We Need to Talk About Critical Anarchism
Why this is the best name for the ideology otherwise known as 'woke'
After spending the last two issues of The Liberal View on the postliberal right, this time I want to turn my attention back to the ideology of the so-called 'woke left', which as I have argued, should probably be known as critical anarchism. Today, I want to present and respond to several recent critiques of this ideology, and analyze how they fit together to paint a picture of an ideology that is somehow both fundamentalist in nature and yet refuses to be defined at the same time. A proper liberal discourse against wokeism or critical anarchism is needed to show why the right-wing anti-woke culture warriors are doing it wrong, and in many cases, are not dealing with the actual problem at all, but rather using the frustration with wokeism to advance their own reactionary agenda.
A note before we continue: when I say 'woke' or 'wokeism' here, I refer only to the activist movement rooted in postmodern critical theory. Social progressivism itself is not necessarily woke. Right-wing culture warriors have been weaponizing anti-wokeism against all progressive proposals, in order to justify an extraordinary and authoritarian response to shut them all down. I have repeatedly argued against this in the past. To avoid justifying the postliberal right's dishonesty, I have chosen to only feature left-leaning critiques of wokeism here.
As I have said many times, I don’t like using the term “woke” myself, not without qualification or quotation marks. It’s too much of a culture war pinball and now deemed too pejorative to be useful. I much, much prefer the term “social justice politics” to refer to the school of politics that is typically referred to as woke, out of a desire to be neutral in terminology. However: there is such a school of politics, it’s absurd that so many people pretend not to know what woke means, and the problem could be easily solved if people who support woke politics would adopt a name for others to use. No to woke, no to identity politics, no to political correctness, fine: PICK SOMETHING. The fact that they steadfastly refuse to do so is a function of their feeling that they shouldn’t have to do politics like everyone else....
“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s....
I could go on. And some will disagree with this or that. But whether you think this is an accurate portrayal of the kind of politics that became dominant in progressive circles in the last 10-12 years, something happened. Something changed. Of course something changed! I find it so, so bizarre that people still insist that nothing much changed in progressive discourse or politics in that time period. Go back and read stuff that was getting published in liberal outlets in 2010 and tell me it’s the same. Come on. Give me a break. Grow up.
-Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means by Freddie deBoer
In other words, wokeness is very different from the regular social progressivism we have been used to seeing, everyone can see it, but the pro-woke won't allow this to be acknowledged. As I have argued previously, regular social progressivism is rooted in the liberal tradition in Western politics, while wokeism, which is really critical anarchism, is rooted in the anti-liberal left tradition in Western politics. Of course the two are different, and even opposites, in many ways. You can't stop people from simply pointing out the truth.
This is why we need a definition for 'woke', that they can't poke holes in and sink. Recently, I proposed that 'wokeness is a program of cultural change that is rooted in philosophical theory, rather than objectively evident need', which I believe is a very strong definition that covers all cases where most people would agree to be 'woke'.
I also don't agree with equating wokeism with social justice. As I've said, wokeism is basically critical anarchism, which has nothing to do with social justice. Of course, supporters of the ideology do believe that critical anarchism and its 'deconstruct everything' approach is necessary for social justice, but it's just what they believe, and not something we have to agree with (or supported by objective evidence). In fact, I firmly believe that anarchism (of any kind, but particularly the critical kind) would be bad for social justice.
Urban writes a 700-page book on politics, filled with citations to current events, without considering the problems of nuclear proliferation, the climate crisis, the decimation of Earth’s biodiversity, animal farming, global wealth inequality, plutocracy, exploitation in the workplace, medical bankruptcy, opioid deaths, police brutality, homelessness, mass incarceration, COVID, unaffordable housing, student debt, or voter suppression....
Tim Urban spent six years writing this book. He shouldn’t have bothered. He squandered his time. He produced nothing of any value to anyone who is serious about making the world better....
Leave this tired debate about wokeness behind. We have much more important work to do.
-Why Centrism Is Morally Indefensible by Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs
This, I think, is the typical response of the pro-woke to any criticism of wokeism, including those coming from the left. It is made up of a lot of whataboutism, and ultimately attempts to attack the person making the critique on the grounds of this whataboutism. However, anyone who is paying attention would be able to see that this is just being evasive. The evasiveness of wokeists is certainly not helping their credibility. As previously discussed, even those who don't have a strong background in philosophy or political theory would know that something has changed in left-leaning circles in the past 10 years or so, and any attempt at discussing this change has been met with great resistance.
The refusal of the pro-woke to allow discussion and debate on their ideology has led to widespread frustration, which has been capitalized on by the religious-authoritarian 'postliberal' right. To stop the postliberal right, therefore, would require us to resolve the frustration around wokeism. The only way to do this would be to expose wokeism as a coherent ideology, and demand that it be able to be debated in the marketplace of ideas. We can't afford to allow wokeism to evade scrutiny anymore.
But, in my experience, many leftists find themselves attracted to pure consequentialism, as well as another philosophical claim I’ve criticized in past entries on this Substack—skepticism about free will. They associate the idea that justice involves moral rights rather than just good and bad consequences with defenses of capitalist property rights, and they associate belief in free will with harsh retributive approaches to criminal justice on the one hand and “poor people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”-style victim-blaming about economic inequality on the other. They (rightly) reject all of these positions. They also (wrongly) associate free will denial and utilitarian morality with scientific materialism.
-How to Be a Leftist Without Being a Utilitarian or a Free Will Skeptic by Ben Burgis
This article represents a serious academic philosophical attempt to analyze the philosophical position of many cultural leftists today. It describes the biggest reason why I'm anti-woke: critical anarchism is anti-morality. Thinkers like Michel Foucault, who were foundational to critical anarchism, were very anti-morality. In critical anarchist thinking, morality, and the associated idea of free will, is just another oppressive social construct that needs to be deconstructed and demolished. (This is why I characterize it as critical anarchism: the abolition of everything using postmodern critical theory.) It is basically anti-essentialism and social constructionism taken to the most extreme. This is why critical anarchism is a fundamentalist ideology, akin to a religion.
And I also assert that, to whatever degree I am eventually able to wean myself off the illusion, that’s going to represent a long step in the right moral and political direction. Belief in free will is at the heart of how the defenders of the status quo rationalize social ills ranging from our retribution-obsessed system of criminal justice to meritocratic defenses of economic inequality. We’re better off without it.
-How to Be a Leftist Without Being a Utilitarian or a Free Will Skeptic by Ben Burgis
This is another quote from the aforementioned article, where the author tries to describe the philosophical position of many cultural leftists these days, in relation to the concept of free will (note that it is actually not the position of the author himself). Critical anarchists reject free speech because they reject free will. They reject free will because they think that everything in our cultural status quo is an illusion, and everything is an oppressive construct to be demolished, because they are anti-essentialist fundamentalists. They can't accept even a bit of 'what you see is what you get', because their religion won't allow it. Everything has to be seen as an oppressive construct to be demolished by default. This is why critical race theorists say that racism is assumed to be there in every interaction, in every context, without needing objective proof. It is all rooted in a-priori assumptions about the world that are highly ideological and fundamentalist.
If Robinson’s new book is an update on Alinsky’s, we could similarly view his previous, Why You Should Be a Socialist, as his own reboot of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” which saw socialism as a path to—paradoxically—radical individualism. Wilde imagined a world without capitalism where all people—free from work, poverty, and duty—can spend their days pursuing creative passions and personal interests. It was the original case for “fully automated luxury communism,” and Wilde the prototypical “radlib,” a bourgeois rich kid turned bohemian layabout directing socialists away from solidarity and class politics and toward an aesthetically radical individualism, conveniently to the interest and benefit of creatives such as himself. (Wilde even slipped in a quick abolish-the-family: “Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear.”)
-The Left’s Debate Bro by Sohale Mortazavi in Compact
This old-school socialist critique of wokeism gives great insight into what wokeism actually is: an attempt to abolish everything. Not just our existing political and economic systems, but literally everything. (This is where critical anarchism goes beyond old-school anarchism.) In the critical anarchist utopia, everything, including things most people regard as facts of nature, can be abolished, by rationalizing it all as socially constructed. Their ideology does not allow treating anything as immutable, and does not allow for the idea that some things might be worth preserving either. The ultimate goal of critical anarchism, even if sometimes unspoken, is that everything we know can and should be abolished. This is very misguided, because firstly, not everything can be abolished, and secondly, even if we can, we wouldn't want to abolish things like the family, for example.
Note: The articles quoted above do not necessarily reflect my views, and I do not endorse their arguments outside of what I have specifically agreed with.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Horizon books, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
One major problem with post-modernism is the focus on deconstruction but without enough reconstruction. Alternative : metamodernism or post-postmodernism
For me, the term "critical anarchism" is a very new term. Is it better to say that those who are critical anarchists do have some moral/morality views and ideas but in a more nihilist sense?