How Wokeness Kills Class Politics and Empowers Empire (w/ Christian Parenti) | The Chris Hedges Report

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Oftentimes the idea of “wokeness” or “woke” ideology, whether calling it as such or acknowledging its existence, can be thought of as coinage of the right wing. Christian Parenti, professor at John Jay College, journalist and author, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to make the case that what he and many others define as “woke” is actually a weapon used to further suppress marginalized people, prevent the awareness of class politics and class struggle and further divide the working class.

“What a lot of the story comes down to,” Parenti tells Hedges, “[is] detaching class struggle from cultural struggles. And what woke is, is the continuation of all of the goals of the Enlightenment left, but in the realm of culture war, in the realm of cultural struggles, and that material conflict is increasingly elided and erased.”

Although the ideas behind “wokeness” attempt to foster a more egalitarian and inclusive society, it has been corrupted by the system itself and thus weaponized. “Woke ideology, wokeness, serves as an armory, an arsenal for the professional managerial class to draw weaponry and armor from in their increasingly Hobbesian war of all against all for posts,” Parenti remarks. For him, this is crucial to understanding the material incentive behind what wokeness stands for now as it continually appears in corporate and academic sectors. 

“There are real material stakes for people, and one way a professional manager/member of this class can get ahead is by using these tropes to advance themselves and defend themselves,” he argues.

Its prevalence in today’s society, Parenti asserts, has cynically manifested as a reaction to corporations historically having to shell out millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements for discrimination and unethical cultural practices. Nowadays, in contrast, companies are very careful and even promote this ideology to appeal to marginalized groups—and ultimately raise their bottom line. 

Enterprises like the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation, Parenti argues, may present themselves as proponents of social justice but in reality “[they] are not established to and are not seeking to overthrow, undo or transform American capitalism. They are fundamentally about legitimizing and perpetuating it,” he says. It turns out that woke ideology is only their latest tool in doing so.

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Host:

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges  

Woke ideology is pervasive in liberal institutions, especially universities, but does it further and hamper the liberal values and inclusiveness it purports to advocate? It seeks to transform society through what Christian Parenti calls the moralizing micropolitics of politicized etiquette. It is fixated on the politics of language and symbols, the sins of cultural appropriation and misnaming and calls for centering historically oppressed groups. It advocates identity politics, prioritizing race, gender, indigeneity, sexual orientation, physical disability, mental health diagnoses, immigration status and socioeconomic status over political content. Woke discourse, Parenti writes, “is imbued with a therapeutic mentality expressed in safety-obsessed incantations about harm, trauma, healing, care and doing the work. Personal struggles take precedent over political struggles. But, as Parenti argues, wokeness is deeply anti-intellectual, endowed with a moralizing that draws a distinction between the politically clean and unclean, friend and enemy, good and evil.  It demands the censoring and cancelling of the politically incorrect, along with books and ideas. Woke culture has displaced old-fashioned universalist class politics – the fundamental struggle over who produces wealth, how and for whom.  It not only divides the working class, but often serves, as Parenti points out, the interests of the ruling class. Joining me to discuss woke culture is Christian Parenti, Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York, and author of the recent article “The Cargo Cult of Woke.”

Okay, let's begin with the title, Christian. “The Cargo Cult of Woke.” Woke, where participants believe that social justice and perhaps even revolution can be achieved through the performance of safety oriented rituals of political etiquette. So let's define it. What is it?

