Article  Intellectual roots of Wokeness ("The founding father of systemic oppression" style)

George Benard Shaw: All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary authorities? [...] Thus you may see that when a [...free-thinker of any nationality...], by becoming a Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and stands free from all allegiance to established religion, law, order, patriotism, and learning... He promptly uses his freedom to put on a headier set of chains.

https://youtu.be/4JX4bsrj178

The intellectual roots of wokeness: Adapted Marxism
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/4JX4bsrj178

VIDEO SOURCES:

The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts - 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

The intellectual roots of Wokeness
https://youtu.be/4JX4bsrj178

VIDEO EXCERPTS (Part 1): Liberalism is the ideology that essentially champions the freedom of the individual, if at all humanly possible. So liberals want to maximize your personal rights while putting as few restrictions on it as possible. And the place where they mostly draw the line is if you put someone else in physical harm. So you don't have the right to punch someone in the face, and you don't have the right to shout fire in a crowded theater because people could panic and get hurt.

But besides that they want to maximize your individual freedoms, and that includes the freedom to think for yourself, protest, have a fair trial, own property, and a bunch of other stuff.

[...] I think the main problem people have with liberalism is this idea that it's too passive of a take on progressiveness and that it doesn't actively try to encourage its citizens to improve the conditions of the least well-off. And instead it instills this everyone for themselves kind of attitude and within that some people become wildly successful while others struggle and kind of fall through the cracks.

So you could say that liberalism is great for laying down a base layer of human rights, but it also tends to create large power imbalances within society and doesn't actively encourage its citizens to do much about it, at least in any kind of expedient way.

So because of that there's room for other ideologies that address that, and that's where Marxism comes in. Marxists basically say that liberalism is a protection mechanism for oppressive behavior...

[...] So I should talk about oppression for a minute because the way that Marxists frame oppression is very distinct. We normally think of oppression as something that arises or doesn't circumstantially [...] In one moment you could hypothetically be an oppressor or not, and in another moment I could be an oppressor or maybe even oppressed.

[...] So we normally think of it as something that no one is inherently guilty of and also no one is inherently exempt from, and it's really dictated by a circumstance.

Marxism on the other hand -- and this should already be sounding eerily familiar -- has this particular way of dividing society up into two parts: The oppressed and the oppressors. And you're 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 it was based in class identity and he thought that the dynamics of this oppression were baked into the nature of society itself. So the only way to overcome this oppression is to change
society. In other words, have a revolution and make a new society free from oppression.

[...] in Marx's case the freedom that he was concerned with was the freedom to own private property. So the people who are exercising this freedom to own private property -- and this includes the means of
production -- are necessarily the oppressors. And the people who are not exercising that freedom, so they don't own private property, are necessarily the oppressed.

As long as the freedom to own private property exists oppression will inherently be baked into society.

Marx thought that in order for this revolution to happen, people first need to awaken and see the nature of the oppression happening around them.

[...] if they awakened, and they were able to see the true nature of this class oppression happening around them in his terminology they would gain class consciousness. Marx thought that a critical number of people needed to awaken to class consciousness, and if they did that they would be naturally motivated to band together ... rise up and overthrow their oppressors and make a new utopian society.

[...] Wokeness is the result of a series of adaptations of Marx [...] there's a clear intellectual path we can follow to get us there.

[...] I'm going to break it down into three major steps. The first 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 came from this Italian man in the early 1900s who argued that elites control culture and the control they have over culture gives them a kind of dominating influence over the public...

The intellectual roots of Wokeness
https://youtu.be/4JX4bsrj178

VIDEO EXCERPTS (Part 2): [...] The second major stage was adapted by identity politics movements...

At the time (1960s & '70s) there was a huge resurgence of interest in Marx, especially among young people. And the activism that came out of that is broadly referred to as the New Left. And the leader of the new left is mostly thought to be Marcuse, who wrote repressive tolerance, who I was just talking about. He was working at the same time that this stage was starting. [...] This is the time period where Critical
Race Theory was developed, which took Critical Theory and integrated it into a racial framework. Critical Race Theory presumes that unfavorable differences in group outcomes come from racial oppression and as a solution wants to end racial oppression among a broader goal of wanting to end all forms of oppression. Which also puts us in a world where the first amendment is attacked on the grounds of being a protection mechanism for racial oppression.

