The Marxism Behind Wokeness Explained

hey what's up everyone today we're going to talk about some fairly uncontroversial stuff like wokeness and karl marx it's been fashionable for a while now to compare wokeness to a religion or to a cult in that it has orthodoxy heretics original sin and all that but that's never struck me as a critique that hits the target dead on in that it doesn't paint that clear of a picture of what makes wokeness distinct and the critique that does do it for me which you've probably guessed is the critique that wokeness fundamentally comes from the ideas of karl marx i'm far from the first person to make that argument and i think most people that talk about this stuff generally struggle to not sound like conspiracy theorists and those are usually the grounds that are used to wave away this kind of criticism but there's actually a lot of substance behind it and if you follow the academic trail all roads really do point to karl marx so i'm going to go through it more slowly and thoroughly than i normally do because i think this is all criminally misunderstood and needs to be understood if we're ever going to disentangle ourselves from this thing so yeah [Music] so i'm going to start with going over marxism not because i think you haven't heard explanations of marxism before but because i think explanations of it usually miss a crucial point and that point's also crucial to understanding wokeness and that crucial point is that marxism is an ideology made fundamentally in opposition to liberalism if that surprised you then i'm glad you're watching this marxism at its core is a critique of liberalism and presents itself as the alternative to liberalism and by liberalism i don't mean democrats in america right now i mean what we now think of as the founding principles of western civilization i'm sorry to say we're going to have to go over liberalism too because it's crucial to understanding everything else i'm going to say so to give a quick refresher on that 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 speak for yourself protest have a fair trial own property and a bunch of other stuff so quintessential liberal texts is this one the bill of rights liberalism was made as an attempt to form an ideology that represents the interests of everyone within a society they thought that as long as everyone had a certain amount of rights that were protected and a freedom to voice their concerns society would over time naturally become better and better and they knew full well this would lead to all kinds of struggles and failures and dangers and all that they said overall this is the best system and over time society will become more peaceful and more progressive 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 and the alternative that they put forward goes something like them saying freedom ends where oppression begins how do they know where oppression begins because they're pretty much obsessed with it marxists are basically bloodhounds for oppression the freedom that karl marx was concerned with was the freedom to own private property and the oppression that karl marx was concerned with was class oppression 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 and something that everyone should theoretically be capable of so in one moment you could hypothetically be an oppressor or not and in another moment i could be an oppressor or maybe even oppressed and that should scale up too like the catholic church in one moment you could say that they're an oppressor and in another moment you could say that they're not or maybe they're 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 itself in other words have a revolution and make a new society free from oppression so then you might ask how do you know what kind of fundamental change society needs in order to get rid of this oppression and they would say you need to figure out what was being allowed to occur in order for this oppression to take place and in marx's case the freedom again 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 and 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 and if they didn't if they were blind to that oppression in his terminology they would then have false consciousness 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 in a collective of like-minded class conscious people rise up and overthrow their oppressors and make a new utopian society and by the way the economic implementation of marxism where the freedom tone private property especially if it relates to the means of production is abolished is communism and the economic implementation of liberalism where you have the right to own private property and you have the freedom to exchange goods and services with others is capitalism so yeah marxism 101 marxism is an inherently unstable ideology that tends to initially sound good but then gets out of control so if a marxist says freedom ends where oppression begins you might say hey i mean that doesn't sound bad we don't want to be born into a world where people oppress us for things we can't control but then you say wait where is this oppression and they say everywhere and then you say who gets to say what is and isn't oppression and they say we do and you say can we talk about it and they say no if you disagree with them marxist organizations tend to categorize you as part of the problem and when marxist organizations come into power they tend to shortly after declare speech and action against the movement as oppression and they abolish political opposition and things tend to quickly go further downhill from there as you probably know every attempt to implement marxism so far upon a whole country has been a disaster for human rights bringing tyranny death censorship and shortages and never bringing the free utopian society that was promised and we think was responsible for the deaths of something like 100 million people in the 20th century and the people who suffer the worst are always working class people the people who marxism was promising to represent but that being said karl marx was a pretty smart guy and a lot of the critiques he made of liberalism and capitalism were pretty sharp and if you read some of them today you might even agree with them even if he's obviously not capturing the full picture i think because of that there have since marx's death always been people who were inspired by him and didn't think that the disasters of trying to implement marxism were enough of a deterrent and decided to try to adapt marx to their own political environment so the practice of doing that of taking marx and adapting him not taking him literally word for word is called neo-marxism but neo-marxists don't call themselves neo-marxists they tend to just call themselves plain marxists so i'm going to use that word too because it's shorter and there's about zero people trying to adapt marx literally in the 21st century and i don't know how to talk about neo-marxists without feeling like i'm doing this so i think wokeness is the result of a series of adaptations of marx and i think that there's a clear intellectual path we can follow to get us there and i'm actually not aware of any alternatives so if you have one let me know because i'm genuinely curious but in the meantime i'm going to lay out the path of adaptations as i understand it 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 that control they have over culture gives them a kind of dominating influence over the public and makes the public kind of complacent with whatever the agenda elites have for them so in liberal capitalist society elites within that society can use culture to essentially brainwash the public into not questioning that society and that's why these revolutions that marx predicted haven't been happening so to fix that marxists need to get influence in culture and once they gain that cultural influence they can use it to educate the public and once that happens then the public will rise up and revolution will happen so the incorporation of marxism into culture is called cultural marxism and no that's not a right-wing anti-semitic buzzword that's an actual academic word that people have been using for a long time and if you don't believe me go into google scholar and type in cultural marxism cultural marxism was then expanded upon starting the 20s and 30s by the work of a think tank called the frankfurt school which was a bunch of guys that basically set out to criticize and readapt marx after they saw that marxism had failed to overtake capitalism in western civilization and they expanded upon these ideas of cultural marxism saying that the elites who control culture in all these different ways are the oppressors and regular people who are subject to the impositions of this culture are the oppressed and the culture they're critiquing is the liberal culture so they're saying that liberal culture is basically forcing people into these boxes of how it wants them to behave and how to think so it's controlling their thoughts it's controlling their behavior and they say this all has a dehumanizing effect that makes them not be able to think outside the system and to be less alive i think the main contribution of the frankfurt school was to take these types of critiques and place them in a modern updated american framework because they're mostly working at new york at the time and mostly critiquing american culture so that gave people on the left in america access to these kinds of critiques and on top of that they wove in these radicalizing arguments for the left like this book which tried to redefine authoritarianism as something that not anyone could be capable of but something that only the right is capable of this was another hugely influential piece which argued that tolerance in the traditional sense of being tolerant of people you disagree with actually serves to protect depression happening in society and as an alternative he proposes liberating tolerance and what is that it's to be intolerant of people on the right and extra tolerant of people on the left so he's advocating against free speech for people on the right and he's saying to enforce this people can go outside the law if they need to and even use violence if they need to since he questions the effectiveness of non-violence speculating that gandhi's success with it may have been a fluke so this was basically the early intellectual version of the antifa handbook and also just a broad intellectual justification for the censorship of the right by people on the left while labeling it progressive i know it's hard to imagine that these types of academic works can really have that much of an influence on reality but you have to realize this guy was very popular at the time especially on college campuses he had a kind of superstar intellectual kind of status similar to how we think of like g jack or peterson or maybe bell hooks today so this wasn't like some kind of obscure work that nobody read but anyway i'm just gonna do one more because i'm trying not to make the section boring and i'm not totally confident that i'm succeeding at it this paper brought together the ideas of the frankfurt school under the name critical theory critical theory compares itself to traditional theory which is when people try to be objective in their examination of and interpretation of the world critical theorists on the other hand have their political goals in mind as they work through academia so they don't say what they think is objectively true they say if they're a critical theorist what they need to say in order to reach their political goals so this is planting the seeds for the death of objectivity in leftist academia and giving intellectual justification for people to work in academia as political agents so what are the goals they said academics should be aiming for to adapt marks and transform us into the right kind of society what kind of society is that a society where there is no exploitation or oppression a society where injustice is abolished the second major stage started in the 60s when this cultural marxist framework was adapted by identity politics movements at the time 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 