Christian Parenti  

Well, I mean, your introduction helped kind of define it. So I see it as having basically six key features. It's this, as you said, this micro-politics of etiquette... I mean, it's not going through all six of them. Woke is the dominant subculture of the left now, and it is highly destructive. If you critique it on the left, a lot of people deny its existences. Now, there's no such thing as wokeness or woke culture, or cancel culture, there's only accountability culture. But indeed, wokeness is a real thing, and it's a real problem for the left. So in this article, which was for Catalyst, the journal associated with Jacobin magazine, independent, but sort of a cousin-sister institution, maybe. It's a review essay of several books that came out over the last year about wokeness, some of them from the left, some of them from the right, even far right. And some of them sort of center. And I go through their explanations and try and unpack them, and there's actually a second half of this, which the article in its first draft was too long, and a lot of it was left on the cutting room floor, which I'm currently turning into another article which gets kind of deeper into the history of how the left arrived at this. But the main problem with wokeness is that it effectively purports to offer total transformation of society, even revolution. But it is in reality, it comes at the expense of Universalist class politics that seek to redistribute wealth and seek to change how wealth is created, you know? And does and seeks to grapple the questions of how wealth is produced by whom and for whom, right? Those questions drop away, and frequently, woke ideology purports to want to arrive at the same place many proponents of woke will even claim to be socialists and Marxists, but I argue that in reality, it doesn't add up to class politics, and it really, more often than not, comes at the expense of good old Universalist class politics. And the great irony, one of the greatest ironies in all this, is that it is, in fact, Universalist class politics that delivers the most for whatever hyper-variegated subgroup of the most oppressed there is. That might sound snide, but I don't mean it that way. So as I say in the article, you know if Black trans people suffer disproportionately from unemployment, lack of medical care, lack of adequate housing, etc. The irony is that universal provision of those goods would disproportionately benefit the most marginalized Black trans people, for example, right? We see that logic at work in Social Security. Everyone pays into Social Security, though the rich, of course, stop paying after whatever it is like $170,000, maybe it's $150,000. That's the first 150k you're taxed on. But anyway, the point is, everybody pays into Social Security according to their ability, and then everyone receives Social Security, both millionaires and elders, who otherwise would be homeless. And who benefits disproportionately from the Social Security check? The poor, the poorest benefit disproportionately. For the millionaires and multi-millionaires, whatever social security pays them doesn't have a material impact on their life. It's not that important, but the average working class senior, that check is transformative. If they didn't have that, millions of them would be homeless. So that, I think that's an important thing to keep in mind when arguing for and considering a return to or an amplification of a Universalist class politics, that it is, in fact, very good for all of the ultra-oppressed groups who that woke ideology purports to serve more efficiently and foreground most. And I think, in other words, long story short, is that woke doesn't deliver on its own goals.

Chris Hedges  

Well, as you write in the article, it's even pernicious in the sense that it's become a bludgeon in the hands of the corporate state. You call it authoritarian and profoundly anti-intellectual. You write, others on the left privately bemoan wokeness and its safety obsession, but in public, remain quiet for fear of attack from woke online mobs. I think this is especially true in universities. At Princeton, for instance, that woke culture has banned the great Black novelist Richard Wright as a misogynist, and so they don't teach him. But let's talk about that authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism.

Christian Parenti  

Yes, I mean, I opened the article with a recent example of the anti-intellectual and authoritarian nature of woke ideology. The American and Canadian Anthropological Association at their annual meeting, canceled, unilaterally from the executive committee, canceled a previously approved panel called, "Let's Talk About Sex, Baby: The Enduring Importance of Biological Sex to Anthropology." And their explanation was that, well, this would be, this would cause harm to trans and LBGTQ members of the association. I mean, that is kind of bonkers that the Anthropological Association doesn't want to have a panel discussing, contemplating, grappling with what role should biological sex play in the discipline, right? And they didn't do it by some membership vote, it was done last minute after scheduling the panel, you know, from the top down. So, I mean, that's an example of the woke authoritarianism. But I mean, it's everywhere in that it's one of the preferred strategies these days, this cancel culture of, you know, online mobs targeting a person, going to their employers, their funders, whatever, and trying to get them fired, canceled, etc. I mean, we saw this with countless, countless people, many of whom deserved it but it also can run amok. So that's how it's authoritarian and I mean, it's anti-intellectual in that it has this intolerance, that you are not allowed to explore. If you're going to stay in the good graces of woke ideology, and those who report you, you can't ask difficult questions. You have to sort of assume the right language, etc, etc. I mean, it's also just incredibly divisive. One of the books discussed is Yascha Mounk's book, "The Identity Trap," and he has some really surprising examples of just like racially segregating five-year-old kids in some elite private school. There's a number of examples of this kind of, like, just racist, but in the name of anti-racism, segregation of young people in private schools, but it also examples of this in public schools. You just wonder, like, how could that even be legal? So in that regard, it's incredibly divisive.

Chris Hedges  

You quote Adolph Reed at the end, and he refers to this anti-racism as class politics, I think it explained that idea. And also you note that while woke politics professes concern for the downtrodden, you say it's right in content because it is compatible with economic exploitation.

Christian Parenti  

Yeah, so an example of that, that I cite in the article, is how the CIA had these online ads called "Humans of the CIA." One of them was a Latina who has this amazing, like, flawless woke riff about how...

Chris Hedges  

You got to read it. Do you have it in front of you?

