Hello to all good comrades on this blessed website.
Something that has been bugging me for a while is how liberals use "woke" language to justify their neoliberalism. I'm the son of two Iraqi immigrants to this cursed country, and due to both cultural and physical factors, I think it is fair that I consider myself a PoC. I try to do my best with stuff like LGBTQ+ affairs and other leftist causes that are usually outside the cultural sphere of conservative Arab culture.
As part of maturing and becoming a more dedicated communist, I'm starting to be more active in activism both online and offline. But coming from a complicated background and quickly entering more serious activism since the Floyd protests started, I'm becoming more and more shocked about how many supposedly leftist spaces and ideas are just neoliberalism dressed up in woke language. I first noticed it with Arab Americans that are firmly entrenched in the professional middle class of this country, with their children only retaining fringe elements of Arab culture and weaponizing their cultural background while completely being just plain liberals.
The most obvious oh shit moment for me was meeting some of the organizers of the local Floyd protests. One (white) dude kept screaming about how police were our brothers and sisters, and did a thing where black people marched in front of everyone else. My inner monologue was something like "Jesus dude you're just making black people human shields for your own wokeness". Reading the experiences of a lot of people here and elsewhere, lib grifting seems to be a major problem everywhere. Every online brained liberal seems to just cover up their inhumanity towards the working class by co-opting the surface level identity crises of working class people. Everything online seems to be a competition to completely dismantle any reasonable criticism of liberalism by instantly jumping to the woke arguments. The rise of Liberal Zionism and Arab Zionism are good examples of that phenomenon I think, with both ideas being mostly repeated by young good looking people that do the "we're young Jewish/Arab peace loving hippies that love genociding Palestinians" shtick
How do we counter this annoying trend comrades? This mostly worries me because the real experiences of PoC, LGBTQ+ people and other repressed minorities are being misrepresented and weaponized by the bourgeois libs to further exploit the working class by offering surface level platitudes.
Yes. It is a big problem. We're caught in a dilemma. We need to educate the masses (and by extension, the liberals) about revolutionary theory, but in the process of introducing liberals to revolutionary theory, we will inevitably introduce them to the vocabulary of revolutionary analysis. As long as there are more of them than us, it will be simple for them to lift this vocabulary and use it opportunistically for their own purposes. Over the past decade, this has become the epitome of "progressive" bourgeois politics, and has also formed the basis of various reactionary currents driven by contempt for their hollow usurpation of revolutionary rhetoric.
The day to day situation on the ground at these protests will be a mixed bag. The vast majority of people turning out will be turning out because they know there is a problem and want to do anything they can to make a difference. What will make or break them is the makeup of organizers who turn out to direct this spontaneous energy. Liberals and NGOs have an advantage here as well, because they have been organizing these nonviolent "awareness" marches for decades, and have the mass media on their side. Normal people at these marches will cede to whoever appears to be most prepared, or most embedded in the struggle. All these NGOs need to do is show up with a megaphone and tell people to do stupid shit like kneel with the cops or snitch on rioters and a lot of them will assume they are helping.
When the state loses its legitimacy, a vacuum is opened. These times are usually described as chaos, but in the midst of this chaos, the most organized groups will usually triumph. I think the only answer is to plant our roots and be intransigent about our beliefs. Don't assume people are acting in good faith because they can produce a PA system and a dozen volunteers in high viz to direct marches away from city hall. We need to establish the stakes, and make it clear what it will take to prevail in this struggle. We need to mercilessly call out the liberal appeasers.