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I'm glad that the Economist points out at the end that 'wokeness' has become a favorite of business, and the reason is pretty obvious, as a movement it's self-d

I'm glad that the Economist points out at the end that 'wokeness' has become a favorite of business, and the reason is pretty obvious, as a movement it's self-defeating because all identitarian politics eventually ends in infighting, with its subjective, choice and preference based worldview it's actually ill-equipped to move anything. It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and twitter threads but it does very little to affect material relations and power structures, so it's if anything the Left and not anyone else who should be concerned with it. It's always surprising to me that this seems to be such a Conservative topic of concern who if anything should be glad that it occupies so much mindspace.

mc32 5y ago
It's like wokesters complaining about X-fragility. One does get fed up from the constant droning on.
nradov 5y ago
Leftist movements tend to consume themselves in escalating purity spirals. https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/ https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bengold14 5y ago
  > Nor is it confined to the Left: neo-Nazi groups offer some of the clearest examples of purity spirals Seems like your own linked article says it's not just a leftist thing?
  - invalidOrTaken 5y ago
    To an extent left and right are asymmetrical---leftist groups tend to be groups organized around being leftist as their main purpose, while "rightist" groups (churches, police unions, gun enthusiasts) tend to be rightist incidentally. Neo Nazis feel like the exception that proves the rule.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      The idea that Nazis are right-wing is also kind of a modern conceit. When FDR was President the Democrats were the party of the Klan. Does that mean the New Deal is a right-wing program, or that the KKK is a left-wing organization? Or maybe politics can't be divided perfectly along a one dimensional axis and attempting to do so is folly.
      - swarnie 5y ago
        Maybe we need a new definition for these extreme groups? I've always found using left and right to describe authoritarian hellscapes to be a little off... And to be honest I've always found using left and right when viewed from an American perspective to not work either. In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal.
        AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        You can look at the political compass the Libertarians are always using. Then you learn that Stalin is a left-authoritarian and Hitler is a right-authoritarian and the lesson is that all authoritarianism is a hellscape. But even that is just a toy model. If Alice is pro-choice and anti-gun, those are in opposite quadrants. If Bob is the exact opposite, do we say that they're both in the middle, even though they disagree on everything? > In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal. The thing about the US is that the federal government is a kleptocracy, so both parties never actually do the things they say they're going to do. If you judge the Democrats by what they say, they're pretty far to the left. But then they don't do that. If you judge the Republicans by what they say, they're pretty far to the right. But then they don't do that. People who want to claim that the country is far to the right then point to what the Democrats actually do and what the Republicans say they want to do. But, for example, the US has government spending as a percentage of GDP in line with the Netherlands or Australia and not dramatically less than the UK or Germany. If you take all the law books full of regulations in the US and put them on a scale, not many countries could match them. If you go back to the political compass, it's maybe more authoritarian than some of Western Europe -- certainly more people are in prison -- but left vs. right? By what objective measure?
  - carlmr 5y ago
    Doesn't saying "but you can find this on the other side" imply that it's much more common on the side you're comparing to?
    - yifanl 5y ago
      Not really, it just implies that there's a common perception that may or may not reflect reality.
  - chakkepolja 5y ago
    Not him. But aren't neo Nazi's fringe and rarer than wokies?
    - rnd0 5y ago
      > But aren't neo Nazi's fringe and rarer than wokies? Depends on your definition. They may be rare if you only include self-identified Nazis. However, if you expand that to include members of the Far Right and general White Surpemacists then they're not only not fringe but they become as mainstream as Hannity, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon and all of the Q-anon grifters. White supremacists -as in people who believe most of the same thing as actual literal nazis, are by no means rare these days. But if you mean people traipsing around in black SS uniforms then sure yeah those guys are rare, sure.
      - hnbad 5y ago
        In online arguments I've seen people use definitions ranging all the way from "members of the National Socialist Worker's Party of 1930s and 1940s Germany" to "literally anyone talking in a loud voice" but the most practical distinction between run of the mill fascists and nazis I've seen is that nazis are fascists who also believe in the Jewish conspiracy - which describes a lot more people than most people unaware of far-right memes would probably think. Of course that leaves the question of how you define fascism, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
        Applejinx 5y ago
        I'd loosely define 'fascism' as 'rule through sheer power by the deserving, over those who don't deserve power or self-rule'. The basic concept is, not everybody deserves to rule. Some people deserve to rule, and others have to BE ruled against their wishes, forever. Maximum observed 'forever' seems to be under a decade, once the full fascism kicks in and is unavoidable. I don't believe fascism is sustainable, and what we see as 'woke' is a typical reaction to these attempts at rule. (Yes, I'm suggesting that power structures lean more towards fascism than they used to, and that this creates 'woke' as a reaction to this pressure) I'd loosely define 'Nazi' as 'fascist with specific focus on seizing power through propaganda, media, and politics, particularly with use of anything that's new media'. In the 30s and 40s, of course, this was radio. There had always been massed political rallies (though the use of epic film propaganda was also new, as there'd be no Riefenstahl without the existence of film) but there hadn't been broadcast radio. Generalized, 'Nazi' means fascism plus modern media, and I'd be comfortable focusing that down a little to specify the media's used to rally 'the people' against enemies, specifically internal enemies in an ill-defined way. Rallying people against 'woke' through coordinated use of social media is EXACTLY Nazi, in technique.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  That article goes directly from people complaining about discrimination to Mao's Great Leap Forward, but it seems like wanting to be treated with a reasonable level of dignity at work is unlike causing a major famine that kills millions of people. Politics leads to ideological thinking which generates mostly garbage.
- lemmsjid 5y ago
  Heh. If you replaced “leftist movements” with “human movements” then I’d be with you. Witness the ever developing criteria for identifying and excising “RINOs” from the Trump movement. Find any decently sized organization with humans in it, and you will find a subset of its members actively attempting to identify and excise inpure members. The fallacy you are demonstrating is the notion that such behavior is relegated to a particular other group, as though ostracizing behavior doesn’t predate the very concept of “left” vs “right”.
enkid 5y ago
Identitarian does not mean what you think it means. In fact, it's basically the exact opposite. I also have no idea what you mean when you say it has no ability to change anything. Are you talking about identity politics? Politics that specifically aim to better the position of people in certain subgroups? Because there are many political movements that have been wildly successful in doing that, women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage, the LGBTQ movement. There's a lot of politics based on group identity that has been successful.
- andreskytt 5y ago
  I don’t think these movements have been based on identity but rather the concept of lacking something. This group lacks X, thus we should seek to give them X. But X does not necessarily equal the identity. What I find heartbreaking in all this identity issue is the ever-increasing number of dimensions. Simple math shows that at about 20 or so there’s going to be about one gender identity per person or two. Which is absolutely correct as all people are unique and beautiful in their own ways. But instead of being able to freely move across the spectrum that is being a “man” or a “woman”, each person would be locked in their own tiny identity. And, as we see, crossing the identity barriers is hard for many many reasons. I can’t see this increasing happiness of people. Everyone is or should be looking for their identity for most of their lives, creating additional barriers on this journey is unlikely to be beneficial.
  - politician 5y ago
