism but do not think well of Critical Social Justice - Marxists and socialists - are unlikely to say that CSJ activists admitted to being aligned with them and much more likely to say “These prominent figures claimed to be Marxists or socialists” followed by an explanation of why they think that claim is false and why CSJ is antithetical to Marxism or socialism. Here is an example from Eric London of the World Socialist Web Site writing about our “Grievance Studies” Project. It is worth quoting in full because it encapsulates, particularly well, the objections that socialists and Marxists have been making to postmodernism and then Critical Social Justice for many decades,

The academic architects of postmodernism and identity politics occupy well-paid positions in academia, often with salaries upwards of $100,000–$300,000 or more. As a social layer, the theoreticians of what the World Socialist Web Site refers to as the “pseudo-left” are in the wealthiest 10 percent of American society. Their political and philosophical views express their social interests.

The obsession with “privilege,” sex, and racial and gender identity is a mechanism by which members and groups within this layer fight among themselves for income, social status and positions of privilege, using degrees of “oppression” to one up each other in the fight for tenure track jobs, positions on corporate or non-profit boards, or election to public office. A chief purpose of the #MeToo campaign, for example, is to replace male executives and male politicians with women, while ignoring the social needs of the vast majority of working class women.

The weaponization of identity politics is directed down the social ladder as well. By advancing the lie that white workers benefit from “white privilege,” for example, the proponents of identity politics argue: the spoils of Wall Street should not go to meeting the social needs of the working class, including white workers, who face record rates of alcoholism, poverty, opioid addiction, police violence and other indices of social misery. Instead, the world’s resources should go to me. It is this visceral class hatred that serves as the basis for absurd and reactionary arguments like those advanced in the hoax papers.

Nor have the politics of racial identity improved the material conditions for the vast majority of minority workers. Inequality within racial minorities has increased alongside the introduction of affirmative action programs and the increasing dominance of identity politics in academia and bourgeois politics. In 2016, the top 1 percent of Latinos owned 45 percent of all Latino wealth, while the top 1 percent of African-Americans owned 40.5 percent and the richest whites owned 36.5 percent of white wealth.

The influence of postmodernism in academia exploded in the aftermath of the mass protests of the 1960s and early 1970s. Based explicitly on a rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class and opposition to the “meta narrative” of socialist revolution, it is not accidental that identity politics and postmodernism have now been adopted as official ideological mechanisms of bourgeois rule.

It is safe to say that London is not a fan, and he makes his critique in terms that some on the economic left would consider too strong. Nevertheless, his fundamental criticism of what has become known as Wokeness and his identification of it as a neo-liberal, bourgeois movement that serves the interests of capitalism, corporations and the wealthy, neglects socio-economic issues, distracts from any productive action to address the root causes of inequality and divides the working class are those most commonly expressed on the socio-economic left. (I should disclose to anybody unaware of this that I am on the socio-economic left, although I am a social democrat who supports a capitalist system rather than a socialist or a Marxist. I seek reform not revolution). A particularly thorough, accessible and unusually engaging breakdown of the conflict between socio-economic leftists and identitarian leftists is to be found in the introduction to Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate After Neo-Liberalism by the Marxist scholar, Marc James Leger, which is freely available here.

Some of you may be thinking that these differences are not worth your attention because this is just more leftist infighting circling around the same basic belief systems - a circular firing squad - but that is not the case. Not in the sense of fighting within the CSJ movement around issues like whether racism in the trans community is more of a problem than transphobia among BIPOC and whether we need to decolonise queer theory or queer postcolonialism anyway. These are different categories on the left which have different ethical frameworks and ways of deciding what is true, much in the same way that libertarians and religious conservatives on the right do. It would not work if you tried to criticise a Christian conservative’s views by assuming them to be represented by the work of Ayn Rand or to critique laissez-faire economics as though Tim Keller is the go-to source on that. Equally, it does not work to criticise wokeism as though it is Marxism.

It is, of course, not only possible, but reasonable, to regard both Marxism and Critical Social Justice as deeply illiberal ideologies that should be opposed and prevented from gaining power and influence in any society that wishes to conserve the defining principles of Western liberal democracies. Nevertheless, I would argue that in order to oppose these effectively, we must be able to tell the difference between them as they play out in practice and in activism. While there are some activists who seem to be some kind of hybrid, at root traditional Marxism and postmodern-inspired Critical Social Justice are antithetical in their understandings of power, knowledge and language as well as in their end goals and their methods for getting there. We see this in their modes of engagement, in their beliefs about objective truth, their understanding of how power is exercised and their beliefs about how language works. Mostly, we see it in their primary focus on socio-economic issues or issues of identity. Ultimately any activist will have to choose between seeking a society in which private property is abolished and the means of production are communally owned or continuing to use the functions of capitalism and corporatism to fund the Critical Social Justice Industry and impose it on workers.

I have been trying to write a piece breaking down the differences here and discussing how to recognise them in everyday discourses used by activists who claim to be Marxists for over two years now. I inevitably end up over-complicating myself and planning out a 10,000 word indigestible tract. I have decided now to address this in three parts. In this part I have argued that Marxism and wokeism are fundamentally different things and that accepting a Critical Social Justice activist’s claim to be a Marxist uncritically is a mistake usually made by people who are bewildered by ‘wokeness’ and/or are strongly opposed to Marxism.

In Part Two, I will look at the differences in economic and identitarian focus and in concepts of power, knowledge and language, modes of engagement and end goals. I will cover common speaking points that people will recognise and show how these tie into the different theoretical frameworks and provide questions you can ask about the way someone is speaking to detect whether their worldview is fundamentally Marxist or postmodern.

In Part Three, I will discuss why recognising these distinctions matters if we want to be able to tackle the problem effectively, including that not doing so causes critics of wokeness to blame the wrong people (often identity groups), make arguments against beliefs the proponents of CSJ do not hold and attempt to ward off end goals they do not have. I will also argue that this conflation causes people wanting to critique and show the flaws with postmodernism and Critical Social Justice to miss valuable sources which have been doing just that for decades and have been provided by socialists and Marxists. I will also suggest that while arguing about some common intellectual ancestry Marxism and wokeism undoubtedly has and some common themes they therefore share may be interesting in the realm of academic discussions of intellectual history, it is not very useful for opposing the current dominant moral orthodoxy capturing mainstream institutions and defending the vital freedom-centred principles underlying our liberal democracies.