The Elite/Woke Alliance #2

A brief disclaimer to start: What I’m calling “Marxism” is Lenin’s version of Marxism. I haven’t read any of Marx directly, but only Lenin’s interpretation, which is obsessively polemical. That is: Lenin explains his version of Marxism as a withering critique of all those interpretations of Marx, Engels and Socialism more generally he regards as “distortions” and “opportunism”. If, therefore, you want to argue that Lenin misunderstood Marx, I have no answer, as I have no direct familiarity with Marx’s writings.

That aside, what I want to talk about today is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and to suggest that although I’m not aware of a Woke Lenin, I believe Wokism as a movement implicitly shares Lenin’s view of the necessity of this Dictatorship in the achievement of Utopia. More pointedly, I think Cancel Culture is a precursor to such a Dictatorship.

To understand the necessity of the Dictatorship according to Marx (again, as read by Lenin) you have to understand that although capitalism naturally gives birth to socialism by means of the dialectical processes of history, this naturally emergent socialism is distorted by the imprint of its origins. Socialism is not real equality (“real equality” being what is in Wokism called “equity”), but only the condition in which the Proletariat assumes political power.

“Real Equality”, or “Equity”, is that state which Marx described as Communism, where each person gives according to their gifts and receives according to their needs. The nominal equality under Socialism, by contrast, lacks a genuine sensitivity to individual need but is informed instead by a capitalist idea structure defined by the concept of *merit*.

You will likely have been made aware of this distinction by a meme in which three people of radically different heights try to watch a baseball game from behind a fence. Giving them all the same box to stand on only helps the one just a bit too short, whereas the taller one doesn’t need a box and the shorter one needs two. This, the graphic informs us, explains the difference between “Equality” and “Equity”. Equity is where the tall person gets no box, the middle person gets one box, and the shorter person gets two. For Marx, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the necessary means for getting from Equality (which carries within it the stamp of capitalist thinking inherited by the society that gave it birth) to Equity (which is informed by a genuine human solidarity that is currently known only within *the cultural vanguard*).

This, because the idea of an abstract standard blind to individual difference (the standard represented by Blind Justice) is actually an artifact of the ruling class, which has used this supposedly blind neutrality to maintain its hegemony for so long that the idea has been imprinted onto the lower class. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, under the Iron Will of the Party, is the means to efface this imprint, by both propaganda and, when necessary, force.

I think Wokism shares this notion of the essential function of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and that this is evidenced by the rise of Cancel Culture; on social media, yes, but much more importantly, within academia and in state and local governments with the adoption of Critical Race Theory.

Put aside for a moment whether you think this ought or ought not happen, to consider whether or not, in fact, it is. I say it is, in the corporate and bureaucratic worlds through diversity training, and in social media by the phenomenon of “canceling”. Granted, cancel culture has peaked and is in decline on social media. However, the influence of Critical Race Theorists like Ibrahm X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo is rapidly expanding within state and local governments, large corporations, and academia, such that at least nominal adoption of the language of Critical Race Theory is *a precondition of employment*.

Although the compulsory performance of ‘allyship’ is derided as far less that what is truly called for, it is nonetheless a first step in the establishment of a coercive social order sufficient to not only destroy the inequity of the past, but to reeducate the population so that the Utopian future is made possible. This reeducation requires the deconstruction of once cherished concepts, such as “equality before the law”, by revealing them as nothing more than constructs to keep the cultural hegemony – a hegemony established by force and built on a foundation of racism, sexism and transphobia – in place.

Freedom is Slavery

Herein we arrive at the profound irony that reading Lenin helps to make plain, and which George Orwell satirized in 1984. Lenin makes it plain because he explicitly spells it out. Whereas true Communism, finally realized, is a state of individual freedom within which everyone gives what they have and receives what they need, according to their genuine *but socially enlightened* sense of self, the Socialism *that leads to* this Communist Utopia is necessarily coercive in mind and body. To arrive at the complete liberation of true Communism *requires* a period during which what used to be known as “Freedom” is exposed as a bourgeois con, and stamped out once and for all.

Similarly, “diversity training” does not admit any diversity of opinion. In fact, what used to be called “freedom of opinion” was in fact another of those slanted playing fields that served to invisibly marginalize the most vulnerable. “Freedom of opinion”, thus, must be unlearned, so as to be replaced by a socially enlightened sense for, and allegiance to, the plight of the historically marginalized. As any good Imam will tell you: obedience comes before understanding.

So, to be “trained in diversity” is to at a bare minimum be made to at least nominally adopt the Party Line; and, depending on your race, gender and/or sexual identity, to confess your sinfulness as regards it. It’s not an option, if you want to keep your job.

Hold on, you might say, compulsory diversity training at work is not the same as laws made by the State. True, however, these diversity trainings, because they involve different treatment on the basis of race, gender and sexual identity, are in direct violation of anti-discrimination laws written under the latter forms of liberal democracy, according to which different treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation is expressly forbidden. The very concept of “equality before the law” that was long presented and understood as the guiding ideal and highest accomplishment of liberal capitalist democracy runs directly counter to both Wokism and Marxism.

Remember, according to both Wokism and Marxism, the equality of Socialism, which is the social form eventually produced by democratic capitalism, *still bears the imprint* of the society that gave it birth, in the form of an illusory notion of “equality before the law”. It is exactly this sort of imprint, this false conscience, that the Dictatorship must eradicate by coercive education and economic control.

So, the conflict between mandatory, race-based, “diversity training” and established laws written to prevent discrimination manifests a power struggle between Bourgeoise Democracy (which in Wokism is generally called “White Supremacy”) and the Socialist Dictatorship necessary to reprogram the population in preparation for Life in Utopia.

We’re going to Build Back Better… but first, we’re going to have to destroy everything. Trust Us!