Woke Wars w/ Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor & Mike McCarthy

This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com and by Haymarket Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles, perfect for digless anders like you. When that you might like is Enemy Feminisms, Turfs, Police Women, and Girlbosses against Liberation by Sophie Lewis, Former and also Future, Guest of the Pod. In this unflinching tour of 200 years of Enemy Feminisms, from 19th century imperialist feminists and cops to 20th century KKK feminists and pornofobes, to today's anti-abortion and turf feminists, writer and critic Sophie Lewis argues with characteristic verb and eloquence that we must reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of winning the liberatory feminist politics we need. As Judith Butler puts it, this book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in a rough and compelling vision of the feminist past, present and future, honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant. Find Enemy Feminisms at haymarketbooks.org where all paperback books are 20% off every day. Welcome to the Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. The Trump administration and the Doge Blitzkrieg gets unleashed upon the administrative state has been justified in the name of efficiency, and also of stomping out all things DEI and woke. Really, when it comes to MAGA, everything about this full-scale reactionary class war from above has been justified in the name of fighting what they deemed to be the perversities of DEI and woke. Absolutely bankrupt forms of liberal identity politics very much laid the groundwork for this racist oligarchic reaction. But whatever the very serious problems with liberal identity politics, it's a huge and to me pretty obvious mistake for anyone on the left to be cheering on what's happening right now. Today, I'm interviewing Femi Taiwo, Kienge Yamada Taylor, and Mike McCarthy. A few quick thoughts before we get started. Racism has been a constant organizing principle of social and economic life in the United States. But after the classic civil rights movement defeated formal segregation in Jim Crow, we entered a contradictory period dominated by racial liberalism. Racial liberalism rendered certain overt forms of racism taboo and protected formal civil rights. Racial liberalism did all that, but also through the demonization of poor black people facilitated the rise of mass incarceration and the destruction of welfare and public housing. But here we are. After the end of the Cold War, amid a crisis of liberalism sparked by a crisis in neoliberalism, in the political rubble of the war on terror, amid a decade and a half uneven and limited revival of the American left, and at the beginning of Trump's second term. This is the context in which we today have the far right echoing pre-civil rights era forms of the most absolutely open and explicit forms of white supremacy. Take Pete Hague Seth's islamaphobic crusaderism or acting under secretary for public diplomacy Darren Beatty, an open, enthusiastic advocate of eugenic population policy. Then there's Trump's policy toward South Africa, attacking the post apartheid government for purportedly oppressing Africaners, a brazen far right apartheid nostalgic conspiracy theory, and then prioritizing white South Africans for entry as refugees into the United States. The left has asserted that Israel is like apartheid South Africa. The right now suggests, well, apartheid South Africa was good, actually. Finally, well, not finally, I could go on and on, but finally for the purposes of this introduction, finally, there's musk and JD Vance defending one of the adolescent racist doge employees after it was discovered that he had posted about his opposition to marrying outside his ethnicity, and saying that we should quote "normalize Indian hate." JD Vance's wife is Indian. These people are so messed up. This, after musk made an absolutely open series of Nazi salutes during the inauguration, and then played cute about it. And then banning just the other day, likewise extended his arm just so. Yet this is not simply a cut and paste resurgence of some past pre-civil rights era racist form. It's not as though, as some liberals might imagine it, it's not as though it had been frozen in the permafrost only to be revivified by Maga's white heat. For one thing, at the same time as we're seeing this unapologetically brazen racism, parts of the far right are also making a strong pitch for multi-racial inclusion, or at least they were pretty recently on the campaign trail. At this moment of resurgent and brazen racism and social reaction, we must watch out for the ways that the far right seeks to expand its coalition. They want to appeal to young men of color through conservative gender politics, and also by way of crypto and passive income-oriented forms of identification that promise release from wage labor hell to the elect who successfully win the hustle through entrepreneurship and scam artistry. They seek to appeal to Asians through attacks on affirmative action, particularly in high school and higher education. And then there's the muscular, militarist, imperialist nationalism, which in its most expansive forms welcomes a heterogeneous citizenry into its civilizational project. This multiracial nationalist politics is where Steve Bannon sees the possibility for a permanent multiracial far-right majority. But the contradictions will likely prove to daunting for Bannon to navigate. The far right would require the provision of a marachum of social welfare to bind such a coalition together. Clearly, that's something that the billionaire reactionaries running Maga won't be eager to allow. But most of all, the right depends upon its ability to exploit the contradictions of a liberalism that promises recognition but denies substantive liberation. This all points to a big problem with the sort of liberal identity politics that put its faith in demographic change combined with Republican racism somehow guaranteeing a permanent democratic majority. In fact, people's identities and ideologies and perceived interests, they're far more complex and contingent than that. Class composition is a project and a contested one. It's the left's task to make it a project that can successfully stitch together different layers of a complexly structured working class around a project of solidarity and collective liberation. Before we get started, the dig, this podcast, it's a non-profit political education project dedicated to sharing ruthless criticism of all that exists with everyone out there who is struggling to change everything. That's why we put out every episode with no paywall. We want every single person possible to listen, very much including those of you who can't afford to contribute. But that's only possible because listeners who can afford to contribute do so at patreon.com/thedig. We send every contributor our excellent occasional newsletter by email and if you contribute enough and live in the USA, we will send you books, tote bags and coffee mugs in the mail. If you live elsewhere depending on how much you donate, we will send you ebooks. But the real reason I'm asking you to contribute is because if you depend on this podcast, please understand that we likewise depend upon you. Please contribute now. That's p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash the dig. Okay, here's Femi Taiwo, Kienge Yamada Taylor and Mike McCarthy. Kienge Yamada Taylor is the co-founder of Hammer and Hope, a digital magazine of race, culture and politics. She's also the author of From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation and a professor of African American studies at Princeton University. Olufemio Taiwo is professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and an editor at Hammer and Hope. He's the author of Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture. Mike McCarthy is the director of community studies and professor of sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz. His most recent book, The Master's Tools, How Finance Rec Democracy and a radical plan to rebuild it was just released with first-hand books. Femi Taiwo, Kienge Yamada Taylor and Mike McCarthy. Welcome to the dig. And Femi and Kienge, welcome back. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you. I think we should start this conversation by being clear about two things. First, that a lot of the sort of identity politics we've seen from corporations, from liberal politicians, on elite college campuses, and also Also in some left-wing spaces, we can agree stipulate that there are various discourses, practices that range from annoying to damaging. But second, that also and more importantly, that we can agree that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, that these are all very powerful forces in American society. So yeah, just to frame out our larger discussion, I want to start by asking, need these two things be so hard to hold in one's head simultaneously? Well, I was just going to start with the actual issue at hand. What was the point of the DEI, Bonanza in 2020? And now what is the point of its destruction five years later? And so I think on some level, it's obvious that corporations, Apple, Amazon, soul foods, embraced these varying initiatives around DEI to basically get out of the way of the iron of protests. I think it's important to always remember that these were historic protests in 2020, what the New York Times estimated to be upwards of 26 million people in the streets. And so, you know, there was an obvious effort as there was in the 1960s, what they called it then was socioeconomic capitalism, capitalism with a conscience. These were efforts to avoid boycotts, to avoid protest, and to make it seem as if the largest corporations in America were on the side of black people. It went even further in ways that you could see how there was also a realization that DEI could be profitable for them. JP Morgan Chase, one of the reasons why they have continued with their DEI initiatives, despite the pressure to jettison them, is because mostly that these are loans that they agree to make. They agree to expand their low-income home ownership portfolio. And so, I think the 50 largest corporations in the United States made $50 billion in pledges to do a variety of diversity initiatives. So that was obviously one manifestation of the DEI bonanza. But that wasn't all of it. You know, I mean, most of the efforts have been centered around workplace culture, how to create what they describe as a more equitable workplace. And you know, I mean, that is where some of the kind of conflicting issues, I think, with DEI are legitimate and raise important issues and questions that we shouldn't kind of avoid talking about. But I think sometimes what gets lost is that this is in reaction to real issues, right? This is in reaction to real racism in the workforce and on college campuses, which is one of the reasons why I think that given the relentless assault on these kinds of initiatives, they're actually not unpopular, right? If you look at gallop appute polling, adults in the United States, a majority of home support businesses having diversity initiatives. And so I think that that all has to be a part of the discussion, real racism, that these are in reaction to just like affirmative action, but was a real response to real racism in society and workplaces on college campuses. Do they go far enough? No, but there are plenty of reforms that exist within our society that don't go far enough, that we don't say, "Thus you should jettison them." Roe v. Wade didn't go far enough. And no one, you know, on the left with any credibility, it was celebrating its demise because it didn't go far enough and drove a wedge between men and women in the working class. It's a ridiculous premise. So I'll say that to open things up. There's more to say about it, but I think the context is important. I'll just add one thing to underscore the last-poi-cangage that's made. I think the argument that D.I., the anti-racist, that social justice policies in the workplace are suspicious because they don't go far enough just strikes me as a particularly disingenuous kind of argument for exactly the reason the Kangage said, right? Like no one says that about dental. Right. No one, in any part of the left, thinks that the working class is a 5% raise away from dismantling capitalism. We fight for things that are less than the full society we want because we value those things, whether it's dental, whether it's pay raise, whether it's better benefits, and whether it's having less racism at work. Those are all just things that are independently valuable and that we should not confuse with the total victory of the class war, but there's no reason to think that we should replace the total victory of the class war with any of those things. Yeah. I want to add, I think a real puzzle is why is it that this bundle of things that are actually so completely different from each other have come to have this powerful force in our society politically? Everything from cancel culture to race prioritizing hiring and college admissions, to sensitivity training, to even watching a commercial and seeing somebody that appears queer to you and thinking, "Ooh, that's woke." How is it that all these things in our society have come to have this political salience when we can obviously recognize that they're of all sorts of different sorts, right? And I think it's important to keep in mind the role of liberalism and the Democrats in this story. To me, a key part of the rise of anti-wokeness