Wokeness as a proxy for class struggle

[downer]

I found this piece about resignation from the APA interesting. https://quillette.com/2021/12/31/my-apa-resignation/

The opening stuff about woke declarations is par for the course. We are very familiar with them.

The final paras are the heart of the article.

To be explicit, I worry that capitulation to the kind of wokeness that has permeated left-leaning institutions is akin to a kind of virus and actually tokenizes and harms historically marginalized communities, increases polarization and racial discord and obstructs data-driven progress on critical issues such as criminal justice reform and income inequality. What strikes me about all this is that these types of turmoil, whether in psychology, academia, journalism, even role-playing games are happening largely in elite, progressive spaces. Scholars such as Michael Lind and Batya Ungar-Sargon suggest that much of the current narrative on race (whether neoracist identitarianism from the Left or the xenophobia of the Right) is a proxy for class struggles, with elites in politics, business and academia using this narrative to divide working-class people of all ethnicities. One need only look at the APA's decision, communicated via exchanges on a division leaders' listserve, in June 2020, to eliminate approximately 50 lower-level staff positions, but without reducing executive-level pay. Interestingly, comparing their executive salaries from 2019 tax documents to draft 2020 tax documents provided to me by the APA treasurer, APA executives received significant raises in the same calendar year they let multiple lower-level employees go. For instance, APA CEO Arthur Evans made $821,000 in total compensation in 2020.

I tend to favor more marxist class-based approaches to inequality. As I've suggested in other posts, I tend to find that a lot of focus on multicultural curricular and implicit bias in the classroom are not particularly productive. The real changes that universities could make to support struggling students don't get made. I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that organizations embrace woke posturing as a way of avoiding more fundamental changes. I'm willing to entertain Ferguson's suggestion that it is indeed a more conservative ploy, to further increase class divisions.

[marshwiggle]

As George Orwell said:

The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred — a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred — against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs.

His use of "socialists" pretty much sums up the woke.

[Parasaurolophus]

Sounds like concern-trolling to me. The real threat--particularly in the US--is the right. Clearly. Obviously. The right is shutting down speech it doesn't like, actively promoting quack cures and cheering on hundreds of thousands of entirely preventable deaths, organizing coups, murdering protestors, etc.

It remains in effect despite several meta-analyses subsequently finding CBT has little benefit over other therapies. More controversial were practice guidelines for men and boys which drew deeply from feminist theories, dwelled on topics of patriarchy, intersectionality, and privilege, and arguably disparaged men and families from traditional backgrounds. This guideline is actively harmful to the degree it both misguides therapy in favor of an ideological worldview and likely discourages men and families from more traditional backgrounds from seeking therapy.

Interestingly, after citing evidence for his claims about violence in video games and CBT, we've got no evidence for the feminazis-are-ruining-boys claim. We do have a link to another Quillette piece characterizing the issue.

Then there's a bunch of complaining about demands for racial justice and what-about-white-lives, citing some dodgy statistics, blah blah language police (please, I come from a province that actually has language police), blah blah woke blah blah--I don't have the energy this morning.


As far as I can tell from the article, for all his talk of class being more important than race, his class-consciousness seems only to extend as far as skepticism about calls for gender and racial equality. In other words, I think he's full of shit. If you're so worried that the talk of race and gender is obscuring the real issue, then take this opportunity to speak to the real issue, instead of going on and on about bow important traditional masculinity and white lives are.

[mahagonny]

I tend to favor more marxist class-based approaches to inequality. As I've suggested in other posts, I tend to find that a lot of focus on multicultural curricular and implicit bias in the classroom are not particularly productive. The real changes that universities could make to support struggling students don't get made. I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that organizations embrace woke posturing as a way of avoiding more fundamental changes. I'm willing to entertain Ferguson's suggestion that it is indeed a more conservative ploy, to further increase class divisions.

The real reason for diversity staff and the noise from them that we welcome is not to fix problems, but to be able to say we're working hard on them.

[dismalist]

I tend to favor more marxist class-based approaches ... .

Let me put my best marxist foot forward:

Wokeness is neo-marxist. It substitutes a race war for a class war. As such, if they knew, the guy with the Chaplin mustache would love it, but Charly himself would turn over in his grave.

More specifically,  wokeness is indeed the ideology of the aristocracy of the black class, and does nothing for or indeed hurts the black underclass.