    It's a prison for the mind.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >Identitarian does not mean what you think it means. From context it should be clear that I'm talking about identarianism in the literal sense of the term (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/identitarianism https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/identitarianism), not the European right-wing political movement that confusingly shares the same label. >women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage the keyword in those movements is 'suffrage' and 'civil' not 'man' or 'woman'. The reason they were successful is because they were republican movements. Women's suffrage wasn't about women with a capital W having a sort of privileged identity, it was about the opposite, women being treated like equal citizens. Identity politics is the opposite, it is the creation of separate, distinct, protected spaces for groups of people based on some set of features. Rather than gaining access to the commons, aspiring to universal values which was the goal of desegregation in the civil rights era, women's rights and so forth, identity politics seeks to carve out virtual spaces that are only even understandable if you share said identity. The notion of the a citizen proper goes out of the window. And the gay rights movement is a good example of that shift, whereas historically it was focused on access to civil rights, nowadays you have clashes between different queer groups. Which part do we include, are TERFS reationary? Are asexuals queer? There is at least half a dozen fronts in this war already about who deserves to be part of the rainbow label.
noptd 5y ago
I agree, and I'm concerned about the divide and conquer-type of impact it's having in societal discourse. This effect seems way too convenient (and beneficial) for the ruling class, and in that respect, I'm afraid academia may be inadvertantly working against the common interest of the working classes by pushing these worldviews.
- bopbeepboop 5y ago
  The conspiracy theory is that modern “Woke” was a PSYOP to dismantle Occupy Wall St, which it was highly effective at.
- colordrops 5y ago
  You've nailed it. Analysis of social movements often doesn't take the intent of the ruling class into account nearly enough, and for good reason - part of their program is to deflect attention away from themselves and make it look organic.
  - parineum 5y ago
    > part of their program Who's they? Name names.
    - rnd0 5y ago
      He already said -the ruling class. The specific names aren't irrelevant since they change regularly...but the dynamic (divide and conquer) doesn't appear to.
      - notahacker 5y ago
        Sure, but as soon as you start naming names, it's pretty obvious that a lot of the people proposing alternative pronouns that don't really catch on or making claims about their workplace are little-known ordinary middle class people without any real power, and some of the people declaring "war on woke" own media empires and sit in parliaments. Which places a different complexion on the "divide and conquer"...
notanzaiiswear 5y ago
People are getting fired over those things, it is not just mindspace of silly people.
- Layke1123 5y ago
  As they should. People get fired for being racist. People should get fired for being homophobic.
TameAntelope 5y ago
I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to. I don't think the problem of racism and sexism (two classic "woke" topics) are "Left" problems, which is why it strikes me as odd that I don't see ideas about how to deal with them coming from everyone, beyond a straight denial they exist, or that it's actually the fault of the folks experiencing the discrimination somehow.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another. This creates a competition for local resources, including demands on police time and attention. This competition reporduces racism, in that it is very hard not to have racism when "looking out for one's own" is a racial matter. What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. The woke concern is against alleged "implicit" forms of racism which "harm" graduates jockying for position within large corporate structures. It reads a little like "what happens when the upper middle-class discover that they too may, possibly, have been discriminated against".
  - concordDance 5y ago
    > What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. A plain reading of this seems false. Wokism definitely makes demands.
    - MrsPeaches 5y ago
      material [1] demands. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
      - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
        I can immediately think of one woke policy that is considered to be a material demand: UBI, also Medicare for all and reparations for black people.
luckylion 5y ago
> It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and twitter threads but it does very little to affect material relations and power structures, so it's if anything the Left and not anyone else who should be concerned with it. Are you sure? It feels like it has a much stronger influence, at least in Western Europe.
- Jochim 5y ago