is precisely the emptiness of liberalism and its own reaction to those movements and protests that Kiyango was mentioning that sparked off in 2020. There's a really fascinating book. It's written by a Japanese Marxist name, Tosaka Jun, it's called the Japanese Ideology, published in 1935. Jun was basically the gromp she of Japan. He was imprisoned under fascist regime. He died because of his treatment in prison, but he wrote this book and basically he argues that liberalism has basically three forms. It has an economic form, a political form, and a cultural form. The economic and political are basically about sort of, you know, freeness from the state political or freeness in the economy. And when economic liberalism doesn't have legitimacy or salience, it can sometimes persist in its cultural form. And its cultural form is all about sentimentality and kind of empty ideas about the individual's freeness to identify themselves. What's interesting about this book and why I think it's actually relevant to this discussion is that after the protests kicked off the response and the way they were integrated into a political discourse by the Democrats and by liberals was in a de-classed and a defanged way that presented them as simply sort of free expression of people's individuality and their own identity. And I think this kind of empty space, this empty reaction that liberalism had to black lives matter created the context for the right to kind of subvert it and to turn this into a politically salient and powerful issue in politics. It was precisely that emptiness of the Democrats and their response to black lives matter that created the grounds for the right to sort of repurpose this. And so I think we really need to think serious about why is it that wokeness is even a thing. Why can somebody say that and we can kind of associate that with this bundle of very different sorts of things? I think again, we have to tie that in some way to the failure of liberalism. That's exactly where I want to go right now that we're seeing woke in DI becoming central motifs invoked to legitimate a wide swath of this authoritarian mega blitzkrieg that's underway right now in DC. And I want to get more into the the historical context, but just starting with what's happening right now. How are we seeing Woken DEI being invoked from everything from the gutting of USAID and the EEOC countless federal agencies to why Kendrick Lamar performed at the Super Bowl. Half-time show to why to why an aviation disaster took place at National Airport to why the LA fires happened. What is this work that Woken DEI are doing across these incredibly disparate sorts of events in context? Why is it able to do so much work in so many different sorts of places? I think in some ways it is the ideological banner of the right now. And so it is the framing, the cultural framing, to make sense of politics generally. It's emerged as essentially the key lens to understand a whole variety of social ills and social problems. I kind of going back to what I was saying before. That was made possible by the failure of liberalism. Liberals have kind of helped create this kind of distorted worldview that is now kind of the rallying cry of the right. Yeah, and I think one half of it is the point Mike's made over these last couple comments, right? They're seizing on a real failure on the side of the Democratic Party and the center and the center left to connect the sense of values that they communicate with the kneeling in the kentay cloth and all the kind of symbolism to a concrete set of actual political actions. One second, they're calling Trump a fascist, the next, they're gleefully handing power to them. So there's a real disconnect, there's a real weakness of liberalism and the center in this country that the right are seizing upon. But they're also, I think, just as importantly managing to seize on a weakness of their own and managing to convert that into a strength. I think one of the big features of the last sort of era of politics, this generation that we're in, that Doug headwood has written a bit about is a kind of lack of political historical vision from the ruling class as a whole, right? What DEI substitutes for is really having any answers for the actual historical crises that we're in. Like the right doesn't have any ideas about what to actually do about airplane safety. They don't have any ideas about what to do about climate change. They don't have any ideas about really in a serious way how to respond to the geopolitical security crisis that Russia represents. What they have are a bunch of clever, well-honed, kind of scapegoating tactics that substitute for having any actual ideas about how to govern and what they have is an audience of people that been conditioned not to have or even want answers, right? They want people to blame. It's not clear that they want any actual solutions or even on the crudest, most cynical policy terms, any of these actual problems. So I guess I would say that this is actually more determined than that. I do think that the right doesn't have a particular plan to address the issues that they ran on, right? So inflation and insecurity and all of the things that Trump masterfully manipulated, they have no resolution too. But I don't think this is just a smoke screen. I don't think that this is just a distraction in the usual way that we think about that kind of divide and conquer politics of the right. I do think that this is the culmination of decades-long effort by the right to do a few things. One is to denude racism of any real meaning, which has been a long project from the right. First in a very hand-fisted way in the early parts of the civil rights movement where they embraced a kind of open racism and derision of black people. And then the shift in the late 1960s and 1970s to color blindness and to functioning with race outside of the law to still come back to this issue of impugning black people in particular for their own conditions of poverty, which is connected to the next objective, which is the dismantling of the welfare state in particular. And so we know that the right is not anti-statist. The biggest qualms are with the social welfare state. They love the war state, they love the police state, they love the business state. It's the social welfare state that is the problem. And they use and have used racism from reconstruction to now as a way to undermine a welfare state that provides for both black and white people and now brown people, women as well. But anti-black racism is always the Trojan horse for the white, for the right to enter into these discussions. And so Project 2025 is not a new fangled invention of the right. The Heritage Foundation I believe was founded in 1973. It is the, you know, and hereder of Buckley's earlier legacy conservatism. And this has been a part of a strategy for five or six decades that has ebbed and flowed in its, you know, success, less success. And this presented an opening. And so, and what is the this that presented the opening? I think the way that anti-racist politics have devolved from a kind of big left objective to the kind of individual initiative of people based on a leasing individual behavior. So in many ways, the woke DEI, the way that it expresses itself mimics the kind of worst politics of the left, which is anti-racism is about you. And it's about how you respond to people. It's about changing your individual self. It's about being self-reflective. And so of course, sometimes some of that is necessary. I was talking to a friend of mine who was relaying that someone that she knows works at a law firm and the extent of their DEI was telling white people not to touch black people's hair. And of course, sounds ridiculous. But then it's like, but sometimes those white people need to hear that. Like, stuff, such and people's hair. You know, like before I went to graduate school and the reason why I went to graduate school is because I worked for a liberal lawyer, white man in Chicago. And in a fit of rage after a court appearance, we're driving back to Chicago. We had been to court in the suburbs. He begins to explain to me that there is a difference between niggers and black people. This is a liberal white lawyer who defends tenants when he's not making racial slurs. And so it's real like at work where people just say crazy racist shit. And so I don't have any qualms with trying to create an environment where that is just not permissible. But to think that that is the extent of what it means to actually confront racism is not just, I mean, it's obviously a deep reflection of liberalism, but it's also a reflection of how the premises of liberalism have come to usurp the much bigger, broader vision of what the left used to have in this country and has been replaced by this kind of individual initiative. And so the right has exploited this by picking up on the resentments of people being individually told by their employer to change their behavior, to change how they interact with people at work, to change how they think, right? This is why this is an opening that can be exploited. But I don't think that it's just about smoke screens and distractions, but that this is part of the rights long war on the social welfare state. They want to undermine that they have always had racism at the center of those efforts to undermine that and they this is an opportunity. A crisis, if you will, that they have refused to squander. They are taking advantage of it. Kiehenga, you put this really hilariously and well in a group chat and I'm sharing this with your permission. Quote, "If my boss told me to interrogate my whiteness, I would tell them to fuck off, but that's only part of what's happening." Exactly. No one wants to feel policed by the person who's paying them because it feels manipulative. People don't want to be perceived as racist. People don't want to be perceived as oppressors. And there's something about your boss being at the helm of this process that raises all kinds of political issues. But the aspect of there's more happening is important because none of that has anything to do with what the rights doing. Yeah, I just want to build on that a little bit because I think Kiehenga's point about the rights. So it's so fundamental. I don't know if this is a disagreement or if it's just kind of an elaboration, but it seems to me the past decade or so the rights kind of hegemonic project to justify the ruling class through this racial frame has really experienced a significant delgeumization in American culture. And I think it's been undermined significantly precisely by those movements that emerged that have reshaped how people think about race and that both the economic project of the right after Occupy Wall Street has is kind of lost its appeal, but also the cultural project of the right. It suffered massive pushback and kind of fractures. You can actually see that in the disorientation and disorganization of the elite. I think the ruling class in the past five to ten years has been confused and disorganized when it comes to cultural issues. You know, they've had no problem when it comes to making money, but I think in some ways that's what this woke blowback is kind of responding to. It's responding to this cultural disorganization. The ruling class want to be able to say they want to be they want to be able to justify the fact that their wealth comes through exploitation, but they also want to feel good about themselves. And they want to feel good about who they are and they want to feel good about being men and being masculine and all this crap. And I think that pushback and the sort of vehement in which we see it is precisely because they've lost legitimacy in the past. And I think it's interesting right at a moment where where all these books about woke are coming out and all these anti-woke books are coming out and anti-dei stuff is, you know, driving politics and key ways. We're at a moment, I think we're actually these concepts. The rights are the one on these points. Like a wokeness itself doesn't have any political salience for the left anymore. I kind of asked my class the other day, I have a class of 25 UC Santa Cruz students about as liberals you can get. I asked them in class, I pulled them, who in here would, you know, describe yourself as woke. Literally none of them, right, all of them were like, no, this is a concept that we use. And it's not because they're on the right. It's because the concept is doesn't have like social legitimacy in a way that it might have five years ago. And even when you look at, if you look at sort of how DEI issues and executives are talking about these issues in the firm, there's been an absolute collapse. Like there's, it's basically not used anymore. DEI is as a kind of rhetorical justification increasingly kind of going by the wayside. I think in some ways, what we've seen over the past five years to kind of reconnect us to Kionger's point is a little sort of dip in the legitimacy of the ruling class. And they have quickly rearticulated their project. And I think I think we're kind of seeing the emergence of a kind of a new frame to legitimize and to and to justify their extraordinary wealth and extraordinary extraction. I really agree with that. If we think about the last, I don't know since 2008, how long is that 17 years that we have been in a period of expanding radicalization. And you think about how the economic crisis of 2008, but none of my students even know was a thing. It cracked open the logics, the prevailing logics of the world in utterly profound ways. And so if you think about how just a few years before the