Yves here. albrt’s latest post discusses Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke. Its focus on the hypocrisy incoherence of the professional managerial class making a great pretense of egalitarianism and racial/ethnic tolerance, while relying on a servant underclass composed of people of color. And even worse, they believe deeply in their self-styled virtue.
By albrt. Originally published at his Substack
The introduction to We Have Never Been Woke describes how Musa al-Gharbi became aware of a paradox in twenty-first century America, starting before he was a book-writing academic. Al-Gharbi grew up in a small Arizona town, studied at a community college and a state university, sold shoes at Dillard’s for a while, then in 2016 left home to pursue a PhD at Columbia University in New York. Of his political evolution, he says:
I cast my first presidential vote for John Kerry in 2004—and not begrudgingly. It’s humiliating to admit in retrospect, but I believed in John Kerry. At that time, I subscribed to what you might call the “banal liberal” understanding of who is responsible for various social evils: those damn Republicans! If only folks in places like podunk Arizona could be more like the enlightened denizens of New York, I thought, what a beautiful country this could be! What a beautiful world! I had already shed a lot of this in the years that followed—but the vestiges that remained got destroyed soon after I moved to the Upper West Side.
One of the first things that stood out to me is that there’s something like a racialized caste system here that everyone takes as natural. You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you.
Al-Gharbi notes that in New York and other politically blue American cities these services are mostly provided by “minorities and immigrants from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds.” The cities operate as “well-oiled machines for casually exploiting and discarding the vulnerable, desperate, and disadvantaged. And it’s largely Democratic-voting professionals who take advantage of them.”
Such professionals are the “new elite” mentioned in the subtitle of the book. They are often referred to as the professional managerial class (PMC). Al-Gharbi adopts the term “symbolic capitalist” in service to his analytical approach, but the people he identifies as symbolic capitalists are essentially the same people who make up the PMC.
In short, al-Gharbi noticed that Democrats and their primary ideological base, the symbolic capitalists, do a lot of conspicuous wailing and fussing about inequality and oppression, yet the wailing and fussing does not interrupt their day-to-day business of perpetuating inequality and oppression. He describes how, when Donald Trump won the 2016 election, symbolic capitalists were traumatized on behalf of the oppressed masses but the masses just kept showing up for work to serve the elites.
These contradictions grew especially pronounced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder. Even as they casually discarded service workers en masse to fend for themselves—and increased their exploitation of those “essential” workers who remained (so that they could stay comfortably ensconced in their homes)—individuals and institutions associated with the symbolic economy aggressively sought to paint themselves as allies for the marginalized and disadvantaged. Billions were donated to groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM); antiracist literature shot to the top of the best-seller charts; organizations assigned antibias training and appointed chief diversity officers at an extraordinary pace.
Al-Gharbi became obsessed with the questions that arose from his experience: “How can elites whose lifestyles and livelihoods are oriented around the production, maintenance, and exploitation of inequality still view themselves as egalitarians?” Is there any substance to the “rapid and substantial change in norms and discourse” that took place in the past ten years or so? And what do conspicuous displays of symbolic “justice-oriented” activity actually accomplish?
We Have Never Been Woke attempts to describe, in mostly plain language but with lots of footnotes, the practice and theory of all this symbolic activity. Al-Gharbi’s timing was remarkable—the book came out in October last year. The book essentially explains why nobody likes the PMC, and the book appeared just at the moment when the Kamala Harris campaign was demonstrating the abject failure of a PMC-dominant model of politics.
The middle chapters of We Have Never Been Woke provide ammunition for what could have been an epic rant, mercilessly dunking on PMC wokeness over and over again. Such a rant could have been adopted as anti-woke scripture by the triumphant MAGA hordes in November, and could have resulted in al-Gharbi making a lot of money. This book is not that. Al-Gharbi appears to be in favor of giving real material help to the poor and the oppressed, unlike either of the existing legacy political parties. Although al-Gharbi does not say it, I suspect him of being a low-key drum major for righteousness.
Righteousness has not been represented at all in American politics since shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr. was removed from the scene, so We Have Never Been Woke is quite different from the red/blue random diss track generator that passes for political discourse in America today. The book does not exhaust the topic of what is wrong with our elites, but it makes a good start.
So What Is a Symbolic Capitalist?
Al-Gharbi says “symbolic capitalists are professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services).”
In a prescient series of essays for Radical America in 1977, Barbara and John Ehrenreich defined the professional-managerial class (the term they coined for symbolic capitalists) as ‘salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.’ In layman’s terms, the major role they play in society is to keep the capitalist machine running (in the present and in perpetuity), maximize its efficiency and productivity, and justify the inequalities that were required in order to achieve these ends.
