The Woke Grift, part three

A Tale of Two Lefts

I stated previously that the “social justice” or “woke” phenomenon is an urban/bourgeois liberal movement stoking populist ressentiment, rather than anything that could be defined as “leftist.” But there is a problem with this analysis, because technically there has been a “left” that has done this before.

The latest essay in Paul Kingsnorth’s excellent series, “Divining the Machine,” underscores this point. The essays in that series deal specifically with the way the “machine” has come to define our lives in modern industrial society, and he makes a compelling argument (and his writing is as always gorgeous). What interests me in particular is that he has been focusing on roughly the same time period that autonomous Marxists such as Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh explore as crucial to a shift the way humans saw themselves and the world around them.

That period, the birth of capitalism, saw also the birth of the Republic and the end of monarchies, as well as the entire Liberal Democratic order which still dominates modern nation-states. This period also saw the conception of politics into a set of opposing tendencies, specifically “right” and “left,” a dichotomy which came to define all modern politics since then.

As you may be aware, our ideas of “left” and “right” come from a peculiar seating arrangement, not some universal or Platonic ideal. Leading up to and throughout the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror, politicians who sided with the ancien regime (the monarchy and the aristocracy, along with the entire social order they upheld) sat on the right side of the political assemblies. Those pushing for the Republic and an end to the monarchy—as well as later an end to religion itself and the previous social order—sat on the left.

Yes: the completely meaningless and arbitrary location of politician's asses in France within a legislative building almost two and a half centuries ago has since come to define all modern political struggle.

This fact alone makes speaking about the “left” a bit fraught, and even more so when we look at what it was those “leftists” actually argued for. They were against the monarchy, yes, and for a wider distribution of political power, both positions which fit into our modern conception of the “left.” On the other hand, they were solidly in favor of capitalist industrial modes of production, the end of community control over public life and resources, and were themselves part of the urban elite class.

Most important of all, they weren’t really on the side of the poor. As Kingsnorth points out:

It is almost impossible now to imagine the thrilling upheaval that the early days of the French Revolution must have represented to the intellectuals and radical aristocrats who were its progenitors. Like all revolutions of its kind, notably those which followed in Russia and China, the French Revolution was not the product of ‘the people’ but of a disaffected elite, inspired in this case by the ideas of philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau, who scorned ancient hierarchies and structures and promoted instead notions of individual liberty, radical patriotism, virtuous living, intellectual inquiry and market economics.

…As with the Industrial Revolution in neighbouring England, the centre of society was violently wrenched into a new shape by an elite which claimed to be working on behalf of its people. The actual people, meanwhile, according to Schama, when they supported the Revolution, often did so not because they wanted to institute a new dawn of Reason and Virtue, but because the old regime, led by King Louis XVI, had in their view been too modern.

Two years before the Revolution broke out, for example, Louis’s regime had embraced the newfangled Enlightenment notion of ‘free trade’, sweeping away the old protections that had ensured affordable bread for the poor and fair prices for farmers. This eighteenth century equivalent of NAFTA inflamed an eighteenth century populism amongst the people.

Kingsnorth is absolutely correct, though he misses one very important detail. Louis XVI had come to embrace free trade specifically because of political pressure.

A new class of people had begun to exert intense political influence within the cities, influence derived from the wealth they had begun to accumulate through early adoption of capitalist modes of production. That wealth translated into a growing political threat to the power of the monarchy, which was already facing financial crisis because of costly foreign military ventures and mismanagement.

This new class of people continued to agitate for political and economic policies that would benefit them. At the same time, they represented an increasing concentration of tax wealth that the monarch couldn’t afford to lose.

The “Revolutionary” Urban Elite

This new class of people? They were called the bourgeoisie, which literally means “city dwellers.” They were merchants and factory owners, as well as the new intellectual elite of accountants, lawyers, and other managerial professions¹ that arose to meet the demands of colonial administration. They not only lived in the cities (as opposed to rural estates, like most of the aristocracy), but had become a significant power within those cities, rivaling and sometimes superseding the power of the crown.