economic crisis, how black people in New Orleans were blamed for their own poverty, were blamed for not evacuating during Hurricane Katrina. And that this was part of a prevailing logic in mainstream bipartisan political discourse that kind of hang over from the welfare discourse of the Democratic Party and the Republicans in the mid 19 90s that ends up with the destruction of welfare as an entitlement led by the Republicans and then taken up by Bill Clinton in 1996. And the financial crisis really obliterates that worldview that poverty is caused by the excesses of the poor. It revealed that poverty and the threat to global stability or a bunch of reckless greedy bankers. And then it is further delegitimized when the federal government bends over backwards to rescue them with this logic that they are too big to fail. And having nothing substantive for people whose lives were destroyed by this financial crisis, mostly in the form of losing their homes, losing their asset, their investment, the stake they had in this society. It cracked open the space for the development of Occupy Wall Street, Pickety's book on capital becomes a kind of common language to understand expressed through the Occupy Wall Street slogan about the 1%, which then also creates the space for the emergence of black lives matter, which up ends the discussion about post racialism. And connects black inequality and racism to capitalism and to the excesses and the inequality of American capitalism. It totally transformed the political ground upon which everyone was standing. And I think that the high point of the black lives matter movement in 2020 is not just about police violence, although obviously that was a central catalyzing issue, but it was also again about the ineptitude of the ruling class in response to the pandemic. That was also a focal point of those protests. Why are black people dying at such an exponential rate. But also what is this essential worker nonsense, right, calling people essential workers to force them to go out and be vulnerable to an airborne disease, but not paying them as if they were essential workers. How is it that we have a military that can pinpoint bombs and a Pakistani wedding party, but somehow we can't make sure that Michigan has ventilators. Somehow we can't make sure nurses in New York have masks and have aprons like what what is going on. The protests were about the racism and cruelty of police, but also about the ineptitude of the state. And I think the fact that millions of young white people were on those demonstrations sometimes in places where there are no black people. Portland, Maine and Boise Idaho sent a message to at least some layer of the ruling class that we got to we got to get the narrative back. And Scott Walker said it, the former right wing governor of Wisconsin. Our youth have been indoctrinated in this woke multicultural grievance studies that are polluting our universities. If we don't get them back, we will never win another election. And so that is why we have to under understand the attacks on history, on book bans, on curriculum, on schools, as entandem with the attacks on workers, the attacks on the social welfare state, which is why it is so dangerous for people on our side to be entertaining that there's something good and not the collapse of DEI, if it's collapsing under its own weight, then that would be another thing to talk about. But this is a concerted effort to use racism, to undermine the idea of racism as having any explanatory force in our society of basically saying anytime you see a black worker, whether it's at Starbucks, in a control tower, whether it's at Harvard University, or whether it's at your local community college, they don't deserve to be there. They have replaced a more competent white person, and you should be suspicious of them. What does that do to the damn class struggle? As well as reinforcing ideas among white workers that the real problems that they face are not the rich, is not a billionaire selectively deciding which program should stay and which should go. But as of black workers, is of Latino workers and is in Muslims. Of course, we have to take this as a racist attack. Let's talk more about education, because of course, woken various synonyms have long been invoked from states like Florida to the federal level to attack education, particularly, well, I'm not particularly hired to education all education, K through 12 and higher ed in different ways. But for years, in terms of higher ed, the far right attack has been really focused on dismantling the humanities and fields, woke fields like gender studies, and also just generalized curricular censorship, austerity, and privatization. But now in the last few weeks, somewhat surprisingly to me, at least this gutting of the administrative state has led to huge sudden cuts to STEM, a real crisis for scientific research all over the country. What's weird about this to me is that that STEM had been valorized in contrast to the purportedly woken soft sciences and humanities. And now they're suddenly on the chopping block big time. What does dismantling universities as we knew them? Where does that fit into the far right culture war? And what does it mean that it suddenly extended to the hard sciences? Not that the right has ever been especially subtle, but we are in a loud mask off moment among the lines that can't go with just saying, right? You know, whatever it is that you think you mean by opposition to DI, wokeness, there is a particular thing that the right means by that. And it is visible in the character of the politics that they're pushing now. One development I was sharing with everybody here is the bill that's been advanced in the Ohio Senate this past week, which would outlaw DI offices and scholarships and also outlaw strikes by full time faculty. The underlying through line, of course, being we want power, and we being the imperious right have a broad conception of what power is arguably as broad as ours, right? They want to control what information is thought of is valorized is promoted. And so this same bill not only Bands DI, but it also calls for post tenure reviews. So they can undermine faculty protections that might keep other political perspectives around. It would go as far as making institutional statements that the bill deems politically controversial. So that would not only include DI, but foreign policy, electoral politics, immigration, marriage, abortion and climate policy. All of those are specifically named by this legislation that is a full on authoritarian crackdown. And that is the underlying logic behind union busting as well. These people will burn money to make sure that they don't have to share power with workers. It's not, you know, that is how the class war has traditionally been understood. Not just for profit, but also for control over the workplace, over production, over social life that it's organized by production. And that's how they understand it. And they're being very clear about that now. You know, this isn't just the robber barons who are trying to squeeze every nickel out of every human being, but if there is an ideological force that is underwriting this, it's Christian nationalism. And so that's why we get the kind of, you know, capitalist bludgeon, the working class and working class living standards and programs and all of that. But it comes with anti-science, right? I mean, the Senate just confirmed Robert F Kennedy, the anti-vaccine eugenicist cook to be in charge of the $2 trillion budget for health and human services. This is the idea that the right is concerned about meritocracy and qualification is just treated absurdly in this moment. They're literally mocking the idea. But I think that the Christian nationalism explains some aspects of the anti-science parts of this, the intense, extraordinary homophobia and anti-trans agenda, which I think is just the opening. I think they will try to repel equal marriage for LGBT couples. Obviously, before it's all said and done, they will impose a national ban on abortion. It might not be the first thing that they do, but I think before they lose their majority, they will try to impose that. It's an attack on anything that does not resemble the nuclear family. There were reports that the new head, I can't remember his name, of the DOT Department of Transportation wants to tie funding to communities that have side birth rates and high rates of traditional marriage. That is also an aspect of what their political agenda is and also why they want to attack schools. It's not just the undermining of the quote-unquote indoctrination, but it's also advancing another kind of education that you can see embodied in the 1776 Commission report, these executive orders that decry one form of politics in the classroom while promoting a different form. We can't undersell the fact that the right isn't just trying to attack things, they're trying to build things. They have a positive vision. They have an alternative. In the university, they want to recognize nationalist, patriotic, America first, interpretations of history. They are absolutely clear about that. They want to recognize traditional family values. They want to recognize, to bring back basically ideas that have been delegitimized. I think that's absolutely essential. I want to go back to a point that Femme made as well. We need to put front and center how anti-worker this project is. The anti-DI project is fundamentally an anti-worker project. We're going to see that within the universities. We are already seeing that at the level of federal workers. We're being fired. We are seeing that in workplaces where people are being fired out of DEI positions. These are overwhelmingly people of color. By the middle class, it doesn't matter. This doesn't actually have any effect. If you look at the sociological research on the Black family in the US, there's some great research by folks like Mary Patilo and others who basically show that Black families are with middle class, Black middle class individuals are much, much more likely to have people in their families that are impoverished. Those individuals oftentimes give money to those family members to help them. Poverty and class are intertwined. in ways that it's just not true of other groups in the US. So when people on the left say, oh, this is just PMC politics, this doesn't matter. This doesn't matter for the working class. It's just, it's not an accurate view of what the Black family looks like in the United States. And the way in which wealth is moved around the Black family in order to support people who are impoverished. We need to have like a broader view of this stuff. And yeah, just to kind of go back to the point about the anti-woke left, I think it's really, really dangerous and extremely concerning that we have such a significant current of people on the left in the United States that are cheering this on. To me, it is a complete rejection of left values, of the idea of solidarity, of the idea of common support for workers. And I think a lot of it, it's a politics that is so internal to the university and university spaces and is so disconnected in some ways from actual worker struggles. I really want to push back against that 'cause I'm concerned with it and I think it's a dangerous trend. - There are a certain subset of elite university left anti-woke professors whose entire politics seems to be defined by fellow elite university purportedly woke professors who drive them insane. And that's their entire worldview. - It's just a matter of not liking your coworkers, I think. (laughing) - And it's really bizarre on the merits, right? Because we're in an era where the president is like a real estate trust fund kid. The real actual president is the richest person in the world. It's never been easier to make the case for class first politics and the centrality of capital to understand the politics. And there is just a contingent of people that just refuses to take the W. And is just like snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory by fighting yesterday's interlephed weird culture war between academic departments and just won't look at the actual conjuncture. And I don't know what's going on there, but it's weird. - I think Mike is making a really important point. One about the ways that the experience of black middle class people is not the same as what we might describe as a white middle class experience. It's quite shallow, it's extremely fragile because of the proximity of black middle class people to the black poor, often in the same neighborhood because of residential segregation that continues to persist through redlining, but also through the family itself. And so any idea that these are just middle class positions and are somehow superfluous is kind of insidious on its own terms, but is really missing the way that this is ideologically being wielded to raise suspicion about all black workers undermining the solidarity between all workers by creating and raising suspicion about who belongs and who doesn't belong. And it's a politics that we should actually be arguing fervently against no matter what class is affected, right? The Tribune of the oppressed, understanding that racism no matter who it's directed at, has a much broader social appeal. And that's why when Barack Obama is subjected to birtheurism and other kinds of racism-invicted, the point is not to then stand back and say, well, he deserves it. The point is to challenge the ideas of racism anywhere they present themselves in our society because it's antithetical to the politics of solidarity and unity that is necessary to move from what is it, a class of itself to a class for itself. And so that, to me, is one aspect of this that has to be taken seriously. Just the last thing about the university is, I think that what Mike says about the right has a vision and a plan for what they're doing is absolutely true. And if that means shrinking the university back to a kind of, it's classical liberal phase before the dirty herds, the dirty masses were allowed open entry, then that is something that we need to do. I think that their kind of perverse vision of destroying the administrative state as a way to starve the beast, what Musk is now calling the parasite class, meaning anyone who is using the services of the state as part of the enemy is all part of this. And they set this, you know, in the days before the election that, you know, this will be painful, this reordering that we envision ourselves being able to enact will be painful, but will be lucrative in the long run. This is straight class war. This is straight class war, strength the colleges and universities, engorge the working class, the poor, de-classed people. This is who will replace the immigrants that we absolutely in the name of white national, white Christian nationalism want to drive out. This will create their replacements, repopulate the jails, will make them work too. And we will use, you know, AI and all these other technological devices to fill in the gaps. And if some planes have to crash and some doors have to close and some food poisoning has to commence, and some burqa-losis has to spread, then so be it. 