Symbolic Capitalists or Progressive Professionals?

What actually is “wokeness”? In al-Gharbi’s telling, it’s the ideology of a particular group: “symbolic capitalists.” “Capital” here does not refer to money used to invest in profit-making firms but instead, following the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the set of skills, dispositions, and soft assets that one can use to leverage greater status, income, and influence. Symbolic capitalists, then, are that group of “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services).” As the book’s title suggests, these elites certainly aren’t willing to sacrifice their comfortable lives or their high status to achieve what it might take to win something like a good society. Instead, woke ideas and behaviors serve mainly as status markers and as means to advance their particular class interests. For al-Gharbi, if the term “woke” is taken to mean “aware of social injustice and committed to doing something about it,” then they have never been woke.

All of this seems reasonable, but at times al-Gharbi can ascribe too much agency to “symbolic capitalists,” to the neglect of other social forces. Not only are symbolic capitalists blamed for their hypocritical posture and outsized influence. Not only are they, rightly, dinged for their unctuous champagne socialism. Al-Gharbi goes much further. These elites, he argues, are actually responsible for the exploitation and immiseration of the poor whom they claim to hold in such high esteem.

Again and again, al-Gharbi implies that economic exploitation and inequality results primarily from the behaviors of the professional class in their role as consumers. So he lays the blame for Amazon’s awful labor practices at these professionals’ feet, as he perceives them to be driving the demand for cheaper and faster goods and services — as if Walmart hadn’t paved the way for hyper-convenience and “rollback” pricing decades before, with a much less fashionable customer base. He further argues that the rise of the new food-delivery app economy is the fault of symbolic capitalists who “insist that meals are rapidly delivered to our home as well (as it is apparently too much for us to pick up the food ourselves, let alone actually dining at the restaurants we order from).” The dig is a good one, because the laziness of Grubhubbing every meal deserves ridicule. But are the Grubhubbbers really driving these larger social processes? Are they the main profiteers?

Likewise, he claims that high-end restaurants “try to keep their prices relatively affordable (for professionals, at least) by paying subpar wages to ‘back of house’ workers.” Yet McDonald’s, along with every other fast-food outlet, also exploits its cooks, even though its clientele is euphemistically referred to as “downscale.” In fact, hyper-exploitative lower-end restaurants maintain supply chains that are even more brutal than those of restaurants that pedal in “organic” and “fair-trade” gimmicks. A McDonald’s franchise owned by a decidedly nonsymbolic capitalist with definitely non-professional-class clientele still relies on grotesque levels of exploitation (which last year included seemingly credible allegations of literal slavery). All of this without the meddling of any so-called symbolic capitalists and their taste for free-range chicken.

The fact is, symbolic professionals are not chiefly to blame for megacorporations’ exploitative labor practices, the gigification of delivery work, or the low wages in commercial kitchens. Actual old-fashioned, Monopoly-man capitalists, and the anonymous forces of market competition, are to blame. Unfortunately, al-Gharbi’s reliance on the term “symbolic capitalists” serves not only to inflate the power of the professional class. It also helps to mystify the workings of the capitalist market economy. Worse, a totalizing class theory, in which the behaviors, desires, and tastes of symbolic capitalists become the driving force of history, leaves little room for the agency and interests of other classes. And al-Gharbi’s neglect of other class forces — both above and below the professional elite — weakens his larger historical argument.

When Did Woke Start?

One of al-Gharbi’s major innovations is to argue that the “Great Awokening” was not a new or singular moment but instead one expression of a recurrent, even cyclical, phenomenon. Following Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction,” al-Gharbi argues that “awokenings” are provoked by the frustrations of “elite aspirants.” Basically, when there are too many highly skilled professionals chasing too few salaried positions, they advocate for sweeping social reforms and rhetorically ally themselves with the oppressed and downtrodden. Awokenings, then, “tend to collapse when a sufficient number of frustrated aspirants are integrated into the power structure or come to believe their prospects are improving.” In other words, woke moments are the temper tantrums of a professional elite, who quickly put down their picket signs the moment they get the cushy gigs they think they deserve. “All said,” he concludes, “awokenings seem unrelated to significant changes in law or allocation of resources.” This is a compelling class-informed theory. The Progressive Era reformism of the 1910s and 1920s broadly conforms to this theory, as do virtually all liberal crusades since the late 1960s. Yet al-Gharbi stretches his theory too thin. Bafflingly, he claims the “First Great Awokening” was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In his telling, the New Deal was primarily about “expansions of the government bureaucracy” that “provided elite workers with stable, respected, and well-paying positions.” This hardly captures the nature and scope of the New Deal. Yes, the social security offices needed to be staffed with clerks and professionals, the National Labor Relations Board with lawyers and white-collar bureaucrats, but the actual beneficiaries of these new departments were not these employees but the millions of workers who now had the chance at a decent retirement and the assurance that they couldn’t be fired at will. The government’s new programs were not merely sinecures for elites but genuine solutions to poverty and joblessness. Moreover, the demands for such programs were not made by NGO staffers but by a very real working-class movement — a fact that is totally invisible in al-Gharbi’s story.

Unfortunately, al-Gharbi’s narrow focus on the elite alone precludes him from seeing the broad impact of the New Deal clearly. “After the war,” he writes, “Black gains proceeded apace through the 1960s.” “Gaps between Blacks and whites continued to close,” but “there was no apparent impact from the [New Deal] on any of these trends.” Here he seems to echo the broadly swallowed idea that the New Deal did nothing for black people. This ironically regurgitates a major argument of woke liberals. What’s more, it’s not true. Even the evidence al-Gharbi cites for this remarkable claim, drawn from Robert Putnam’s latest book The Upswing, shows almost the opposite of what he argues. According to Putnam, black gains in income and education were the greatest during the period between 1940 and 1970, largely thanks to redoubled government efforts toward these ends. Go figure.