The Ehrenreichs and al-Gharbi agree that the roots of the PMC go back to the 19th century, when industrialization created a need for more experts to manage labor and the means of production, and to educate and indoctrinate everyone including the mass-produced experts. Al-Gharbi adopted the label symbolic capitalist instead of sticking with established terminology for a number of reasons, including his belief that symbolic capitalists are not fully formed as an economic class. He argues that their ideology is highly individualistic, and they generally have not organized as a class to promote their class interests.
It seems to me that symbolic capitalists are more aware of their common interests than the working class, and they have acted very effectively to institutionalize their control over the reproduction of symbolic capital, particularly through control of education. But We Have Never Been Woke is primarily focused on the role played by symbolic wokeness rather than on other mechanics of exercising class power. I suspect an economic class angle would become more apparent if the tools and marketable products of symbol-mongering were given more attention—actionable knowledge, intellectual property, eloquence, and all the other reified things that most people think of as the basis of a symbolic economy, but which symbolic capitalists often disregard in favor of credentials and other abstract symbols of status.
Al-Gharbi also chose the term symbolic capitalist because he wished to recognize the influence of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu figures prominently in Chapter One, where al-Gharbi explains that wokeness is a form of symbolic capital. We Have Never Been Wokeattempts to “reconnect Bourdieu’s important insights on symbolic struggle with more traditional materialist concerns over exploitation and production.” Al-Gharbi explains in a footnote that the book focuses on “how symbolic domination operates in the service of exploitation. This text will highlight how symbolic capitalists’ lifestyles and livelihoods are importantly predicated on extracting labor from vulnerable and desperate people at unsustainably low rates.”
Following Bourdieu, al-Gharbi sees symbolic capital as mostly a matter of status (“resources available to someone on the basis of honor, prestige, celebrity, consecration, and recognition”). Status-based symbolic capital is formalized by credentials, but can also be demonstrated by adopting high-status vocabulary and talking about whatever the cool kids are talking about (also known as signaling). This can plausibly be interpreted as a variation on the conspicuous consumption signaling of Thorstein Veblen’s leisure class, but instead of perceiving familiarity with highbrow culture as a product of leisure, symbolic capitalists are more likely to see it as a hard-earned form of expertise and perhaps even seek employment as class signalers.
We Have Never Been Woke takes as given the notion put forward by Peter Turchin and others that producing too many elites leads to heated competition for elite positions. But where Turchin sees a general breakdown of social solidarity, al-Gharbi sees a different (or additional) dynamic—elites adopt symbolic fields of competition they can use to undercut and outmaneuver each other, particularly the competitive self-righteousness we now call wokeness. Like Turchin, al-Gharbi recognizes that elite competition generates both minor disputes within the dominant elite paradigm and also generates radical counter-elites, so sterotypes about PMC ideology and signaling do not remain static. Instead, stereotypical PMC beliefs are a battleground where important elements of status are determined, mostly by signaling loyalty to a dominant paradigm but sometimes by promoting variations or even taking the other side.
Al-Gharbi acknowledges that the economic capitalists who own the actual means of production exercise substantial power, but he also makes a strong case that symbolic capitalists have more power in America today than any grouping of non-symbolic-capitalists, and that symbolic capitalism is now the main path to become part of the billionaire class. Precisely because roles for symbolic capitalists are ever more numerous and because lack of extreme inherited wealth is not a complete barrier to entry, symbolic capitalism is the domain where most social and economic competition and mobility takes place. In the absence of any political movement in post-Reagan America for the working class to take control of the means of production from the billionaires, second-tier intra-elite competition is where the action is.
Waves of Wokeness
We Have Never Been Woke expressly declines to provide an “analytical definition” of the word woke because the term has many meanings and “the struggles over its meaning are tied to broader socio-cultural unrest.” Al-Gharbi provides a list of beliefs, such as “trans-inclusive feminism,” that most people associate with wokeness. He suggests that in its most recent phase the term woke was first used unironically to describe someone who was “alert to social injustice,” then began to be used within social-justice circles to describe “peers who were self-righteous and non-self-aware.” “Eventually, the political Right . . . began using ‘woke’ as a catchall for anything associated with the Left that seemed ridiculous or repugnant.” Al-Gharbi describes a similar cycle for the term “politically correct” in the 1980s and 90s.