'Cause as Musk said a few days ago, this is our one shot. This is our one opportunity. You can't be afraid. And this is the problem with the so-called opposition of the Democratic Party. You hear you see the inventiveness, the audaciousness, the really like bold thinking of the right. And the Democrats are still, they're so institutionalized that they literally think that the system can't break and that they can play the usual games that they've played. Oh, people will see how bad it's getting and come to their senses. And this will be good discipline for our base as Cory Booker said on a live presser two days ago, elections have consequences with a slight smirk, right? Like they are playing yesterday's game. And so, you know, these are important questions and times for the left about how are we going to re-consolidate our forces. Because one of the lessons from 2020 is that movements don't win because they should. They don't win just because they're morally superior to their opposition. And we had a moment, but without the political tools to really take advantage of that, to win anything substantive. I mean, the lasting residue of 2020 is Juneteenth is a lynching bill that was 60 years too late. And that's it. And they might even cancel Juneteenth this year. And then what do we have? We won't have anything as a victory from then. And so this raises huge questions for what the left is, what it wants to be. How does it organize itself to resist the situation? And at the heart of that, you know, are questions about ideology and politics and what we have to say about racism. It's an unavoidable argument in the United States. You can avoid it maybe in Sweden. Maybe you don't need to take it up. But you probably do because of the poorest borders now. But in the US, you can't be a left without anti-racist politics. There is no historical precedent. And it doesn't even matter. If you-- I don't want to fight against racism and misdivis-- it doesn't matter because black people will fight. These attacks are directed at black people. Black people will fight. And so then the question will be, are you fighting alongside them? Or are you ignoring their struggle? And in that way, you become entangled in the racist or anti-racist politics, whether you like it or not. That's the country we live in. It's a country of immigrants, it's a country of formerly enslaved people. There have to be racial politics. I think it's really important at this point that King, you made Mike made about the racialized class war from above nature of the way that Woken D.I. are now so powerfully resonant in the attack on the administrative state and the federal bureaucracy. This resonates because both the federal bureaucracy and wokeness are identified not just with the despised liberal professional managerial class, but particularly the female PMC and even more particularly the black female PMC and this demonization of black women is always core to attacks on the public sector and public sector unions. Yeah, I think one of the things that we have to contend with as musk and his cronies hollow out the administrative state is what the administrative state actually is. And it goes back to earlier what Kango was saying about which versions of the state the right doesn't like. They like the war state. They like the bits that protect capital. They like the bits that expand incarceration, coercive massive private prison companies meeting every day with the Trump administration and already rolling out a $40 million renovation project which is anticipating Trump delivering on the mass deportation plans. The CEO is saying how he's more excited than he's ever been in his whole career at an article in the intercept. So there are parts of the state that even the right wants to keep around. But the bits that they're dismantling the welfare state bits the fall out from that has a racial character to it. One in five black workers are employed by the public sector in this country. Something like 20% of federal workers are black which is a much higher percentage of the federal workforce than blacks represent the population. And I live in DC where this is especially visible. You know, there are whole ass counties built off of the possibilities for economic opportunity that the federal workforce provides a unique opportunity for economic life in the United States. And this hasn't been missed by the relevant unions, the national secretary of the AFG, the American federation of government employees. One of the reasons he stated for fighting project 2025 is the dependence of the black middle class and black life in the DMV on access to the government workforce. Right? I think the right wing knows this. This is part of why they're fighting against the administrative state. This is part of why they're fighting against home rule in DC. You know, there is a attempt to subjugate all workers. There's a special attempt to subjugate black workers and that's part of why the first executive orders from the Trump administration was rolling out dismantling previous executive orders that institutionalized anti-discrimination measures. There was one executive order in particular that rolled back anti-discrimination in government contracting, which is a $100 billion chunk of the public budget. So we're seeing a full court press against worker rights against the working class and the black working class is a central target in that struggle. Kiehenga, you mentioned Christian nationalism earlier. Mike, I saw that you have Melinda Cooper's wonderful book, Family Values on your desk. And that book is all about the fundamental implication of social and economic reaction. And I think I think something that's been really notable is that we've seen this exuberant executive enthusiasm for ditching DEI and wokeism in the workplace. And one, there are many examples. One in particular that comes to mind is Mark Zuckerberg, who went on Joe Rogan recently and said that corporations needed more "masculine energy" because corporations were becoming "culturally neutered." I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive. Zuckerberg said that in his new aesthetic, which you guys have probably seen of these heavy t-shirts and big necklaces, it's really horrible. It's really horrible. But my question is, are these CEOs overwhelmingly white and male? Are they thrilling to this all because it's all about exalting their total impunity and power in the workplace as owners and executives who exercise total and incontestable domination of their workforce? And are they ecstatic about getting any sort of challenge on that impunity out of the way, not just because of the reaffirmation of a purely class-based domination of their workers, but also in the sense of reaffirming their domination as white men because those are the modalities through which they exercise their class power in the workplace. As white male CEOs, that is how they embody their class power in the workplace. I think it's really important that a lot of these economic spaces where we've been having fightbacks are precisely the spaces where the elite have felt culturally neutered, you know, to put it back into terms to connect up to the masculinity. He said it. Yeah, right, right, right, right, exactly. And what to me, what it is, it's an expression of actually winning the economic fights, like they feel emboldened, they feel in a way sort of that they're past this moment in which they are being sort of held to a greater level of scrutiny that they have in our past. And I think we can see this in a lot of different areas. It's no surprise to me that issues like ESG and investing have experienced a major backlash by the Trump administration. For folks that don't know, ESG is environment, social and governance. It's basically investing norms, financial investing, that's like pro-environment and things like that. And it's basically trying to respond in different ways to environmental justice movements, trying to reshape how we invest. But it's for ESG, for instance, think about where the politics have been on the US campuses over the past years. They've been politics around the genocide in Palestine. And those those those politics have been manifested in fight backs that are about university endowments that are about how universities invest. And the elite understand that investment and these endowments is a critical space of politics and contentious politics. The the encampments that sprung up across the country were precisely about redirecting flows of investment outside of companies that were profiting from the genocide. They understand this. They understand where social movement politics are. And they're they're winning those fights right in the dismantlement of the encampments and the sort of the rollback on ESG. It represents a win for them. It represents a victory. And in the same way, the the dismantling of DEI, the dismantling of the cultural significance of wokeness is a victory for them. And it's it's an opportunity for them to step out in front of us and pump their chest. And and that's exactly what what's happening. People like Mark Zuckerberg, people like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, bizarrely have felt under attack. They bizarrely have felt like they're the cultural victims. And they're stepping up right now in this sort of bravado moment because they feel like it's they're finally winning. I think it represents an actual victory. But it's it's grand moves about minor inconveniences. That's what's happening. The DEI was always a minor inconvenience. But that minor inconvenience was always way too much. And I think we need to kind of recognize that they are they are in a moment right now where they they feel like they're absolutely on top of the world, not just economically, but also culturally. I think that these people have been on the defensive for more than a decade. I think because of the way that liberalism kind of performs action and substantive action with kind of substitutes that with chattering with symbolic gestures that it may open us or multiculturalism or the sort of affects of anti-racism appear to be invogue as a discussion point without actually addressing the underlying materiality that is the product of racial discrimination and inequality. But in doing so, that was part of putting these people on the defensive and I think that corporations were susceptible to this as well. These were initiatives, programs, ideas imposed on them because of the political climate. And to me, that is why they've so quickly fallen, right? I mean, the people acting as if executive order is law, right? Executive orders are not laws. They may be a particular interpretation of the law, but they aren't laws themselves. But think about the NCAA within five minutes of Trump's executive order about transgender athletes. They're like, oh yes, we can see it. We can see it. It's because 15 years earlier, they were forced. The rise and strength of the LGBT movement that produced marriage, 15 years earlier, meant that the NCAA was forced to change its rules then. They didn't want to. They were forced to. And so when that pressure alleviates itself and there's a directive that in other circumstances people challenge the legality of, they're like, oh yes, we will quickly revert back to the way we want it things to be. And that's the same across corporate America that even before Trump is elected, the quick and easy decision to do away with their diversity initiatives because they didn't want them in the first place. They were forced upon them. And so I think that the kind of greening of powerful rich white men is part of the ideological center of the mega movement, right? Make America great again, which was when, which was when wealthy white men ruled without question that it was the expectation. So this is an effort to kind of reestablish an older coalition of white supremacy, understanding white supremacy as a political project, intending to fuse rich wealthy white men with working class white men on the presumption of cultural dominance that this is our country. We are the kings of our castle here and everyone else must defer to us. And substitution of real substantive material left. It doesn't mean that there aren't some material benefits that come with that, but they're unstable and they're inconsistent and they're not nearly enough and they won't be nearly enough. If you combine the shrinking of colleges in university, if you combine the destruction of the administrative state. If you combine the conditions that they are creating for a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top, then the old white supremacist coalition can't really hold together because there's some, there's supposed to be some guarantee as in the uniqueness of the post war period, right? And ever expanding economy, there's supposed to be that trade off of the family wage of the quote unquote American dream. This iteration, which is why it's important not to just wildly use historical analogies. Is this the post reconstruction post reconstruct? No, we're not in a post reconstruction period. No, this is not the new Nadir, right? This is not 1915 where hundreds of black people are being lynched and if you ask then, you know, should black people be colonized somewhere else, then 99% of the population would agree with you. This is not that. In the same way that this is not the post war, white supremacist coalition, the too many financial contradictions. This is coming about at a time when the lives in livelihood of ordinary white people is being destroyed, being destroyed through the forces of the death spud to spare. People recoil at this because God forbid you talk about the exploitation and oppression of white working class people, but that's a real phenomenon, right? Black addiction, opioid addiction, alcoholism and suicide, not really the pillars of white privilege, but exposing the fragility of magas attempts to reconstitute a white power, white supremacist coalition. This is not the post war order. These are the contradictions that a coherent left has to exploit. People have to be anti-racist and be able to articulate a vision for white working class people, but does not just dismiss them as being privileged as being unquestioned supporters and as being outside of a movement that is necessary to build to transform the conditions of life in this country. And that requires a serious mature left that we have to rebuild because we're not there at the moment. Yeah, I just want to add to that, that was such a good point that Ken goes making. There's also a way in which I think Trump is playing the kind of role of a Bonaparte figure in this period, essentially presenting himself as the figure of the nation as a kind of neutral arbiter in such a way that he's actually reconstituting the ruling class's legitimacy and the ruling class's project in ways that they couldn't do themselves. I mean, think about Zuckerberg 1.0. Not really somebody who was wearing the heavy chains and the heavy shirts, he didn't really have the kind of swagger that a ruling class figure has. And the way that these companies were consumed by in certain ways, a liberal politics of recognition kept them from fully embracing a ruling class project and kept them in a certain way confined by the cultural victories of Black Lives Matter. And what Trump is doing is actually inverting that and saying, we're going to crush these victories. Yes, they're just cultural, but I want you to thrive culturally too. I want you to dominate in that sphere too. And that's what the project is doing. It's reconstituting the ruling class's cultural domination in addition to its political and its economic domination, which are obvious. And a strange way, and this connects to what Kionger was saying, he's been able to do that by also winning over a section of the working class. He's done that through a combination of one recognition politics to say, yes, the working class deaths of despair, you are valid people. You are kind of, you are the heart of our nation, type of politics. But also a redistributive promise that if we build a nativist, anti-immigrant project, you will benefit. You will benefit. And it doesn't matter if our culture is one in which we re-embrace white supremacy. Poor black workers, poor workers of color are going to benefit from it anyway. And that is something the left needs to take on. We need to have both a mature, sophisticated politics that recognizes the importance of cultural politics, recognition, the value and sort of dignity of people from all different walks of life. But also this built on a redistributive project that knows how to actually win material gains for working class people of all different varieties. And we were in a moment in 2020 when those protests kicked off, when the left, I think, had an opportunity to consolidate around a worker-led movement of black people in the United States to make demands. And we, I think, in some key ways failed in that moment. You read all the anti-woke stuff and the characterization of this movement as just a phenomena of the PMC or of elite cultural institutions, like Columbia University or something like that. I was living in Milwaukee at the time in 2020-2021 and there were massive protests and riots in the city and those protests were exclusively driven by the poorest neighborhoods in Milwaukee and they were exclusively driven by the poorest, most oppressed people in Milwaukee in the zip code that has the highest black male incarceration rate in the United States. It was a movement of the black working class and I think in key ways we forget that. And so to kind of circle back, the left really needs to embrace a politics that's both the politics of recognizing the significance of sectional demands within the working class, right? Not dismissing them as identity politics 'cause what is class politics if it's not identity politics? I mean, is there anything, is there any other way of doing politics than through some form of identity? But also kind of having a politics of solidarity that can link those things into a broader struggle and I think that's where we are currently failing. There's so many that kind of have this vision of class struggle that if it's not just the class as such, mobilized in mass, then it's not real. But it's always subsections of the class that acts. It's always, that's what class politics always is. Class composition is always a work in progress. Exactly. And just to add a quick point onto that, that was traditionally very explicitly how it was understood. I don't think Vladimir Lenin is anyone's example of like the most racially focused communist, but even him in the terms of admission to the Third International had as one of the criteria for being admitted as a communist party that if you're in a country whose bourgeoisie possesses colonies, you as a party have to have a clear cut policy in respect of those colonies at oppressed peoples. And you have to support in both deed and word every colonial liberation movement and demand the expulsion of the imperialists. And the point of doing that was to inculcate the kind of internationalist solidarity, cross class, cross race, cross national solidarity that they thought was the bedrock of becomeiest movement as such. So like the people that are positioning themselves as the gatekeepers of true class politics would not have been admitted on these terms to the Third International. So it's a weird outcrop. The woke international. Yeah. The woke international, apparently. (laughing) You know what we're seeing now is a weird outcrop of a very specific set of culture war issues that are being read back into the history and the concept of class politics and they really are not watching on correctly to what's at stake here. - I'm Naomi Klein and you're listening to the dig. My go-to podcast for the most thoughtful in-depth conversation on the left. It's an incredible place to be exposed to new ideas and new writing. And if you can, please become a sustaining supporter at Patreon. - This episode of the dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com and by Pluto Press, which has loads of great left-wing titles perfect for dig listeners like you. One that you might like is Solidarity Betrayed by senior labor activist Anna Avendanyl. Unions have criticized Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein for their blatant sexual abuse practices and the example these powerful men are setting for American workers. But what about the powerful men into unions themselves? In Solidarity Betrayed, Anna Avendanyl, who was fired from United Way worldwide for speaking up against harassment, exposes the blatant hypocrisy at the heart of the labor bureaucracy. Working people must be able to have confidence and trust in their unions. And this book is a wedge for anyone working in unions today to help make the changes needed for a stronger and more united labor movement. Dig listeners can get 50% off their first order of this or any book from Pluto Press using the code [email protected]. That's capital DIG50, no spaces, at Plutobooks.com for 50% off your first order of any book. The way that woke in D.I. are being deployed in the gutting and attempted elimination of USAID, I think is really fascinating. It's like a revealing window into the intersection of MAGA, domestic, and foreign policies because USAID is a complex entity that does a lot of different things, all of which though, make it the engine of American imperial soft power. It delivers important life-saving aid and it also has a long and sketchy history of being a CIA cut out that funds groups that advance US interests within rival countries, domestic politics. And so I've been trying to think about, are they just invoking woke in D.I. to gut USAID because that's what they're arbitrarily invoking to justify anything they're doing. And on the one hand, it's like maybe yes. But also, I see two different things on the surface. There are these allegations that the US is spending $100,000 on, I don't know, like transgender theater troops in some third world country or whatever, but then also below the surface. I'm also seeing a MAGA vision, a Trump vision for a new sort of American empire that's all hard power. Is the very sort of soft power that helped underpin US hegemony for such a long time? Is that also now woke in D.I. In a way that can help us learn something about how they're thinking about both the US and its place in the world? I think there is something of a new sort of strategic position with respect to the second Trump administration on the question of foreign policy. I would say it represents more the instability of the right-wing coalition that's lined up behind Trump rather than a kind of ideological shift on his part or on his core circles part. But to the extent that the D.I. stuff interfaces with it at all, I think it is, I don't get the sense that it's much more than rhetorical. I don't know that they have a position that soft power is woke so much as they have a position that woke is a useful device for framing things that they want to move away from. But I am curious what people who have done more deeply into the coalition of right-wing actors on that side of things would make of this particular development. But that would be my guess just as an outsider looking in. I don't think that we should underestimate the kind of extraordinary racism of the MAGA political project. And if it means that children, starve in the shithole countries and Trump's parliants, then so be it. I don't think that that is the underlying sort of explanation. But if there's some of that, that's okay because that is also part of the terrorizing rollout, I think in some ways this is connected to what is happening within the US, which is tearing up the norms of engagement. It's very luggage and mafia like, so tearing up the normal modes of engagement to establish new modes of engagement, which is to say that disemboweling USAID is not about the US turning its back on its involvement in the world. It's about signing a new deal, as Trump would say, to have this engagement. But part of establishing the new terms of a new deal is to really show who's the boss, who's in control. And we'll have a deal on our terms where we won't have any deal at all. So I think that that is part of it. I also think that in some ways, the organization USAID was low-hanging fruit, which is, the easiest aid to get rid of for the American public is foreign aid because it kind of pushes into the sentiment of where are we helping other people given the conditions of life for people in this country. And just an overall kind of ignorance about anything that goes on outside of this country makes this a particularly attractive target and it could be, you know, the people who sort of helm the organization. You get to own the lives of the powers and you know, tweet mean things about them in the midst of this so I think that there's layers and multiple things happening at the same time I agree with what Femis says that. Well, then just is a useful codgel to beat the organization its sympathizers its recipients it's it's something to beat them with even if it's not really the underlying reason I think you know all of this is about scaring people, shocking people and coming back with in their eyes a clean slate to do business whether you're the federal workers union, whether you're a government worker, whether you are a professor, a student, whoever you are a Medicaid recipient. We're going to do this on our terms and you can take it or leave it and we don't care what happens in the end term. Yeah, I think that's a really great point that there's sort of a globalization of the anti welfare discourse and that's not