“Why let people get away with giving Marxism a hip new name like ‘woke’?”
That’s the question asked in a recent Daily Wire column by Andrew Abela, the founding dean of the Busch School of Business and Ordinary Professor of Marketing at the Catholic University of America. If defenders of the free market are to have any hope guarding against the current onslaught of censorious anti-business activists, Dean Abela argues, they must abandon the word “woke” altogether:
For many people, woke means simply “not racist.” So if you stake out an anti-woke position, others will interpret that as you being racist. Avoid this trap entirely by not using the word “woke.” We don’t need it. We already have a perfectly good word for what we mean by “woke” when we use it in its pejorative sense—the identification of people by different subgroups and the classification of people into oppressor or oppressed—and that word is “Marxist.”
Dean Abela, who serves as an advisory council member for Viewpoint Diversity Score, also called attention in the article to a similar misstep committed by free market advocates. Rather than bucking against the term “capitalism”—which itself was popularized by Karl Marx—supporters of the market economy adopted their opponents’ verbiage and the negative framing that came along with it.
Now, instead of employing a term with an intentionally ambiguous meaning, Dean Abela urges backers of the free market to call attention to opponents’ inherent contradictions:
Using the correct word, “Marxist,” instead of “woke” will show how absurd it is to speak of “woke capitalism.” Instead of speaking about “woke capitalism,” we would have to say “Marxist capitalism” — but of course there is no such thing. There is only Marxism, pure and simple. Bringing Marxist ideas into the market economy does not lead to a kinder, gentler form of capitalism. It just leads to the destruction of free enterprise and its replacement by totalitarianism.
Subscribers of the Daily Wire can read the article in full here.