More confused everyday. I thought “Woke” just meant to be aware of white supremacist policies and worldviews affecting society. Now Chris is telling me, no, it is bad. Some on the left seem to be defecting to the right (not Chris). I was all in for Harris and now….after listening to Thomas Frank I seem to have myself defected from the Democratic Party.
Everything is devolving into many separate camps. Divide and conquer. Some are saying the Russians are behind all this, some are saying Russia is a hoax. It is becoming incredibly confusing. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would say it is Artificial Intelligence manipulating humankind to some superintelligent design. But I am not.
3:54 “-(Wokeness) comes at the expense of universalist class politics that seek to redistribute wealth – those questions drop away.”
4:40 “It is in fact universalist class politics that delivers the most for whatever hyper-variegated subgroup of the most oppressed there is.”
Woke ideology is left in form, professing concern for the downtrodden, but right in content, because it is compatible with economic exploitation…(divide et impera)
Parenti went a little off the rails at the end talking about Covid and “experimental vaccines” and free speech and gradually throughout the interview he alludes to being a Marxist. Chris is not a Marxist and while he called relativism and subjectivism evils, Christian Parenti stated they were not necessarily evil. So, there are some differences here, but Chris seems to agree that “woke is bad” and this is, again, very confusing to those of us who instantly associate criticism of the word “woke” with the far-right demonization of anything progressive.
At a bible study a few days ago the subject of the United Health CEO assassination came up and someone said at the end of the exchange, “it is us against them.” My thoughts as of late have leaned toward, “there is no us” and that is in fact what Parenti is trying to get across: the strategy of the ruling class is to divide the working class up so there is no us. Simple. That Parenti used forbidden language and said the word “redistribute” is refreshing. The phrase “redistribution of wealth” is the universal trigger that enrages the hard right. It has been so incessantly demonized that even liberals will rarely dare to use it. It is the key because in a kind of projection, redistribution of wealth is exactly what the right does for their minority while denying it to the majority. They scream theft when it is about their wealth. In reality, they take almost everything from their workers. They eventually convince themselves that their workers are so fortunate to have the jobs they provide that they should essentially, as wage slaves, work for free. In their Market Fundamentalist belief system, they as individuals have as much “value” as thousands of other human beings.
It is the idolatry of the golden calf. Mammon worship. And it is in the process of destroying humankind.
We are all neoliberals now.
Ice on the Moon 