a new thing on the right it's you know the same sort of language used to describe aid to what they would probably call shit hole neighborhoods. I think Trump did say something along those lines in terms of Baltimore aimed at shit hole countries and it's always revealing that Americans when pulled believe that foreign aid is some giant portion of the federal government and it's like slightly over 1% maybe. Yeah it's the same with these cuts if they cut every federal worker that they want to which you know there's the vast majority of them it's less than 1% of the budget. So the whole budget discourse is just you know it's the entry point into the destruction of many things. There's a way in which these cuts aren't simply directed tax on what we might consider liberal gains or liberal institutions but are also part of a deregulatory agenda. I'm thinking in particular about the recent news that they cut 1700 positions at the consumer financial protection bureau which is the basically the institution for providing oversight on financial services. Established and and filled with personnel after the 2000 make crisis in order to kind of guard against that now in some ways it's a liberal institution that has kind of given given legitimacy to the financial system in the in the wake of the financial crisis in a way that doesn't actually respond to the fundamental drivers of that crisis. But they're so hell bent on the complete destruction of their enemies and the complete destruction of the institutions that want scavenging legitimacy to American liberalism that you know they're going after that over whatever what I think most of us would say is not a very significant institution in in terms of how we think about the broader risk safety and macroeconomic stability of people's lives in the US. So I think in some ways they're you know they're both driven by this kind of complete destruction of the liberal project and also by a destruction of these institutions that they think give the liberal project legitimacy in the same way that they're going after the education department right this education department's promotion of certain types of views of history that they see as being liberal or in some ways leftists. They're trying to break those institutions and create new institutions in which they can formulate a hegemonic program for for American conservatism. And like even more specifically because I don't know that we've really underlined this yet you know there's that line that vulgar Marxism sometimes gets you 90% of the way there I mean musk is invoking Woken D.I. to gut agencies that pose and have posed clear regulatory threats. To his businesses. I mean I wrote I wrote about this with the the EEOC right Tesla has been a kind of hornets nest of racial discrimination according to multiple lawsuits and most recently a class action lawsuit involving upwards of 6000 black workers in California. And the way that within days after Trump is inaugurated that you know they're they're doing all their D.I. stuff but two things stood out to me one is reaching back literally into the era of civil rights to rescind an executive order that had been administered by LBJ and 1965. So in the heart of the civil rights movement which the 1776 commission and conservatives love to herald as a kind of genuine expression of Americana that fundamentally erased racism from the stains of racism from the country that even that's woke. So the kind of original you know it's not the 1964 civil rights act that'll be next but the 64 civil rights act is about government itself this executive order was about federal contractors who work on behalf of the government which over the last 50 years has become an increasing number of people because of privatization because of the constant whittling at the edges of the state it has become much more reliant on private contractors including musk for various projects and so this EEOC lawsuit was distinct from the class action lawsuit but was to say that we're suing him because they have created a hostile workplace so black workers. And so within days not only this Trump recent johnson's executive order about federal contractors having to operate without discrimination on the basis of race gender etc but they go in and defing the EEOC you need five commissioners for a quorum to exist so they remove three. So that the organization basically can't exist and this is just months after I mean almost 10 months after on a pill a court said that this suit from the EEOC could move forward that Tesla had tried to have it dismissed and the courts ruled that it could go forward so this this is just kind of appalling undercurrent of corruption. And the Orwellian way or I've been trying to think about the language hypocrisy just seems to almost too straight for what is happening or it's like an exhausted concept at this point or something yeah exactly that like this is it's fraught it's something more robust where you can have this billionaire who has billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government picking off the regulators that are investigating his businesses for which he is making I think congressman said eight million dollars a day through these contracts I mean this is just a naked corruption in the name of weeding out corruption. It's science science fiction if it weren't actually happening this this is like an episode of the twilight zone for all you youngsters out there who get yourself a six pack of episodes and you'll see where this current phase of American history comes from it is the way to. We touched on the Gaza encampments earlier and one thing we definitely need to discuss in some detail is how these really genocide and Gaza under Democratic president Joe Biden truly exposed the limits hollowness fundamental bankruptcy of purported democratic commitments to racial justice the sort of purported commitments on display when For example, and infamously Nancy Pelosi led her colleagues in kneeling while wearing Kentay cloth. Democratic and liberal elites, the very same ones who had been falling all over themselves to insist on their maximal intersectionality. They quite quickly became organized, shoulder to shoulder, in launching wall to wall repression of pro-Palestine protesters, particularly pro-Palestinian faculty and students, a period of liberal repression that's now so clearly greased the wheels for the MAGA attack on higher ed that's intensifying as we speak. Is it enough to say that this was all just bullshit or is there something more like an imminent critique that would help us elucidate more about what we just lived through? I mean, I think it exposed the, certainly the, the, the hollowness of the Democratic Party's commitment to racial justice or anything like that, but I think that there's probably something even more insidious, which is I think that it exposed the hollowness of their commitment to democracy, which was ironic because they were running on saving democracy. And the attack on the encampments at its very sort of basic foundation was an attack on free speech and an attack on the right to assemble and an attack on the right to free political thought. And it's easy to point out the contradiction of JD Vance going to Europe and operating the leaders of Europe for suppressing the right of Nazis to speak while having nothing to say about the violent suppression of Palestinian protest, you know, Germany. I think that they banned the use of Arabic protest and you can't have a Palestinian flag and, you know, there's intense policing of Palestinian solidarity. So nothing said about that. But here in this country to pose the election as this existential contest between darkness and light, fascism and freedom, while you are leading efforts to distort the political intention of college students primarily, saying that their revulsion at what is happening to Palestinians is anti-Semitic. And then I believe that Biden gave the kind of wink and nod go ahead to up the level of repression in a violent direction by just categorically denouncing the protest. I think it was last May as violent, which gave the go ahead to the NYPD to use a SWAT team to break the encampment on campus, but also the building occupation. And so you have this collusion between liberal college administrators and the Democratic party to suppress speech, to suppress political assembly in the name of defending the regime and Israel and defending the genocide of Palestinians. And then wondering, where's the enthusiasm for the campaign? What's this enthusiasm gap? And then callously running on a theme of joy, trampling on the bodies of Palestinians with this theme of joy and exhibiting such kind of racist content that they can't even allow a Palestinian-American on the stage of their sacrosanct convention to say one word. And then they wonder, and grossly underestimated among their reported base, the absolute revulsion and disgust that this generated. Even if this did not become the issue that prevented many of those people from voting, it certainly cast a pall over the entire endeavor that I think ultimately undermined their efforts, because they did look like whatever the word is that is stronger than hypocrisy, they looked like that, telling us that this was a race for democracy while implying the most undemocratic methods in two generations to crush a student movement whose crime was raising their voices against historic genocide. Yeah, I don't think we can understand how utterly cynical and hollow the illiberal elites are that dominate the Democratic party. In every instance, not just the student movements, but in the uprisings that we now call Black Lives Matter, there was absolute resistance to both the movements and the demands that were being made by those movements precisely because those movements were from working class areas that were predominantly people of color. And the demands were principally about those working class areas that were predominantly people of color. It's only after the Democratic Party can absorb the cultural sentiment into their own agenda that they then can pose as supportive of diversity and anti-racist and all this. But the moment that people of color that are being oppressed that are on the other side of power rise up and make demands, they'll slink right back into their typical mode. I think we saw that just with a naked obviousness in the case of the encampments. So let's say a qualified agreement with what King and Micah are saying. And even the frame of the question, I think a lot of times we imagine the liberal elites in the core of the Democratic Party as people who are committed to progressive goals and ideals, but insufficiently and perhaps incompetently they don't understand what these ideals and what these goals really demand of them. But I think exactly these developments, the defensive Israel, the attacks on protesters and the uncommitted movement, sat next to the other developments that happened at the same time, the rallying, especially at the Georgia state level of the Democratic movement against a grassroots movement against Cops City in Atlanta, the ongoing move to the right by the Democratic Party that earned Obama, the moniker, a deporter in chief. No, I think these developments give us reason to frame this a little bit differently. I think there is an element of the Democratic Party, of the core of the Democratic Party that is just insufficiently or insufficiently committed to progressive goals in a silly way. But there's another aspect of the core of the Democratic Party that I think we need to understand as ideologically committed to these stances. What the Democratic Party has decided to rally in favor of is anti-democratic commitments to domestic repression, to border violence and to imperial conquest. And those are the values of at least a section of that party and unless and until other sections of the party or other sections outside of that party force through some kind of political contestation. That section of the party out of power, I think we're going to continue to see the Democratic Party do what it's done over the past decade, which is act as a junior partner to the rise of fascism rather than as an opposition party. Depending on the question of Gaza politics, it was really, really notable and clear that supporters of Israel's genocide in Gaza quickly weaponized prevalent forms of liberal identity politics to bolster the legitimacy of Zionism and to demonize and persecute pro-Palestine activists, Zionists and their supporters across all these powerful American institutions. They invoked Jewish student safety and they rendered opposing genocide and supporting national liberation as a form of anti-Semitism. What can we learn from this perverse inversion and how it took shape and what it reveals about what was always wrong with certain prevalent forms of liberal identity? politics. I have a couple of things to say about this. But I'm interested to hear what Mike G. Agatha says. I'm actually just going to say the one thing, which is that the thing I found most striking about the claims to the protection of Jewish students in the move to smear any defense of Palestinian rights as anti-Semitism was the absolute lack of pretence for anything resembling fairness or universality. No one even bothered to say, oh, by the way, those Palestinian students you have their feelings. Because it was from the very structure of the conversations that these people offered in favor of this weird version of identity politics presumed that there was an inherently more important class of students' feelings that there was inherently more important class of discrimination. And in a