Today, just as I was wrapping up this review, al-Gharbi published a blog post of Frequently Asked Questions from his book tour, and number one is “It’s a problem that a book called We Have Never Been Woke doesn’t define ‘wokeness.’” Al-Gharbi patiently explains (again) that sometimes the most important thing to know about a word is that the meaning is contested, and those who insist on a particular definition of a contested term are usually obscuring what it is really going on. Describing how this verbal contest works is a main point of the book. This seems a lot more useful than insisting that “woke” has a clear meaning and Trumpsters are just too ignorant to understand it.
Layered on top of this descriptive insight, the basic historical insight of We Have Never Been Woke is that wokeness as a trending cultural signal is not a new phenomenon. Al-Gharbi argues that there have been four “Great Awokenings” in the United States, peaking in the early 1930s, the mid-1960s, the early 1990s, and of course the most recent wave that seems to have crested just a little too early to push Kamala Harris over the finish line last November.
Despite refusing to define wokeness, al-Gharbi does define an Awokening as a period of rapid normative and discursive change around identity issues, particularly prejudice and discrimination. These changes tend to correlate across the major outputs of the symbolic economy—journalism, academics, arts and entertainment, even advertising. They also correlate with attitudes and opinions among “the primary producers and consumers of these outputs: highly educated white liberals.” Al-Gharbi hypothesizes that these waves of wokeness are not triggered by any particular event; instead, triggering events become amplified across the symbolic domains whenever wokeness is trending up. The reason expressions of wokeness begin trending up is because symbolic capitalists are feeling more than usually insecure about their prospects, and so they compete harder with each other on this symbolic field of battle to see who can be the most woke.
We Have Never Been Woke provides a historical overview of key events as well as describing similarities and differences between the Awokenings. Historians (and those old enough to remember) will likely disagree with details of al-Gharbi’s sequencing, especially since he is mostly discussing overlapping trends rather than discrete events. Fortunately, al-Gharbi is not trying to write a definitive history of the twentieth century, he is trying to describe a narrative pattern within the history of social justice advocacy, while recognizing that the meaning and purpose of the narrative was always contested. I think the historical review al-Gharbi has provided is sufficient to support his main point—the behavior of symbolic capitalists in the most recent wave of wokeness has historical antecedents. Whether or not the long arc of the universe bends toward justice, the participation of symbolic capitalists seems to cause fluctuations of unusual and perhaps increasing amplitude in cultural discourse around identity issues, particularly prejudice and discrimination.
Al-Gharbi suggests that concrete advancements for the oppressed typically do not coincide with Awokenings. I take issue with the strong form of this argument, but it seems fair to say that the tactics employed by wokists during Awokenings often lead to backlash rather than advancements, at least in the short term. Whether wave tactics are helpful in the long run by moving the Overton Window and/or giving moderates an incentive to make changes during calmer periods remains an open question.
Failures of Symbolic Capitalism
After al-Gharbi establishes his background theses in Chapters One and Two, the middle chapters demonstrate in some detail how symbolic capitalists fail to deliver, not just on promises of social justice, but also on their purported strong points of meritocracy and competent management. This is the bulk of the book. In his FAQ postal-Gharbi makes it clear that his purpose is to study the real world “behaviors, relationships, or allocations of resources and opportunities” that are affected (and effected) by the narrative phenomenon of wokeness rather than merely participate in the contest over the meaning and morality of wokeness. Because the book is for symbolic capitalists, detailed documentation is probably necessary if the PMC are going to be aroused from their current Biden-Harris-flameout-peak-wokeness induced stupor.
If you already have a low regard for PMC-affiliated wokeness, or if you are a very online person who is highly invested in the wokeness narrative, the part of the book that is filled with evidence can feel a little slow, begging the narrative-amplifying question:
Why Not Just Call It What It Is – Hypocrisy?
We Have Never Been Woke is mostly written in understandable language with relatively moderate levels of jargon, but people who do not think like symbolic capitalists (including most MAGA fans) will likely respond to many of the insights about the divergence between symbolic capitalist words and deeds by saying “duh, they’re a bunch of hypocrites.” The words hypocrite and hypocrisy appear only a few times in We Have Never Been Woke. Instead, al-Gharbi talks of “a profound gulf between symbolic capitalists’ rhetoric about various social ills and their lifestyles and behaviors ‘in the world.’” This profound gulf is described at such length that the word hypocrisy becomes conspicuous by its absence. So why does the word hypocrisy appear so rarely in a book that is arguably all about hypocrisy?
