It is
important to emphasize at the outset that the question isn’t whether there are
significant differences between wokeism on the one hand, and the ideas of Marx
himself and the key Marxist thinkers who came after him on the other. No one denies that there are. The question is rather whether wokeism is
best thought of as a species of Marxism, or at least whether the similarities
are significant enough that the comparison with Marxism illuminates rather than
obfuscates.
Here it is crucial
to understand the relationship of both movements to liberalism. The broad liberal tradition from Locke to
Mill to Rawls is individualist, emphasizing as it does the rights and liberties
of individuals, their basic equality, and their consent to being governed as a
precondition of government’s legitimacy.
Hazony notes that the Marxist critique of liberalism emphasizes the
inadequacy of this individualism to make sense of real political life. For Marxism, liberalism is blind to human
beings’ tendency to form social classes, and to the inherent tendency of one
class to oppress another and to utilize the state for this purpose.
Wokeism,
Hazony points out, takes over this central Marxist theme and simply replaces
economic status with race, sex, sexual orientation, and the like as the keys to
demarcating oppressed and oppressing classes.
Where the traditional Marxist focuses on the conflict between
capitalists and the proletariat, the wokester speaks instead of “white
supremacy” versus people of color, “patriarchy” versus women,
“heteronormativity” versus LGBTQ, and so on.
But the emphasis on group identity rather than individualism carries
over from Marxism and marks a break with liberalism. Furthermore, Hazony points out, wokeism’s
disdain for norms of rational discourse and inclination to cancel and censor
opponents rather than engage their arguments differs from the liberal
tradition’s idealization of free debate.
Gottfried
acknowledges that all of this is true enough as far as it goes. He also acknowledges that there is in the
history of Marxism a precedent for wokeism’s turn to obsessing over race and
sex rather than economic class – namely the “Critical Theory” of the Frankfurt
School, as represented especially by the work of Herbert Marcuse. All the same, he judges that Hazony and
others overstate the connection between wokeism and Marxism, and fail to
appreciate wokeism’s connection to liberalism.
For one
thing, in the twentieth century, liberalism began to soften its individualism,
with universal suffrage and the welfare state marking a turn in a strongly
egalitarian direction. In recent
decades, and before wokeness took center stage, mainstream liberals had also
already themselves become more intolerant of dissent and unwilling rationally
to engage the arguments of their critics.
Though many liberals now complain of woke intolerance, the wokesters
simply walked through a door that liberals had themselves opened.
For another
thing, Marxists of a more old-fashioned stripe had no truck with the direction
taken by the Frankfurt School, much less the obsessions of the wokesters. Indeed, they could be as censorious of this
direction as any social conservative.
Moreover, during the Cold War, communist countries were often as
conservative on matters of sex and family as Western society, or indeed even
more so. Nor were communist societies prone,
as wokeism is, to destroying loyalty to country or to a general nihilism. Marxism also put a premium on science and
rationality, at least in theory.
Then there
is the fact that wokeism has allied itself to capitalism in a way Marxism could
not. Capitalists and corporations have
not simply embraced wokeism out of fear but, Gottfried argues, have found it in
their interests to embrace it. For it is
the poor and the working class rather than the rich who suffer from the
idiocies of woke public policy, and corporations can absorb the costs of such
policies whereas their smaller competitors are destroyed by them.
Finally,
while the narrative of oppressor and oppressed is indeed a feature of Marxism,
it is also, Gottfried points out, a feature of the rhetoric of fascism and
Nazism. And in all three cases, he
claims, what we have is a modern and secularized variation on the ancient
biblical distinction between the righteous and those who persecute them. So, that a narrative of oppression is central
to wokeism does not suffice to make it in any interesting way Marxist, any more
than these other views are Marxist.
Hence, Gottfried’s
view is that in order to understand wokeism, it is more illuminating to study
its origins in the breakdown of liberalism than to look for parallels with
Marxism.
What should
we think of all this? I am myself inclined
to what might be a middle ground position between Hazony and Gottfried, though
perhaps the differences between us are more matters of semantics and emphasis
than anything deeper than that. On the
one hand, when writing on these matters myself I have not characterized wokeism
as a species of Marxism, but rather have
merely noted that there are Marxist influences on wokeism and parallels between
the views. On the other hand, while
Gottfried makes some important points, I think that the influences and
parallels are more important and illuminating than he seems to allow. I think he also overstates the differences.
For example,
Gottfried contrasts Marxism’s notional commitment to science and reason with
the irrationalism of wokeism. But on the
one hand, wokesters in general do not explicitly
reject science and reason any more than old-fashioned Marxism did. On the contrary, they typically claim that
science supports their views (about gender, for example). To be sure, these claims are bogus and the “science”
pure ideology tarted up in pseudoscientific drag. But the same thing was true of Marxist claims
to scientific respectability. (Lysenkoism,
anyone?)
Moreover,
though the Marxist theory of ideology was claimed to be part of a scientific account
of social institutions, in practice its “hermeneutics of suspicion” tends to
subvert rather than facilitate rational discourse. Criticisms of Marxism get dismissed a priori as mere smokescreens for the
vested interests of capitalists, just as criticisms of wokeism get dismissed a priori as mere smokescreens for
racism, patriarchy, homophobia, etc. Then
there are the parallels many have noted between the mass hysteria of wokeism
(manifested in Twitter mobs, cancel culture, and the riots of 2020) and Mao’s
Cultural Revolution.
To be sure,
the postmodernist influences on wokeism are a point in favor of Gottfried’s
view that there is an important difference at least in theory between traditional Marxism and wokeism in their attitudes
toward reason and science. But the record
of actual Marxist and woke practice (which
Gottfried himself appeals to in making his case) supports the judgment that
they are less far apart on this score than Gottfried supposes.
The same
thing is true where the other differences Gottfried describes are concerned. Yes, during the Cold War, communist countries
were far more socially conservative than any wokester could tolerate. But that was in spite of Marxist theory, not because
of it. Engels, after all, famously
attacked the traditional family and the bourgeois moral order. And Marxist theory emphasized international
worker solidarity over national loyalties, even if this is not how things
worked out in practice. Even the
alliance between corporations and wokeism finds a parallel in actual Marxist practice,
in the Chinese Communist Party’s adoption of capitalist means to socialist
ends.
Then there
is the fact that woke theorists explicitly acknowledge the Marxist tradition as
among the influences on them. For
example, Critical Race Theorists acknowledge such influence, especially that of
Antonio Gramsci (even if there are, of course, also differences with
Marxism). And Gottfried himself
acknowledges the parallels between wokeism and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt
School.
These points
do not entail that wokeism is a child
of Marxism, exactly, but that does not mean it is not a relation of some other
sort – a brother or a cousin, say. And noting
family relations of those kinds can be illuminating too. Eric Voegelin famously
argued that Marxism, National Socialism, and other modern political
ideologies are best understood as variations on Gnosticism. I
have argued elsewhere that wokeness, too, is best understood as a kind of
Gnosticism. And I
have also argued that the parallels between woke ideas about race and
National Socialism are no less striking or disturbing than their parallels with
Marxism. That does not mean that wokeism just
is a kind of National Socialism, any
more than it just is a kind of Marxism.
It is its own thing, not quite the same as either of those noxious worldviews. But it is no less irrational, and potentially
just as dangerous.
Further
reading:
Countering
disinformation about Critical Race Theory
The
Gnostic heresy’s political successors
Woke
Ideology Is a Psychological Disorder
Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx
All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory