Woke: A Culture War Against
James Lindsay at the European Parliament
Transcript of a
Hello,
thank you. I’m glad to be here. I want to address something Tom just said
which is in fact that “woke is supposed to advance equity in
The definition of equity comes from
the public administration literature. It
was written by a man named George Frederickson and the definition is “an
administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so that citizens
are made equal.” Does that sound like
anything you’ve heard of before, like socialism? They’re going to administer an economy to
make shares equal.
The only difference between equity and
socialism is the type of property that they redistribute, the type of
shares. They’re going to redistribute
social and cultural capital in addition to economic and material capital, and
so this is my thesis when we say, “what is woke?” Woke is Maoism and American characteristics
if I might borrow from Mao himself who said that his philosophy was
Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics.
Which means Woke is Marxism and that’s
a very provocative statement. It’s
something you will certainly hear it is not, that it is different and that the
professors and the philosophers will spend a large amount of time explaining to
you why. “No, no, it’s about economics
when it’s Marxism. This is social. This is cultural. This is different.” It’s not different.
I
need you to think biologically for one moment and I don’t mean about your
bodies. We could do that. That’s a different topic. I want you to think how we organize plants
and animals when we study them. There
are species but above species there are the genus of animals, so you have cats,
all the cats, but you have tigers, you have lions, you have house cats, you
have what ever, leopards, many different kinds of
cats.
If we think of Marxism is a genus of
ideological thought, then classical economic Marxism is a species. Radical Feminism is a species in the same
genus. Critical Race Theory is a species
in this genus. Post-Colonial Theory
that’s plaguing Europe is a species in this genus and they have something that
binds them together called Intersectionality, that
makes them treated as if they are all one thing. But the logic is Marxist.
And I want to convince you of that
because Marx had a very simple proposition but we get lost. We think that Marx was talking about
economics because he often talked about economics. He wrote a book called “Capital.” It’s a very famous book and we think, well,
this is about economic theory, but this isn’t true. It’s only true on the surface.
If we go below the surface, what Marx
was talking about was something different, we know what Marx’s hypothesis was;
that we must seize the means of production if we’re going to bring socialism to
the nations, to the world. We have to
seize the means of production so we have to ask “what does he mean?”, and if we
think that it’s about capital then we miss what he means.
If you think it’s about the means of
production in the factory with a hammer, and the means of production in the
field with a sickle, then you miss what it means because Marx explained what
makes human beings special in his earlier writings. What makes human beings special is that man
is a being that is incomplete and knows that he is incomplete.
He is a man whose true nature has been
forgotten to him, which is social being.
He is a socialist at heart who doesn’t realize it. And the reason he doesn’t realize it is
because of the economic conditions operating as a means of construction or
production not just of the economy, but of him; but of man, of society, and
particularly of history.
Marx said that he had the first
scientific study of history. How is
history produced? By man doing man’s
activity and man’s key activity was economic activity as he saw it. And so economic production
doesn’t just produce the goods and services of the economy. It produces society itself and society in
turn produces man. He called this the
inversion of praxis.
And so when he says we must seize the
means of production and he’s talking about factories and fields, he’s actually
talking about how we construct who we are as human beings so that we might
complete ourselves, so that we might complete history. And at the end of history, mankind will
remember that he is a social being and we will have a socialist society. “A perfect communism that transcends private
property” is how he put it.
He said, in fact, that “communism is
the transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement.” That’s a quote from the Economic Philosophic
Manuscripts, 1844. So, Marx was interested
in controlling, or understanding and controlling, how
man produces himself. He writes about
this exclusively in the 1840s. Very deeply. How do
we do this? And he looks at the economic conditions
and he says “this is where it is.” And
that’s why we get economic Marxism. And
that’s why we think Marx was an economist.
But Marx was never an economist.
He was a theologian. He wanted to
produce a religion for mankind that would supersede all of the religions of
mankind and bring him back to his true social nature.
This is the true fact of Marx. And what the goal was, like I said, was to
complete man. So what he said is, “well,
how are we building man currently?” All
of his economic analysis is about “how are we building man at present?, through what he called material determinism. And he said, “Well, what we have is a special
form of private property in our society.
Our society is organized around private property. So all of our thoughts
organized around private property.”
In other words, there’s a special kind
of property that the bourgeois elite class has access to, and then they
organize society to exclude everybody else from access to that property through
exploitation, through alienation, through estrangement, through oppression. And so what Karl Marx was proposing is that
economics becomes a vehicle to separate society into a bourgeois class that has
access to a special form of property.
The people who have access wish to retain that. So they oppress people and keep other people
out of that special form of property.
They erect a system of classism to do
that. It’s enforced by an ideology
called capitalism that believes that this is the right way to engage in the
world.
And what we have to do is awaken the
underclass, the proletariat to the real conditions, and the fact that they are
historical agents of change. And bring
them to do a revolution and transform society so that we would have equity or
socialism. Whichever word you want, they
have the same definition.