Al-Gharbi addresses the question in his introduction: “if the purpose of this book is not to condemn symbolic capitalists as hypocrites, insincere or cynical, then what do I mean with the declaration that ‘we have never been woke’?” He cites Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, and calls for a “symmetrical anthropology” in which modern cultural constructs are analyzed “the same way as ‘primitive’ or ‘premodern’ ones.” He proposes that “if we want to understand systemic inequality, we must include academics, journalists, social justice activists, progressive politicians, dutiful bureaucrats, nonprofit workers, and others ‘in the model’ alongside those whom symbolic capitalists are less sympathetic toward (such as Trump voters or the dreaded ‘1 percent’).”
Al-Gharbi’s FAQ post puts it in even more straighforward terms—he simply assumes most symbolic capitalists sincerely believe in the social justice goals that are embedded in wokeness.
I only talk about “hearts and minds” at all to explain how people can mobilize “social justice” in self-serving ways without being cynical or insincere. I take sincerity for granted both because I think it’s actually the case that most people are sincere and because, at bottom, I’m not really interested in anyone’s sincerity (or lack thereof).
Hypocrisy is a term of judgment, not analysis. When al-Gharbi says “How can elites whose lifestyles and livelihoods are oriented around the production, maintenance, and exploitation of inequality still view themselves as egalitarians?” the question is not rhetorical. He really intends to look for an answer to the question of “how?”
It does not take a genius to recognize that the actual behavior of symbolic capitalists is objectively hypocritical when compared to their stated ideology of fighting inequality and oppression. Ordinary people are actually very good at noticing that sort of thing. What most people do in response is say to themselves, “self, those people are a bunch of hypocrites” (or alternatively “by their fruits ye shall know them”), then they shrug their shoulders and either forget about it or become more bitter and cynical. Labeling hypocrisy often functions as what John Michael Greer (formerly the Archdruid) calls a thought-stopper.
A thoughtstopper is exactly what the term suggests: a word, phrase, or short sentence that keeps people from thinking. A good thoughtstopper is brief, crisp, memorable, and packed with strong emotion. It’s also either absurd, self-contradictory, or irrelevant to the subject to which it’s meant to apply, so that any attempt you might make to reason about it will land you in perplexity. The perplexity won’t do the trick by itself, and neither will the strong emotion; it’s the combination of the two that lets a thoughtstopper throw a monkey wrench in the works of the user’s mind.
Greer gives several examples of thought-stoppers, including pseudo-profound statements and a “hefty epithet that can be flung at someone like a brick.” Greer mentions the widespread use of “communism,” but “hypocrite” could serve just as well (with the advantage of being true much more often than labeling someone as a communist—the thought-stopping effect is largely independent of truth). Pejorative thought-stoppers often serve double duty as ingroup/outgroup signals that not only stop individuals from thinking, but also stop them from talking to each other across a cultural or political divide. I think it was an exceptionally wise choice for al-Gharbi to avoid this.
If rational thought is going to make any contribution to society, it is necessary to power through the thought-stoppers, analyze what is going on, and try to figure out what should be done. The fact that the symbolic capitalists who manage everything tend to do the opposite during periods of Awokening, deploying thought-stoppers at every opportunity and in response to every problem, is an important reason why our system seems so broken.
Finale
Unlike many books that are driven by a strong thesis, We Have Never Been Woke does not run out of things to say after the first chapter or two, and provides enough conclusions in the final chapter to make the middle chapters seem like a good investment. But al-Gharbi intentionally leaves one thing out: he refuses to propose any solutions. In the FAQ post he says:
I wanted to deny readers any sense of catharsis, or any illusion that there are easy answers. I wanted readers to sit with the weight of these problems and to, themselves, really think about the implications and application for their own lives, communities and institutions (whose specific circumstances and operations I may not be as familiar with).
My publisher didn’t love this. I had to push to end the book on a willfully unsatisfying note.
Al-Gharbi is probably correct that there are no easy solutions. We Have Never Been Woke seems to suggest that the way forward is to replace competitive displays of self-righteousness with humility and actual righteousness wherever possible. That is a difficult and necessarily very personal road to travel. I’m not seeing a lot of humility or actual righteousness in either the red or the blue portion of the zeitgeist right now, but perhaps this book will help.
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albrt: Thanks for this observation: “Righteousness has not been represented at all in American politics since shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr. was removed from the scene, so We Have Never Been Woke is quite different from the red/blue random diss track generator that passes for political discourse in America today.”
I think that there are others who survived Martin Luther King to keep in mind, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin, and Fred Shuttlesworth. They indicate a debt that white America owes black America, although their message was politically inclusive.
Placing the origins of professional management in the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century means that you and al-Gharbi should factor in the religious side. I agree with the gay pagan writer Rhyd Wildermuth that “woke” is by nature religious and has to be thought of as such. One must think of the Awokenings as derived from the Great Awakenings in U.S. history.