Not only does al-Gharbi suggest that the New Deal was little more than the venal expression of elite class interests, but myriad forms of socialism are similarly characterized. He insists that populist and socialist appeals are no less a mask for professional-class resentment than the race- or gender-based politics of wokeness. He goes as far as to argue that nothing in Marxism is “out of line with mainstream symbolic capitalist ideals.” Thus, appeals to economic redress or redistribution on behalf of the vast majority of the population are just disguised attempts at satisfying the appetite of a spoiled elite. At times it appears that all wide-ranging social critiques are ultimately driven by aristocratic frustrations, that any popular movement for social reform is a veil for elite interests — a theory so grand it risks swallowing the very point of class analysis. If, as al-Gharbi argues, “literally any ideology” can be used to further elite interests, then all politics throughout history amounts to nothing more than an interelite competition, an inescapable ouroboros.

Instead of suggesting that all moments of social unrest and reform are elite-driven awokenings comparable to the so-called uprising of 2020, al-Gharbi would do better to see the long stretch of social progress beginning in the 1930s and concluding in the 1960s as comprising a single, productive, progressive moment. A unique moment when the working class managed to impose its interests on the elite against their will. Since then, much of progressive politics has consisted of superficial attempts at rehashing the political fights of 1968. In fact, it feels like the entire period of the neoliberal “Knowledge Economy” era is nothing but a cycle of ‘68s — as tragedy, farce, tragedy and farce. The woke moment just feels particularly farcical.

Is Woke Good?

Much of what al-Gharbi identifies as wokeness makes up a code of elite manners. Wokeness isn’t so much about what ought to be done as it is about how one ought to behave. In the sixth chapter, the book’s strongest, al-Gharbi dissects the fight over “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) in school curricula. He notes that despite the massive amount of media attention this debate has generated, it really only concerns elite schools. “That is,” he argues, “schools for elites.” Why are these schools so obsessed with “pushing woke ideology” onto their students? As a means of signaling elite status: indeed, “the very purpose of these schools is to generate inequality — to give children of elites a leg up on everyone else.” As al-Gharbi rightly observes, effective admissions essays to Harvard or Yale are peppered with social justice jargon. Elite parents, ever anxious about ensuring that their kids can reproduce their social status, are eager to teach it to them. For an older generation of blue bloods, knowing which utensil to use at a formal dinner party sent the signal that one was well-bred; today knowing to include your pronouns in your email signature says the same. As al-Gharbi concludes, elite schools are teaching CRT not out of some duty to the common good but rather because “mastering these frameworks will enhance students’ social status and professional flourishing.”

This all seems right. Yet again the critique is incomplete. Yes, wokeness is clearly the chosen form and style of an educated elite. And yes, woke rhetoric and behavior make up the manners of that elite. But are those manners, whatever they might be, good? Are they worth anything as standalone practices? Surprisingly, al-Gharbi is reluctant to criticize woke ideas on their own merits. Repeatedly, he argues that his aim is not to determine whether these ideas are “bad” per se but instead to criticize them primarily for being socially dishonest or contradictory; he aims to demystify woke ideas to show their true function in society but not to determine whether the ideas, separated from that function, are worthy. “Ideas associated with wokeness,” he even says, “provide us tools for challenging the order that has been established in its name.”

This isn’t convincing. If al-Gharbi believes that woke ideas themselves are not “especially dangerous or powerful,” why would they merit a book-length challenge at all? Or if, instead, he believes the ideas and practices associated with wokeness are actually good, and the problem is that the professional class are not sincere in their convictions — that real wokeness has never been tried — then still the ideas deserve to be defended on their own terms. The book offers neither a defense nor a standalone critique of these ideas.

The lack of a normative critique makes al-Gharbi’s book feel a bit dated already. Wokeness is undoubtedly a means of social advancement for elites — a way to shore up jobs and create new markets for professionals in the media, tech, financial, nonprofit and academic worlds. But as we enter the second Donald Trump term, is it the only means of doing so? Tech giants like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have lately embraced a full-scale anti-woke backlash. Scores of young professionals are now schooled in the “based” language of anti-wokeness. New York Magazine recently profiled the rich, educated, urban “new young Right” who feel “​​liberated” by Trump’s election. They’re excited to be able to say “faggot” again. And the Financial Times wonders if “corporate America is going MAGA,” quoting a “top banker” who relishes his newfound freedom to say “pussy” and “retard.”

Are these the new manners of the elite? Is this a virtuous correction to woke excess? Whatever the case, we can be sure that both wokeness and anti-wokeness are perfectly unthreatening to America’s alpha elite. Which raises the question: What kind of moral, political, and social ideals should one advance in the name of a genuinely democratic challenge to elite rule? Without a discussion of what is good and bad, right and wrong, in the war of ideas, we’re left without an answer.

Still, even these criticisms don’t nullify al-Gharbi’s achievement nor his many valuable observations. We Have Never Been Woke does help us explain why this particular expression of professional-class values triumphed and how woke ideas help advance the interests of this group. And even as elite “anti-wokeness” rises, al-Gharbi’s analysis suggests that after Trumpism, whenever that may be, we might just experience another “awokening.” Buckle up. It’s the elite’s world; we’re just living in it.