Christian Parenti  

Yeah, it's pretty hilarious. Okay, here we go. Yeah, "Humans of the CIA." So this is what she says. She says, I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I'm intersectional, but my existence is not a box checking exercise. I did not sneak into CIA. My employment was not and is not the result of a flute or a slip through the cracks. I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, says this [inaudible]. But at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided, patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be, right? So this is from the CIA, right? An organization that goes around overthrowing governments, assassinating people, and we should say, has a long history of meddling in American politics and American culture in very destructive ways. So if the CIA can try and legitimize itself with wokeness, then you know, that really shows you, kind of, how flexible it is, in terms of its relationship to power. Another thing came to mind, another example, this was Jamie Raskin, a year or so back, talking about how, you know, when ramping up to the war in Ukraine, how Putin was a homophobe and transphobe and all this sort of stuff. This is like, here is woke ideology in the service of a US proxy war. So it is completely compatible with all of that and actually, it's not just compatible, I mean, it's actually pretty useful to the American empire to legitimize it, to return some sort of patina of moral legitimacy to it. And in terms of Adolph Reed, at the end there's a section where I discuss how the professional managerial class embraces wokeness. So you have from the end of World War II to the present, the kind of old, petty bourgeoisie of the small shopkeepers and independent businesses is increasingly absorbed into the corporate structure, structures of universities, corporations, this kind of stuff. And there a class emerges, a class of workers, it should be said, they're fundamentally just workers, but they're a political constituency different from blue collar workers, right? The professional managerial class that has as its task, managing some piece of a hierarchy. No sooner does this class emerge and grow by the '60s and '70s, then does it also start to experience a new kind of precarity? There is, by the end of the '70s, the first experiments in what we would now recognize as neoliberal economic restructuring. Then, beginning with the Volcker shock of 1980 and Reaganomics, there's massive deregulation, tax cuts that facilitate the upward redistribution of wealth, massive deindustrialization, an expansion of the financial sector. And with all of that, the rhythm of the economic cycles of capitalism increases. You have more frequent and more extreme booms and bubbles. And connected to that, all of that, you have an increase in the creative destruction of the capitalist economy throughout the West, but particularly in the United States. And that means that this professional managerial class, pretty much as soon as it sort of reaches its peak form, also finds itself under all sorts of stresses. The company you work for is now likely to be bought out and restructured, and so people are constantly struggling to maintain their position. You see it very clearly in academia. The number of adjuncts has increased massively in academia, while the overall number of faculty has kept up with and matched the number of students, the number of tenured professors has shrunk radically, and the amount of people working on short term contracts is increased enormously. That introduces an intense precarity and fear of falling, as Barbara Ehrenreich put it in her great book by that title. And so woke ideology, wokeness, serves as an armory, an arsenal for the professional managerial class to draw weaponry and armor from in their increasingly Hobbesian war of all against all for posts. And that is an important kind of material incentive for what drives this. There are real material stakes for people, and one way a professional manager/member of this class can get ahead is by using these tropes to advance themselves and defend themselves.

Chris Hedges  

But you say in the process, you say, it erases class politics. ...remarkable.

