Hannah Arendt, bell hooks, and woke oppression classes

I’ve been re-reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, a book I read maybe about 22 years ago. I actually had a first edition of the UK printing, where it was titled The Burden of Our Times, found at a used bookstore.

She was canceled, by the way—we’re not “allowed” to read her anymore. That’s for several reasons, including accusations of racism against black people and, most interesting of all, her “rabid antisemitism” according to some viral social justice articles a few years back.

That accusation, by the way, is derived from her rather unsentimental look at the role Jewish financiers played in colonial bureaucracies in South Africa and the involvement of the Rothschild family in the monopolization of certain industries in Europe (for instance, the Austrian railroad system), and most of all her sober and critical examination of the figure of the “court Jew.”

Anyone who’s actually read The Origins of Totalitarianism of course knows that her goal is to explain how antisemitism became a uniting political ideology for totalitarian movements. The problem for some is that she isn’t interested in painting any group as sacred or agentless victims (rightfully seeing sacred victimhood itself a key feature of totalitarian thinking, just as Nietzsche understood this as the core mechanism of ressentiment).

The social media drive to cancel Arendt was always a bit fascinating to me, especially since it occurred about the same time as attempts to smear bell hooks as anti-black and a “SWERF” (“Sex Worker Exclusive Radical Feminist”) because of her criticism of Beyoncé. I suspect most people have already forgotten this by now since bell hooks just died, but quite a few of the woke were demanding bell hooks no longer be read and also that she must apologize for being oppressive.

Neither of these crusades really worked, as they were primarily limited to social media attacks. I doubt professors stopped assigning Arendt or hooks as part of their curricula, assuming they were doing so in the first place. Also, my guess is that the sort of people who use social media as a guide to what books you should and should not read don’t actually read books at all. Even J.K. Rowling, probably the biggest target of social media cancellations, is nevertheless still selling massive amounts of books (even if “underperforming”1 with US readers during part of 2020).

Regardless of their actual efficacy, the attacks on Arendt and hooks revealed a peculiar degree of vitriol that differed significantly from what is aimed at more mainstream figures. I think the reason for this was precisely because they were “race traitors,” meaning that they were part of an oppressed identity group yet resisted larger narratives regarding those identities and fought attempts to create a sense of sacred victimhood.

In fact, both hooks and Arendt insisted that such a path was not only a dead end, but also was a key feature of oppression regimes themselves. Germans saw themselves as sacred victims of Jewish conspiracies, white nationalists tell themselves that the whites are an oppressed group being diluted, subverted, and killed off by minorities. Inverting that equation to say that black people or Jews are everywhere the victims doesn’t change the underlying recipe, just a few ingredients.

I suspect that most who are probably citing bell hooks after her death haven’t really read her, or probably skipped over the parts where she urges people to stop trying to replace the dominant classes with themselves. Ironically, Kamala Harris and Ibram X. Kendi wrote short tributes to hooks on her passing; ironic since they both represent exactly the sorts of identity dead ends that hooks repeatedly warned against.

I’m rereading The Origins of Totalitarianism for this book I’m writing, particularly because Arendt’s understanding of ideological formation is significantly helpful in understanding the way woke ideology is being formed. Specifically helpful is her analysis of race-thinking before the existence of race ideology, the early roots of that framework when it was merely an opinion about things held by disparate people before becoming an actual political force and ideological framework.

Here’s a quote from her that will help you understand what that sort of difference entails:

an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the “riddles of the universe,” or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.

Arendt isn’t much for communism, by the way. It’s understandable: one of her close friends had been Walter Benjamin, a Jewish Marxist hunted by both Nazis and Stalinists. What is more relevant here is that she identified both race and class as thought formations which eventually became core to ideological formations which became lenses of truth about the world.

Of those two, only race really remains a dominant ideological framework, with class being held to only by an ever dwindling left who is now painted as fascist for even thinking class matters at all. Worse, race-thinking has expanded throughout all other positions, so that both white nationalists and social justice activists equally accept it as a primary explanation for historical and current struggle. That is, everyone believes race matters, they just disagree on who should be the final victor in race struggle.

bell hooks, of course, was one of those increasingly rare examples of someone who thought race could eventually be resolved, transformed, and transcended. Like many of the earlier civil rights thinkers, the goal for her was to make race no longer matter for anyone. The new woke ideologues like Kendi, on the other hand, envision an inverted regime of racial discrimination, thus making race matter even more.

I wonder, though, if class-thinking has actually been diminished at all. In fact, we might be able to say it continues on in under the label “oppressed.” Though no longer tied to economic status, it now defines an amorphous group of “intersecting identities” who are all victims of a dominant “oppressor” class.

In fact, I think that is probably key to understanding why woke ideology has such power in the United States and the United Kingdom but still hasn’t fully caught hold in Europe. Class is very much still a site of contention in France and Germany, and there are still powerful labor unions with Marxist origins. There are few unions remaining in the United States, and those that remain were purged of their Marxist alignment decades ago. The Labour Party itself in the United Kingdom has been cleansed of Marxist sensibilities under a similar process.

Thus, in both places, class has become a mere artifact of history, but a desire for class identity still exists in some vestigial form. Regardless of whether one believes class exists, people might still feel they are oppressed by those with more power and wealth. So an answer for why that oppression and imbalance of wealth and power exists will be sought anyway.

Woke ideology offers an answer, but it comes with initiation rituals if you do not share racial or gender traits with the sacred victim class. If you are already a woman or black, you’re in regardless of how much wealth and power you might already have. If you’re white or a man, you’ll need to show some extra proof you aren’t actually an oppressor (declaring yourself non-binary, trans, queer, or disabled works well).

In traditional class-thinking, it’s the ruling class against the ruled class (the anarchist and also the aristocratic-feudalist position, which are really just inversions of each other) or the capitalist class against the proletariat (the Marxist and also the neoliberal positions, again mostly inversions of each other). In this new kind of class-thinking, it’s the white-cis-hetero-abled-bodied-man against all the other hyphenated identity groups.

And that’s where Arendt matters again, especially her point about the way such ways of thinking eventually “enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines.” Woke ideology is quite good for the capitalists and the neoliberal political parties. Lots of corporations and the DNC have already figured this out, others will eventually follow. Like the ruling class of Rome who eventually converted to Christianity because it gave them more support from populist forces in the city, they’re converting too.

Doesn’t mean they actually believe any of those things, anymore than Constantine could have been said to have really believed in Jesus Christ. What matters for them is the continuation of their own dominance, and adding a few black and trans faces to your cabinet or board of directors and tweeting a few woke slogans is a really small price to pay to hold on to your power and wealth.