marcusa who wrote repressive tolerance who i was just talking about so he was working at the same time that this stage was starting so the timelines are a little bit blurred together anyway 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 feminism showed up as an alternative to the more liberal first wave that came before it and 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 a opportunity to get respect and visibility for people who aren'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 um 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 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 90s with this being the landmark paper 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 pr 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 him 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 his idea of dividing society up into two parts suppressed an oppressor based on identity yada yada but in case you're not familiar this is this time period and the work that came out of it it's 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 with the occasional slip up that we actually do have an ideological frame we are trained marxists i think the name karl marx carries so much stigma in america and the blowback from those kind of name drops tends to be so severe that people have learned not to say his name but meanwhile all these writers and activists are talking about systemic oppression and how we need to achieve liberation from it how do we achieve liberation from it from triggering an awakening of critical consciousness what does it mean to be woke you've awakened to critical consciousness it's right there in the name 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 it also sets you up to understand why they frame their solutions in the way they do so if you go back to the original liberal versus marxist distinction if a liberal sees speech or i guess hear 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 but believing 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 by the way nothing i've said today is supposed to be like a rallying call to go around harassing individual woke people on the basis of them being marxist if there ever was a movement that should be criticized on the basis of the ideas themselves and not the people this is it i think to make sense of what's going on at least in this day and age we should think of wokeness as a runaway idea in that it's not really under the control of any individual involved so if you think of media outlets at least the ones that are caught up in this stuff it makes sense to why they seem to care so little about how unpopular they've become and how much public trust in them has fallen and it makes sense to why these woke films that keep coming out and keep crashing and burning keep getting made as if nothing happened i think wokeness like every marxist organization positions itself as being the will of the people and not just the will of the people but the will of the people who need to be listened to the most and i think that's a dangerous way to position a movement because if anyone criticizes it even if you're a high-ranking person from within someone else is likely to point at you and say hey you're against the people so i think that creates this natural pressure against criticism both internal and external criticism to where if you're part of the movement your only really play is to either go with the flow or try to further radicalize the movement so i don't think there's much point in trying to criticize people to the effect that you're trying to get them to de-radicalize or reform the movement because i don't really think that's possible so i think your best bet is to try to get people to leave the movement i think the best way to do that is to criticize the movement itself i'm afraid for a lot of people that are watching this i basically just did a 20 plus minute explanation for how water is wet because this is obvious stuff that they've been aware of for a long time but i think for most people this stuff is not obvious or they haven't they're not aware of it or it's controversial or there's lots of disagreement and that's more the audience i'm trying to reach here i think even most woke people wouldn't classify themselves as marxist but if everything i just said is true i think it is then yeah wokeness is a marxist movement and it's crazy how little understood that is because it's a hugely popular movement that has a ton of power so i hope this was helpful to hear either way thanks for listening till the end i'm gonna close this one out so catch you next time why are you talking about marxism people want to talk about game stuff right now game what

Channel: Ryan Chapman

Views: 3,843

Rating: 4.6747966 out of 5

Keywords: marxism wokeness, wokeness, wokeness marx, is wokeness marxist, wokeness explained, cultural marxism, history, communism, marxism explained, new discourses, james lindsay, education, politics, philosophy, marcuse, frankfurt school, critical theory, frankfurt school cultural marxism, blm marxist, political theory, cancel culture, woke ideology, is black lives matter marxist

Id: 4JX4bsrj178

Length: 24min 29sec (1469 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Thighs_and_Tiddies]

Left eventually goes auth

[u/alcedes78]

"Comparing to a religion or a cult" - I feel like that can be done with any set of ideological positions. After all, religions are ideologies too. I agree that the comparison does not paint a clear picture. It is too general of a comparison.

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[u/marginales]

This is my own video where I go into the academic roots behind wokeness (spoiler alert: it's based on adapting Marx into a cultural context). I explain how Marxism is fundamentally at odds with liberalism, and explains why movements based in Marxism are a threat to liberal values. Thought this sub might enjoy it.

[u/j4gold]

Dear Sir,

Thank you for doing an excellent job breaking all of those dynamics into nice digestible nuggets.

“Freedom isn’t free when someone says you have too much of it”