Woke as Maoism with American characteristics

Posted By Mahabodhi on Jul 3, 2024 | 0 comments

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…

© Mahabodhi Burton

7 minute read

This excerpt is from Chapter 4: ‘Postmodernism and the academic mindset’ and follows on from Ideas without a Ground.

James Lindsay European Parliament talk

James Lindsay, author of Cynical Theories and Race Marxism– recently gave a talk at the European Parliament on Woke Ideology, which Jake from Rattlesnake TV comments on in his YouTube video James Lindsay SHATTERS Woke Ideology: EU Parliament Speech.[1] Lindsay’s thesis is as follows: He says Woke is supposed to advance equity in Europe, and he presents the definition of equity written by a man named George Frederickson: ‘an administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal’[2] and asks if it sounds like a definition of anything else we’ve ever heard of, like socialism. ‘They’re going to administer an economy to make shares equal.’[3]

‘The only difference between equity and socialism is the type of property that they redistribute, the type of shares they’re going to redistribute, social and cultural capital in addition to economic and material capital and so this is my thesis: when we say what is woke, woke is Maoism with American characteristics. If I might borrow from Mao himself, who said to his philosophy was Marxism Leninism with Chinese characteristics, which means woke is Marxism and it’s a very provocative statement. It’s something you will certainly hear. It is not that it is different, and the professors and the philosophers will spend a large amount of time explaining to you why no, no, it’s about economics when it’s Marxism.’[4]

Lindsay claims that Woke is no different from Marxism: he says that when we study animals we classify them at different levels: the cat is at the level of genus, but within that genus are all the different species of cat: lions, tigers, leopards and so on, suggesting that:

‘If we think of Marxism as a genus of ideological thought, the classical economic Marxism is a species, radical feminism is a species in this same genus, critical race theory is a genus, or sorry, a species in this genus. Queer theory is a species in this genus, postcolonial theory that’s plaguing Europe is a species in this genus, and they have something that binds them together called intersectionality, that makes them treat it as if they are all one thing, but the logic is Marxist.’[5]

Jake provides context: ‘Karl Marx was a 19th century philosopher who wrote The Communist Manifesto and Das Capital and his work obviously inspired the revolutions led by Vladimir Lenin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot and more. …’

‘… the idea of Communism is built upon the idea that the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class are the oppressors, and the proletariat  or the working-class are the oppressed. And in order to remedy this, there needs to be an uprising, where the proletariat class seizes the means of production, they redistribute wealth and they abolish private property, because these are institutions that are only designed to benefit the bourgeoisie. So traditionally Marxism is thought to be an ideology that’s based around economics and economic revolution, and this is why the Left will often scoff at the idea of cultural Marxism, which is the idea of that instead of economics, the modern-day incarnation of Marxism targets culture, and when I say culture I mean things like race, sex and religion.’[6]

If we assume that, because Marx wrote a book called Capital, Marxism is only about seizing the means of production of economic activity, then we miss the deeper meaning. Lindsay:

‘If you think it’s about the means of production in the factory with a hammer and the means of production in the field with a sickle, then you miss what it means, because Marx explained what makes human beings special in his earlier writings. What makes human beings special is that man is a being that is incomplete and knows that he is incomplete. He is a man whose true nature has been forgotten to him, which is social being. He is a socialist at heart, who doesn’t realize it, and the reason he doesn’t realize it is because of the economic conditions operating as the means of construction or production not just of the economy but of him, but of man, of society and particularly of history.

 

‘Marx said that he had the first scientific study of history. How is history produced by man doing man’s activity, and man’s key activity was economic activity as he saw it, and so economic production doesn’t just produce the goods and services of the economy it produces Society itself. And Society in turn produces man. He called this the inversion of praxis and so when he says we must seize the means of production and he’s talking about factories and fields, he’s actually talking about how we construct who we are as human beings, so that we might complete ourselves, so that we might complete history, and at the end of history mankind will remember that he is a social being and we will have a socialist society. A perfect communism that transcends private property is how he put it. (My emphasis)

 

‘Marx was interested in controlling our understanding and controlling how man produces himself; and he thought that economics was the sphere where it took place.  And that’s why we think Marx was an economist, but Marx was never an economist, he was a theologian. He wanted to produce a religion for mankind that would supersede all of the religions of mankind and bring him back to his true social nature. This is the true fact of Marx. And what the goal was, … was to complete man.’[7]

Marx was writing at a time when the Industrial Revolution was having a destructive effect on the fabric of society, breaking up old established patterns of socialisation, and so we can view his ideas as a helpful corrective. However–as an ideology–the move that Marx makes here crosses a boundary: it turns ‘the Political’ into ‘the Religious:’ we can see how Marx’s focus here is on second- rather than first-person evidence: he asserts that man is produced not by his ethical or religious behaviour, but ‘by Society:’ ‘by the group:’ he rejects all first-person subjectivity: Religion being  ‘the opium of the masses,’ and his claim to scientific objectivity (the domain of third-person evidence: and thus a category error) essentially masks a political: and power-based, move.

