The Material Roots of Wokeness

“So, the fact that what is now called wokeness is a minority persuasion, believed by a small group of elite left-liberals and pursued through the instruments of the managerial state and corporate oligarchies, should not be surprising.”

The issue of entrenched cultural progressivism is one that the political right in the United States and Great Britain obsesses over. The progressive war on everything deemed good, morally beneficial, and life-affirming is seen as a direct threat to the viability of Western civilization. This rhetorical inflation demonstrates both the very real alarm felt at something undeniably real and also a form of politics divorced from the reality of where wokeness comes from. Dark mutterings about so-called “Postmodern Neo-Marxism,” the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism, Critical Race Theory, and on and on conceal what actually causes people to believe these diffuse ideas and ideologies captured by the word “wokeness.” A dose of material analysis is in order, cutting through the echo-chamber verbiage.

Those such as James Lindsay, among others, spend hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of words to trace what they see as the precise ideological heritage of wokeness. The endless intellectualizing over wokeness’s roots is all very worthy, but it does not really lead anywhere and does not offer an answer as to why those who espouse and spread this ideology do so. It gives in to what James Davison Hunter calls the “idealist fallacy,” where ideas themselves are so strong as to move history and drive change by themselves. This ignores the role of social and institutional structures and material forces, like economic change and class interactions.

As Hunter writes, “the key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks. And the more ‘dense’ the network—that is, the more active and interactive the network—the more influential it could be. This is where the stuff of culture and cultural change is produced.” Cultural change on a deep, seismic scale is top-down, not bottom up, and “the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.”