Christian Parenti  

Yeah, well, it erases the larger class politics of thinking about one's relationship to the means of production. Does your income... is it derived from the ownership of capital, or is your income primarily from the sale of your labor? Be that labor unskilled or highly skilled, it's still fundamentally the same kind of relationship that a worker, be they, a highly trained doctor or a ditch digger, has to the business, right? It's fundamentally different from owning the business and opening your dividend statements once a month and cashing checks. And, of course, there's a hybrid, this is a kind of ideal type, right? Many workers also receive a little bit of income, you know, through ownership of capital, through their 401K's, etc, right? And there are plenty of rich people also work and get high wages as managers and owners of businesses, etc, But that's the fundamental question at the heart of class politics and all that gets erased by wokeness, because all these other questions, which are important, I'm not saying they're not important, but all these other questions then crowd out the class question and purport to be headed in the same direction they promised that they're going to end up improving the material conditions of people, except based on these variegated subsets. And this is fundamentally the logic of Madison's Federalist 10, "divide et impera," right? And he says in Federalist 10 that he's answering elites who are concerned that the Constitution, if ratified, will empower the people too much, right? And Madison says, no, no, don't worry about that. The only danger is if all of the property lists come together and unite, that's when there's a threat, that they could use political democracy. But the good news is that there's always faction, as he calls it, in society. And you know, there's division around religion, around geography, around different types of trade, around class questions, right? The biggest source of faction, he says, is that of property between the haves and the have nots, right? But the solution to preventing the use of the democratic process for class struggle is to divide the majority, what we would call the working class, to divide what he's considering the properties, to divide them in as many subgroups as possible. And a lot of this arises naturally, and when necessary, there could be nudges and there can be the facilitation of deeper division. That's fundamentally what woke politics is about; it continues that kind of divide et impera. And what Adolph Reed means when he talks about, he actually, it should be said, does not like the term "woke" because he thinks it's a coinage of the right. I disagree, obviously, but what he says about identity politics is that it is a class politics, and it's in both those senses. It's a class politics because it obscures the fundamental relationship between the working class and the owning class, the ruling class, the capitalist class, and workers. It obscures that. But it's also a class politics because it's the politics of a class, that is the professional managerial class, sort of mid-level elites, who use these questions to find positions for themselves and accumulate power and then protect those posts. Let's explain to us what Mounk means when he uses the term "identity synthesis," this is his term for the woke mentality. And then also talk about the rise of all these new academic centers and departments that are focused on questions of identity. Well, I mean, Mounk does not, none of these authors discuss, really flesh out what they mean by woke ideology. And so, you know what, what Mounk means is the identity synthesis is kind of intersectionality, to some extent. It's this hyperfocus on the nature of one's identity and then building a politics out from that; that always returns to that. And in terms of these academic centers, you see, I mean, a lot of the books that I discussed are written by academics. And one of my critiques is that these academics perhaps overemphasize the role of academia in all of this. But there has been a rise since the '60s of these academic centers that are not departments, which is important in a number of ways. One thing that Mounk doesn't talk about is that,  traditionally, the university was self-governing, and there has been a change since World War II, where the administration has gotten bigger and bigger. This great book about this by Benjamin Ginsberg, who's a professor emeritus down at John Hopkins, and it's called "The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All Administrative University." But one of the ways that the faculty, who were, who still are, a very privileged group of workers, but much less so as our ranks, you know, as tenure is eliminated or replaced with adjunct labor. But one of the ways that the faculty are weakened is instead of channeling resources to departments, academic departments that are still self governing and often kind of little democracies, contentious, often terrible places to work. Not the one I work at, which is a great place, but these centers dispensed with all that bureaucracy you don't have like faculty voting on hires, faculty voting on curriculum changes. These centers usually are built around one charismatic individual, and they appeal to funders, and the funders have undue influence, direct influence, on the content of what is going to be researched, presented to the public, etc. And what gets funded, surprise, surprise is not working class politics, the class struggle, anti-imperialist organizing, it is this divisive politics of ever more rarefied subsets of identity. And so that's a big part of what helps push wokeness is because those are where the jobs are, and that's where the jobs are because that's where the money from elites is going, right? If you look at the website of the Ford Foundation, or the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, or any of these foundations, I mean, just look, do keyword search for social justice, right? The modern left in the United States is heavily, heavily dependent on these foundations, which are themselves the tools of the American ruling class, funded by fortunes built on the backs of coal miners and fossil fuel exploitation, etc, etc. And you know, these foundations are not established to and are not seeking to overthrow, undo or transform American capitalism, they are fundamentally about legitimizing and perpetuating it. And they have become very adept at using rhetoric that, at first glance, you hear echoes of the '60s. At first glance, I go, this is quite radical, but you realize it's not. It's totally compatible with the increasingly unequal class hierarchy that is our society here.

Chris Hedges  

No, go ahead.