As that class grew in power, they began to make demands upon the ancien regime to make it easier for them to earn money. Two barriers particularly irked them: first, the series of cultural traditions which prevented extreme profit-taking (for instance, the cultural norm of how much a loaf of bread or bottle of wine should cost); and second, all the legal norms the monarchy had put in place over the centuries concerning property ownership and trade.

Both of those barriers, by the way, were earlier compromises between the noble elite and the poor over which they ruled. The Feudal era is seen as a particularly horrible time to have been poor, yet we forget that the peasants and serfs had actually accumulated a significant amount of protections for themselves.²

The institution of the Commons, for example, was the product of class struggle between the serfs and the feudal lords. Serfs demanded access to land owned by the lords for their own survival, and when they didn’t get it they refused to work. Lords eventually gave in to this demand, and the Commons became a cultural institution for centuries that no lord who wanted to keep his head dared challenge.

Other customs were created through this same process of struggle and became part of noblesse oblige. These customs included upper price limits on food and rents (both of which continue culturally—and in some cases legally—in France today), rights to celebrate saint days rather than work (France has a lot of saint days, and the French are still known for their pious devotion to not working), and a vast and interlocking series of other customs which lords, mayors, and priests had to uphold.

Such customs were constantly getting in the way of the profit-taking of this new class. You can see this tension easiest in England, where they are more obvious because of England’s singular and more longstanding linguistic identity. ³ In my book and the course I ran for three years on it, All That Is Sacred Is Profaned, I bring up one of my favorite examples of this in England, existing as a shadow over the famous story by Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

…The refusal of Ebeneezer Scrooge, the uncaring boss, to give his worker any extra money during Christmas seems bad enough to us now. It is even worse when we consider that giving serfs and commoners cake, brandy, and time off from work during Christmas was considered part of the duty of feudal lords under noblesse oblige for centuries.

In fact, many modern Christmas traditions still echo this older feudal order. Caroling itself was part of this system: peasants and townsfolk sang raucous songs outside the homes of the wealthy lords demanding food and alcohol. If the lords did not oblige, the carolers would break in and take what they wanted. That's why Dickens' story is named A Christmas Carol: it is an ironic play upon the older social relations, and those who read it when it came out would have understood his point.

“Take what they wanted” is not quite the right way of putting this, but rather “take what they were owed.” That sense of what was due went both ways and was derived from a cultural sense of obligation, duty, and fairness, created over centuries of social struggle.

This sense also explains something peculiar that often happened during the many bread riots in France. The poor would break into the bakeries, tie up and occasionally abuse the bakers, and then took their bread. But curiously, they sometimes left money for it. That money wasn’t what the baker was charging, however, but instead the traditional and cultural cost of a loaf of bread.

This is only a strange thing to us because that old series of customs are lost to our consciousness now. And what is even harder for most of us to understand is that the entire body of those customs was upheld and sustained by the monarchy.

As David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins point out in On Kings, for all the abuses that monarchy creates, it derives from a human attempt to create a sacred order where power is limited and custom is upheld. If this seems bizarre to you, consider how the Magna Carta was not a document abolishing the monarchy, but rather one clearly outlining the monarch’s duties, obligations, and limits of power in relationship to the people he governed.

In France, the king was seen as failing in his duties, but the criticisms came from two different classes of people. The first was the peasantry or commoners, who as Kingsnorth notes were not necessarily arguing for revolution, but rather for the king to uphold the sacred order he embodied (those customs and traditions that set the price on bread, for example).

The other class was the bourgeoisie, who wanted something opposite from what the poor wanted. With their increasing economic and intellectual power, they were constantly pushing the king to abolish that older order, to eradicate the ancient customs that were limiting their ability to take profit.

Louis XVI caved, embracing “free trade” as a concession to this class. The results were disastrous for the poor, and of course disastrous to the entire ancien regime. The civil strife this caused allowed the bourgeoisie to gain even more power and blame the sudden economic turmoil from which they benefited onto the king they had pressured to cause it.

The result was the French Revolution, and then the Terror, and ultimately the full embrace of capitalist modes of production not only in France, but also all of Europe and eventually the rest of the world. And the people who demanded this transition became known as “the left” merely because of where they were sitting.

