All the woke prerequisites—mass immigration, feminism, equality laws, etc.—are the inevitable fruits of capitalism. It pretends to make individuals “sovereign” after drawing them into the labor pool, while neutralizing their attempts at political organization.
In the 19th century, various thinkers on the right—most notably, Thomas Carlyle and Brooks Adams, a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt—argued that capitalism drives societies towards atomization, the breakdown of social bonds, mass immigration, nomadism, and the dissolution of meaningful differences between peoples. Adams argued that capitalism is hungry for “new blood;” not only for cheap labor around the world, but through mass immigration. He foresaw the inevitable rise of China and demise of Europe way back in 1895.
While Carlyle and Adams framed these developments in negative terms, they were “progress” to later champions of capitalism, such as Milton Friedman:
“The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”
Capitalism liberates the individual from the old chains of traditions, customs, rules, religions and so on; it forces them to be free in the face of consumer choice. Friedman always framed the consumer as “sovereign” and the market as the ultimate democracy, voting firms in and out of existence with their purchasing power.
The logic of woke, at its core, is precisely the logic of the “sovereign” individual. If I wish to identify as a woman, then who are you to tell me otherwise? The core of most woke doctrines, even those centered on race, boil down to a kind of individualist entitlement.
The invocation of historical injustices is usually a pretext to much more mundane outcomes that further the ends of the capitalist system: buy from this or that business, bake the cake for this consumer or that consumer, accept the insertion of this or that star into your Marvel superhero film, etc.
As long as it is this and only this, the system is fine with “woke.” If it becomes a genuine political force, then “woke” can and will be destroyed, which has, in fact, already happened you just haven’t noticed yet.
If we agree that capitalism facilitated both feminism and mass immigration, then let us consider the five-stage process by which it reproduces its social relations: 1. expansion of the labor pool; 2. increase of purchasing power; 3. enlargement of the total pool of atomized “sovereign individuals”; 4. “sovereign individuals” attempt to organize politically; 5. these attempts are contained or crushed using newly elevated bureaucrats.
Capitalism told women that being devoted to the family as a mother is a constraint, a vestige of the bad old world of tradition that needs to be consigned to the history books. Radical liberation comes instead by working for a corporation on a wage. Hence women were reborn, not as women, but as “sovereign individuals.”
Of course, if you double the labor pool you halve the labor costs, so it stands to reason why employers under a capitalist system would push for women to enter the workplace. In the 1970s, Friedman explicitly and repeatedly argued that women would reduce labor costs. The power of the family as an institution was duly crushed, and feminism won out.
However, women did not collectivize or organize politically; they simply became dutiful clients of power. Representation on executive boards and reproductive “rights” was enough, it seems, to satiate women as a political group. Any dissident threat feminism may have carried was thereby contained.
Friedman also argued for mass immigration, against trade union leaders. Here, unlike “women” as a political group, the dissident threat was real and could not be easily contained. The power of the trade unions was duly crushed, and mass immigration won out.
Trade unions were the attempt of the patient zero of this process—namely, white working-class men—to organize politically. That was tolerated for a period, and coopted to take down the old aristocracies, until such unions became a genuine rival and threat to the power of capital. They had to be destroyed themselves—just as Henry VIII eliminated Thomas Cromwell after he used him to take down the church.
Feminism and mass immigration were two “Thomas Cromwells” coopted to destroy any resistance from the forces of tradition. But as Bertrand de Jouvenel observed, whenever power uses newly elevated bureaucrats to crush rivals, it is only a matter of time before said newly elevated bureaucrats become rivals themselves who must be taken down.
While “feminism” by itself has only worked in the advance of capitalist interests, “woke” as a political phenomenon became a problem, especially when it turned to the pro-Palestinian cause, and the process by which it is being dismantled has already started in earnest.
Wokeness” is often seen as the product of radical Marxism imported to America from Europe. In fact, “woke” is a capitalist phenomenon that emerged in the U.S., which exported it to the vassals of its empire. The least woke places in Europe are represented by the former Soviet bloc; the most woke places are those most closely tied to the U.S., such as the UK and Germany, which is still under military occupation.