Christian Parenti  

Well, another material force behind all this is the law. And the last book I discussed is actually by a really, a pretty odious right winger, Richard Hanania, who was a self-admitted former racist. But his book, I must say, makes an interesting point. He says that a lot of what, that essentially woke culture is downstream from the law, specifically 1964 Civil Rights Act, which he doesn't like and would like to get rid of. But this is the interesting part of his argument. He says it's the weakness of the law that sort of perpetuates wokeness. What's he talking about? Well, the Civil Rights Act allows for private sector enforcement in the civil courts, and it has incredibly vague parameters. For example, for some reason that I'm honestly not quite clear on, hiring quotas have always been taboo in the United States. This is, I believe, Eisenhower said, you know, when first being confronted with civil rights legislation that in the military, that there wouldn't... as long as there weren't any quotas, right? Ever since then, maybe it was Truman, ever since then, this idea has stuck. But in fact, there are quotas. There are informal quotas. And so part of how you learn what, part of what you learn in modern academia is this kind of lying and double standards. Anyway, so in the vagueness of this law, and he compares it to some extent, with what's going on in France. In France, for example, there are certain laws against discrimination. For example, French firms have to hire a certain percentage of disabled workers. This is a quota. It's set by the labor ministry, and the labor ministry enforces it, right? In the United States, we don't have anything like that, that would be illegal, but instead, what we have is a law that says you, as a worker or consumer, person, you can sue institutions if you've been discriminated against. And so this leads to, I should interrupt myself for a second. There is also enforcement of civil rights law violations by the federal government, but a lot of the enforcement is left up to the private sector. So what has happened over recent decades is that corporate America has been faced with really expensive lawsuits, you know, $100-200 million at times by basically like, I think it's like 95% of the Fortune 500 firms have had to pay out pretty significant damages for various types of racial and sexist discrimination, right? So what do they do to defend themselves? Well, they start investing in the HR infrastructure and the outsourced HR infrastructure of diversity consultants and trainers, etc, etc. And they do this in hopes that they won't have, that they can, extirpate the racist and sexist managers, or at least the mentality of managers that might have those attitudes, get them to shut their mouths and stop costing the company money. But if that fails, they they also have a defense, because they say, look, to the court they say, look, you know, we invest heavily in trying to create an inclusive workspace. So that's a huge amount of money that goes to people like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. And there's an entire industry, people make a fairly good living doing this kind of training around these woke ideas. And inculcating, also, it's not just ideas and arguments, it's a whole kind of sensibility, right? That's why it's a subculture. It's like concern with etiquette and aesthetics is absolutely important in it. And that's part of why corporate America, people are like, why does corporate America go into this stuff? To defend themselves against lawsuits because the history of 95% of the Fortune 500 companies having had to pay out large damage settlements because of their bigotry, right? So they invest heavily in this private sector, entrepreneurial infrastructure. And so then this cadre of experts, of course, see the need for their services everywhere. And as a result, you get certain kind of left ideas from social sciences extracted and distorted. For example, the idea of structural racism has become the notion of systemic racism. Structural racism is the idea that there are racist outcomes even when there isn't racist intent, that structures like housing markets, educational funding systems that are partly dependent on property values, how this can lead to, you know, unfair outcomes for different demographic groups, right? Systemic racism is the idea that racism is everywhere and in everyone, and that everything is racist. The two sound similar, structural racism, systemic racism. What's the difference? They're actually very different. So now this cadre that can siphon up money, not just from universities and foundations, but also from the private sector, is constantly pushing these ideas into sensibility, and that's a very important part of where it all comes from. Another part of where it comes from, which I left out of the piece but if I were to do it again and have more time, more space, the Obama administration plays a very important role in this. Mounk notes that the mainstream press turns woke in around 2010 and that all this predates Trump. This is not just a reaction to Trump, but that the use of terms like systemic racism increases by orders of magnitude in the New York Times, usage of it in the New York Times and The Washington Post, etc. And while he doesn't get into this, Laura Kipnis does in her book, which is not one of the books that is reviewed here, called "Unwanted Advances." And she shows how the Obama administration's interpretation of Title IX and the use of what it called "Dear Colleague" letters really kind of set off a kind of sex panic on campuses that she documents in a critical fashion. And that's a very good book, but I think that's a very important part of the kind of explosion of woke. Those Obama administration, "Dear colleague" letters about how Title IX is to be interpreted.

Chris Hedges  

Let's talk about social media...

Christian Parenti  

Lest it be misunderstood. So Hanania, he wants to get rid of civil rights law. That's a terrible idea, but what I argue in this piece is that the evidence he shows can be used for the exact opposite conclusion, which is that actually maybe what we need is a clearer, stronger civil rights law. We need to have a larger role for government and maybe, you know, a discussion about quotas, since we informally have them but we deny it. And to get rid of this whole private sector, entrepreneurial, propulsion system for woke ideology.

Chris Hedges  

I want to talk about social media and you're quoting Mounk, "the rise of a popularized version of the identity synthesis to transform the ideas of serious thinkers," he's probably thinking of [Michel] Foucault, "into simplistic memes and slogans."

Christian Parenti  

Yes, what's the question in that, like, what...

