The woke creation of the apex-oppressor

As noted previously, I provide notes and excerpts of my current manuscript-in-progress for the really kind people who have become my paid supporters here on substack. If you are not yet a paid supporter, you’ll regardless be able to read a portion of this, and if you want to become a paid supporter, you can do so at the end of this preview.

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The manuscript is due for submission 1 April, 2022, for publication by a UK leftist publisher towards the end of 2022. More details about its publication will be announced after I’ve submitted the manuscript.

Earlier editions of this series can be found here: 1 // 2 // 3

Also, special thanks to Constance Davis, who just reminded me about Pierre Bourdieu.

The Woke Creation of the Apex Oppressor

No radical attempt to critique the woke ideological constellation can begin without first acknowledging the truth of what this movement is reacting against. Regardless of how absurd the positions may seem and how contorted the logics appear, the “systems of domination” which they sense absolutely exist. However, just like a conspiracy theorist may have truthfully identified that there are larger political, economic, and social forces affecting and limiting the actions of individuals, yet inaccurately named those forces as ‘the Jews’ or ‘the aliens,” the woke have similarly misunderstood the objective dimensions of the structures against which they fight.

Nowhere is this misunderstanding clearer than in the form of the apex-oppressor class within the woke oppression hierarchy: the “white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man.” Within the woke cosmology, it is he for whom all the world has been made, all institutions founded, all laws designed, all wealth accumulated, and all exploitation affected. As in the ecological understanding of the wolf as the apex-predator in an ecosystem, he preys on others while being uniquely privileged to fear no predation. Yet unlike the wolf and other natural apex-predators, all of whom have an overall balancing and positive effect on the ecosystem (keeping herbivore populations in check and thus benefiting the survival and growth of forests), the white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man is seen as having no purpose within the social order except to dominate.

His existence and the attributes which describe him define the rest of humanity by division and opposition. He is white, and thus the opposite of all the people in the world who are not white. He is heterosexual, and thus possesses the only identity not included in the LGBTQIA+ formula. Being a man, he is thus in opposition to all woman, but even more so being cis-, he has been endowed with the great fortune of never questioning his birth assignment. And unlike the sick, the diseased, or those with mental and psychological illnesses, there are no societal or natural limits to the capacities of his body.

Such men undoubtedly exist, but their physical or material existence is much less relevant to the category than his symbolic existence, or rather his existence as a symbolic container. Into that symbolic container are placed all manner of lacks and absences which compose him in negation: he is not woman, nor disabled, nor black, nor gay nor queer, nor is he trans.

From these negations comes his supposed power of dominance. As a not-woman, he does not suffer as women do but rather causes them to suffer. He has no disabilities, and therefore moves throughout the world without obstacle while creating obstacles for others. He feels no internal need nor societal pressure to hide his sexual attraction for his binary counterpart, and thus makes miserable the lives of all those whose desires manifest differently. He lacks any sense of incongruity between the man others see him as and the man that he feels himself to be, and thus oppresses trans and non-binary people by the naturalisation of his experience upon the rest of humanity. His skin is light, absent the darker hues of others, and by this lack he rules over all others.

He is the normative, the rule against which all other people are measured and found lacking. He creates this world, and it is he for whom the world has been created. He is the elect, the chosen son, the architect of all oppression and the master of all dominance.

The problem is that he doesn’t actually exist, or at least not in the way the woke understand him to exist. He is their creation, in the same way that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were creations of Marx and the Christian and the Heathen were creations of the Catholic Church. That is, he is a symbolic construction crafted through ideological pastiche and bricolage, sewn together from loose historical and mythological threads along a pattern mapping him to physical reality only through collective belief.

The woke correctly understand that there are social constructions underpinning economic and societal oppression. Absolutely, some people have more wealth than others, and the people who compose those groups engage in social and political struggle not only to maintain that wealth, but also to guarantee their continued access to further wealth creation. The pre-capitalist aristocracy in Europe, for example, employed both physical and social or symbolic violence to ensure their large landholdings were secure and that they would have a continued supply of landless peasants who could be compelled to labor on their land. Trade guilds restricted access to specialized crafting skills to guarantee higher wages and continued demand for the labor of their members. Protestant town dwellers employed in specialized labor (medicine, law, academia, and accounting) adopted and propagated specific social codes and signifiers to ensure the new professions they quickly dominated would not be open to those outside their religious and political sensibilities. The early “captains” of capitalist industrial production likewise learned quickly to accumulate not just economic capital but symbolic capital, influencing the legislative politics which formed our still-current forms of private property and wage labor.

That is, every group which finds a way to accumulate wealth exerts social, political, and economic force to ensure not just that the group can hold onto that wealth, but that it also attains a monopolistic or at least exclusionary access to the means of that accumulation. Woke ideology does not just posit the white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man as yet another of these groups, but rather an esoteric category which binds all these other groups together and extends into the pre-modern past as a historical force.

One can even suggest without any risk of absurdity that the woke have merely retooled the formula from The Communist Manifesto with different actors. That is, rather than “the history of all hitherto existing society” being “the history of class struggles,” it is the history of race struggles, or gender struggles, or struggles of sexuality, or of ability. In the woke cosmology, it is not the limited bourgeois class against the innumerable proletariat, but rather the white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man against everyone else in the world.

