Opposing oppression doesn't make one woke

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By Michael Rectenwald 

Oh no, you say, not another article about wokeness. But wait. There’s a twist or two. A contingent of supposed anti-leftist influencers, including James Lindsay, Konstantin Kisin, Ben Shapiro, et al., has suggested that there’s also a “woke right.” This woke right, we are told, is a mirror image of the woke left. The premise of Lindsay’s argument for a woke right is that any group that avowedly (or unconsciously) opposes an oppressor is woke by definition.

How do they arrive at this notion? They take a faulty template and apply it universally. They force their enemies into a procrustean bed and proceed to turn the screws.

This template, which James Lindsay calls “the Woke operating system and sociopolitical architecture,” is what I have elsewhere referred to as the oppressor/oppressed dyad. Wokeness, I’ve argued, takes the Marxist class version of this dyad (capitalist/proletariat) and translates it into identity terms (e.g. White/Black, etc.). Lindsay calls this basic paradigm the operating system of wokeness.

Garnering flak on X for parading this idea of a woke right and attracting several high-profile detractors, Lindsay decided to prove that a woke right exists and that Christian nationalism is a particularly egregious example thereof.

He submitted a reworked version of a section of The Communist Manifesto to a fledgling Christian nationalist webzine entitled American Reformer, and the editors published and praised it. Lindsay then took this trophy and touted it as definitive proof that the woke right exists and that Christian nationalism epitomizes it.

Some Hoax History

This attempted hoax has a noble lineage, dating at least as far back as the so-called Sokal Hoax, which I described and analyzed in Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage (2018), as follows:

When NYU physicist Alan Sokal submitted a parody to Social Text, a respected Critical Theory and Cultural Studies periodical, the editors, including [Andrew] Ross and City University of New York (CUNY) professor Stanley Aronowitz, ran the piece in a special “Science Wars” spring/ summer issue in 1996. Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was the final article in the issue. It followed chapters from a star-studded cast of Science Studies scholars. Sokal demonstrated as possible exactly what Ross had dismissed as preposterous—that Science Studies [in short, a field critical of science from several leftist standpoints] might go so far as to deny the reality of gravity. Sokal managed to put the hoax past Ross himself, who had so recently denied the prospect as outrageous.

“Transgressing the Boundaries” suggested that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct and that one could understand quantum mechanics with postmodern theory. Sokal [an NYU physicist] satirically criticized his fellow scientists, because they accepted “the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole.” In quantum gravity, “the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality” and “existence itself become[s] problematized and relativized” (my emphasis). Littered with jargon and excessive citations of postmodern theorists and signaling radical relativism and extreme skepticism with every turn of phrase, Sokal’s essay mimicked Science Studies so successfully that even given the knowledge of the hoax, I wasn’t sure just where it merely strained credulity as opposed to being patently ridiculous. Sokal had seamlessly blended the patently ridiculous with the semi-plausible.

The preposterous, satirical claims in Sokal’s parody bear an unmistakable likeness to social justice statements, especially in transgender theory. The non-existence, disappearance, or insignificance of physical reality or the external world in Sokal’s piece anticipates the transgender belief that the facts of biology have nothing to do with the “reality” of gender identity.

In a subsequent issue of Lingua Franca devoted to the Science Wars, Sokal triumphantly spilled the beans. He announced that he had duped the editors of Social Text and therefore the entire field of Science Studies. In response, Ross and Columbia University professor of literature Bruce Robbins insisted that Sokal’s deception was a serious breach of ethics (as if postmodern Science Studies itself wasn’t already an ethical breach). In an attempt to save face, Ross and Robbins suggested that the editorial board had not been utterly bamboozled. They knew the article represented a bad case of mimicry. “From the first, we considered Sokal’s unsolicited article to be a little hokey,” they wrote.

Yet the title of the article crystalized the significance of the hoax. Postmodern Science Studies had transgressed the boundaries of evidence and rationality and Sokal transgressed the otherwise secure boundaries of Science Studies’ hallowed nonsense (pages 78-79).