Chris Hedges  

I want to know how that works. I mean, what's happened? So you have figures like Edward Said and [Michel] Foucault and others, but it's the reductionism, that how they're very complex, often, and especially with Edward, nuanced ideas are reduced to a simplistic formula to serve woke culture.

Christian Parenti  

Well, I mean, that happens... I don't think that Mounk's account of that as particularly good. All the academics take up this case against post-structuralism. And I mean, they have a point. I mean, what happens... But the thing they leave out is the following: what happens simultaneously with the arrival of post-structuralism from Europe in the late '70s, early '80s, simultaneously, there is the legacy of McCarthyism, right? In the background of all this has to be understood the impact of the Red Scare. Taft-Hartley, so in the second half of this article, which I'm working on now, it's almost done, I get into the role of Taft-Hartley [Act]. This is very important, since Taft-Hartley doesn't just weaken organized labor in a quantitative sense, but also qualitatively undermines all sorts of practices of solidarity that help build class consciousness.

Chris Hedges  

But let me just interrupt to explain. This is the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which essentially prohibits any kind of sympathy strike. It absolutely cripples the ability of striking workers to have any kind of impact.

Christian Parenti  

Right, boycotts, sympathy strikes, these kinds of things. Communists are purged from the CIO. You've got the Smith Act, where socialist politicians are actually prosecuted. You've got McCarthyism and the Red Scare, and this continues on. You've got then the blossoming of this kind of radicalism of the new left, but pretty quickly thereafter, there is very serious red-baiting all the way through, this red-baiting within the universities. And lots of Marxists lose their jobs in university. And so what happens is that this new radical theory from Europe arrives, which is a reaction, for example, from the pen of Foucault. I mean, Foucault is a member of the French Communist Party for a while, but in the '50s, the French Communist Party was hegemonic among intellectuals, and it didn't always have good ideas, and it had a kind of bureaucratized culture, and there's plenty about that project to critique. And so Foucault is a part of a generation of left intellectuals who become increasingly anti-communist while promoting new kinds of radicalism. And so that's what Foucault is taken up for in the US and others, right? And so as a vacuum is created by the continued red-baiting and blacklisting of professors, my father was one of these people. He was Yale educated, PhD, and was treated very well, until, in the '60s, his students started radicalizing him, and he became a radical and a Marxist, and thereafter, found it very, very hard to get and keep jobs. A lot of Marxists had this experience.

Chris Hedges  

And let me just interject there that you're talking about, Michael Parenti, your father, who has also written several great books, but Ellen Schrecker has done, if you want to read about the history of how brutal these purges were, right down to the high school level. Where the FBI would show up at a high school with a list and no questions asked, no evidence, suddenly, not only did all of those teachers lose their jobs, but they couldn't get hired anywhere else. So that's a moment in America that's extremely important. And Ellen Schrecker wrote two good books, "No Ivory Tower," and "[Many Are] the Crimes," I think is the name of the other one, but she's chronicled that history, and I didn't know how pervasive that blacklisting was until I read those books.

Christian Parenti  

Yeah, so that creates an atmosphere of hostility and a vacuum, and then into it come these enticing new ideas about how, well, there's a different kind of revolution and radicalism that focuses on the micropolitics of resistance and the politics of identity, etc, etc. And part of the critique that makes this post-structuralist wave so appealing is that, Foucault's argument is that Marxism is this incredibly powerful theory, and it's essentially the height of the Enlightenment in western metaphysics. And it, nonetheless, in the hands of the Soviet state, produces, helps produce the gulags, right? So the problem is making any kind of sweeping truth claims, and so you have to push back against that and kind of shatter epistemology and knowledge into smaller pieces. And this became very useful and very appealing to academics because it was a way of being radical, a way of being subversive, and also a way of speaking to real problems. There really is racism, there really is sexism, right? Disabled people really are mistreated and shunned, right? So you can talk about real problems and be radical and propose radical transformations without confronting the class hierarchy of the society, which is where the power really lies. It's not that these other issues aren't important. They are, but it's like, in most cases, the solutions to those problems require the redistribution of resources, which only comes when the ruling class, the capitalist class, the owning class, are confronted, right? And so post-structuralism allows academics to pursue a kind of left politics that minimizes, in some cases is even openly hostile to a class analysis and to class struggle, you know? I mean, so what a lot of the story comes down to detaching class struggle from cultural struggles. And what woke is, is the continuation of all of the goals of the Enlightenment left, but in the realm of culture war, in the realm of cultural struggles, and that material conflict is increasingly elided and erased.