That “other” Left

Here we might conclude as many others have, that the left is the entire reason the world has gone to shit. But this ignores that something—or someone—came later to reweave those older customs and the demands of the poor into a revolutionary framework.

The only people who seem to hate Marxism more than conservatives are the urban woke elite, because it was Karl Marx who pointed out that the urban elite class of which they are a part--with their fantasies of social progress and the abolition of all tradition--are fully responsible for the birth of capitalism.

It was Karl Marx who first identified this group of elites as not just a “revolutionary” class but a usurper class. Rather than actually abolishing the instruments of state power, they simply retooled them with a utopian veneer. What they did abolish, however, were all the older customs and traditions—created through class struggle during the Feudal era—in the name of “progress.”

Consider the following excerpts from The Communist Manifesto in which Marx and Engels discuss the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation…

…Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

…The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

…It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image…

In the official Liberal Democratic narratives of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution is presented as the quintessential moment of liberation for everyone. The problem, of course, was that it was only liberation for the bourgeoisie. In the following years and decades, the same lower classes whose discontent with the king the bourgeoisie had manipulated into revolution became even more discontent.

The lower classes kept revolting, opposing the policies of their new Enlightened Republican masters even more fiercely. That rebellion, of course, was hardly limited to France. In England and Germany as well, the lower classes were continuing to fight the cultural, social, and economic changes the capitalist class was implementing. But they were not just demanding a return to the previous status quo, but rather the revival of a much older revolutionary project, one that predated the “gauche” and the Jacobins of the French Republic by several hundred centuries.

That older revolutionary project appeared sporadically throughout the entire post-Roman history of Europe in the form of heretic movements and millenarianism. Throughout the feudal period especially, mystics—almost always themselves peasants or artisans—would suddenly develop massive followings for their communalist re-interpretations of Christian society.

One such incident occurred in the Holy Roman Empire during the early part of the 16th century. Three prophets from the town of Zwickau began preaching against not just the Pope but against the nobility and landlords, arguing that true Christianity meant everyone must share and partake equally in all wealth. Their ideas, which influenced the later Anabaptist movement, became a primary banner for the German Peasant’s Revolt. That revolt was violently put down by the aristocracy (an act Martin Luther enthusiastically supported), resulting in between 100-300 thousand deaths.

Many other such movements existed throughout Europe’s pre-capitalist history. Some lasted longer than others (for instance, Catharism), some successfully slaughtered kings and nobles (the French jacquerie). Some even gave women and men complete equality and accepted homosexual relations. Many others were more short lived, a few became even more repressive in some ways than the reigning political order.

What they all shared in common was a “radical” vision of re-creating society from the ground up, rather than the top down. This tendency appeared again in the many anti-enclosure movements in England, Wales, and Ireland, and even in the early days of the American colonies.

So a kind of radicalism pre-existed the French Revolution, and that radicalism re-appeared after the Revolution had successfully installed the bourgeoisie as the new power of Europe. In the poor houses, the factories, the mills, and especially in the crowded city streets, this other radicalism arose to fight the new capitalist order and argue for something even more revolutionary than the bourgeoisie ever countenanced.

“A spectre” began to haunt the European bourgeoisie, that old ghost of common-ism that neither their soldiers nor philosophies could successfully fight. This was “that other left,” the left of communism and anarchism both. That “other left” argued not just for the end of the lords but also of landlords, the end not just of wealthy kings but also of the wealthy bourgeoisie.

Which Left?

Thus, we’re in a mess. Who is the real left? Was it the wealthy urban elites of the French Revolution, obsessed with their fantasies of “reason” and the perfect management of society? Or was it this other left, who opposed the capitalist order the bourgeoisie created?

That other left looked much more like the pre-leftist rebellions of Europe than anything the bourgeoisie argued for. This, I think, is the only other blind spot in Paul Kingsnorth’s analysis about the French Revolution and its relationship to our present situation. The lower classes who were swept up into the revolutionary fervor were not mere stooges for the bourgeoisie. They had their own history of revolt, a folk memory of the heretical millenarian rebellions and shared dreams of a classless society, a real revolution which the bourgeoisie never would have allowed.