The problem is that the Awokenings didn’t want to produce, and the Awakenings only seldom produced, figures like Jane Addams, who went to Chicago to live among what were then called the lowly.
An especially important observation in this article, though, is that the managerial class wants to be perceived as virtuous (see: Sinclair Lewis and Babbit and Dodsworth) even as it maintains an economic hierarchy (those supervised) and racial hierarchies (the endless rigidity of the U.S. racial categories, the endless varied forms of discrimination). This is why Kamala Harris could claim to “have seen” the photos of slaughtered Palestinian children, testify to being deeply moved, and then advocate the “premier lethal fighting force.”
There’s plenty of bad faith involved.
I’d add that Catherine Liu and her critiques come into play here: Virtue hoarding. The “trauma” of the bourgeoisie as a form of social control and of denying societal problems.
What is to be done? I agree that the question has to remain open. Restructuring society to get rid of a class of busybody bourgeois or ineffective boyars or entrenched latifundistas means revolution. And as is well known in the U S of A, when the bulls fight, the grass gets trampled.
Excellent review — thanks !!
I’m sure al-Gharbi has a much better analysis of this, but right off the bat it strikes me that the symbolic capitalists can do this because they are fundamentally unwilling to reflect on their own position in the socio-political order, and their role in reproducing an unequal status quo, for they already believe themselves to be saintly, ergo there is no need to seriously reflect. It’s not hypocrisy so much as a combination of amour-propre, shallowness, and a need to define oneself as hierarchically “above” the knuckle-dragging haters, racists, fascists, man-splainers, xenophobes, transphobes, mouth-breathers, Trump supporters, etc. etc. (hierarchy is OK when we define it). The symbolic capitalists own eagerness to throw these labels at others already says a lot.
Really detailed and enjoyable review
Always good to see John Michael Greer mentioned
Based on the description, al-Gharbi doesn’t appear to be against “wokism”, encouraging its decline, however one may define it (and he doesn’t).
That white folk suck at eliminating their own racisms and biases, especially in the USA, is not an argument against wokism, and to be against wokism for this reason would make for a tu quoque. al-Gharbi doesn’t appear to be going in that direction, however.
And I suspect the author is neither disrespecting the various instances giving rise to moments of wokeness, nor those moments of wokeness, nor arguing against “wokism” as such, but appears to be squarely targeting the caste system and relating that as a product of capitalism, which I can wholeheartedly agree with.
What might be an interesting discussion – Marx admired capitalism for the way it rapid progressed social justice while also predicting that capitalism would necessarily self-destruct since it cannot be both social justice and also exploitation. Marx predicted the social justice aspect would win out against the exploitation aspect. al-Gharbi would appear to be saying capitalism seems to be heading us backwards, going against that prediction, that the exploitation appears to be winning instead.
Thank you albrt for the highlight, I’ll be adding this book to my reading list.
Some symbolic capitalists can see themselves as virtuous because they sacrificed much of their childhood building up the ideal resume for admission to an elite university and much of their adulthood positioning themselves for subsequent hoop jumping.
I read We Have Never Been Woke immediately after it was released. I had to keep checking myself because I agreed with 99.99% of what I was reading (the only thing I looked askance at was the overuse of “leverage” as a verb, but that is all on me). I thought about a review, but good thing I didn’t. After albrt, anything I would have had to say would have been a complete and utter waste of time. I do look forward to what the New York Review of Themselves (long time subscriber here) has to say about it, though. And the usual, more abject PMC (my preferred term for symbolic capitalists) suspects who will completely miss the fact they are looking at themselves in a virtue signaling mirror.
Thank you albrt. Having been a denizen of the upper west side I very much appreciate Al-Gharbi’s observations of the “environment” there. If I may share an anecdote and example of the performative nature of the “symbolic capitalists” (good term, IMO) that thrive there.
During the early days of the pandemic, come 7:00pm, all the now work from home professionals would lean out their windows or step out on their balconies and applaud and cheer, thus showing their appreciation for “essential workers”. It was never fully expressed that their real appreciation was of the “thank god it’s you and not me” variety. What was disturbing about this daily ritual was how enthusiastic my friends were about it, and how blind they were to how it might be perceived.
Thanks again for the essay. If our timeline allows it, in the future there will be some interesting reads about this period and the psychology that shaped it.
Being perceived as virtuous.
In a prior era, that could be pretense at candor.
Turchin’s overproduction of elites can be extended to show that those self-described or wannabe elites will sacrifice morals, righteousness, self-awareness and what else to keep up that designer stuffed-shirt appearance.