way that both exploits existing problems with identity politics, I think we've all talked about. But the way that it does so is in a way that I think indites the claims to liberalism of the people employing this strategy. I never thought I would, you know, yearn for the days where people were defending enlightenment universalism and increasingly hack-need ways that were disguised as a bigotry. But at least there was the pretence of those kinds of basic aspects of quote, quote, rationality and argument. What we have now is some deeper, uglier thing that I don't quite know what to do with. I think it demonstrates, in fact, the actual cultural change that happened in the wake of Black Lives Matter and the way in which these ideas resonated on a deep level for ordinary people, ideas that we now think of as wokeness. So one, I would say, the discursive move of pro-Israeli organizations and activists was acting in that cultural space. It demonstrates that there was real resonance there. But I also think it was cynical. To the extent that wokeness is now dead, the al of manurva type of thing, we're just talking about something that's actually dead. To the extent that it's dead, these organizations will just use some other thing. They'll quickly pivot to whatever the common sense of the moment is. In some ways, it shows the power of the wokeness narrative, but also the fragility and actually the way in which organizations or activists or individuals, how they justify what they do, is just contingent on the moment. And what underlies their actual power and their actual ability to achieve genocide, it doesn't actually have anything to do with that sort of cultural sphere. It's the underlying kind of political and military power that they wield and justify through these narratives. Yeah, and I'm genuinely curious to see where it goes as we get into a new time. But I have no doubt that these organizations will pivot on a dime if suddenly wokeness and DEI become uncool. But I do think that this dynamic probably has exposed better than perhaps others, that the problems with a conceptualization of identity politics that really is purely on identity and devoid of any actual political content. I will say that it hasn't taken Zionist hijacking, this particular deployment of politics to bring attention to this. I mean, I do think that there has been attention for a very long time. And I'll just talk about Black politics around the crash deployment of identity to get your way. And so June Jordan has this great interview from 1994 where she's basically talking about the limits of identity politics and just says in a very matter-of-fact way that I look at what you do and not at who you are. And there's a different kind of politics that is organized around that idea that the politics is more than just your ability to deploy your identity or to say that based solely upon who you are, you know more, you have more to say that your opinion is more valued simply because of that, not because of the content of what it is that you have to say, but because of the body that you inhabit. There has been a critique of this and there has been attention around this. Femish should talk about his very wonderful book Elite Capture, which has tried to kind of elucidate this tension in politics and how identity politics without attention to class, without attention to what he describes as who's in the room is very different from the progenitors of identity politics. If we want to go back to the black women of the river collective who were making a much more simpler intervention, which is to say that our issues are being ignored in the existing social movements. No one is talking about black lesbians, no one is talking about sterilization, no one is talking about violence against working class black women, not the male dominated black nationalists movements in the, you know, black power in the black liberation era, but also in the spaces of middle class feminism or even amongst radical white feminists, our agenda is not being taken up. So we're going to call this identity politics. The politics that affect us, we're going to develop a political strategy around because no one else will take them up and we're going to try to involve other people because we know as black women, we're about 5% in the population and so even if these are issues that only affect us, we alone cannot resolve them. We have to be in community, in coalition with other people. That's a very different conceptualization of what in some ways, right, the movement into the academy and really the academy becoming the the place of where these politics get the beta discussed, shaped, formed and ultimately repackaged into something else. And you know, that's not, it's not a moral dilemma. I mean, this often happens, you know, people mean one thing and one historical moment in one period. It's a catchy phrase and it gets usurped and you know 40, 50 years later, it comes to mean something else that happens. There are certainly limits to that, but I just want to make my only point here is that this particular defilement of identity politics is not the only time that this has come up as, now it's time to critique it. There has been a long standing tension around this abuse of identity to capture and pursue a different agenda from what it's, it's kind of original political intent was. Yeah, um, Femi, as as Ginga just mentioned, you wrote a really excellent book that we discussed here on the podcast about this very question. What, what about this track record of this sort of identity politics, not just among liberals, but on the, the left, the left, the broader left that all of us would consider ourselves to be on a form of identity politics that has had various sorts of prevalence and influence on our broader left that is ranged from annoying to truly damaging, undermining our historic, very serious task of building power to win collective liberation. Yeah, I actually, you know, the longer I talk about it, the simpler I think it all is at the end of the day, you know, just along the lines that Kengo is just saying, you know, we can go back into labor history. And find misuses of the basic ideas of class solidarity. But no one, for whatever reason, seems to print out poster-sized photos of people saying workers united for a white South Africa. And make it the basis of their politics that that is what the class struggle really means. People understand and accept that over the course of generations, people will take up ideas sometimes in ways that are helpful to the broader movement that those ideas came from, sometimes in ways that are neutral and just wacky and weird. And sometimes in ways that are actively injurious to the politics that originated those ideas. And that is just as true about identity politics as it's true of any other sort of identity politics. And the thing that I think is becoming clearer as this particular anti-DI energy moves forward, you know, the thing that is distinctive about identity politics, if anything, is that there came to be a cottage industry of pointing out this particular kind of co-optation, which I suppose. I am part of, but certainly the kind of centrist that we're writing about cancel culture for the Atlantic and the telegraph also work part of. And that anti-wokers on the left also work part of. And I don't think, you know, I don't think the historians of this period 60 years from now, or if we still have historians 60 years from now. But I don't think historians of this period will think that some deep thing was learned in the course of the struggle over what identity politics really means or, you know, if it's been co-opted. I think something maybe more insidious and cynical is at the root of all this. What we have been having over these hours is a nuanced discussion, critique of identity politics in the context of actually existing systems of oppression under American capitalism that include things like racist domination. But in some corners of the left, there's a move to cheer on the right wing war on woke hopeful that that some sort of universalistic working class consciousness and maybe even socialist politics will will spontaneously emerge from the ashes. What are these sorts of arguments from the socialist left missing about what is quite clearly going on right now and also about how class composition happens. Well, let me just say that there's a there's a kind of new orthodox Marxism on the American left and when I say orthodox, I am referring less to what Marx wrote more to what folks like Kowski wrote Carl Kowski who was a German socialist on the early 1900s. And they're kind of building on Kowski's basic idea about class politics. I'll just say it very simply. Kowski argued that as as capitalism develops, people become proletarianized, they become drawn into common workspaces. And that sort of that developmental dynamic of capitalism itself generates this proletarian politics, kind of almost automatically. And it thinks about class in this very abstract way, right? You're simply a part of the working class or you're not today. Nobody would call themselves. Well, I guess some people actually do call themselves Kowski's, but nobody really has that has that theory in their brains. Instead today, there's kind of more abstract and static theories about how class politics work. That basically argue that capitalism creates constraints on politics. And the overwhelming effect of these constraints is to make it so people don't want to fight back in that space, then culture becomes dynamic. It's changing people's ideas and it's these cultural barriers that exist to class politics, which is why I think there's such an obsession with wokeness. But I think this is this this move on the left is really it's really mistaken and it's really confused and it's led to a large number of activists and otherwise role meeting people just really misunderstanding our moment. I think it's because in some ways this abstract way of thinking about class, right? I'm a worker, your capitalist. These two things that I just said explain everything that I see around me. It misunderstands in some fundamental ways. The diversity of class experience. It makes in two basic conflations. It makes a horizontal conflation. It conflates that abstract thing called class with all the different dimensions of class, right? Where you work, like your occupation, if you work in the city or if you work in the countryside, but it also conflates class structure with all the other structures that exist in society, right? Your citizenship, your gender, your like what neighborhoods you live in, all this other stuff. So if we take all that stuff into consideration, it actually suggests to us that the form that class struggle takes is not predetermined by class structure. It takes all sorts of different forms. It's not necessarily workplace fight back. So, though, sometimes it is. It's not necessarily electoral campaigns, though, sometimes it is. It's not necessarily community or residential riots, although sometimes it is. But the key point is that a dynamic understanding of class actually kind of leads us in the direction of what Stuart Hall called Marxism without guarantees. It kind of leads us in the direction of of needing to understand that class politics changes its dynamic, it transforms. And so I guess part of my argument, I wrote a paper called the problem of class abstractionism with some of somebody named Matthew Desson, an hour argument rather, is that we need to think about a class in an in a slightly different way. We need to have a more dynamic view. And what what we put forward is that in fact the key dynamic of capitalist development is not this homogenization thing that Kowtsky was talking about. It's actually a differentiation thing. It's actually that as capitalism develops, the working class becomes more differentiated within itself. It's a differentiation as that as that occurs over time, it actually makes salient, it activates, it actually generates, it actually creates the importance of non class identities and non and what we would think of as identity politics, right? Or what what certain elements of the left would think of as identity politics, I don't like that phrase, I think all politics is identity politics, but that's kind of our perspective, we need we need to have a more dynamic understanding and what that what that actually allows us to do is it allows us to see that these movements that are dismissed out of hand as mere movements of the PMC or just unserious movements of different identity groups who could never link up to a broader class struggle are in fact part and parcel of class struggle that fight back that occurred in 2020, which can't guys written so brilliantly about was a class struggle. And to the extent that it turned into something else, we shouldn't think about the tale of the process as telling us something about the whole process to the extent that liberalism was able to co-opt it, it doesn't tell us that it in fact it wasn't a class struggle. Capitalism was able to co-opt unions all the time, it doesn't tell us that that's not part of a class struggle and a fight back. And we're kind of like trying to push folks on the left and in particular the little sectors that you're talking about to have have a more dynamic view about class and to understand that that class is deeply tied into what we would think about as identity. And that's in a slightly different way, historically about racism. The American Socialist Party, which was part of the Huskies International affiliation, the second international, try to act out these politics in real life, which essentially