Battle of Ideas talk on Woke Capitalism

As per your request!

Readers and readerettes, yesterday evening saw the London Battle of Ideas coming to Zurich for a Sattelite event to a full house and a pretty good panel, of which I was part.

https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/woke-capitalism-and-its-discontents/

I was approached by several people in the audience and asked to publish my 7-minute input talk somewhere online. I decided Substack is a good place. So while, as long time readers, you may be used to a more pertinent, detailed and intellectually stimulating analysis, bear with me for a round-up on the phenomenon we call “woke”. For what it’s worth, the “capitalism” aspect was less interesting to me. The question, after all, is not between capitalism and anticapitalism, but between democracy and fascism. Thanks, Covid!

Here goes:

Let me try to provide what I would consider an encyclopedia definition of “woke” and then say something about its specific characteristics and purposes.

What is “woke”? Woke is a vulgar anti-capitalist belief system found mostly in urban areas in the Western World that, in the name of “social justice”, builds on political oppression of their opponents to promote a nihilist view of modern society in politics, economics, education, media, culture, and institutions. This includes, but is not limited to, racial and gender oppression as allegedly ubiquitous social phenomena, environmental catastrophism, a negative view of democracy and participation, a negative view of free speech, a negative view of liberal democratic institutions, a negative view of the family and family structures, and a negative view of tradition and traditional values (i.e., religion). At the same time, woke promotes state worship, censorship and the persecution of dissenters, a stronger influence of unelected bodies on the private lives of individuals, and the dissolution of traditional values, including families. 

Woke is therefore an anti-democratic, compared to its own ambitions ahistorical, and anti-social set of beliefs in a specific sense. It is, indeed, a totalitarian, if not fascist, ideology.

How is woke totalitarian or fascist?

Before I show that woke indeed fulfils the central criterion for being fascist, I want to make a small detour and talk about the nature of power.

In recent years, and especially after the system collapse of really existing socialism, wokeness has increasingly become the one and only set of beliefs in the hands of the powerful in the Western world. If your belief system eclipses economic inequality and systematically ignores growing totalitarianism –e.g., increasing censorship, of which it is a symptom – then your belief system becomes an ideology of power. In that sense, it is no wonder that the woke phenomenon has captured the whole of the political, institutional, cultural, economic, media, and especially educational landscape (i.e., schools and universities).

In what forms does the woke phenomenon appear? It appears in the form of DEI or ESG quality assurance instruments in larger (but also smaller) companies, in the form of using correct pronouns/”gendering” in official documents, as pressure on employers to partake in educational measures that serve the elimination of Wrongthink, e.g. “racial sensitivity trainings”, it appears in the pressure on women to open their spaces – such as women’s sport – to men, it appears as a general atmosphere of fanaticism in developing ever-emerging new “oppressed groups”, in the idea of victimhood-as-social status and, most of all, in appears in the zero tolerance policy against and persecution of dissenters and “non-believers” that shares its motivation and zeal with religious sects. In other words, wokeness is a moral and religious belief system whose actions are automatically justified qua moral agitation against its critics, or against anyone not following its rules. In that sense, and this is crucial, is it a deeply nihilist belief system that has no positive content and, to the contrary, derives its essence from the denunciation of all content, in a gesture of being “anti” for the sake of being “anti”. What remains in effect of the woke belief system in political terms is “enemy politics” in the strict Schmittian, and therefore historically fascist, sense of the term.[i]

According to Carl Schmitt, as stated in his eminent The Concept of the Political (1927),

"The specific distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced back is the distinction between friend and enemy. (...) Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish between friend and enemy. The high points of great politics are also the moments in which the enemy is recognised as an enemy with concrete clarity."

As in historical fascism, the persecution of critics and dissenters is the cornerstone of the self-understanding of woke ideology. In contrast to historical fascism, however, woke is in a better position, as the experience of fascism has left such a deep mark on historical consciousness that “fascism” can now be used as a slur to cover one’s own authoritarian inclinations while smearing the enemy to become a social outcast. The commonalities between historical fascist and woke ideology do not stop there, however, and include:

-       A developed authoritarian personality, including “belief in experts” and the view that “the state/the government /the authorities are always right”,

-       Political party representation (the NSDAP/the Green and other left-wing parties),

-       The belief in racial purity (“white guilt”, “white privilege”, “black oppression”, the rejection of colour blindness, etc) and, as we could recently see again, blatant antisemitism,

-       The rejection of universalism and the embrace of cultural relativism,

-       Cancel culture (i.e., social demeaning of individuals and an increasing social acceptance of loss of employment or employability for “wrongthink”)

-       A preponderance of sentimental iconography/kitsch aesthetics,

-       The observation of violent rituals and youth activism (chanting, marching, vandalism, threats to individuals, “flash mobs”),

-       An elitist view of society, including contempt for individual and human rights (contempt for a democratic rule of law),

-       Anti-individualism and herd mentality,

- The substitution of political, interests-based social organisation, with moralism

-       A collectivist view of society.

It is the latter I want to talk about last.

A German second league football club has recently ordered that employees who eat meat or drive combustion cars and/or do not use correct pronouns (do not correctly “gender”, in the German idiom) will face deductions from their salary. In classic liberal democracies, what car one drives or what food one eats was no business of the employer or the state. You got paid, and in your private time, your private lives, you could do whatever you wanted (if you got back to work on Monday morning).

But in the West, we no longer live in classic liberal democracies that not only value freedom, but privacy. With woke ideas being the ideas of the rulers, we are transitioning to a new era of collectivism and a war against the individual.

Indeed, the definiting feature of fascism, its hallmark if you will is the elimination of the boundary between the public and the private, of the collective and the individual. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels famously stated that “the common good” trumps individual rights. And that, and nothing else, is the basis of all totalitarian rule.

The basic idea, as with any authoritarian ideology, is that the boundary between individual and state, between private person and the collective, has been torn down. And the irony is that while everyone of us – everyone sitting here tonight – is free game to the state, we are told that we’re the oppressors. If everyone is a oppressor, though, where are the victims? And that, indeed, is a crucial component of woke belief that goes beyond the victim narrative of historical (German) fascism: nothing lends itself to pure and naked power as self-flagellation and the voluntary renunciation of one’s own inalienable civil and human rights. Woke ideology in that sense is the ultimate expression of misanthropy, self-resentment, and social masochism that, contrary to its own self-presentation, does not enforce empowerment, but the disempowerment of the people as a whole.  

And this is where the circle to the ideology of power is closed: for if we are all oppressors, the disenfranchisement of civil rights, economic de-industrialisation and energy austerity, censorship, and the persecution of dissenters becomes a feature, not a bug.

Cover: video still from Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ There My Dear (1980)

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[i] Carl Schmitt was a prominent political theorist and jurist in the German National Socialist Workers Party, the German Nazi party, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt and is hugely influential today in the woke movement, often unbeknownst to its own disseminators.