All the woke prerequisites—mass immigration, feminism, equality laws, etc.—are the inevitable fruits of capitalism. It pretends to make individuals “sovereign” after drawing them into the labor pool, while neutralizing their attempts at political organization.
In the 19th century, various thinkers on the right—most notably, Thomas Carlyle and Brooks Adams, a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt—argued that capitalism drives societies towards atomization, the breakdown of social bonds, mass immigration, nomadism, and the dissolution of meaningful differences between peoples. Adams argued that capitalism is hungry for “new blood;” not only for cheap labor around the world, but through mass immigration. He foresaw the inevitable rise of China and demise of Europe way back in 1895.
While Carlyle and Adams framed these developments in negative terms, they were “progress” to later champions of capitalism, such as Milton Friedman:
“The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”
Capitalism liberates the individual from the old chains of traditions, customs, rules, religions and so on; it forces them to be free in the face of consumer choice. Friedman always framed the consumer as “sovereign” and the market as the ultimate democracy, voting firms in and out of existence with their purchasing power.
Friedman also argued for mass immigration, against trade union leaders. Here, unlike “women” as a political group, the dissident threat was real and could not be easily contained. The power of the trade unions was duly crushed, and mass immigration won out.
The logic of woke, at its core, is precisely the logic of the “sovereign” individual. If I wish to identify as a woman, then who are you to tell me otherwise? The core of most woke doctrines, even those centered on race, boil down to a kind of individualist entitlement.
The invocation of historical injustices is usually a pretext to much more mundane outcomes that further the ends of the capitalist system: buy from this or that business, bake the cake for this consumer or that consumer, accept the insertion of this or that star into your Marvel superhero film, etc.
As long as it is this and only this, the system is fine with “woke.” If it becomes a genuine political force, then “woke” can and will be destroyed, which has, in fact, already happened you just haven’t noticed yet.
If we agree that capitalism facilitated both feminism and mass immigration, then let us consider the five-stage process by which it reproduces its social relations: 1. expansion of the labor pool; 2. increase of purchasing power; 3. enlargement of the total pool of atomized “sovereign individuals”; 4. “sovereign individuals” attempt to organize politically; 5. these attempts are contained or crushed using newly elevated bureaucrats.
Capitalism told women that being devoted to the family as a mother is a constraint, a vestige of the bad old world of tradition that needs to be consigned to the history books. Radical liberation comes instead by working for a corporation on a wage. Hence women were reborn, not as women, but as “sovereign individuals.”
Of course, if you double the labor pool you halve the labor costs, so it stands to reason why employers under a capitalist system would push for women to enter the workplace. In the 1970s, Friedman explicitly and repeatedly argued that women would reduce labor costs. The power of the family as an institution was duly crushed, and feminism won out.
However, women did not collectivize or organize politically; they simply became dutiful clients of power. Representation on executive boards and reproductive “rights” was enough, it seems, to satiate women as a political group. Any dissident threat feminism may have carried was thereby contained.
Trade unions were the attempt of the patient zero of this process—namely, white working-class men—to organize politically. That was tolerated for a period, and coopted to take down the old aristocracies, until such unions became a genuine rival and threat to the power of capital. They had to be destroyed themselves—just as Henry VIII eliminated Thomas Cromwell after he used him to take down the church.
Feminism and mass immigration were two “Thomas Cromwells” coopted to destroy any resistance from the forces of tradition. But as Bertrand de Jouvenel observed, whenever power uses newly elevated bureaucrats to crush rivals, it is only a matter of time before said newly elevated bureaucrats become rivals themselves who must be taken down.
While “feminism” by itself has only worked in the advance of capitalist interests, “woke” as a political phenomenon became a problem, especially when it turned to the pro-Palestinian cause, and the process by which it is being dismantled has already started in earnest.
Neema Parvini, Chronicles
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 