Hazony and Gottfried on wokeism and Marxism

Right-wingersoften characterize wokeism as a kind of Marxism, and left-wingers routinelydismiss the characterization as a cheap smear that reflects ignorance ofMarxist theory.  Who is right?  In his book Conservatism:A Rediscovery , Yoram Hazony argues that there is indeed asignificant link between wokeism and Marxism. Paul Gottfried respondsat Chronicles, arguingthat the similarities between the two have been overstated.  Let’s take a look at their arguments.

It isimportant to emphasize at the outset that the question isn’t whether there aresignificant differences between wokeism on the one hand, and the ideas of Marxhimself and the key Marxist thinkers who came after him on the other.  No one denies that there are.  The question is rather whether wokeism isbest thought of as a species of Marxism, or at least whether the similaritiesare significant enough that the comparison with Marxism illuminates rather thanobfuscates.

Here it is crucialto understand the relationship of both movements to liberalism.  The broad liberal tradition from Locke toMill to Rawls is individualist, emphasizing as it does the rights and libertiesof individuals, their basic equality, and their consent to being governed as aprecondition of government’s legitimacy. Hazony notes that the Marxist critique of liberalism emphasizes theinadequacy of this individualism to make sense of real political life.  For Marxism, liberalism is blind to humanbeings’ tendency to form social classes, and to the inherent tendency of oneclass to oppress another and to utilize the state for this purpose.

Wokeism,Hazony points out, takes over this central Marxist theme and simply replaceseconomic status with race, sex, sexual orientation, and the like as the keys todemarcating oppressed and oppressing classes. Where the traditional Marxist focuses on the conflict betweencapitalists and the proletariat, the wokester speaks instead of “whitesupremacy” versus people of color, “patriarchy” versus women,“heteronormativity” versus LGBTQ, and so on. But the emphasis on group identity rather than individualism carriesover from Marxism and marks a break with liberalism.  Furthermore, Hazony points out, wokeism’sdisdain for norms of rational discourse and inclination to cancel and censoropponents rather than engage their arguments differs from the liberaltradition’s idealization of free debate.

Gottfriedacknowledges that all of this is true enough as far as it goes.  He also acknowledges that there is in thehistory of Marxism a precedent for wokeism’s turn to obsessing over race andsex rather than economic class – namely the “Critical Theory” of the FrankfurtSchool, as represented especially by the work of Herbert Marcuse.  All the same, he judges that Hazony andothers overstate the connection between wokeism and Marxism, and fail toappreciate wokeism’s connection to liberalism.

For onething, in the twentieth century, liberalism began to soften its individualism,with universal suffrage and the welfare state marking a turn in a stronglyegalitarian direction.  In recentdecades, and before wokeness took center stage, mainstream liberals had alsoalready themselves become more intolerant of dissent and unwilling rationallyto engage the arguments of their critics. Though many liberals now complain of woke intolerance, the wokesterssimply walked through a door that liberals had themselves opened.

For anotherthing, Marxists of a more old-fashioned stripe had no truck with the directiontaken by the Frankfurt School, much less the obsessions of the wokesters.  Indeed, they could be as censorious of thisdirection as any social conservative. Moreover, during the Cold War, communist countries were often asconservative on matters of sex and family as Western society, or indeed evenmore so.  Nor were communist societies prone,as wokeism is, to destroying loyalty to country or to a general nihilism.  Marxism also put a premium on science andrationality, at least in theory.

Then thereis the fact that wokeism has allied itself to capitalism in a way Marxism couldnot.  Capitalists and corporations havenot simply embraced wokeism out of fear but, Gottfried argues, have found it intheir interests to embrace it.  For it isthe poor and the working class rather than the rich who suffer from theidiocies of woke public policy, and corporations can absorb the costs of suchpolicies whereas their smaller competitors are destroyed by them. 

Finally,while the narrative of oppressor and oppressed is indeed a feature of Marxism,it is also, Gottfried points out, a feature of the rhetoric of fascism andNazism.  And in all three cases, heclaims, what we have is a modern and secularized variation on the ancientbiblical distinction between the righteous and those who persecute them.  So, that a narrative of oppression is centralto wokeism does not suffice to make it in any interesting way Marxist, any morethan these other views are Marxist.