Chris Hedges  

And isn't it done through the twin evils of relativism and subjectivity?

Christian Parenti  

Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure I would call them evils. I mean, because, you know... But those are the methods, for sure. It's like, the question becomes subjectivity, and a kind of moral relativism is introduced, which is at first glance, it's about undermining the the bigoted ideologies that had dominated in the West, and say, well, no, it's like there's all sorts of different ways of being. And homosexuality is not a mental illness, right? And everyone deserves full civil rights, right? So there's some important work that's done by relativism. Say, well, just because your worldview is such that you think this is a sin doesn't mean you're right. You just have a point of view, and there are all sorts of other points of view. So I think there's something useful in that, but it is deployed to undermine the Marxist-socialist tradition say, well, it's reductive. It's this meta theory and it's essentialist, and we want to explode things and be more playful than that. And in terms of the subjectivity, yes, that's huge. And another part of that, kind of what goes with subjectivity is the therapeutic turn. And that's something that's in the second part of the essay, right? You have at the end of World War II, most psychologists, psychiatrists, work in institutions, but there's a massive deinstitutionalization of the profession prior to the deinstitutionalization of the patients, that happens in [inaudible] days. But there's a deinstitutionalization of psychology and post war psychology turns away from just dealing with crippling mental illness, and it starts trying to heal regular people and find pathology everywhere, and there's an explosion of this stuff, and you see it taking on a rather maligned form, unfortunately, in the new left. This is the second half of this essay, which is not published yet, but you get the rise of these like politicized therapy groups. There's one I've written about elsewhere, called "reevaluation counseling," which comes out of this guy, Harvey Jackins, who was one of the founders, actually, of Scientology. He was sued by L. Ron Hubbard for stealing a lot of Hubbard's ideas. And reevaluation counseling is still very big on the left, it's associated from 1971 onward, increasingly, with the Movement for a New Society, which is a group [that] comes out of sort of like Quaker movements. And they advocate collective living. And they're very, very involved, the Movement for a New Society is very, very involved in the anti-nuke struggles and the Central American solidarity struggles, and then the anti-globalization struggles, and then they expand. But their influence is still there in this kind of anti-communist, but very radical, quasi-anarchists, but detached from the traditional anarchist theories, and they're all also very influenced by Gene Sharp, who is one of the best known components of revolutionary non-violence. But unlike King and Gandhi, he's secular. He doesn't have a religious cosmology and morality driving him. His approach to revolutionary non-violence is very technocratic, and he actually spends the first 30 years of his career at a Defense Department funded think tank. He is not necessarily directly funded by the Defense Department, but this think tank at Harvard called the Center for International Affairs. When he arrives there, Henry Kissinger is one of the co-directors and the U.S. defense establishment uses Sharp's ideas to basically build out the color revolution toolkit, right? So those same kinds of ideas are increasingly permeating the new left. Reevaluation counseling is just one example of this stuff, these encounter groups like the radical Women's Liberation Movement in the late '60s. Again, these encounter groups and Cesar Chavez famously gets wrapped up with one of these kinds of like, basically cults, Synanon. So subjectivity becomes a battleground for the left, and from the '60s on, it's seen that individual subjectivity is in many ways, the path forward for larger social change. You could argue that it's the other way around. That people's subjectivity changes when the structures they're embedded in change. I mean, of course, it's a bit of both. Anyway, that whole psychological turn within the society and then within the New Left is a very important part of the origins of woke.

Chris Hedges  

There's a small point, but I think an important one. And you talk about the avoidance that causes left intellectuals to brag openly about not reading their political enemies is itself an expression of woke, secular religiosity. The right is haram, do not touch it, lest you, too, become unclean. So there's all sorts of figures who I don't necessarily agree with. Karl Popper, I have huge issues with Reinhold Niebuhr, and yet these intellectuals deeply have informed my own understanding of the world around me, although ideologically, I'm not always in tune with them. And I think that, essentially by bifurcating the world into those who are acceptable and those who are not, it is anti-intellectual, intellectually stunting. It stunts us.