In the wee hours, do not count on any examen or flash of insight, just anxiety.
I recently finished the book, and I highly recommend it.
One of the ways it affected me was inject some more cynicism into my views of the 1930’s secular awokening, in which, for example, my engineer grandfather was a part. (He was a communist.) I have had a somewhat shallow and perhaps romantic view of that era. Since what I have seen of a “left” over my now all-too-long lifetime has been almost uniformly ineffectual, PMC-centered, and invariably inflected with a most annoying style of moralizing, I have usually thought of earlier periods of the “Old Left” in more positive terms—at least they did things, and had some partial successes.
El-Gharbi’s historical overview points out that there was plenty of performative bullshit and PMC self-dealing in my grandfather’s era as well. Maybe nothing in modern attempted-left politics can escape “wokeness” type of problems: you invariably draw movement leadership from among disaffected intellectuals or lower-rung professionals rather than the somewhat mythical organic leaders arising from the working class. So in left-milieu, things can easily degenerate into PMC status-seeking, and they often do.
(I’m sure this observation is nothing new; it’s just been slow dawning on me.)
Taner Edis, your comment reminds me of a story my father used to tell me. From the age of 5 until he was adopted by my grandparents at the age of 8, he was in an orphanage and consequently had terrible teeth. So as a teenager he had to go to the dentist a lot and the dentist’s office was filled with Communist literature, which he duly read as he waited. He enjoyed reading it very much! Or so he told us. This was in the early to mid 1930s.
Thanks for this post which takes up issues we have been talking about here forever. My own view is that while we are in the middle of a class war America is still a classless society in that most poor people don’t hate the rich but rather want to become one of them. Social mobility here–while not what it once was–still exists to the extent that our vice president wrote a book called Hillbilly Elegy. To be sure many call him a fake hillbilly but his growing up made him lot more aware of the poor and their lives than, say, an English aristocrat of the 19th century was of the poor of that day. In Europe the working class knew they would be in that class forever and solidarity was their only defense.
As for woke, being someone who grew up in the South I know all about prejudice and also about the prejudice aimed at us by those who prefer to target their prejudice elsewhere. It’s hardly original to point out that Jim Crow and lynching have moved to the Middle East and found a defense among many who express horror at racial prejudice. MLK’s religious training which included “hate the sin, not the sinner” comes to the fore, and hypocrite becomes a term of analysis, not moral superiority, as long as you recognize we are all capable of it.
By this view hierarchy and competition are baked in the cake. The real question is how do we control these human individual impulses so society can live.
This review is a good reflection of Al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke. If you’ve not read or listened to the book, you’ll learn what you’re missing. It is Veblenesque with its ironies and skewering of the PMC. Those who read it will end with sweat-soaked white collars.
I heard many echoing thoughts reading the synopsis of al-Gharbi’s work. Similarly, I left a small Midwestern town and went to graduate school in NYC in 2017. My takeaways were largely the same: as a polity, Manhattan is based on an informal racial caste system that imports cheap labor from the outer boroughs to work as the servant class of the PMC Manhattanites. To deal with the guilt associated with their silent exploitation of these groups, they embrace wokeness as an antidote to the festering internal guilt they feel.
In academia this ideology is particularly pronounced due to the enforcement of wage poverty and the lack of any community or family based support system for graduate students. Penniless, rootless, and without a family, graduate students of modest means or immigrant backgrounds come to resent the world around them and to approach it with a sense of dutied paternalism, taking it upon themselves to take up the mantle of the oppressed as it is the easiest way to distract oneself from the reality of being oppressed themselves: by projecting that onto minorities and the least fortunate, they avoid the uncomfortable reality that they are just as disposable as the poor wretches whose “cause” they lay claim to, completely disregarding any input from those same less fortunate about what’s important to them. They spawn people like Robin DiAngelo and her ilk to manifest this guilt while unconsciously ignoring the root causes of this oppression and then trading in this social currency to maximize professional outcomes after finishing their professional education.
I rejected it all and am now working on Wall Street. I spent 10 years wallowing in academia and gave it my best years. As a man, the sacrifice of my late 20’s and early to mid 30’s (no family, children, or money saved for retirement) is small relative to what women experience, many of whom sacrifice pursuit of a family for success in their career and when they attain that and feel comfortable enough to start a family, they are already in their 40s and it may not be so easy. This realization comes hard and fast, and dealing with it is complex. Rather than becoming parents, people on this path get dogs and become social justice warriors to combat their loneliness and lack of community. The cult-like confines of wokeness are the closest that many of them will ever feel to not being completely and utterly alone, forgotten by a world that sees them as disposable as the illegal migrant delivering their UberEats order.