Now, let’s say that we step out. We step back from this species, this economic
species, “homo-economicus” and we step back to the
genus and we look at this idea, a special form of property that segregates
society into people who have (the bourgeois) and the people who do not have,
who are in class conflict with an ideology that keeps this in place.
And the underclass must awaken with
consciousness to fight back and to seize the means of production, of that form
of deterministic property. And now we
say change out class, put in race and watch.
We get Critical Race Theory, falls out of the hat just like that. Very simple.
In 1993, Cheryl Harris wrote a long
article for the Harvard Law Review called “Whiteness As
Property.” She explained that whiteness
or white privilege constitutes a kind of cultural private property. She says it must be abolished in order to
have racial justice. Just like Karl Marx
said that in the communist manifesto he wrote, “communism can be summarized in
a single sentence: The abolition of private property.”
Well, this is why Critical Race Theory
calls to abolish whiteness because whiteness is a form of private
property. People who have access to this
property are whites or white adjacent or they act white. These are words out of the American lexicon
that they’ve used to describe how people gain access to the private
property. People without that are people
of color and they are oppressed by systemic racism. Systemic racism is enforced by an ideology of
white supremacy instead of capitalism.
If you think of whiteness as a form of
cultural capital, white supremacy as they define it, as identical to
capitalism, it’s the belief. It’s not believing that white people are superior. It’s believing that
white people have access to the control of society and should maintain
that. Even if you don’t actually believe
that, if you merely support, that, you have adopted the ideology of white
supremacy into your mind. And so you
have the exact same system and the goal is to awaken a racial consciousness in
people so that they will bank together as a class and seize the means of
cultural production so that white cultural production is no longer the dominant
mode.
It’s a big mystery in
I wrote a book called Race Marxiam and
I defined Critical Race Theory as it really is in that book on the first
page. I said the Critical Race Theory is
“calling everything you want to control ‘racist” until you control it.” But couldn’t we say the same about
Marxism? It’s calling everything you
want to control “bourgeois” until you control it. But those mean the same thing.
But what about Queer
Theory? How is that Marxist? It’s very strange. All this gender and sex and
sexuality. Well, Tom said, “What
does woke attack?
The idea of being normal.” Well, the Queer Theory thinks that there are
certain people who get to set the norms of society. They are privileged. They called themselves normal. They say this is normal. It’s normal to consider yourself a man, and
look like a man, and act like a man, and dress like a man, and eat meat like a
man; and then there are women that should be feminine and pretty and all those
things. And so they get to define what’s
normal. They’re heterosexuals, so they
get to define that heterosexuality is normal and other sexualities are
abnormal.
And so you have a conflict across this
cultural property of who gets to be considered normal and who is a pervert or a
freak or some other term that get used in their literature. But technically, who is a Queer, which sounds
like a slur, but they adopted it and it’s a technical academic term now. It means an identity without an essence, by
the way, an identity that is strictly oppositional to the concept of the normal
as defined by Queer Theorist David Halperin in his
1995 book Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. I didn’t make that up. I’m not extrapolating.
So you see Queer Theory is just
another species of the genus of Marxism.
What about post-colonial theory, which is plaguing Europe thanks to
Frantz Fanon and his biggest European fan, John-Paul Sartre? What about this? Well, it’s the same. You have the West as the oppressor. They have access to the material and cultural
wealth of the world because they’ve decided their culture is the default and
have gone and colonized the world to “bring culture to the world” as they say. And so the oppressed, the natives around the world,
the people have to band together and their activity is going to be called
decolonization. They have to remove
every aspect of western culture.
So when they come to
The evolution into this, sometimes
called Western Marxism, began in the 1920s.
We had a Russian revolution in 1917 and this did not happen in
Now you aren’t allowed to talk about
Cultural Marxism now. They’ve
categorized this as a conspiracy theory.
They say that it is anti-Semitic.
This is not true. Antonio Gramsci wrote books.
Georg Lukács wrote
books. You can read those books. They have a philosophy. If they don’t like the name Cultural Marxism,
we can use the name that other people at the time used, Western Marxism. So much like – I don’t know – a virus
adapting to the conditions, it changed to try to infect a new host. It worked in feudal societies. Marxism took over in
Then several Germans from the
But how is that to be done? They sought an answer through the middle part
of the 20th century and World War II breaks out. The
In other words, we don’t have to be
responsible to the working class anymore which opens up the ability for
Marxists who are seeking power to make friends with the corporations. The bosses are no longer the enemy; they’re
an opportunity. Because
the working class is irrelevant.
He said the energy is somewhere else.
He said it’s in the racial minorities, the sexual minorities, the
feminists, the outsiders. That’s who he
said have the energy for a Marxist revolution in the west, not the working
class.
And so Marxism was able to evolve to
abandon the working class. And so what
did they do? Well, all they had studied
for 30 years was what they called the culture industry, an industry and commodifies and packages culture and sells it back to
people supposedly stripped of what it actually is, empty, abstract now. And so what, of course, did they do? They seize the means of production of the
culture industry because that’s what they do.
