Where did wokeness come from?
by Patrick West, spiked:
Taboo, by Eric Kaufmann, digs at the roots of a new religion.
It is often said that woke ideology is the expression and fulfilment of ‘cultural Marxism’. Many take issue with this claim and this phrase, not least those who are familiar with Karl Marx and his writings. They reply that he concerned himself foremost with economic matters, not those related to culture. If we can detect any connection between Marxism and the project of transforming a society’s attitudes and collective psychology it can probably be found in the work of the German intellectuals in and around the so-called Frankfurt School. They conceived of awakening the proletariat from its slumber, of developing class consciousness, as a cultural problem rather than a material, political task.
Political scientist Eric Kaufmann also takes issue with the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’, preferring ‘cultural socialism’. In fact, in his new book, Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution, he takes issue with the entire idea that wokeness has its roots in Marxism or radical ideology. Sure, the broad creed that has broken into the mainstream over the past decade co-opted a lot of radical theory during its earlier development, including the thought of 1960s icons such as Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault – indeed, the latter bequeathed the theory of power being invisible and ubiquitous. But wokery, Kaufmann insists, is fundamentally a form of hyper-liberalism, an extreme egalitarianism. It is less a cast-iron ideology and more a soft religion. This explains why some of its claims can seem so bizarre – because that’s how the tenets of religions usually appear to outsiders and non-believers.
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