Of course, we know what happened after Marx, who himself was merely describing the situation in Europe and how capital worked. Where his ideas took root in organic soil they grew into successful permacultural resistance. Where they were planted with the logic of industrial monoculture, the machine churned out authoritarian projects which poisoned soil and soul.

Any useful tool can also be used to bludgeon someone to death.

Applying this same logic to the intellectual currents which informed the French Revolution reveals the key to these “two lefts,” as well as the nightmare we are in now. The Russian Revolution and the French Revolution were both managed revolutions, informed by liberatory ideas which somehow never actually got around to being implemented. Both started with populist rebellions of the lower classes and a crisis of state power, but soon became channeled and led by an urban elite for whom power was their only goal.

In our present we are in the same situation. The desire for common wealth without artificial identity barriers (gender, race, etc) is the dream of the lower classes, and it is the same dream they expressed in their countless revolts across Europe both before the birth of capitalism and after.

This dream expresses itself still within class analysis, both in its Marxist but also rural “reactionary” forms.⁴ Likewise in many of the racial justice movements, whose original goals were not an equalization of the races but the more radical abolition of race itself.

But just like in the French and Russian revolutions, the bourgeoisie are yet again channeling these populist desires towards their own ends. And thus we have the “woke,” this social, cultural, political, and essentially religious movement fighting not against the capitalist class but instead against “injustice” and “oppression,” nebulous concepts as fantastical and useless to war against as “terrorism” and “drugs.”

One place we see the influence of the bourgeoisie is in woke “anti-racism.” The historical reality of race is that it is completely made up, a fantasy born from the bourgeois management ethic, Enlightenment science, and the need of the nascent capitalist class to prevent the poor from seeing each other as natural allies against them. Race was a “revolutionary” social disruption, destroying older forms of identity (village, tribal, ethnic, cultural, local, religious, familial) and replacing them with a new one.

To be racist, then, was both to believe in the existence of race and to favor one race over another, as well as prioritizing this new category of identity over all older forms. The former left’s (the Marxist left, but also older anarchist forms as well) response to racism was to focus instead on the natural affinities and common material conditions the poor have with each other, regardless of skin color. A poor person with light skin and a poor person with dark skin are both poor, both lack access to the “means of production,” are both forced to sell their labor to capitalists for wages in order to survive, and both suffer constantly from the alliance of the state with the capitalists.

The woke “left,” on the other hand—despite officially stating that race is a “social construct”—argues that race is a primary terrain of political struggle, regardless of class. Thus, a female black member of the elite (be that Kamala Harris or Kimberly Crenshaw) suffers the same “oppression” and has the same shared interests based on their skin color as a poor black person in Flint, Michigan, who has no access to clean drinking water.

The thing is, of course, that they don’t actually have shared interests. Kimberly Crenshaw is a highly paid member of the elite class: a lawyer with two university professorships. That is, she is precisely Marx’s definition of the petite bourgeoisie, the urban professional class whose interests align with the capitalist order. And of course, Kamala Harris is the vice president of the most powerful capitalist nation on the planet, second in line to the ability to obliterate the world in nuclear holocaust. She doesn’t really have anything in common with a black woman relying on welfare benefits to make sure her child doesn’t starve except for the pigmentation of her skin.

The fact that such elites have been able to convince the black poor to identity with them—rather than with their equally poor white neighbors—is the same mechanism by which the capitalists were able to convince poor white people to identify with their bosses, rather than with the people the capitalists had enslaved.

This mechanism is also how the French urban elite—the bourgeoisie—were able to convince the poor in France to rise up against the king and the aristocracy and install the bourgeoisie to power instead. It is also how the Russian urban elite were able to turn the autonomous Marxist movement of the soviets into the USSR.

Revolutionary Woke Capitalism

What we are seeing is really no different from what the bourgeoisie have always done ever since they arose as a political class. In their hands, ideas like “intersectional identity” and “systematic oppression” have become mere bludgeons by which they accumulate political and economic power off the backs of the impoverished masses they claim to be fighting for.