Around the same time Second Wave Fminism showed up as n alternative to the more liberal first wave that came before it. The basic marxist contribution to that was to take Marx's idea of the proletariat breaking free of their chains and seizing the means of production from bourgeoisie. Taking that and replacing it with women breaking free of the shackles that men have put on them, and empowering each other to rise up and smash the patriarchy.

The gay liberation front happened around the same time. I think for a lot of people it was just an opportunity to get respect and visibility for people who weren't straight. But if you look at the literature like the manifestos that came out of it, it did have an explicitly Marxist wing to it. Which called out various forms of systemic oppression like straight supremacy, and called for various forms of solidarity and collective action. And for ending freedom that allowed these oppressive behaviors to occur. Which would bring on a new free society.

At this point Marx has been adapted so many times that he's pretty watered down. But the basic dynamic is still there in Marx's writing. The power dynamics in liberal capitalist society necessarily means the bourgeoisie are the oppressors and the proletariat are the oppressed.

In critical race theory the power dynamics in white western society necessarily means white people are the oppressors and non-white people are the oppressed.

In feminism it became the power dynamics in patriarchal society necessarily means men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed.

And in queer theory it became the power dynamics in heteronormative society necessarily means straight people are the oppressors and non-straight people are the oppressed.

At the same time we're seeing this distinct convergence of agreement that the problem is the system itself. So the solution calls for solidarity and collective action and spreading consciousness of the nature of this systemic oppression. And then once a critical number of people achieve that consciousness they can rise up and revolutionize the system and achieve liberation.

The intellectual roots of Wokeness
https://youtu.be/4JX4bsrj178

VIDEO EXCERPTS (Part 3): [...] The third major stage was to tie all these movements together with the introduction of intersectionality while dropping mentions of Karl Marx, but leaving the language of liberation and systemic oppression.
This happened in the late 80s and early, which introduced intersectionality which is basically a rallying call for people to unite and also recognize each other's various forms of oppression.

I don't know if it was a conscious strategy. Maybe they thought that they had to drop the name Karl Marx in order to have a chance of popularizing their movement. Or maybe Marx had been adapted and around for so long that his ideas were just so ingrained in the radical left that they weren't even consciously referencing them anymore.

I don't know but either way this is the time period where the name Karl Marx started disappearing, at least in the published academic vernacular. But his ideas of liberation and oppression were still there, and this idea of dividing society up into two parts suppressed an oppressor, based on identity. But in case you're not familiar, this is this time period; and the work that came out of it is considered the origin for what we think of as wokeness today.

So woke people's ideology is directly based on the academic work that was coming out at this time. From what I can tell, Karl Marx as the origin for wokeness is something of an open secret that you're not supposed to say out loud.

With the occasional slip up. [Brief video footage shown of Black Lives Matter founder giving a lecture, where she mentions their ideological framework: "We are trained Marxists."]

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Okay, so what's the point of this? The point is that understanding that wokeness is fundamentally rooted in Marxism sets you up to better understand the movement. It sets you up to understand why they frame problems in the way they do. Which we've already talked about.

[...] So if you go back to their original liberal versus Marxist distinction... If a liberal sees speech or I guess hears speech that they disagree with -- maybe it's hateful speech -- even they're probably going to want to protect that speech because they think the protection of that speech is necessary for a progressive society.

While a woke person, if they hear this speech that they think is hateful or oppressive, in some way they're going to likely want to use the force of their movement to one way or another put a stop to that speech. And they believe that the protection of that speech is contributing to oppression.

To give another example a liberal business owner would probably want to defend their right to hire whoever they think is best for the job, thinking that that leads to the most progress overall. But a woke person might look at that and say you're trying to defend your right to hire who you want is actually contributing to systemic oppression. And their solution is to use the force of their movement to probably
impose some sort of hiring quota on you, based on identity.

Knowing full well they're restricting your freedom butbelieving that they're expediting progress.

Those are just a couple examples, but you could use this framework to understand the Woke playbook. It's always to abolish something or to use the force of their movement to bend people or society against their will in some kind of direction to end oppression as they see it.

So someone wasn't already aware of the obvious progressive/woke connection to Marxism?

(Aug 27, 2023 05:53 PM)Syne Wrote: So someone wasn't already aware of the obvious progressive/woke connection to Marxism?

Yup. I thought Wokeness was the illegitimate child of Political Correctness. Was Political Correctness also Marxist?
Back in the day we weren't expecting a negotiated settlement - more like a revolution culminating in a lot of people being lined up against a wall.