meant having a kind of racism in different attitudes towards the experiences of black workers experiencing extraordinary racism in the south and outside of the south. And not really having a theoretical framework to understand what was happening to black workers. So in some cases it meant in the big tent of the Socialist Party, you would have outright racists who were in the party. And then of course you'd have the left wing, which was the best of the Socialist Party's tradition, someone like Eugene Debs, who refused to speak to segregation. gatherings of workers who was anti-racist but didn't really have a political framework to put that into as he continued to operate within the framework of the socialist party which operated under the premise that it's the class struggle that will liberate the working class and everything else is superfluous to that. And so this politics in some ways made sense in the US in the late 19th century in the early 20th century but two decades into the 20th century when black workers start to leave the south start to leave rural areas go to southern cities but then also begin to go to cities in the north. There's a problem. Take 1919 the year that the Communist Party forms but more importantly there's a big steel strike in the United States in 1919 and still bosses would pick up black workers in the south and trains and literally drive them to the picket line and drop the trains would drop them off to break through the city. Break through the picket line and literally take the jobs of the people on strike. And very quickly within the labor movement and within the left it became imperative that we actually have to have something to say to these black workers because if the employers are so easily able to just break the strike. With the use of black workers then they're not just going to do this in the steel strike this is going to become a pattern throughout. And so by way of circumstance the socialist movement. And I realized that they had to have something to say to black workers even though their formal theory didn't allow for that it meant that we actually have to innovate. And so we're just going to have to think about the things that we're seeing in our theory to make sense of the material world surrounding us. And they're pushed by black socialists who are in black communities who understand that the experiences of black workers is different. And so they're not just being oppressed who are oppressed who are exploited all true. But there's something additional. Something when and described as a special oppression not just being oppressed on the basis of being a worker. But now you have this group of people who are also oppressed on the basis of who they are. And so you have to think about that you can have your nice rounded out theory. But then the world punches you in the face right everyone has a theory to get punched in the face. And then you have to be able to adapt and do something different. And so you have to be able to adapt and do something different. And so the politics of white supremacy create an impediment to joining with other non white workers and is more black people begin to migrate from rural areas into urban areas and become a part of the workforce. And so it becomes an impediment to the development of labor organization and to the development of class consciousness, a class again of itself versus a class for itself. The socialists had to have something to say not just to black workers, but to theorize about how do we overcome this problem and part of the way that we overcome this problem is by actually challenging racism and fighting racism. And so it becomes if we don't fight racism, then how do we ever convince black workers that they should take our ideas and politics seriously, how do we convince them to come into organizations. And so the organizations refuse to take the issues that are affecting them seriously if the organizations have nothing to say about the fact that landlords are charging black workers two or three or four times what other workers are having to pay that police brutality police murder is an issue. And so it's much longer history around this, but the point is that what was actually happening in real life in the real world forced the left historically to have to take up this question of racism. Because someone was morally enlightened and felt bad for the black people and you know, so that the black people were just left out. It had become the limits of the socialists of koutskism of the socialist theory of organizing had been met. That theory could no longer take you anywhere because the world changed black people went from being atomized and dispersed throughout rural areas to being concentrated in urban areas and then part of the proletariat. It meant that the theory had to change and this has been with us the American left since then. They're more black people and so and now there are Latinos and you know after 1965 there all sorts of non white people and a left that is serious can't hide from racism can't hide from the politics. The politics of bigotry and xenophobia. The left has to actually take these up to be able to integrate and include the wide variety of people within the working class. And you can't do that by telling those people that those other issues that you face aren't real and if we just have this class struggle that will overcome them not just because of the black and brown workers but the white workers who think they're superior. Who think that somehow they're better because they're not black or brown like those impediments also prevent the development of class consciousness the development the shift from being of a class for class. I don't have much to add but I will return to the line I feel I've been pushing underneath the surface at least for the hour or two that we've been talking which is I'll just say explicitly now we have to understand this weird question of whether quote quote identity politics ought to fit into the left. As a cultural development of our time. We don't need to agree and we certainly don't need to relitigate every decision of the 19th and 20th century Marxist or Socialist or anarchist or leftist. But I don't think this question in this form arose in their time you can read the correspondence between Lenin and Clara Zetkin who was part of the SPD and you know one of the founders of international feminist movements and organizations. They had lots of debates and disagreements about where the struggle for gender equality fit into the larger left struggle and how to advance it. But they didn't have those arguments or disagreements about whether or not it was properly considered part of the class struggle. In fact, Zetkin even has a quote in her memoranda book where she says social equality for women was of course a principal needing no discussion for communists. Marx spent you know the better part of a decade working for an abolitionist newspaper he has the famous quote about labor not being able to emancipate itself in a white skin while it's branded. in a black skin, the various European socialists and communists and anarchists had discussions about how to fight imperialism and what imperialism meant from the standpoint of capital accumulation, but they didn't have fights about whether it was some other thing other than the class struggle, probably because there were imperialist world wars dividing and reshaping the countries that they lived in and the idea that imperialism didn't have to do with their political circumstances is not one that would have passed the laugh test in their century. So all this stuff that we're seeing now about whether identity politics is a distraction from the real class politics is a peculiarity of the way people have responded to neoliberalism and I would suggest a peculiarity of a way people have chosen to over-correct in response to some less than good ways of talking about race or gender or sexuality or whatever, but the idea that correcting means not fighting for those issues or joining with the writer, cheering on the right as they advance the most reactionary showvenist positions with respect to people's race and gender as some kind of victory for the left is I think deeply misguided and I don't think there's much to say about it beyond that. Yeah, I really like Femi's provocation here about how do we understand identity politics as an actual cultural development or you can even say how do we understand a wokeism as an actual cultural development. I think that's the key question, I'll just put it like that, I think that is the key question for this discussion because most of the anti-woke left they don't have any account whatsoever for the development of it. It's just kind of this free-floating cultural phenomena that elites kind of attach themselves to to advance their careers and it kind of is it's kind of like the false consciousness of our time or something and the actual arguments that are put forward which are few and far between are really not very useful. So you have some folks that say it's a result of actual elite overproduction where we live in society, we're creating too many elites and it's just people going to school, they're going to college and that's how they understand elites by the way, it's just people with a college degree that do some kind of, they're in some kind of creative mental industry which it turns out as much. You think these people would be board Julian's rather than Marxists? Right, exactly. That's an inch, you should have a podcast on the way that the American left has become board usian. But even that, it's not a very convincing argument. On the one hand, the vast majority of, as more people have gone into higher education, actually, there's been a proletarianization of people that leave higher education with a degree. So it's an odd argument and two, these elite overproduction arguments are classic right-wing arguments. They've gone all the way back to explaining the rise of Marxism. It's why, too many people are going to the university and this kind of explains these left-wing things. It's just strange that the American left will pick up on something that's been classically right-wing for 150 years. But the other aspect of all this is that I think there's a way in which this embrace or this critique rather of identity politics or a wokeism as the principal barrier to class politics does a kind of double displacement of really meaningful agency in our politics. So on the one hand, it actually displaces working class agency. It displaces the movements that we've been talking about throughout this whole episode that put these issues on the table. It displaces that entirely and instead treats wokeness as it formed over the past five years as it always was from the very beginning. And I think that's just not a very sophisticated way to think. And the second thing is, which I think is as equally as important, it displaces agency from systemic causes of genuine displacements, exploitation and domination into individual sources. So in our time for people in this kind of anti-woke milieu, the key villains of our time are people like Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi. These are the people that are actually the source of domination and exploitation. And while DiAngelo is certainly annoying and certainly cuts against the kind of politics that I want to embrace, of course DiAngelo isn't the principal actor in systems of exploitation and domination. So I think when you allow this to center, when you allow these kind of frames to center in your analysis of politics, it leads down some really strange paths. And I think there's a reason why we've seen a cultural convergence between the left and the right on these issues. That was Femi-Taiwao Kiehenga Yamada Taylor and Mike McCarthy. Kiehenga Yamada Taylor is the co-founder of Hammer and Hope, a digital magazine of race, culture and politics. She's also the author of From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation and a professor of African-American studies at Princeton University. OluFemi-O-Taiwao is professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and an editor at Hammer and Hope. Mike McCarthy is the director of community studies and professor of sociology at the University of California's Santa Cruz. His most recent book, The Master's Tools, How Finance Wrecked Democracy and a Radical Plan to Rebuild it, was just released with verso books. Thank you for listening to the dig from Jacobin Magazine, as Marks once said, after noting that economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, this mass becomes united and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests, it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle. While other podcasts from the Lee interpreter to the world in various ways, our point is to change it. We're posting new episodes most weeks. The dig was produced by Alex Lewis. Our associate producer is Jackson Roach, Music by Jeffrey Brodsky. Our operations manager is Sylvia Atwood. Our senior advisors are Fiorio Franco-San and maybe check out our vast archives and newsletters at thedegradio.com. Follow us on Twitter and also Instagram at the Degradio and find us wherever you get podcasts and subscribe to this podcast. If it's on iTunes or Spotify, also please rate and review us positively. Those reviews help introduce us to listeners. But what really does that is you telling people who might like the pod to check out the pod, please make propaganda for us. And do find us at patreon.com and make a monthly or annual contribution to keep this operation up and running strong. Even a few boxes huge. [Music]