Hence, Gottfried’sview is that in order to understand wokeism, it is more illuminating to studyits origins in the breakdown of liberalism than to look for parallels withMarxism.

What shouldwe think of all this?  I am myself inclinedto what might be a middle ground position between Hazony and Gottfried, thoughperhaps the differences between us are more matters of semantics and emphasisthan anything deeper than that.  On theone hand, when writing on these matters myself I have not characterized wokeismas a species of Marxism, but rather havemerely noted that there are Marxist influences on wokeism and parallels betweenthe views.  On the other hand, whileGottfried makes some important points, I think that the influences andparallels are more important and illuminating than he seems to allow.  I think he also overstates the differences.

For example,Gottfried contrasts Marxism’s notional commitment to science and reason withthe irrationalism of wokeism.  But on theone hand, wokesters in general do not explicitlyreject science and reason any more than old-fashioned Marxism did.  On the contrary, they typically claim thatscience supports their views (about gender, for example).  To be sure, these claims are bogus and the “science”pure ideology tarted up in pseudoscientific drag.  But the same thing was true of Marxist claimsto scientific respectability.  (Lysenkoism,anyone?)

Moreover,though the Marxist theory of ideology was claimed to be part of a scientific accountof social institutions, in practice its “hermeneutics of suspicion” tends tosubvert rather than facilitate rational discourse.  Criticisms of Marxism get dismissed a priori as mere smokescreens for thevested interests of capitalists, just as criticisms of wokeism get dismissed a priori as mere smokescreens forracism, patriarchy, homophobia, etc.  Thenthere are the parallels many have noted between the mass hysteria of wokeism(manifested in Twitter mobs, cancel culture, and the riots of 2020) and Mao’sCultural Revolution.

To be sure,the postmodernist influences on wokeism are a point in favor of Gottfried’sview that there is an important difference at least in theory between traditional Marxism and wokeism in their attitudestoward reason and science.  But the recordof actual Marxist and woke practice (whichGottfried himself appeals to in making his case) supports the judgment thatthey are less far apart on this score than Gottfried supposes.

The samething is true where the other differences Gottfried describes are concerned.  Yes, during the Cold War, communist countrieswere far more socially conservative than any wokester could tolerate.  But that was in spite of Marxist theory, not becauseof it.  Engels, after all, famouslyattacked the traditional family and the bourgeois moral order.  And Marxist theory emphasized internationalworker solidarity over national loyalties, even if this is not how thingsworked out in practice.  Even thealliance between corporations and wokeism finds a parallel in actual Marxist practice,in the Chinese Communist Party’s adoption of capitalist means to socialistends. 

Then thereis the fact that woke theorists explicitly acknowledge the Marxist tradition asamong the influences on them.  Forexample, Critical Race Theorists acknowledge such influence, especially that ofAntonio Gramsci (even if there are, of course, also differences withMarxism).  And Gottfried himselfacknowledges the parallels between wokeism and the neo-Marxist FrankfurtSchool.

These pointsdo not entail that wokeism is a childof Marxism, exactly, but that does not mean it is not a relation of some othersort – a brother or a cousin, say.  And notingfamily relations of those kinds can be illuminating too.  Eric Voegelin famouslyargued that Marxism, National Socialism, and other modern politicalideologies are best understood as variations on Gnosticism.  Ihave argued elsewhere that wokeness, too, is best understood as a kind ofGnosticism.  And Ihave also argued that the parallels between woke ideas about race andNational Socialism are no less striking or disturbing than their parallels withMarxism.  That does not mean that wokeism justis a kind of National Socialism, anymore than it just is a kind of Marxism. It is its own thing, not quite the same as either of those noxious worldviews.  But it is no less irrational, and potentiallyjust as dangerous.

Furtherreading:

Howto define “wokeness”

Counteringdisinformation about Critical Race Theory

TheGnostic heresy’s political successors

WokeIdeology Is a Psychological Disorder

Socialismversus the Family

Adventuresin the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx

AllOne in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory