By Declan Fry
SOCIOLOGY
We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Musa al-Gharbi
Simon & Schuster Bundyi, $39.99
Writer Musa al-Gharbi poses an uncomfortable question in his latest book: how can you be sure you’re not a wolf in sheep’s clothing? What if – in a troubled world – you’re part of the problem?
In We Have Never Been Woke, the sociologist and assistant professor describes a group he calls “symbolic capitalists”. They often work in professional-managerial roles: think journalists, administrators, tech bros and sises, lawyers, academics, consultants and so on.
This “new elite” are unaware of – or not particularly concerned by – how their actions undermine the social causes they claim to support. Their social justice discourse, or “wokeness”, al-Gharbi writes, tends ultimately to be symbolic and aesthetic rather than material. It’s affective – but it doesn’t really affect the reallocation of power and resources.
They declare “Black Lives Matter” – and crowd the benches occupied by homeless Black men. They will vote for Clinton and Biden – before purging the homeless from the Upper West Side. They might study at universities such as Columbia and protest against Trump’s 2016 election – but, al-Gharbi asserts, they fail to organise for the food prep and maintenance workers who keep their lives running smoothly.
Such “symbolic capitalists” do not tend to see themselves as elites, both because they traditionally haven’t been, and because the language of social justice they favour makes it harder to believe they might harm those they are trying to help. Yet, their lifestyles are often premised on exploitation and exclusion. Their philanthropists and benefactors? The working poor.
Musa al-Gharbi with his new book.Credit:
Fair enough: consultants, journalists, academics and the like aren’t generally revolutionaries. Then again, neither are many of the working poor. Revolutionaries tend to be a minority regardless of class background. And, as al-Gharbi notes, status is relative.
We see this locally. Consider the ongoing subsidisation of well-funded private schools. The loss of social safety nets (learn to love your boss – or else!). The pressure to work harder for less leisure time and fewer benefits. In the symbolic economy, status and its accumulated benefit – better schools, better education, cooler clothes – is largely zero-sum: for you to win, someone else has to lose.
Many of the systemic failures al-Gharbi diagnoses go back to the OPEC oil crisis and the hollowing out of public welfare and social services under Reagan/Thatcher/Howard and, yes, Obama. But it goes back further still, as al-Gharbi notes, to Marx’s prophecy about the free market’s ability to obliterate communities, traditions and social relations. Everything that is solid melts into air.
In tying the material to the affective and symbolic, al-Gharbi might have interrogated some of his examples further. He cites Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century as an example of how the low completion rate of e-book purchases proves their “negligible effect on the social world”. Yet what about Karl Marx’s own Kapital, a book few have read a tenth of? You couldn’t call its “impact on the social world” negligible. Books – that beloved artefact of “symbolic capitalists” – are usually consumed, like so much art, by a statistically tiny amount of the population. That doesn’t mean they can’t affect the majority who are never exposed to them.
A carnival float satirising “wokeness” at Germany’s annual Rose parade earlier this month.Credit: Getty Images
Al-Gharbi’s primary critique of “wokeness” is that looking for confirmatory narratives in consecrated individuals and “leaders” of particular groups is a cop-out. It substitutes for taking in the complexity of competing voices. “Call-outs” and cancellations are often finger-wagging, passive-aggressive forms of mutual policing and revenge, rather than the consciousness-raising and self-criticism the Left have always practised. Noblesse oblige continues, while class relations remain unchanged. Some people just suck.
So what else is new? Al-Gharbi says he wants to see those who profess wokeness to walk the walk, not simply talk the talk. Especially given that real wolves – the 1 per cent of corporations, politicians, plutocrats, folks such as Elon Musk – still largely act through the professional-managerial class of “symbolic capitalists” to accomplish their goals.
Whether it’s greenwashing or cops and corporations at Mardi Gras, it’s easy for the post-Cold War, post-September 11, post-global financial crisis world – take your pick – to feel stuck between latent (and explicit) fascism and liberal-capitalist inertia. Yet symbolic things – class, race, religion, gender – matter because they can be so intimately connected to aspects of the world that remain unjust. Unlike status, they do not have to be zero-sum; a symbolic gesture does not have to delay or replace a material plan of action.
Al-Gharbi’s argument is that they often do: that symbolic gestures – everything from a land acknowledgment to cries that “the colony will fall” – can substitute for the complex, difficult and long-term work of planning systemic change. Wokeness and culture wars are usually distractions.
We know that modern life, for many people on the planet, is rubbish. The question is: what happens after the liberation?
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