Woke Ouroboros: Segregation and Essentialism

Why is it so hard to talk about wokeness? According to Merriam-Webster, "woke" means "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)," but it rarely seems that's all it means. If one asks the right, "woke" is a pejorative term for someone pushing identity-only politics. If one asks the left, it's a signifier one isn't a bigot. If one asks Peter Coffin, author of Less Sucks: Overpopulation, Eugenics, and Degrowth (and producer of the documentary of the same name), "wokeness" is an ideology used to obscure power and funnel people into left/right political fandoms - ensuring culture war arguments that solve nothing. Woke Ouroboros is a grounded criticism of "wokeness" built on top of a materialist conception of the relations of power through production - a thorough-but-accessible examination of one of the most fraught political conversations Americans are having and the implications it has via the imperialist world order.

"Woke Ouroboros takes a different and humanizing approach to criticism on liberal and neoliberal ideas of identity. Coffin does not downplay the real marginalizations and inequalities that exist along social lines, however nor is there a mincing of words when it comes to how the capitalist class co-opts these issues to perpetuate itself at the expense of the majority of people. The solutions put forth by ruling class ideology, in a nutshell, serve power, even when they claim they do not. And power plays all sides, so both pro and anti woke teams end up serving a similar function. Everything from representation to imperialism is examined using a truly dialectical Marxian analysis without moral judgement. And as the title suggests, it is primarily framed around how Wokeism, in the identity politics sense, ends up in a similar place as the right-wing ideology it claims to critique, and how this fits into a larger capitalist structure by design. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the sinister nature of our system in order to understand it." - L.W.