While the moral vanity and hypocrisy of the Manhattan PMC is as you describe, it’s also easy to overstate, given the hard gentrification of the past forty years. For example, stereotypical Lib neighborhoods like the West Village and the Upper West Side gave sizeable majorities to Giuliani and Bloomberg from the late 90’s until De Blasio was elected in 2013. These were the Stop and Frisk Years, the Close Hospitals and Privatize the Schools Years, and this lifelong New Yorker remembers very little liberal virtue signaling during that era.
Thanks, Michael.
A fair point and outside of my own personal purview given my more recent transplant status. It’s possible that TDS has had a major role in reshaping some of those sensibilities of the Upper East/West side. I spent 5 years in the UES and I never met a single person who had anything positive to say about Trump or any Republican, including past mayoral office holders.
As most New Yorkers know, gentrification is now penetrating the outer boroughs, as well: I count myself among the Queens gentrified having realized that even a six figure salary in NYC is insufficient to support a single adult in a one bedroom apartment in most of Manhattan unless you accept roaches and rats as roommates rather than another human with whom you can split costs. This is in fact part of the malaise: professionals at the entry level are completely financially hopeless in this city due to the price of housing. It’s part and parcel of the hopelessness that drives people into woke politics and is a component of the formula for understanding why this is largely an urban phenomenon that scales with the cost of living. It’s not a coincidence that the most woke places in the USA are also those with the highest cost of living (NY, DC, SoCal, Bay Area).
Thanks for sharing your experiences and insights kriptid, personally I found them most enlightening.
Excellent review, thank you very much. I will be buying the book.
Thanks for this. I haven’t read the book, but I have read much of his Substack, which I’d definitely recommend. I particularly liked this post: Smart People Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling, which I think has wider relevance.
I get the impression that al-Gharbi is very much committed to the egalitarian tradition of American politics, but (unlike so many others who express the same commitment) actively tries to face the facts and wants to get others on his side to face them too. Whatever quibbles I may have, I think that attitude is admirable, as is his willingness to engage seriously with those who don’t share his views.
Yes, and generally the backlash comes from other symbolic capitalists, which I guess is what Turchin’s framework would predict one would find. The New York intellectuals were already reacting against their origins in the 1930s awokening by the mid-1960s, and the 1960s awokening drove them all the way into neoconservatism. Barbara Ehrenreich charts that progression in Fear of Falling. But these intellectuals were all symbolic capitalists too, tenured faculty at prestigious universities, think tank denizens, and highbrow magazine editors.
What is less understandable to me is how these symbolic capitalists/PMC types, who I think combine the “not working with their hands/not providing tangible products and services” aspect with “having impressive academic credentials”, are able to make their programs appealing to so many ordinary people, i.e., people who lack impressive credentials and/or do work with the physical world. Is it just having a lock on the media? Being able to use entertainment providers to glamorize their message?
Excellent post.
Brings to mind something I overheard being overtly admitted in Silicon Valley from a card carrying member of the performatively progressive class ….”you know, apart from the moral imperative of supporting people of color, even illegal immigrants, is that it keeps the “terms of trade” (ratio of PMC wages to manual worker wages ,,,the table-cleaners, the short order cooks, the parcel-deliverers) in our favor, by increasing their supply.”
The production and reproduction of the underclass is a key part of all this.
A couple of commenters in the past have pointed out that the privileging of mental labor over physical is pre-capitalist, probably dating from the time when reading and writing were rare skills and must have seemed almost magical. I’ll settle for pointing out that most of what “PMC” or “white collar” people do now will in the future still have to be done somehow by somebody, probably by people who are not all that different from those doing it today. Presumably they’ll have a less privileged position relative to the rest of society though.
indi.ca latest posting kind of deals with this same issue. But he is briefer and more entertaining to read:
https://indi.ca/the-two-engines-of-america-part-1-colonization/
Thx for the link. It was an interesting fairly short read. I didn’t know this blogger. Looking forward to his take on imperialism.
“his belief that symbolic capitalists are not fully formed as an economic class. He argues that their ideology is highly individualistic, and they generally have not organized as a class to promote their class interests.”
It seems to me that the PMC is a class but perhaps their insistence on removing any thought or discussion about “class” keeps them from doing anything overtly class like. But they quack like a class, I think.