  The influence exerted is usually orthogonal to the traditional goal of improving the conditions of the working class. Instead identity politics focuses on a platform of "more POC female dictators" rather than one that actually fights to make a material difference in people's lives. It also destroys any form of class consciousness, replacing it with one based on race. The white middle class get the catharsis of flagellating themselves but the people struggling to pay rent or working two jobs are understandably defensive when you try to tell them how privileged they are.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    I agree completely. It reminds me of when German trade unions found out that their members are much more conservative than their apparatchiks and their response was "we'll teach them" and they pressed full force ahead, predictably losing 20% of their members in the past 20 years. Inflation is much higher than wage increases, rent is exploding in the cities while jobs are being migrated into the cities, but thank god we have committees for identifying more and more absurd diversions and divisions.
bitwize 5y ago
Because it's caustic and corrosive like few cultural movements are. I've always said about self-appointed woke commissars that what they really want is to eat at the cool kids' table. But they can't do that because they are often profoundly mentally ill. So what they do instead is take over the nerds' table and exploit whatever good nature they find there to turn it into their personal fiefdom. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven. (This is also why wokesters are such bloody corporatists. A corporation is a power nexus, and power is the flame to which they are the moth. It was always about power.) The thing is they have been profoundly successful! Wokeness has gone for the throat of just about every nerd hobby: first it was science fiction, then video games, then comics, and more recently open source and tabletop RPGs. TSR/WotC laughed off the right's assault on D&D during the "Dark Dungeons" era when they tried associating it with Satanism. But they sure crumpled to accusations of racism from the other side of the aisle and today you can't assign traits such as strength or aggression to fictional nonhuman races because orcs are "coded as black" or some shit. The result is that nearly everything about these hobbies is in ruins. You cannot write traditional science fiction without aligning yourself with fascists or those perceived to be fascists. The X-Men are no longer heroes, just jerks with superpowers and an axe to grind. Nerds are such soft targets, destroying what they love was easy. So yeah, they've done nothing to address class inequality or challenge existing power structures, but they have demonstrated that they can dissolve our cultural fabric with proven techniques. Do not be surprised if conservatives are concerned with this -- conservatism is about protecting and preserving a culture. Not everything is money and power to them.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > TSR/WotC laughed off the right's assault on D&D during the "Dark Dungeons" era when they tried associating it with Satanism. Well, there was a period of many years when WotC stopped printing the creature type "Demon" out of deference to that assault. (And if I recall correctly, TSR replaced the terms "devil" and "demon" with "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri". I don't know whether they had yet been bought out by WotC.)
  - cgrealy 5y ago
    And let’s be honest: The “satanic panic” had no basis in fact. The idea that role playing gamers were going to do actual magic (or even think they were doing magic) is clearly nonsense. But if you use human ethnicities as the basis for your games monsters… yeah, that’s a real problem. It doesn’t mean you have to ban D&D, but it does mean it should address those issues. Same with rock music. I don’t care if bands write about demons and wizards, but maybe try not to objectify women so much.
angelzen 5y ago
What is the long term plan here? The infighting is at an ever increased risk of leaking into real world and real violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars
mkr-hn 5y ago
>> "It's always surprising to me that this seems to be such a Conservative topic of concern who if anything should be glad that it occupies so much mindspace." I think most people who self-ID as conservative really believe what they claim to believe about wanting to work with people who have other views to make a better world where they don't have to worry so much. There are people within their own spheres who encourage their fears because they know it's a distraction. A lot of them do seem to be wising up to it, but only because the firestarters overplayed their hand. The people who once persuaded people to see this as some majority, overwhelming force did so by sounding more reasonable than the people they complained about. Once the agitators went off the deep end, I think most people are reasonable enough to see it for what it is even if the realization takes a while to propagate past the scripts people have developed in a half decade or so getting mad online about it. A similar thing happened on "my" side when people started to catch on to all the plainclothes cops in protests trying to turn them into riots.
fidesomnes 5y ago
it's because you don't have any idea how destructive purging undesirable factions from your body politic are to society as a whole. it is perfectly fine if you remain ignorant of this, the rest of us are not.
deleted 5y ago
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mc32 5y ago

