Marxism and Woke Ideology – Discourses on Minerva
Woke ideology is Marxist. We have commonly heard this retort as Woke ideology and activism has spread over the past few years. Is this assertion really true? Yes and No.
It is doubtful that many proponents of Woke ideology are thorough-going Marxists. Few have read the writings of Marx. Fewer still have read the writings of the principal Marxists of the second and third generations. And even fewer have read the leading neo-Marxists revisionists. And while it is doubtful that many proponents of Woke ideology adhere to the strict dialectical materialism of Marx, many are indoctrinated zealots of Neo-Marxism, a philosophical school that emerged within Marxism after the horrors of World War II.
What is Woke ideology? That is a question that can elicit many different responses. It suffices for us to answer this question with the practical reality of Woke activism we see around us. Woke ideology can be understood, in its broadest applicable sense, to be the movement of anti-fascism and anti-racism throughout the world, but principally the western, white, world. Its strongest footholds are in Europe and North America, as well as Australia and New Zealand, with smaller pockets of activist politics in the more developed regions of South America.
More to the point, anti-fascism and anti-racism in Woke ideology are conceived as being one and the same. The worst racism of the 20th century was exhibited by fascism; therefore, anti-racism necessarily entails anti-fascism since fascism is the most vicious and violent manifestation of racist ideology. To be anti-fascist is synonymous with being anti-racist. We can equally extend anti-capitalist activism to Woke ideology, though that is secondary to anti-fascism (and anti-racism).
So how did Woke ideology arrive at this underlying premise: that politics is a battle between the forces of anti-fascism and fascism, anti-racism and racism?
Marxism.
During the 1930s and especially the 1940s and then the 1950s, Marxism underwent an intellectual renaissance with the second and third generation Marxists who had to grabble with the failures of Marx’s prediction of scientific socialism and the proletariat revolution. Moreover, they had to come to terms with how a highly developed and capitalist country, Germany, didn’t produce the proletariat revolution but instead devolved into the horror of Nazism. There was also the need to explain why other developed capitalist countries, like Britain and America, didn’t destroy themselves in a workers’ revolution.
This crisis within Marxism led to the rise of Neo-Marxism and post-Marxism, intellectual movements within Marxism that had to change and revise the “classical” Marxist paradigm to account for the recent developments of history. The German Marxist and playwright Bertolt Brecht summarized the new Marxist understanding aptly when he wrote that fascism was “a historic phase of capitalism.”
The key revision of the neo-Marxism was in how the confrontational politics before the eventual disappearance of all states and social groups into the homogenous end of history communist utopia was no longer conceived as capitalism vs. socialism but fascism vs. socialism, since, per Brecht and other new wave Marxists, fascism was a historic phase of capitalism.
What did these new Marxists mean when they asserted fascism was a historic phase of capitalism?
To them, fascism is the universal manifestation of violent class and racial hierarchy politics at the end of capitalism when capitalism has morally degenerated itself and is on the verge of collapsing due to the weight of its own contradictions and oppressions. The capitalists and the little capitalists, the “petit bourgeoisie,” will come to form a reactionary alliance against the forces of egalitarian liberation and violently fight to defend decadent and dying capitalism against anyone and everyone deemed an enemy of the capitalist system. Fascism, as reconceived here, is the last breath of a dying capitalist system.
Furthermore, this new Marxism underscored how racial hierarchy and resentment, the pillars that undergird the ideology of racism, helped to suppress working class consciousness among white workers who fell into the propaganda of patriotism, Christianity, and the Whig Idea of (economic) Progress. Racism is what Fascism draws upon to gain its strength as the capitalist order collapses—instead of allowing workers and the middleclass to see the real culprit of their discontent, capitalism, capitalists scapegoat various minority groups to establish a false consciousness, the fascist consciousness, which leads to fascist militancy and counter-revolution against revolutionary socialism and liberationism.
Once this revision within Marxism is understood, understanding Woke ideology becomes easier. The Woke insistence that all political opponents are ultimately fascist, the Woke insistence that their movement is revolutionary and liberationist – especially toward scapegoated minority groups – and the Woke opposition to capitalism reveals its intellectual basis in the neo-Marxism of the post-WWII world.
In the here and now, Woke ideology looks to dismantle all the structures of “hierarchy and power” within the developed capitalist world in order to prevent the rise of militant fascism. The elimination of the hierarchies and power of capitalism, which will fuel the rise of a neo-fascism as capitalism collapses under the weight of its own contradictions and oppression, is the purpose of revolutionary politics. Revolutionary socialist and liberationist politics aims at dismantling all the forces and institutions which would otherwise be used to advance fascism and fascist propaganda.
What ultimately governs Woke ideology and activism is the Marxist understanding of history and politics: that history and politics, which are ultimately one and the same since man’s nature and destiny is political, is the confrontational struggle between oppressor (the capitalist turned fascist) and oppressed, and how in this historical movement the oppressing system of capitalism degenerates and collapses into fascism, thus meaning the final battle of historical politics is between reactionary capitalism and racism which is what fascism is according to the neo-Marxists, and progressive egalitarianism and liberationism which is what socialism is according to the neo-Marxists.
With this view of history and politics in mind, we can look back over the rhetoric and activism of what we have come to call “Woke” and see how it very much falls into this neo-Marxist vision. So while many Woke activists have not read Marx, no longer adhere to the classical Marxist view, and have probably not read the neo-Marxists who created the outlook of history and politics that they have become indoctrinated adherents of, they very much follow the neo-Marxist revision that has overtaken the broader Marxist mindset.
What is Woke ideology and Woke politics? Woke politics is the view of history and politics that capitalism will collapse into fascism under the weight of its own contradictions, inequalities, and oppressions, and in capitalism’s collapse the capitalist order will scapegoat various groups of people – often those who are already oppressed by capitalism – as the cause of the degeneracy and decline of capitalism. This collapse of capitalism and scapegoating of various groups manifests itself as fascism, which emerges as the final stage of capitalism. The way fascism protects capitalism is through racism, which gets white people and white adjacent communities and individuals to align with the decadent and declining capitalist system against the oppressed and scapegoated groups of people that fascism then violently seeks to exterminate as the last gasp of capitalism defending itself. The violence of reactionary capitalism, which is fascism, must be confronted by revolutionary socialist politics, the egalitarian and liberationist ideology of those who have freed themselves from capitalist-fascist propaganda and who have allied with all the oppressed and scapegoated groups within capitalist-fascist ideology. This final battle between reactionary capitalism in its fascist form and socialist liberationism is the historical epoch we are living in before the egalitarian utopia can be achieved through the eradication of capitalist-fascism.
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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