E.M. Forster, A Room With a View
My take on the PMC is that they think like Lucy’s mother, Mrs. Honeychurch, but they think they think like Lucy’s brother, Freddy. Thinking that they think like Freddy (when actually they like Mrs. Honeychurch) precludes a lot of them from doing anything more than class-like than democratically complaining about
the wrong sortKarens on social media.Some really great comments above.
I would guess that symbolic capitalists, including myself, make up a majority of the readership and commentariat here at NC. I would also guess that much of the creative energy of the Old Left, New Left, and the now ascendent MAGA populist Right comes from this same grouping.
We all may also have a powerful internal tendency to view ourselves as “good” guys and gals. But Al-Gharbi, in his latest post, argues that we (symbolic capitalists of all political persuasions) are being judged not by what we say but by what we do or have done. Al-Gharbi then says “You don’t have to see into others’ hearts and minds…” to make this type of observation–it can all be done from the outside.
Yet, it may also be that we symbolic professionals (of all sorts) must now engage in deep internal self-reflection to discipline ourselves from sliding once again into the quite comfortable and familiar path of moral superiority and self-righteousness that so often has doomed our political aspirations.
excellent choice of reading matter brother albrt, much respect for reviewing this book and understanding its relevance to present day America.
NC readership might learn something from it, being a White blog with a modicum of woke readership – I use Woke in the old school sense of the word, Natives learned it from Black people who used it in reference to Whites who weren’t racist or to people who had “good politics”, a forerunner of “decolonized”.
Whites largely view race as an issue, like gun control or choice or immigration. Emphasis on race is seen as identity politics by people unable to recognize that what they view as normalcy is their white identity. For us race can literally be life and death, hence something which is part of our daily lives.
Some here bemoan the preponderance of nonwhite faces in movement/protest circles. It’s because we had to organize for self preservation and to provide for our communities, so the mechanisms are in place whenever we need people in the streets. Class and Race are not mutually exclusive. We get this but unless you’ve literally experienced racist fury it’s an abstract concept which can be downplayed. We don’t have that luxury. We do experience classism just as much as Whites do. Our own people prey upon us too.
Thanks for all the great comments (and the compliments). I second Daniil’s recommendation of al-Gharbi’s blog – some of the posts from late last year are basically outtakes from the book that illuminate his thinking but were a little too off-point from the main thesis.
I am most impressed by al-Gharbi’s intellectual discipline and ability to focus. I suspect he has more good books in him.
Sorry if I repost this but since it´s the same book…
A review of Gharbi´s book by JACOBIN from 2/2/25
The Politics of the Woking Class
By Dustin Guastella
Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke pinpoints the hypocrisies of professional elites who use social justice jargon as status markers. Yet the book exaggerates their agency, casting “wokeness” as a core driver of economic inequality.
https://jacobin.com/2025/02/wokeness-al-gharbi-review-bourdieu
Thank you very much for mentioning this review. I found it quite helpful, since it deals with the PMC within the wider context of class societies in general.
This is so depressing. We are all symbolic capitalists
We are, but I took a hopeful message from the observation that latest Awokening seems to have foundered and now there is an opening for something else. We have the tools to do better, but we need more people to find it within themselves to use those tools the way al-Gharbi does instead of the way Rachel Maddow does.
Thanks for this excellent post albrt, it resonated for me in terms of my own progression through life, not that different from Musa al-Gharbi’s in his early days. I liked the part about him selling shoes at Dillard’s. We had one of those at the Merle Hay Mall* too, only I worked at Younker’s pushing a vacuum cleaner and emptying trash cans. The apostrophe in the store names is important I think.
No advanced degrees for me but I have been amongst the “privileged ass white people”, as I like to say, for most of my days and witnessed their clueless notions of merit and worth while benefiting from the capitalist shakedown of everyone and everything. Never able to fully take part in that, I have taken my financial lumps over the decades. I have also gained benefits from it as well, not going to deny it.
And for my own experience, the last decade or so of woke-ness in all of its forms has been fairly breathtaking. Two examples:
1. A video hosted on my workplace YouTube about the dangers of childhood drugs/surgery for transgender dysphoria was shouted down by anonymous comments. I tried to hold my ground, as this was a presentation of a 3rd party at a government funded Senior Center, and despite any controversy this was free speech. My supervisor (who is not the villain here in any ways) deleted the video without any discussion of the issues.
2. When it was time to get new business cards I declined to state my gender preferences and they were added after the fact. Small thing, but indicative of the controlling mindset.
* Merle Hay was the 1st Iowan killed in WWI, and I have seen his gravestone in NW Iowa. It’s also the road that mall is (still) on, so no real significance.
Those who enjoy this sort of thing may also like Catherine Liu‘s
Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56876312-virtue-hoarders