It's like wokesters complaining about X-fragility. One does get fed up from the constant droning on.

nradov 5y ago

Leftist movements tend to consume themselves in escalating purity spirals. https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/ https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bengold14 5y ago
> Nor is it confined to the Left: neo-Nazi groups offer some of the clearest examples of purity spirals Seems like your own linked article says it's not just a leftist thing?
- invalidOrTaken 5y ago
  To an extent left and right are asymmetrical---leftist groups tend to be groups organized around being leftist as their main purpose, while "rightist" groups (churches, police unions, gun enthusiasts) tend to be rightist incidentally. Neo Nazis feel like the exception that proves the rule.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    The idea that Nazis are right-wing is also kind of a modern conceit. When FDR was President the Democrats were the party of the Klan. Does that mean the New Deal is a right-wing program, or that the KKK is a left-wing organization? Or maybe politics can't be divided perfectly along a one dimensional axis and attempting to do so is folly.
    - swarnie 5y ago
      Maybe we need a new definition for these extreme groups? I've always found using left and right to describe authoritarian hellscapes to be a little off... And to be honest I've always found using left and right when viewed from an American perspective to not work either. In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        You can look at the political compass the Libertarians are always using. Then you learn that Stalin is a left-authoritarian and Hitler is a right-authoritarian and the lesson is that all authoritarianism is a hellscape. But even that is just a toy model. If Alice is pro-choice and anti-gun, those are in opposite quadrants. If Bob is the exact opposite, do we say that they're both in the middle, even though they disagree on everything? > In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal. The thing about the US is that the federal government is a kleptocracy, so both parties never actually do the things they say they're going to do. If you judge the Democrats by what they say, they're pretty far to the left. But then they don't do that. If you judge the Republicans by what they say, they're pretty far to the right. But then they don't do that. People who want to claim that the country is far to the right then point to what the Democrats actually do and what the Republicans say they want to do. But, for example, the US has government spending as a percentage of GDP in line with the Netherlands or Australia and not dramatically less than the UK or Germany. If you take all the law books full of regulations in the US and put them on a scale, not many countries could match them. If you go back to the political compass, it's maybe more authoritarian than some of Western Europe -- certainly more people are in prison -- but left vs. right? By what objective measure?
- carlmr 5y ago
  Doesn't saying "but you can find this on the other side" imply that it's much more common on the side you're comparing to?
  - yifanl 5y ago
    Not really, it just implies that there's a common perception that may or may not reflect reality.
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  Not him. But aren't neo Nazi's fringe and rarer than wokies?
  - rnd0 5y ago
    > But aren't neo Nazi's fringe and rarer than wokies? Depends on your definition. They may be rare if you only include self-identified Nazis. However, if you expand that to include members of the Far Right and general White Surpemacists then they're not only not fringe but they become as mainstream as Hannity, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon and all of the Q-anon grifters. White supremacists -as in people who believe most of the same thing as actual literal nazis, are by no means rare these days. But if you mean people traipsing around in black SS uniforms then sure yeah those guys are rare, sure.
    - hnbad 5y ago
      In online arguments I've seen people use definitions ranging all the way from "members of the National Socialist Worker's Party of 1930s and 1940s Germany" to "literally anyone talking in a loud voice" but the most practical distinction between run of the mill fascists and nazis I've seen is that nazis are fascists who also believe in the Jewish conspiracy - which describes a lot more people than most people unaware of far-right memes would probably think. Of course that leaves the question of how you define fascism, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
      - Applejinx 5y ago
        I'd loosely define 'fascism' as 'rule through sheer power by the deserving, over those who don't deserve power or self-rule'. The basic concept is, not everybody deserves to rule. Some people deserve to rule, and others have to BE ruled against their wishes, forever. Maximum observed 'forever' seems to be under a decade, once the full fascism kicks in and is unavoidable. I don't believe fascism is sustainable, and what we see as 'woke' is a typical reaction to these attempts at rule. (Yes, I'm suggesting that power structures lean more towards fascism than they used to, and that this creates 'woke' as a reaction to this pressure) I'd loosely define 'Nazi' as 'fascist with specific focus on seizing power through propaganda, media, and politics, particularly with use of anything that's new media'. In the 30s and 40s, of course, this was radio. There had always been massed political rallies (though the use of epic film propaganda was also new, as there'd be no Riefenstahl without the existence of film) but there hadn't been broadcast radio. Generalized, 'Nazi' means fascism plus modern media, and I'd be comfortable focusing that down a little to specify the media's used to rally 'the people' against enemies, specifically internal enemies in an ill-defined way. Rallying people against 'woke' through coordinated use of social media is EXACTLY Nazi, in technique.
m0llusk 5y ago
That article goes directly from people complaining about discrimination to Mao's Great Leap Forward, but it seems like wanting to be treated with a reasonable level of dignity at work is unlike causing a major famine that kills millions of people. Politics leads to ideological thinking which generates mostly garbage.
lemmsjid 5y ago
Heh. If you replaced “leftist movements” with “human movements” then I’d be with you. Witness the ever developing criteria for identifying and excising “RINOs” from the Trump movement. Find any decently sized organization with humans in it, and you will find a subset of its members actively attempting to identify and excise inpure members. The fallacy you are demonstrating is the notion that such behavior is relegated to a particular other group, as though ostracizing behavior doesn’t predate the very concept of “left” vs “right”.

enkid 5y ago

Identitarian does not mean what you think it means. In fact, it's basically the exact opposite. I also have no idea what you mean when you say it has no ability to change anything. Are you talking about identity politics? Politics that specifically aim to better the position of people in certain subgroups? Because there are many political movements that have been wildly successful in doing that, women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage, the LGBTQ movement. There's a lot of politics based on group identity that has been successful.