Completing ourselves through Politics means relying on the good-will of others: it naively assumes we can take that for granted. This is Socialism’s Achilles heel. Man certainly did not remember he was a social being while oppressing his fellows in the Gulag: which indicates that man needs to be active in all three domains: Religious, Political and Scientific, to be best placed to complete himself; and Society.

I recently watched a video, Collective Stupidity- How Can We Avoid It?  [8] on Sabine Hossenfelder’s YouTube channel. She points out that if people follow the leads of others (out of a wish say to appear in harmony) but they fail to decide and express what they themselves think beforehand, then a weird distortion of opinion can arise. She points out how ants – like bees – can show a collective intelligence in colonies.

‘They communicate with each other by pheromones to signal where food can be found, and together they can defeat enemies much larger than themselves. But ants also show us the problems with collective intelligence. Ants try to follow each other’s trails, and if some of them accidentally draw such a trail into a circle, they will walk in circles until they die. This death spiral isn’t collective intelligence, it’s collective stupidity.

 

‘It’s what happens when a usually beneficial behaviour goes badly wrong. And the same thing can happen for humans. … Groups are only collectively intelligent when the mechanism to collect their information is carefully set up. If you crowd source information from a group and want errors to average out, then the members of the group must put forward their private information independently of the others. This means you shouldn’t know what other people have said before you put forward your own guess. … But if that’s not the case, if people know what others have said before making up their own mind, then the information can become systematically biased.’ [9]

I wonder if something similar is not going on in society today: where, in ‘following each other’s empathy trails,’ we cease to work out what we think and feel (independently of others) before moving to express our opinions; and thus, are collectively in danger of going off in the wrong direction.

I feel I have seen this happening to some degree in the Buddhist movement I belong to. Under the influence of woke ideas, issues like race and sex have come to infiltrate our discourse. As Triratna Buddhists, we have the principle of Going for Refuge (to the Three Jewels) as being primary and ‘lifestyle’ as being secondary, although not unimportant: in order to ‘go along with’ progressive norms in society, we are being presented with the option of putting race or gender in front of our Buddhism: but to do so is to corrupt our central values.

Marx’s economic analysis, Lindsay says, proposes that Capitalist society is organized around private property: that this is essentially what people organize their thoughts around; and it is the bourgeois elite class who has access to that property; they then organize society to exclude everybody else from access to it: through exploitation, alienation, estrangement, and oppression.

‘The people who have access wish to retain that, so they oppress people, and keep other people out of that special form of property. They erect a system of classism to do that. It’s enforced by an ideology called Capitalism that believes that this is the right way to engage in the world.’[10]

And Marx thought that the under-class, the proletariat, needed to be woken up to the real conditions; and the fact that they are historical agents of change: to bring them to create a revolution and transform society, so that we would have Socialism.

‘Now let’s say that we step out, that is, we step back from this species, this economic species, homo economicus, and we step back to the genus, and we look at this idea. A special form of property that segregates society into people who have, the bourgeois, and the people who do not have, who are in class conflict with an ideology that keeps this in place. And the under-class must awaken with consciousness to fight back and to seize the means of production of that form of deterministic property. And now we say, change out class, put in race and watch what we get, critical race theory falls out of the hat just like that, very simple.’[11]

The chapter goes on to explore Critical Race Theory.

[1] ‘James Lindsay SHATTERS Woke Ideology: EU Parliament Speech. Rattlesnake TV. YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aviyl1eiC1s

Permission has been sought from James Lindsay on multiple occasions to use the transcript of his European Parliament talk.

Below is the transcript of Rattlesnake TV’s video which I have consent to share:

https://archive.org/details/james-lindsay-shatters-woke-ideology_202312

[2] The definition of equity comes from the public administration literature: H. George Frederickson. (2010) Social Equity and Public Administration: Origins, Developments, and Applications. ISBN-13 978-0765624727. ‘This book is designed to be the definitive statement on social equity theory and practice in public administration. Social equity is often referred to as the “third pillar” in PA, after efficiency and economy. It concerns itself with the fairness of the organization, its management, and its delivery of public services. H. George Frederickson is widely recognized as the originator of the concept and the person most associated with its development and application.’

[3] ‘James Lindsay SHATTERS Woke Ideology: EU Parliament Speech.’

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Collective Stupidity — How Can We Avoid It? Sabine Hossenfelder. YouTube. 25 March 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25kqobiv4ng&t=540s

[9] ‘James Lindsay SHATTERS Woke Ideology: EU Parliament Speech.’

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.