Subsequent hoaxers have mimicked the Sokal Hoax, notably Lindsay and co-authors. They wrote 20 parodic articles using fashionable jargon and successfully placed an alarmingly significant number of these parodies in high-profile journals—in such fields as gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. One of the published pieces translated passages from Mein Kampf into feminist jargon, replete with heroines and villains.

Class Struggle

Lindsay argues that the woke right adopts the oppressor/oppressed dyad of Marxism and the woke left. Thus, not only Christian nationalists, who oppose the hegemony of “the liberal consensus,” but also those on the right who oppose Israel’s onslaught against the Palestinians are woke.

Lindsay even suggests that MAGA, as well the father of anarcho-capitalism, Murray Rothbard, are/were woke:

Lindsay is apparently unaware that libertarian class analysis preceded Marxist class analysis by decades and that Marx adopted the class analysis of the former and deformed it. He thereby made it a tool of the very ruling class that libertarian class theory identified. (Marxism vastly increases state power.) As Rothbard put it in Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Volume II):

The theory of class conflict as a key to political history did not begin with Karl Marx. It began, as we shall see further below, with two leading French libertarians inspired by J.B. Say, Charles Comte (Say's son-in-law), and Charles Dunoyer, in the 1810s after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. In contrast to the later Marxist degeneration of class theory, the Comte­-Dunoyer view held the inherent class struggle to focus on which classes managed to gain control of the state apparatus. The ruling class is whichever group has managed to seize state power; the ruled are those groups who are taxed and regulated by those in command. Class interest, then, is defined as a group's relation to the state. State rule, with its taxation and exercise of power, controls, and conferring of subsidies and privileges, is the instrument that creates conflicts between the rulers and the ruled. What we have, then, is a ‘two-class’ theory of class conflict, based on whether a group rules or is ruled by the state. On the free market, on the other hand, there is no class conflict, but a harmony of interest between all individuals in society cooperating in and through production and exchange (pages 75-76).

According to Lindsay’s formulation, their class analysis would make these early libertarians woke. It would make tax resistors woke. Anti-government movements or persons: woke. It would make anyone who opposes the powerful, or anyone the powerful oppose, woke. Timothy McVeigh was woke. The Unabomber was woke. The Tea Party was woke. Jesus Christ was/is woke.

Clearly, the oppressor/oppressed dyad is not the essential criterion for wokeness. Rather, wokeness is a totalitarian ideology wielded by putative victims to silence and destroy their enemies. The woke weaponize their supposed fragility to vanquish their foes. Far from being subordinated, under a woke regime, the supposed victims are either the oppressors or else they are backed by the real oppressors.

Wokeness is an inversion ideology that flips the totem pole of the supposed social hierarchy on its head. The woke are actually the dominant party in the oppressor/oppressed dyad. As I wrote in Springtime for Snowflakes:

Therefore, social justice ideology [or wokeness] does not foster egalitarianism. Rank is maintained, only the bottom becomes the top when the totem pole of identity is inevitably flipped upside-down and stood on its head. (Rank is established on the basis of intersectionality, a grid for determining the number of ways that a subject is subordinated based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth.) Is it any wonder then that social justice warriors compete valiantly for the status of “most subordinated” in the games derogatorily referred to as “the Oppression Olympics?” The race to the bottom is really a race to the top—although the race runs downhill (page 75).

The woke have no real victim status. They seek a reputed victim status because under a woke regime, victimhood equals power.

There is a ruling class. Class struggle is inevitable. Marx simply misidentified the classes, as does the woke left. The ruling class is not “the capitalist class,” per se, or Whites, or heterosexual men, etc., but rather the holders and beneficiaries of state power. The ruled are those on whom the state exercises its power to extort and control.

To recognize and struggle against oppression is not woke. Wokeness is an entirely disingenuous movement. The woke are those individuals, groups, and nation-states that attempt to gaslight their victims and others into thinking that they themselves are the victims while they exercise or are backed by state power.

Is there a woke right? You bet there is. But it does not consist of those persons or groups that Lindsay identifies as such.

*Special Thanks to Lori R. Price of CLG News for her help with this essay.

Dr. Michael Rectenwald is the author of twelve books. Michael was a candidate for the nomination for president in the Libertarian Party, who fell just short of winning the nomination in the last round of voting. You can support his work on Substack here: https://rectenwald.substack.com/

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