I would not go so far as to say that woke whites form part of a woke class. Rather, I see woke whites as useful idiots in the revolution.

[mahagonny]

Wokeness is what results when a society decides to give itself cooties. Here's an eyeful of the problem the democrats have, and are to the USA, and still deny:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/happy-woke-2022-democrats-with-democracy-in-the-balance-time-to-reclaim-your-brand/ar-AASnzYI

There's still far more to be done to correct economic inequality and other injustices.

Economic inequality is by-product of free market capitalism, which we have intentionally chosen.

[dismalist]

Wokeness is what results when a society decides to give itself cooties. Here's an eyeful of the problem the democrats have, and are to the USA, and still deny:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/happy-woke-2022-democrats-with-democracy-in-the-balance-time-to-reclaim-your-brand/ar-AASnzYI

There's still far more to be done to correct economic inequality and other injustices.

Economic inequality is by-product of free market capitalism, which we have intentionally chosen.

Societies don't decide anything. Societies evolve. Free-market capitalism no one ever chose. It, too evolved, and we don't have as much now as once upon a time, for better and for worse.

Inequality is near meaningless when contemplating the hardly fathomable decrease in poverty over the last 100 years or so. In 1820 roughly 90% of the world population lived on under the contemporary equivalent of $1 per day.  Nowadays, that's under 10%.

If the rich got richer along the way, so what? That is not ipso facto an injustice. System is working.

Wokism is nothing special, just the ideology of another group trying to become bosses. Our founders, later Lenin & Co, now BLM, just wanna be bosses. Economic history tells us that it matters to our individual well-being what the bosses believe!

In the US it is still difficult to institute a tyranny, even of the majority. Thus, wokism, BLM, whatever, will fail in the end, as Lenin & Co have failed.

[mahagonny]

Wokeness is what results when a society decides to give itself cooties. Here's an eyeful of the problem the democrats have, and are to the USA, and still deny:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/happy-woke-2022-democrats-with-democracy-in-the-balance-time-to-reclaim-your-brand/ar-AASnzYI

There's still far more to be done to correct economic inequality and other injustices.

Economic inequality is by-product of free market capitalism, which we have intentionally chosen.

Societies don't decide anything. Societies evolve. Free-market capitalism no one ever chose. It, too evolved, and we don't have as much now as once upon a time, for better and for worse.

Inequality is near meaningless when contemplating the hardly fathomable decrease in poverty over the last 100 years or so. In 1820 roughly 90% of the world population lived on under the contemporary equivalent of $1 per day.  Nowadays, that's under 10%.

If the rich got richer along the way, so what? That is not ipso facto an injustice. System is working.

Wokism is nothing special, just the ideology of another group trying to become bosses. Our founders, later Lenin & Co, now BLM, just wanna be bosses. Economic history tells us that it matters to our individual well-being what the bosses believe!

In the US it is still difficult to institute a tyranny, even of the majority. Thus, wokism, BLM, whatever, will fail in the end, as Lenin & Co have failed.

Thank you. But, not to quarrel with any of this, one hopes wokeness will fail before one's life and culture suffer too much because of it. Those of us who're inclined to react to current events in ways that don't blend with wokeness already feel the need to stifle ourselves. I speak for myself and at least three colleagues at college 'A.' It seems from my casual observing that the more visible the diversity staff are, the more likely this climate results.
Thus far I have had two African American students who came to class very late, routinely, and when I politely (I thought) confronted them over it (the habitual extreme tardiness, not their skin color), became indignant. This has never happened with students of any other demographic. And we are being told that things like getting the answer right in mathematics, promptness, and other positive habits are noxious 'white supremacy' impositions. When a student thinks being late should be OK and I'm trying to avoid giving low grades to people who can't afford to miss class time, we are at cross purposes.

Well, I hope this isn't a hijack, but it looked like the thread was sinking like a stone anyway.

[mahagonny]

If the "...proxy for class struggle" discussion resumes I'll get out of the way.

[downer]

Sounds like concern-trolling to me. The real threat--particularly in the US--is the right. Clearly. Obviously. The right is shutting down speech it doesn't like, actively promoting quack cures and cheering on hundreds of thousands of entirely preventable deaths, organizing coups, murdering protestors, etc.

