Wokeism, the highest stage of capitalism

Following the success of the Barbie movie, the toy company Mattel presented 'Weird Barbie'. In the film, 'Weird Barbie' is a Barbie doll which somebody "played too hard" with. She therefore no longer fits within the Utopian pink landscape of Barbie world. She is instead a discarded individual who lives reclusively, hidden in the seamy side of society.

Weird Barbie embodies the fusion of capitalism and cultural Marxism: she proves that 'woke' and neoliberalism have merged. A character which embodies the frayed edges of disposable society and highlights the dark side of the capitalist production process now becomes a capitalist consumer product herself.

The term “woke” is supposed to indicate that a person is aware of social and political issues, such as inequality and injustice, and that the person actively engages to fight this inequality. The problem is that this engagement has no end point. Woke wants to discover social injustice in every interaction. This obsessive, distrustful and morally outraged attitude has the effect that every (perceived) inequality fuels feelings of resentment. Even if we are made more equal in absolute terms, envy and intolerance increase because small differences are magnified to fuel activism. A closer analysis of this ideology, as with Weird Barbie, reveals that woke is a marketing strategy that fuels the very thing it claims to fight.

Thin identity

The paradox is that 'woke' pretends to oppose the inequality caused by the capitalist mode of production but at the same time it is the ultimate embodiment and continuation of this mode of production. Now that the individual has been torn away from all close ties (the economic guild has been dissolved, church and country mean little, even family ties are broken), new identities are proffered and commercialised to fill this void. Social engagement is sucked out of the community and transferred to identitarian consumer products. A person with a 'thin' identity craves consumable symbols to express his own identity.

The impact of woke is catastrophic at the level of individual identity. Woke incites identification with outsiders as a 'way out’, in the face of personal shortcomings and social failure. Instead of exploring what you can improve on a personal level, people are tempted to sink into thinking, "I can't get a job because I have a different skin colour, a different sexual orientation" etc. Woke conditions people to experience the world through the lens of minority characteristics: thus, every setback in life becomes evidence of discrimination. This victim identity is then encouraged in subcultures that are highly marketed.

Another example are the 'digital nomads'. They often present themselves as progressive cosmopolitans exploring the world and fleeing the corporate bureaucracies of the Western world. They often end up in countries where life is considerably cheaper, which in turn creates new forms of economic dependency. In South Africa, many global citizens and globetrotters sit in well-secured laptop cafés. Despite all progressive intentions, this accomplishes new forms of segregation.

Transsexuality is another example. Someone might think that gender reassignment offers a way out of bourgeois normative frameworks which define what 'masculinity' and 'femininity' are. The practice, however, is that transsexualism makes the body into an object of profit for the medical and pharmaceutical industries. That industry has a financial interest in creating confusion and uncertainty about innate gender identities. Alongside this is the phenomenon of drag queens, which is a commercialisation of femininity. Those tons of glitter, make-up and dramatic outfits are a hyper-commercial exaggeration of female identity.

This last example makes it clear that 'woke' not only carries with it a commercialisation of identities, but also makes them into caricatures. This alienates people from their deeper inner selves by making them caricature themselves as well.

Symbiosis

Masking personal shortcomings by linking them to woke ideology enters into a perverse symbiosis with the capitalism against which woke supposedly rebels. The media bombard us 24/7 with YouTubers who live in villas because they got rich by, say, putting on nail polish in front of a webcam. The unspoken question which constantly arises with this momentum bombardment is, "If she can get rich with silly videos, why don't you live in a villa? You went to university, didn't you?"

Here we see a perverse symbiosis of capitalist achievement drive and identitarian insecurities. Capitalism awakens existential doubt on the meritocratic plane, which then takes on a tribal expression through woke identity politics. This, again, is what capitalism provides. Enter the Che Guevara shirts, Palestinian scarves, rainbow flags and rainbow wristbands.

By calling themselves 'woke' and branding themselves as fighting for social justice and equality, companies hope to lure more customers and improve their image. This is called 'woke-washing'. Companies and brands like to profile themselves as woke to flaunt their commitment to social issues such as social justice and equality. This ranges from supporting certain charities to offering products that are said to be 'sustainable' or 'ethical'.

Hopefully, the flip side of this approach is now clear. For it is a paradox that the woke movement - which supposedly emerged to fight against the excesses of capitalism and other forms of oppression - is simultaneously used as a marketing trend to maximise profits and promote consumption. Naming the problematic aspects of this trend, it suggests that woke is indeed the height of capitalism, as woke contributes to the commercialisation of social justice.

Distrust of noble motives

This is so bad partly because it creates an atmosphere of scepticism that affects even those entrepreneurs who want to take social responsibility out of sincerity and stewardship. Woke-washing' turns morality into a commercial product. This gives intrinsically motivated morality the final push towards dying a quiet death.

These reflections take us back to something which I already discussed in my book, The West and Identity (2015), namely that the postmodern insistence on 'unmasking' and 'deconstructing' defensible authorities - an insistence which is in turn linked to the marketing of social responsibility - leads to the undermining of what is most formative for a personality of integrity: our pursuit of the Good, the Beautiful and the True. When these noble motives are constantly approached with scepticism, the anti-hero becomes the highest achievement.