andreskytt 5y ago
I don’t think these movements have been based on identity but rather the concept of lacking something. This group lacks X, thus we should seek to give them X. But X does not necessarily equal the identity. What I find heartbreaking in all this identity issue is the ever-increasing number of dimensions. Simple math shows that at about 20 or so there’s going to be about one gender identity per person or two. Which is absolutely correct as all people are unique and beautiful in their own ways. But instead of being able to freely move across the spectrum that is being a “man” or a “woman”, each person would be locked in their own tiny identity. And, as we see, crossing the identity barriers is hard for many many reasons. I can’t see this increasing happiness of people. Everyone is or should be looking for their identity for most of their lives, creating additional barriers on this journey is unlikely to be beneficial.
- politician 5y ago
  It's a prison for the mind.
Barrin92 5y ago
>Identitarian does not mean what you think it means. From context it should be clear that I'm talking about identarianism in the literal sense of the term (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/identitarianism https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/identitarianism), not the European right-wing political movement that confusingly shares the same label. >women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage the keyword in those movements is 'suffrage' and 'civil' not 'man' or 'woman'. The reason they were successful is because they were republican movements. Women's suffrage wasn't about women with a capital W having a sort of privileged identity, it was about the opposite, women being treated like equal citizens. Identity politics is the opposite, it is the creation of separate, distinct, protected spaces for groups of people based on some set of features. Rather than gaining access to the commons, aspiring to universal values which was the goal of desegregation in the civil rights era, women's rights and so forth, identity politics seeks to carve out virtual spaces that are only even understandable if you share said identity. The notion of the a citizen proper goes out of the window. And the gay rights movement is a good example of that shift, whereas historically it was focused on access to civil rights, nowadays you have clashes between different queer groups. Which part do we include, are TERFS reationary? Are asexuals queer? There is at least half a dozen fronts in this war already about who deserves to be part of the rainbow label.

noptd 5y ago

I agree, and I'm concerned about the divide and conquer-type of impact it's having in societal discourse. This effect seems way too convenient (and beneficial) for the ruling class, and in that respect, I'm afraid academia may be inadvertantly working against the common interest of the working classes by pushing these worldviews.

bopbeepboop 5y ago
The conspiracy theory is that modern “Woke” was a PSYOP to dismantle Occupy Wall St, which it was highly effective at.
colordrops 5y ago
You've nailed it. Analysis of social movements often doesn't take the intent of the ruling class into account nearly enough, and for good reason - part of their program is to deflect attention away from themselves and make it look organic.
- parineum 5y ago
  > part of their program Who's they? Name names.
  - rnd0 5y ago
    He already said -the ruling class. The specific names aren't irrelevant since they change regularly...but the dynamic (divide and conquer) doesn't appear to.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      Sure, but as soon as you start naming names, it's pretty obvious that a lot of the people proposing alternative pronouns that don't really catch on or making claims about their workplace are little-known ordinary middle class people without any real power, and some of the people declaring "war on woke" own media empires and sit in parliaments. Which places a different complexion on the "divide and conquer"...

notanzaiiswear 5y ago

People are getting fired over those things, it is not just mindspace of silly people.

Layke1123 5y ago
As they should. People get fired for being racist. People should get fired for being homophobic.

TameAntelope 5y ago

I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to. I don't think the problem of racism and sexism (two classic "woke" topics) are "Left" problems, which is why it strikes me as odd that I don't see ideas about how to deal with them coming from everyone, beyond a straight denial they exist, or that it's actually the fault of the folks experiencing the discrimination somehow.

mjburgess 5y ago
The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another. This creates a competition for local resources, including demands on police time and attention. This competition reporduces racism, in that it is very hard not to have racism when "looking out for one's own" is a racial matter. What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. The woke concern is against alleged "implicit" forms of racism which "harm" graduates jockying for position within large corporate structures. It reads a little like "what happens when the upper middle-class discover that they too may, possibly, have been discriminated against".
- concordDance 5y ago
  > What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. A plain reading of this seems false. Wokism definitely makes demands.
  - MrsPeaches 5y ago
    material [1] demands. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
    - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
      I can immediately think of one woke policy that is considered to be a material demand: UBI, also Medicare for all and reparations for black people.

luckylion 5y ago

> It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and twitter threads but it does very little to affect material relations and power structures, so it's if anything the Left and not anyone else who should be concerned with it. Are you sure? It feels like it has a much stronger influence, at least in Western Europe.