(Aug 27, 2023 05:53 PM)Syne Wrote: So someone wasn't already aware of the obvious progressive/woke connection to Marxism?

Given the concerted effort of the intellectual community circa the 1980s to no longer be overt about it (crypto-Marxism?), and the disinformation campaigns that got "cultural Marxism" re-labled as Marxist cultural analysis (while also ingeniously ridiculing and deprecating the former to conspiracy nuttery) -- it wouldn't be surprising that the bulk of the population is clueless, or that repeated revelations never stick in their minds. A student was actually not wholly "trained properly" if they openly blurt it out as many times as the BLM founder did during video and radio interviews, public speeches, etc.

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(Aug 27, 2023 06:24 PM)confused2 Wrote:

(Aug 27, 2023 05:53 PM)Syne Wrote: So someone wasn't already aware of the obvious progressive/woke connection to Marxism?

Yup. I thought Wokeness was the illegitimate child of Political Correctness. Was Political Correctness also Marxist? [...]

Political correctness: The term "political correctness" first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line. Later in the United States, the phrase came to be associated with accusations of dogmatism in debates between communists and socialists. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance. — "Uncommon Differences", The Lion and the Unicorn

[...] Early usage of the term politically correct by leftists in the 1970s and 1980s was as self-critical satire; usage was ironic, rather than a name for a serious political movement. It was considered an in-joke among leftists used to satirise those who were too rigid in their adherence to political orthodoxy. The modern pejorative usage of the term emerged from conservative criticism of the New Left in the late 20th century, with many describing it as a form of censorship.

Covert Marxism only really existed while it wasn't making significant in-roads into culture and politics, like in the 80s & 90s, when Democrats still recognized the necessity of compromise and working across the aisle, even just for a chance at winning a general election. But the majority of the political right have always recognized it for what it was...regardless of the gaslighting denials from Democrats.

Yep, "political correctness" is straight from Marx.

This is the sort of sentence that worries me..

Syne Wrote:Covert Marxism only really existed while it wasn't making significant in-roads into culture and politics, ..

To write "really existed" instead of just "existed" suggests even the writer is aware there's something a bit strange about the sentence.
Time out to look at Red Scares..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

Quote:A Red Scare is a form of right-wing propaganda in which there is a widespread promotion of fear and panic towards the potential rise of communism, anarchism or other leftist ideologies within a society or state. Historically, "red scares" have led to mass political persecution, scapegoating, and the ousting of those in government positions who have had connections with left-wing to far-left ideology.

In fairness what one person calls 'propaganda' might be called a threat that 'really exists' by another.

How do you control a society where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer? If you are rich and getting richer one option is to spin up a Red Scare and hope even poor Red Blooded Americans won't want to be associated with Pinkos (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinko).
That is my spin on Syne's spin.

CC .. as usual . thank you, dead straight reporting.

(Aug 27, 2023 10:58 PM)confused2 Wrote: This is the sort of sentence that worries me..

Syne Wrote:Covert Marxism only really existed while it wasn't making significant in-roads into culture and politics, ..

To write "really existed" instead of just "existed" suggests even the writer is aware there's something a bit strange about the sentence.
Time out to look at Red Scares..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

Quote:A Red Scare is a form of right-wing propaganda in which there is a widespread promotion of fear and panic towards the potential rise of communism, anarchism or other leftist ideologies within a society or state. Historically, "red scares" have led to mass political persecution, scapegoating, and the ousting of those in government positions who have had connections with left-wing to far-left ideology.

Maybe you're unaware, but the communist party use to be a legit party running for political office in the US. It went underground only for the left to immediately start taking up its causes in other guises. And it seems odd that you would follow me saying "regardless of the gaslighting denials from Democrats" only to parrot that exact same gaslighting, e.g. "mass political persecution, scapegoating." The US left played that game for decades, only to eventually get overconfident enough to let the mask slip, as they clearly have nowadays.

Quote:How do you control a society where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer? If you are rich and getting richer one option is to spin up a Red Scare and hope even poor Red Blooded Americans won't want to be associated with Pinkos (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinko).

That ignorantly presupposes that there is not significant class mobility in the US. The rich only get richer until a generation or two later lack the skills to maintain that wealth...and then new people rise into the ranks of the rich. The left wants a permanent underclass of the perpetually jealous and aggrieved that they can rule. Hence why they target black communities with welfare rather than school choice, want open borders for an influx of easily intimidated undocumented laborers, etc..