It remains in effect despite several meta-analyses subsequently finding CBT has little benefit over other therapies. More controversial were practice guidelines for men and boys which drew deeply from feminist theories, dwelled on topics of patriarchy, intersectionality, and privilege, and arguably disparaged men and families from traditional backgrounds. This guideline is actively harmful to the degree it both misguides therapy in favor of an ideological worldview and likely discourages men and families from more traditional backgrounds from seeking therapy.

Interestingly, after citing evidence for his claims about violence in video games and CBT, we've got no evidence for the feminazis-are-ruining-boys claim. We do have a link to another Quillette piece characterizing the issue.

Then there's a bunch of complaining about demands for racial justice and what-about-white-lives, citing some dodgy statistics, blah blah language police (please, I come from a province that actually has language police), blah blah woke blah blah--I don't have the energy this morning.


As far as I can tell from the article, for all his talk of class being more important than race, his class-consciousness seems only to extend as far as skepticism about calls for gender and racial equality. In other words, I think he's full of shit. If you're so worried that the talk of race and gender is obscuring the real issue, then take this opportunity to speak to the real issue, instead of going on and on about bow important traditional masculinity and white lives are.

I don't know what the author does in other work. Maybe you are right. Or maybe he works for the socialist revolution. Academics are generally more focused on critique and analysis than solid action, especially since class action seems so difficult in the US.

That doesn't much speak to the truth of his analysis. The evidence for it is spotty. The socialism vs identity theory debate goes back a long way, at least to the 1980s, when I remember it being significant in the UK. Socialists said that the move to identity theory would undermine socialist gains. Certainly it hasn't done the Labour Party much good. But then the old Trotskyite Jeremy Corbyn also didn't get a whole lot of popular support either.

It's not surprising that universities embrace identity theory to an extent -- rarely enough to make real changes, but in their press releases. It is easier to monetize. Universities are not going to do much to undermine class divisions because they serve the middle and upper classes, and private universities want to charge as much as they can.

I have found more class consciousness in my students in the last few years. Occupy Wall Street and the the growing media focus on the power of billionaires, the 1% richest or the 0.1% richest, and Bernie and AOC have had some effect in the US.

[jimbogumbo]

J.D. Vance now believes culture wars "are easy" now (I think to 'message' )that he views them as class warfare:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/01/04/jd-vance-hillbilly-elegy-radicalization/

[nebo113]

J.D. Vance now believes culture wars "are easy" now (I think to 'message' )that he views them as class warfare:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/01/04/jd-vance-hillbilly-elegy-radicalization/

And he's working hard to be a manly man.

[mahagonny]

Sounds like concern-trolling to me. The real threat--particularly in the US--is the right. Clearly. Obviously. The right is shutting down speech it doesn't like, actively promoting quack cures and cheering on hundreds of thousands of entirely preventable deaths, organizing coups, murdering protestors, etc.

That is like saying the democratic party actively promoted and encouraged sexual exploitation of women of subordinate position in the workplace because they successfully ran Bill Clinton for POTUS. The democrats preferred Bill Clinton's policies to those of any republican and they accepted a known predator in the bargain. Out of all the millions who voted for Donald Trump, a relative small handful trespassed and rioted on government property in protest to the vote certifications. Some of them are now prosecuted for breaking the law which the republicans (and others) who voted for Trump are not trying to prevent. Except maybe a hapless few.

[Caracal]

I really have no idea what anyone means when they talk about "wokeness." The term started as slang among young people, went mainstream, and very quickly became used almost exclusively as a negative term. In the process, it has lost all clear meaning. As far as I can tell, most people who use the term have just substituted it for political correctness, another phrase that came to just mean "something I don't like."

[marshwiggle]

I really have no idea what anyone means when they talk about "wokeness." The term started as slang among young people, went mainstream, and very quickly became used almost exclusively as a negative term. In the process, it has lost all clear meaning. As far as I can tell, most people who use the term have just substituted it for political correctness, another phrase that came to just mean "something I don't like."

If that were the case then it would also be used by people on the left to complain about ideas from the right. It isn't. It refers to ideas from the left such as

• critical theory (race, gender, etc.)
• "the patriarchy"
• "-phobia"s and "-ism"s applied to any ideas or actions that are undesireable
• oppression Olympics (part of critical theory, but it is assumed regardless of whether critical theory is invoked or not)

This is by no means exhaustive, but ti gets the main points. And it is all from the "progressive" left.

(This is not to sat that things like identity politics cannot come from the right, but when they do, NO-ONE calls that "woke". They call it Fascist, white supremacist, etc.)