Jochim 5y ago
The influence exerted is usually orthogonal to the traditional goal of improving the conditions of the working class. Instead identity politics focuses on a platform of "more POC female dictators" rather than one that actually fights to make a material difference in people's lives. It also destroys any form of class consciousness, replacing it with one based on race. The white middle class get the catharsis of flagellating themselves but the people struggling to pay rent or working two jobs are understandably defensive when you try to tell them how privileged they are.
- luckylion 5y ago
  I agree completely. It reminds me of when German trade unions found out that their members are much more conservative than their apparatchiks and their response was "we'll teach them" and they pressed full force ahead, predictably losing 20% of their members in the past 20 years. Inflation is much higher than wage increases, rent is exploding in the cities while jobs are being migrated into the cities, but thank god we have committees for identifying more and more absurd diversions and divisions.

bitwize 5y ago

Because it's caustic and corrosive like few cultural movements are. I've always said about self-appointed woke commissars that what they really want is to eat at the cool kids' table. But they can't do that because they are often profoundly mentally ill. So what they do instead is take over the nerds' table and exploit whatever good nature they find there to turn it into their personal fiefdom. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven. (This is also why wokesters are such bloody corporatists. A corporation is a power nexus, and power is the flame to which they are the moth. It was always about power.) The thing is they have been profoundly successful! Wokeness has gone for the throat of just about every nerd hobby: first it was science fiction, then video games, then comics, and more recently open source and tabletop RPGs. TSR/WotC laughed off the right's assault on D&D during the "Dark Dungeons" era when they tried associating it with Satanism. But they sure crumpled to accusations of racism from the other side of the aisle and today you can't assign traits such as strength or aggression to fictional nonhuman races because orcs are "coded as black" or some shit. The result is that nearly everything about these hobbies is in ruins. You cannot write traditional science fiction without aligning yourself with fascists or those perceived to be fascists. The X-Men are no longer heroes, just jerks with superpowers and an axe to grind. Nerds are such soft targets, destroying what they love was easy. So yeah, they've done nothing to address class inequality or challenge existing power structures, but they have demonstrated that they can dissolve our cultural fabric with proven techniques. Do not be surprised if conservatives are concerned with this -- conservatism is about protecting and preserving a culture. Not everything is money and power to them.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> TSR/WotC laughed off the right's assault on D&D during the "Dark Dungeons" era when they tried associating it with Satanism. Well, there was a period of many years when WotC stopped printing the creature type "Demon" out of deference to that assault. (And if I recall correctly, TSR replaced the terms "devil" and "demon" with "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri". I don't know whether they had yet been bought out by WotC.)
- cgrealy 5y ago
  And let’s be honest: The “satanic panic” had no basis in fact. The idea that role playing gamers were going to do actual magic (or even think they were doing magic) is clearly nonsense. But if you use human ethnicities as the basis for your games monsters… yeah, that’s a real problem. It doesn’t mean you have to ban D&D, but it does mean it should address those issues. Same with rock music. I don’t care if bands write about demons and wizards, but maybe try not to objectify women so much.

angelzen 5y ago

What is the long term plan here? The infighting is at an ever increased risk of leaking into real world and real violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars

mkr-hn 5y ago

>> "It's always surprising to me that this seems to be such a Conservative topic of concern who if anything should be glad that it occupies so much mindspace." I think most people who self-ID as conservative really believe what they claim to believe about wanting to work with people who have other views to make a better world where they don't have to worry so much. There are people within their own spheres who encourage their fears because they know it's a distraction. A lot of them do seem to be wising up to it, but only because the firestarters overplayed their hand. The people who once persuaded people to see this as some majority, overwhelming force did so by sounding more reasonable than the people they complained about. Once the agitators went off the deep end, I think most people are reasonable enough to see it for what it is even if the realization takes a while to propagate past the scripts people have developed in a half decade or so getting mad online about it. A similar thing happened on "my" side when people started to catch on to all the plainclothes cops in protests trying to turn them into riots.

fidesomnes 5y ago

it's because you don't have any idea how destructive purging undesirable factions from your body politic are to society as a whole. it is perfectly fine if you remain ignorant of this, the rest of us are not.

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