This explains the popularity of a provocative hothead like Donald Trump. If you rip apart all the classic virtues and any references to laudable role models, because they would only be talking points justifying social inequality and status differences, any character virtue that can temper unbridled greed disappears. Then, charismatic fraudster Jordan Belfort and psychopathic investment banker Patrick Bateman become the highest profile personalities.

Of course, the greed of a company like Mattel is nothing new - greed also existed in the time of Plato, Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza. They mitigated greed by praising frugality and warning against hubris. Adam Smith - the main thinker of capitalism - also appointed excellence and ethics as social conditions. Today, the problem is that this classical education, which once curbed capitalism within ethical limits, has been broken down by postmodernism: that education is said to be part of an aristocratic white male history which imposes authoritarian norms on us.

With this formative embedding gone, only quantities remain to measure the value of products: clicks, shares, sales, likes and votes. Borderless capitalism has thus been promoted by cultural Marxist deconstructionism: neoliberalism and cultural Marxism reinforce each other.

Media under the spell of identity politics.

The debate is becoming concentrated on identity issues, and this suits the media: after all, it makes less and less sense to report on global economic developments and related institutions such as the European Central Bank. Not only are these complex and therefore boring, but politicians have lost their influence on them. We are ageing, paying through the nose for healthcare and immigration, and pumping less gas to offset those expenditures. The days when politicians had a leading role as drivers of major investments are gone. When it comes to identity issues, however, the appearance of influence is still alive and well, because those issues touch personal lives so closely. Think, for instance, of how the construction of mosques affects the streetscape.

People like George Soros cleverly address this, subsidising a mediatised culture industry dedicated to stoking identity debates. For example, who paid for the campaign of the marginal action group, Kick Out Black Pete?

Multinationals & globalisation

On top of that, multinationals like to sell generic products, detached from national identities and local colourings. Being exchangeable in any country means maximum economies of scale and profitable promotional campaigns. Erasing, ignoring and exceeding identitarian embeddings is therefore economically beneficial.

The globalisation of the economy means that economic linkages are international. These transcend the nation-state - that is, national identity becomes an obstacle and national democratic control becomes toothless and irrelevant.

Cosmopolitans benefit from this: they are highly mobile, speak their languages and can navigate well within a borderless world - they are the 'anywheres'. The 'somewheres', however, are still strongly attached to nationality and local connections: they are home-loving because they depend on social cohesion. In the current situation, cosmopolitans continue to promote identity politics. The field of interests around the government and the largest companies, has coalesced into one organic (political) ecosystem that perfectly senses whether or not a participant is 'rowing in the right direction'.

The dominance of woke - the fact that identitarian issues dominate political discourse and outstrip socio-economic issues - amounts to a power shift towards 'winners of globalisation'. Woke-identitarian issues are mainly metropolitan issues: this means there is less attention to the problems of voters in small villages and rural areas, who feel undervalued and overshadowed. This should also worry leftists, but they remain asleep. After all, they are hypnotised by the leftist mainstream media with the 'danger' of Wilders, Trump, Farage and Le Pen.

Unbreakable stalemate

This stalemate cannot be broken from within. Anyone within the mainstream media who wants to break open this discussion will be ideologically blackballed by the rest of the left-wing sect and immediately lose his or her position: see what happened to J.K. Rowling. The way out lies in misery: things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. A harsh, increasingly raw polarisation must at some point create a new playing field. Exactly how this will happen cannot be foreseen now.

Thus, the problem of the current situation persists. That problem is that any situation where a minority is disadvantaged - where there is even the appearance of it - is by definition portrayed as racist or discriminatory. Constantly, this messaging reinforces the suggestion that our society is more discriminatory than it actually is.

Those who love the 'somewhere', i.e. the (mostly white) average inhabitant of the Netherlands, have to constantly clash with militant woke-activists and social justice warriors because of this. The left should also recognise a problem in this, as it keeps the debate on cultural Marxist issues. Woke's fixation on colonialism, sexism and racism keeps the debate focused on identity politics and not on, say, reforming the housing market or making labour more flexible. Ewald Engelen and socialists 'of the old school' will have to acknowledge this.

Murder of the middle class

Neoliberal big business and globalist multinationals join forces with cultural Marxist academics and social justice warriors. Together, they march against the middle class, which is treated as a cultural backwater of nationalism, with its traditions such as St Nicholas and Black Pete. The middle class is simultaneously absorbing the economic blows of globalisation, mass migration and automation. An ageing population and the decentralisation of the healthcare system come on top of this.

Attempts to address this end up in stories about privileged 'white' people. According to woke activists, the 'somewheres' are used to monocultural communities and are too 'rigid' and too 'provincial' to adapt to the new multicultural situation. The more they vote for dissident political parties, the more the metropolitan progressive class wants to punish them.

The mainstream left repeatedly allows itself to be taken advantage of by far-left woke activists. The identity politics this produces keeps the middle class morally trapped on the defensive, while at the same time its economic interests are squandered in globalisation. Only the construction of a new pillar - i.e. a network of rooted entrepreneurs, socially engaged citizens and patriotic freethinkers who join hands to support themselves socio-economically and keep globalisation at bay - can resist this crab with two claws.