Confronting Capitalism: The End of Wokeness?
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There is no cultural phenomenon more hated today than what is called wokeness. While it is wrongly associated with the Left, the Right is very successfully taking advantage of it.
In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber traces the political and economic origins of it, and argues that the Left should be at the forefront of criticizing it.
Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Confronting Capitalism. I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chibber, |
| 0:22.7 | a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy. |
| 0:28.7 | So we're recording on January 24th. It's day five of the Trump presidency. |
| 0:35.2 | Yep. |
| 0:35.6 | How are you safe? The dark night of fascism has not yet descended. |
| 0:39.3 | We're still alive. |
| 0:40.3 | We're broadcasting from an undisclosed location, y'all. |
| 0:43.6 | Oh my gosh. |
| 0:44.3 | How cool would it be? |
| 0:45.5 | Like one day Trump just came out in full badmant attire. |
| 0:49.6 | Yeah. |
| 0:50.3 | I mean, it's been a crazy week so far, and it doesn't seem that there's any sort of end in sight to this flurry of political news, executive orders, and almost everything has been in the news this week, but something that has been in the news, not just through Trump, but through other people affiliated with MAGA |
| 1:13.3 | has been, Wokeness and the right-wing counterattack on culture. So on Trump's end, we've had a bunch |
| 1:21.7 | of executive orders issued. We had Mark Zuckerberg taking down fact-check checking on meta and trying to bring more masculine energy to the company. |
| 1:33.8 | So I'm sure that'll definitely help make Facebook cool again. |
| 1:36.7 | And then, of course, we have Elon's Nazi salute. |
| 1:41.0 | So the right wing seems to be in full swing. |
| 1:45.0 | Full regalia, yeah. In terms of making its cultural stand right now. Yeah, there's no doubt about |
| 1:50.4 | it. They're definitely a lot more confident than they were last time. And things like |
| 1:55.3 | Musk's Nazi salute is pretty brazen. And when you look at it, to me, there's no doubt. I mean, |
| 2:00.5 | that's what he was doing. |
| 2:01.2 | I don't know if he was just trying to troll people on social media and on the media or if it was |
... |
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