Nowhere can this be seen better than in the unquestioned embrace of corporate power as a tool for social change by “progressives.”⁵ Goldman Sachs, a financial investment firm which manages 1.2 trillion US dollars of wealth and played a major part in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, has been lauded repeatedly by the woke for their Critical Race Theory-informed hiring processes and capital funds. Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook are likewise seen not as enemies but reliable allies, applauded for their surveillance and deplatforming efforts against rival political movements and even presidents, while massive corporations popular with the urban elite like Starbucks and Airbnb have declared their allegiance to the cause of racial justice.

At no point, however, will you find anti-capitalist criticism of these same companies from the woke “left.” Such criticism is increasingly seen as suspect, symptoms that the person levying those criticisms might actually be a reactionary or a full-blown white supremacist. To even speak about economic exploitation, your speech must be couched in “privilege acknowledgements,” and most importantly you must never suggest class is as important as race.

The Democratic Party in the United States has become the primary site of this union between the urban elites and the capitalists. Consider the woke devotion to “The Squad”—a group of racially diverse “progressives” in the House of Representatives—despite their relentless pro-capitalist and pro-state voting records. They are not only urban elites, but politicians with the power to shape the everyday lives of the poor—yet they are simultaneously seen as “oppressed” and “bullied” underdogs.

The usual reading of all this—which was also my understanding until quite recently—was that this was all merely part of the process of capitalist recuperation. That is, the CIA making a “woke” recruitment video, or corporations claiming their solidarity with oppressed racial minorities, or politicians peppering their political speeches with the words “intersectional” and “social justice,” were all evidence of a kind of counter-revolution by the capitalist class. Seeing the way the populist winds were blowing, they decided to get on board to shift the sail towards the maintenance of their own power.

Instead, it’s now more and more obvious to me that this is just the bourgeoisie manipulating the lower classes again, channeling their disaffection and discontent with their governments’ failure to uphold certain sacred customs (jobs, health care, safety, and civil protections) towards a new revolutionary order. And if the French Revolution is any guide, that order won’t be what the poor—racial minority or otherwise—actually want.

What we will have instead is capitalism with a woke aesthetic. Increased commodification of our daily lives, increased surveillance and manipulation of our desires and expressions, and even more social disruption, but all managed according to the principles of social justice and intersectionality. We may one day be given a disabled asexual black trans women as president of the United States, but the apparatus of military power and imperial exploitation will stay the same. Children will be taught about non-binary gender and the racist history of the United States while being trained to be more efficient piece-workers for intersectional feminist tech companies. We’ll get “extremism” alerts from our benevolent corporate overlords who helpfully provide us 58 custom gender options, making sure we deviate from the norm in only capitalist-approved ways. And detained immigrants in overflowing ICE facilities will even get their chosen pronouns respected.

What we won’t get, however, is an end to capitalist exploitation, nor an end of waged labor or of monopolistic state power. We won’t get an end to climate disruption or mass extinction events. We won’t get control over our social or economic production, nor we will get affordable rents or access to land to grow our own food.

We won’t even get the “social justice” the urban elites have promised us, because it will never be possible as long as capitalism—the force of constant and unending social disruption which they uphold—remains in place.

1. In our current time, they roughly translate to the urban “professional managerial class” which do the work of making large corporations actually run, as well as big-name Silicon Valley capitalists and smaller entrepreneurs.

2. Even more so after the Black Death swept through, as Silvia Federici notes in Caliban & The Witch. Feudal lords suddenly had fewer laborers to work their estates, meaning those workers had more power to demand concessions from the lords.

3. At the time of the French revolution, no less than half of the “French” even spoke French at all (and likely only 15% were fluent), but rather one of the scores of other native languages in what is now France (including Gallo, Breton, Occitan, Basque, Auvergnat, Alsacien, Provençal, Catalan, and many more).

4. The rural poor don’t like the rich anymore than the urban poor do.

5. The terms in the United States change as frequently as the war propaganda posters in 1984. In some later essay I’ll try to work out exactly what to call all these people, but there are only so many times you can write the word “bourgeoisie” without wanting to vomit.