And so they started to transform the culture industry to sell racial,
gender, sexuality-based, agit-prop as though that
were genuine culture.
And so we get concepts like cultural
appropriation, we get concepts like cultural relevance, cultural this, cultural
that, cultural everything. And it’s all
provided in pastiche, it’s all provided as a mockery of what’s really going
on. And this evolved in American’s
highly racialized context. And we ended up with Woke, a form of
identity-based Marxism, a constellation of Marxist species. That all work with the same operating premise
but locate themselves in different, and I’ll use the
German term here for this, “folk.”
LGBTQ is a
folk. And they get folkish
identity there and become activists. The
black community is a folk. How do I
know? That’s what W.E.B.
Du Bois said it would be when he laid down the
foundations that became Critical Race Theory later. They think of themselves as nations. Don’t they all have flags? Don’t think put them on your buildings like
colonizers? Don’t they hang them in your
streets? They think of themselves as
occupying nations, but they see themselves as bound together just like the
various colonized nations around the world and seeking liberation from Western
Civilization.
And so we end up with Western Marxism
taking many forms but with one overarching approach. And the approach that they use, I started off
by saying, is Maoist not merely Marxist.
Now you know the theory is Marx.
It’s just evolved into different species to attack the West at its
weakest points, through our tolerance, through our acceptance, through our
openness, through our generosity, through our best traits actually. The things that we should
be proud of being; the things that we are proud of being.
But Mao Zedong knew how to use
identity politics. I don’t know how you
study in
What they are doesn’t really
matter. Of course they were communists, they were things like landlord and rich farmer
and things like this. Right winger is a
bad category in and of itself by the way; conservative, all of them bad. Bad influences, that’s another one. You could be a bad influence for just
thinking the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing at any time or because the
government decides it doesn’t like you.
These are the bad categories.
And if you have a bad category, very
importantly, your children have a bad category by default. So they create a social pressure for your
children to identify as revolutionaries at which point they get a red identity,
a communist identity, a good identity, and they get rewarded for it. And the youth led the revolution in
This should feel very uncomfortable to
you because here we have, at least in the United States, we tell our children
being white is bad, being white is oppressive.
You automatically hurt people of other races by your very
existence. But by the way, if you become
queer we’ll celebrate you. And you can
create a radical army of people who identify as gender minorities at seven
years old. You can lead them into paths
of puberty blockers in transition, medical transition, which of course, big pharma profits off of.
At sever years old, behind their parents’ back.
There’s a reasons for this. It’s the same program that Mao Zedong used to
radicalize the youth in
One last point about
Mao to kind of drive that point home.
Mao said in 1942 that his formula to transform
And so we have this new program and
within inclusion we have, or above inclusion actually, we have sustainability. We have a sustainable and inclusive
future. I see the agenda 2030 here with
an x over it. The sustainable and
inclusive future is the new socialist standard that we will have freedom under
socialist discipline. And Mao said the
way that will work is through what he called democratic centralism. We call that stakeholder capitalism. And my shot at the World Economic Forum is
taken, because it’s one of the things coordinating this. My shot at the United Nations is taken
because it’s one of the things that coordinating this.
So Woke is Marxism. It’s advancing through Maoist cultural revolution.
It’s using Americanized identity categories. And while some of those will not work in
Now the last thing I’ll mention is
this risk is twofold. When you endure
Marxist provocation, Marxist strategy is always of the same type, it’s called
middle level violence. They don’t come
at you will full blown Bolshevik assault very often. It’s middle-level violence they provoke. Which mean s if you give in
and you do like John-Paul Sartre said in his foreword to The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon, the post-colonial book. He said the violence is coming. So
So, you can give away; that’s one side
because they provoked at the middle. Or
you can react and overact, which sadly
So, you have to stand firm in your
principles, but you have to do so cleverly.
You have to do so understanding that you’re being provoked, which means
you don’t react as the provocateur wants you to react. You have to outsmart them, which is not
possible unless you know the diagnosis of your problem. It’s a Polish proverb, “Never attempt to cure
what you don’t understand.”
Woke is Marxism evolved to attack the
West. If you don’t understand that, you
will not act correctly, you will not cure it, and it will conquer your
countries. It will conquer all of
But they tell you if you actually read
their literature, what is a global citizen?
It’s somebody, I kid you not, I make no joke, they say this themselves, it’s somebody who supports the 17 sustainable development
goals of the United Nations agenda 2030.
That’s a global citizen, and they say, “What are the rights of a global
citizen?” This is in a book about global
citizenship education published two years ago.
What are the rights of a global citizen?
The answer one paragraph later is, “We’re not that interested in rights
with global citizenship. It’s more about
global responsibilities.” In other words, slavery.
This is a pivotal moment in the
history of the Western world. The model
that they are pushing us toward, using the means and mechanisms of that place, is the model we see in
If you want to know what the future of