Woke Labor Thesis
Discussion
Theodore Kupfer:
(an explanation for the spread and hegemony of Woke Ideology)
Another materialist account, the “woke labor” thesis, promises to explain such cases. In short, a glut of well-educated but insecure white-collar workers use their control over corporate resources to push a political agenda that they not only agree with but also depend upon for job security. In City Journal, Malcom Kyeyune writes that America’s culture wars can be understood by examining the class interests of mid-level managers who don’t own capital but retain control over how it is deployed. What seem like earnest arguments for a company allegedly dogged by a toxic culture to submit to an audit or scale up its diversity-training initiatives actually constitute calls for a “massive expansion of managerial intermediation in previously independent social and economic processes.” These managers simply want to create more work for themselves (and other members of their guild). Cancellations of dissenters therefore function as labor market discipline, forcing the unwoke to exit the sector.
But how can economic incentives explain the great many cancellations that have little to do with material gain, as in hobbyist communities like knitting? These cases suggest an ideological dimension to wokeness that the materialist explanations cannot capture. Explicit instances of coordination between corporations and activists also tend to be lacking. And, after all, woke boilerplate tends to identify capitalism as one of many interlocking systems of oppression that keep minorities down."
(https://www.city-journal.org/a-taxonomy-of-anti-wokeness?)
Towards an integrative, multi-factor account
"Each explanation for wokeness’s rise has gaps that invite corrections or modifications. Left with a set of theories that don’t seem to work on their own but complement each other well, one could embrace a synthesis: a perfect-storm view, in which all these different phenomena happen at once. Thus, a certain brand of overprotective parent raised a generation of kids susceptible, in an era of declining religiosity, to morally urgent ideologies. The theory-suffused academy was happy to supply such an ideology, which these kids took up with gusto upon arriving on campus, despite its evident shortcomings. When they graduated and started entering the white-collar work force, litigation-averse corporations—already seasoned in adjusting their behavior to comply with civil rights laws—happily indulged the political demands of this socially engaged class of workers. And, thanks to the immense cultural power of well-educated Americans and the economic power of large companies, that ideology became increasingly visible, and eventually all but inescapable.
This multifactor explanation may strike some as overthought and extravagant, but a complex account, involving many different proximate causes, somehow fits such a nebulous, yet expansive, phenomenon as wokeness. Skeptics of wokeness tend to point to the difficulty of defining it and explaining its causes, but such imprecision would be expected if it was really a number of different but interrelated and overlapping phenomena, each with its own set of causes."