The economic, political, and social system that the bourgeois class created has a name: capitalism. The white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man is likewise said to have created systems: white supremacy, cis-heteropatriarchy, toxic masculinity, and countless other sub-systems (homophobia, ableism, and so on). He has supposedly constellated a symbolic order at the top of which he alone sits, accumulating wealth and preventing all others from accessing his proprietary secrets. His systems are the reasons for which black people are poor, why trans people commit suicide at very high rates, why people with “invisible disabilities” struggle to hold regular jobs, any why many gay teenagers struggle with meth addiction or are bullied at school.

Here we must recognise that woke ideology is engaged in the very same mechanism of symbolic ordering in which Marx and Engels engaged. Whether or not there is “such a thing” as the white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man is just as irrelevant as is the question of whether or not the world can be divided between bourgeoisie and proletariat. What is important here is that the white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man is a symbolic category which woke ideology is attempting to manifest as a physical reality.

In other words, or more precisely in the words of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, woke ideology is attempting to institute the white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man into the constellation of radical political struggle:

The act of institution is thus an act of communication, but of a particular kind: it signifies to someone what his identity is, but in a way that both expresses it to him and imposes it on him by expressing it in front of everyone (kategorein, meaning originally, to accuse publicly) and thus informing him in an authoritative manner of what he is and what he must be. This is clearly evident in the insult, a kind of curse (sacer also signifies cursed) which attempts to imprison its victim in an accusation which also depicts his destiny. But this is even truer of an investiture or an act of naming, a specifically social judgement of attribution which assigns to the person involved everything that is inscribed in a social definition.

By naming the bourgeoisie as a social, political, historical, and economic class, Marx instituted them. He assigned to them—and others later added to the assignations—specific traits, behaviours, moral positions, and political powers which constellated their identity in opposition to the proletariat.

This isn’t to say that the people the term bourgeoisie came to define did not exist; however, identifying the bourgeoisie was only a necessary step to the ultimate goal, that of the instituting the proletariat.

From Bourdieu we understand that the core goal of acts of institution is division. A category is named in order to divide the people within it from other categories to which they might otherwise belong. Bourgeois, therefore, institutes a categorical division between the group of people named the bourgeoisie and all the other people in the world: the proletariat.

The white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man is likewise a category of division. He must be identified, categorised, and ultimately instituted so that all other identity categories can be defined by their lack of his traits. But unlike the singular binary division between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose primary definitional distinction is material and functional (one owns or has access to the means of production, the other must sell his labor to him in order to engage in production), the white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man is constructed through a series of multiple binaries.

Each of these binaries are binaries of oppressor/oppressed. His race (white) sets him as the oppressor of all people who are not white; his sexuality (heterosexual) makes him the dominator of all homosexuals, bisexuals, and asexuals. His lack of disability makes him dominate all those with disabilities. And his sex/gender is not only man (thus dominating woman) but also in a continual state since birth, thus making him oppressor also of trans and non-binary people.

The hierarchy can be drawn out as a pyramid, with him at the top. At the very bottom is his supposed opposite, the black disabled queer trans woman, and between them compose all the other people in the world holding “intersecting” oppression identities. Each of those people experiences domination, but they can also potentially dominate those below them because of the vestiges of privilege remaining in any their shared binary traits with the apex-oppressor.

Thus the common social justice slogan, “listen to black trans women,” or as an addendum to other slogans, “especially trans women of color.” The white heterosexual able-bodied cis-woman may feel she suffers societal oppression, and she may be correct, but ultimately any oppression she suffers pales in comparison to those below her in the hierarchy. The white gay-cis man, even if has disabilities, still possesses unfathomable and unforgivable privileges that the black trans woman—even if able-bodied—will never experience.

…

The identity hierarchy created though these theories glaringly lacks a specific division which any Marxist immediately can sense: that of class. In fact, class cannot be introduced within these categories without undermining the totalizing identity of the white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man.

In the plainest of ways, we must ask, what does a jobless and homeless white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man really have in common with a CEO who possesses all those same identity traits? Or for that matter, what do certain of a CEO’s employees have in common with him except for those identity markers?

To introduce class into his identity would be to disrupt not only the cohesion of the apex-oppressor category, but also to disrupt the core cohesion of all those he is seen as oppressing. We might ask as well, what does a black woman millionaire entrepreneur (such as Oprah) really have in common with a single black woman holding down two jobs yet barely able to afford rent and feed her children? And more so, is their shared racial identification actually stronger and more relevant than the shared class identifications between such a woman and a white woman counterpart in the same economic situation?

This is the reason for which any Marxist who attempts to re-introduce class as a framework and foundation for solidarity or radical organising is typically smeared as a “class reductionist.” Class destabilises the entire discourse by looking for commonalities and differences along a fully different set of co-ordinates which cut across all the other identity categories. It divides every supposedly unitary oppression grouping by asking a simple question: do you have access to wealth and the creation of more of it? Or must you sell your time, your body, and your labor for even the barest means of your survival?