Symbolic Capitalists

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Kenan Malik explains:

"The key to understanding Wokeness, Al-Gharbi insists, is the struggles of “symbolic capitalists” – “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. In other words, writers and academics, artists and lawyers, museum curators and tech professionals. It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”. Theirs is a struggle within the elite presented as a struggle against the elite on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed.

This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.

Many aspects of this argument have been expressed before, for instance by the cultural theorist Catherine Liu and the philosopher Olúfémi Táíwò. Liu argues that the professional-managerial class “hoards virtue” to enhance self-worth and justify “its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people”. In Elite Capture, Táíwò also maintains, though from a different perspective, that the elite have appropriated the politics of radicalism to serve their own ends.

These works are important in helping make sense of the absurdities of contemporary politics."

(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/10/cosplaying-social-justice-is-the-new-elitist-way-of-elbowing-out-the-working-class?)

More information

• Book: Musa al Gharbi. We Have Never Been Woke