Christian Parenti  

Yes, and anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism are deeply linked. One saw this during Covid, right? There was zero discussion of any dissent from the official line around any of these measures, lockdowns, the use of experimental vaccines. Mandates firing people who didn't want to take these vaccines. There was no discussion on the left about this. Go back and search the pages of Jacobin. Search the pages of Catalyst, in which this article appears. Search any left journalist pages. There was no critical discussion about any of that. And in fact, that facilitated what I consider to be intensely authoritarian and destructive policies, right? That's just one example of how anti-intellectualism facilitates authoritarianism. If you're not allowed to think, if you're not allowed to read certain authors and let your mind wander, you're going to end up in a very sterile, repetitive cul de sac. And I think that, frankly, I think that's where a lot of the left is at these days, that it is cutting itself off for more interesting ideas. And it's one of the ways that the right has gotten a kind of cultural upward hand on the left by, perhaps cynically, but entertaining ideas. And people are, all people, I think, are intellectually hungry. They might not seem intellectually hungry, I'm not saying that everybody wants to read esoteric theory, no. But people have ideas about stuff. People have ideas about reality. I mean, the number of people in this country who are interested in things is enormous, right? And if the left is just offering a set of kind of, "just so" stories and prefabricated pat answers, it becomes intellectually boring and people will turn away. So that's another problem with all this stuff that in shutting down and policing thought and policing speech and policing thought and turning away from the unclean authors and ideas, the left is painting itself into a corner.

Chris Hedges  

You write that millennials, which I think is true, are kind of shaking off a lot of this woke culture.

Christian Parenti  

Yeah, I definitely see that. Probably, you know, because for them, it's the establishment. It's not edgy. It's the guidance counselors and the principles that are pushing the trans club, right? Nothing against trans rights, right? I support all of that. But don't be surprised if there's a backlash when that becomes the official ideology, and everyone is supposed to just like accept the preconceived arguments of that lobby, essentially. And so yeah, you get younger people who are turning away from that. Unfortunately, sometimes, into some pretty destructive directions, but also, I think they're just getting over this stuff. And there was certainly a blossoming of a kind of socialist politics in the last 20 years, and a revivification of Marxism. I mean my generation, Gen X scholars, when we got hammered by this post-structuralist moment and the anti-communism, anti-Marxism, that was central to that stuff. And so you learned, perhaps even without knowing it, that you were not supposed to get too into those ideas, you can sort of assume their existence and utility, and you don't want to dig into that too much. I mean, I was explicitly told such things by a British socialist criminologist, Ian Taylor. Great guy, passed away, but he said he once, I think it's important you don't identify as a Marxist. And he had identified as a Marxist for the first half of his career, but he was telling me this in the mid '90s, and he was saying, it's like because you're not going to get a job if you do that, they're going to red-bait you. He didn't say that part, but that was implicit, right? But the younger folks have have thrown that off, and we got... for not being critical in relation to Covid. You know, Jacobin is a great example of this, of a kind of young millennial and Zoomers who are digging into the fundamental class questions and all of the literatures that have accumulated over the last 150 years that help the class struggle and the politics of class struggle.

Chris Hedges  

Well, because this generation's hammered, economically. They have been completely betrayed by the system.

Christian Parenti  

Yep, a friend of mine out west who was in DSA when it was blossoming, I asked him, so what's like, why are all these people into DSA? He recounted how they were in some meaning, like everybody went around and told the story of what happened to their families in the 2008 crash. And a lot of these people, like 70% of people in the room, like, yeah, you know, my parents, like, got divorced because we lost the house. Or it was just like, you know, stories of real suffering among middle class people. But there was this, like, economic trauma. I think that's actually the key rupture that helps explain the revival of socialist politics and kind of Marxist thinking. Not that that socialist politics and that Marxist thinking always has everything right, no. Not that it's just complete in of itself, no. But it is absolutely important to focus our intellectual efforts and our political organizing on the core class questions about who produces wealth, how and for whom, you know? And to think about ourselves in relationship to those material questions, because the vast majority of us make our living by selling our labor, and the way life is going to improve is if everybody comes together and struggles for what they all need in common, against the few, the increasing few, who are hoarding more and more, and in the process, in fact, creating bubbles and crashes that damage all of us and even freak out some of those owners of capital.

Chris Hedges  

Well, we haven't seen an oligarchy. I mean, you know, figures like Bezos, are they worth $180 billion? I mean, you probably have to go back to Pharaonic Egypt to find this kind of disparity and then a system that they have distorted to essentially impoverish the rest of us and funnel wealth upwards, and that makes you ask the right questions.  Yeah.  Great. That was Christian Parenti, a professor at John Jay College, and we were discussing his article "The Cargo Cult of Woke." I want to thank Diego [Ramos] and Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at Chrisedges.substack.com