It's All About Power
Part three of a series on the ideas behind the woke movement
This is part 3 of a series on the ideas underlying the woke movement. If you haven’t already done so, you might find it useful to look at part 1 and part 2.
As I noted in the first post in this series, woke isn’t a label for a precisely delineated set of ideas. Rather, it is more useful to think of it as a sort of culture, animated by certain core convictions and ways of looking at the world.
Like any culture, members of it will vary in the extent to which they share and embrace the convictions in question. Some will be at the margins of the culture, fellow travelers with moderate sympathies for its themes and aims. Others will be at the center, the true patriots and champions of its distinctive vision.
Allowing for this fuzziness, it still seems useful to talk about the woke movement in general terms, describing the key ideas that impart its distinctive character.
The first such idea is this: it’s all about power.
To unpack this concept, let’s start with Marx.
Marx’s View of the World
Why Marx? The woke perspective is recognizably Marxist in its basic view of society, so understanding what Marx thought provides a useful framework for grasping a core woke idea.1
Marx held that the key to understanding society is in economics — how things are produced, owned, and distributed. There is always a struggle between classes, the haves and the have nots, with those on top trying to maintain their position and those on the bottom attempting to improve theirs. The ruling class protects its power by creating a system of laws, norms, and ideas that undergird and justify the status quo.
Think of the Middle Ages in Western Europe, for instance. In that society, nobles ruled and extracted wealth from the labor of the serfs, who owed their labor in exchange for protection and land to till.
This was a nice arrangement for the nobles, often not so nice for the peasants. That’s why culture matters - to provide the glue that holds things in place. And in that culture, authority was very important, as was the idea of the God-ordained nature of different orders of people, from clerics to kings to craftsmen to peasants. If the peasant was tempted to find his lot unfair, he was reassured by the belief that the order of things was divinely appointed.
In Marx’s analysis, then, everything is really about economic power, even if it seems to be about something else. This is even true for a culture’s moral ideals. Justice? Duty? Rights? These are cleverly-designed props to keep the powerful on top. After all, who else would think a right to property is important than those who own the property?
In a nutshell, then, Marx says this: Everything is about economic power, with those who have it oppressing those who don’t.2 This is the fundamental lens through which to understand a society.
Marx Woke Up
The woke perspective retains this basic understanding but simply shifts the emphasis. No longer is the focus on economic classes and arrangements, but on groups based on certain identities, particularly race, gender, and sexual orientation. So it is no longer the wealthy capitalist against whom we need to struggle, but the white, straight, “cisgendered” male.
Just as with Marx, the institutions and norms of our culture are seen as veiled expressions of and supports for the power of the oppressor.
As political scientist Yascha Mounk, describing the woke perspective, puts it,
“universalist values and neutral rules, like those enshrined in the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are just meant to pull the wool over people’s eyes…they actually were always designed to perpetuate forms of racist and sexist discrimination.”
This is why we see an emphasis within woke thought on the idea of systemic oppression. Oppression doesn’t operate chiefly on an individual level. Instead, its force is felt through the institutions, laws, norms, and arrangements that have formed within society for the purpose of maintaining the position of those on top.
Some targets of this perspective seem obvious. The norm of heterosexual marriage, for instance, is considered oppressive to sexual minorities. They are forced to the margins in a society that embraces it. Other targets are more surprising. Mathematics, for example, is increasingly viewed as problematic, with Western approaches to the subject viewed as tools of oppression.
Join this way of seeing society, as the arena of power struggles between competing identity groups, with the conviction that individual freedom is perhaps the most important condition for living the good life3, and you get the single-minded focus on identifying and disrupting oppressive power structures as our most pressing concern.
John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia, describes the mindset this way in his book Woke Racism:
“Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.” (p. 11)
The idea that it’s all about power, then, can be unpacked in three simple points:
The central dynamic in society is the struggle for power between groups who are oppressors and those who are oppressed.
The norms, structures, laws, and institutions of society are an expression of power and serve to keep oppressors on top.
The most important political and moral imperative is to uncover and subvert these structures, liberating the oppressed.
To see these ideas in action, consider the example of activist and author Srilatha Batliwala.
In a booklet entitled All About Power, written for CREA, a feminist international human rights organization, she writes:
“As activists, we are concerned about the injustice, inequality, marginalization, exclusion, discrimination, stigma, and violence that we see around us. But do we always recognize that power is at the heart of each of these, and at the heart of every social problem? Do we realize that injustice and inequality of every kind is actually an expression of power or a symptom of power structures?
The fact is that power lies at the heart of human relationships and of how societies are organized. So when activists try to change people’s lives, or tackle the injustices they face, we are actually trying to change power equations.“ (p. 10)
That’s point one.
Illustrating point two, she writes,
“A power structure that has a few privileged elites at the top cannot hope to survive if the large mass of people that are marginalized rise up and overthrow it…
How to ensure that this doesn’t happen? How to ensure that the people at the bottom also support – or at least accept - the power structure? Maintaining this power structure, this unequal control over people, knowledge, and material resources thus becomes a priority – especially keeping the less privileged in their place, and preventing them from challenging and overthrowing the structure. This has generally been achieved by developing a very clever and effective set of mechanisms to protect and sustain it!” (p. 73)
Those mechanisms, she goes on to explain, are ideology, social norms and rules, institutions, and the state.
Point three is not explicitly stated by Batliwala, but given her understanding of power and the dedication of her life to activism, it is arguably implicit. More broadly, it certainly seems to lay behind much of what one can observe about the woke movement.
All About Power?
Is this the best way to think about society? Let me first admit that the basic picture draws on realities I have no wish to deny. Power dynamics are a real and important thing and are an essential aspect of some social problems. One might even look at a society like that of India, especially in the past, and find the perspective sketched above a compelling lens through which to understand it.
Even in our own context, I have no objection to the idea that an ideology or institution can function as a veiled way of serving some group’s interests at the expense of another.
However, the woke perspective on society as a function of power dynamics has serious problems. I’ll explain what I understand them to be next week.
There is some debate about this. For example, Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, thinks the woke picture is sufficiently different that calling it Marxist obscures rather than illuminates. Moreover, he finds the intellectual origins of the movement within Postmodern thinkers, not Marxists. Christopher Rufo, author of America’s Cultural Revolution, counters that many of the influential figures behind the rise of this way of thinking in our culture were avowed Marxists and it makes perfect sense to see the movement in these terms.
Obviously, Marx said a lot of other things, too, but they aren’t important for present purposes.
This awaits another post, but I would argue the current Western way of thinking about life goes like this: The purpose of life is to discover one’s identity, which is a subjective, inner reality uncovered through looking within, and then live in a way consistent with it. Freedom, understood as the absence of any constraints that might stand in the way of this project, is the essential condition.