I’m the person who brought the word ‘woke’ into the NZ Political vernacular.
Me.
I did it.
I know Sean Plunkett likes to pretend he did, but that’s not true, I taught him the word FFS!
I had identified the new identity movement inside the Left in 2016 and saw immediately its danger to us as a movement, that’s why I named it and shamed it as early as I did.
I have a following amongst the Right because I’m far more clever and funny than they could ever be and my brilliant insightful criticisms of the middle class Emerald Stormtroopers is better than anything they could come up with themselves.
Watching the Minister for Graft, Pork Barrels and Ethnic Slurs, Shane Jones, use my word as often as he does makes me angry I didn’t trademark it.
He uses the word without any comprehension of its actual meaning.
Seeing as the term gets so much traction now, let’s remind everyone what the actual definition is again and why I, as a Class Leftist, uses it.
For me, as a Class Leftist, the true demarcation of power in a democratic capitalist state is the 1% richest + their 9% enablers vs the 90% rest of us.
Once you understand politics in that equation, you can never lose!
As a class lefty, I do see identity as an important personal journey that leads you to politics but Identity Politics becomes terribly limited in gaining the democratic 51% as its most shrill advocates in the cancel culture landscape manage to make progress as alienating as drinking a cup of cold sick.
Class solidarity can gain 51%, Identity Politics risks pure temple over broad-church and you get endless schisms and little to show for it.
For most ultra woke activists, their starting point is all white people are racist, every man is a rapist and anyone supporting free speech is a uniform wearing Nazi.
There’s not much intellectual wriggle room there.
That virtue-signalling-middle-class-micro-aggression-policing-identifiably-Green-Party-militant-bike-riding-vegan-condescending-supporting-pronoun-Spinoff-subscriber in your social media feed screaming endlessly at you in the ubiquitous world of social media certainly thinks they are shouting truth to power, unfortunately it all ends up as a cacophony of self righteous struggle sessions alienating the vast chunk of voters who just want to know how they are paying for the roof over their heads and the food on their tables.
Not one family in poverty is sitting around the kitchen table cancelling each other for misusing pronouns, mispronouncing Te Reo or suggesting female comedians aren’t funny, they are trying to work out how to pay the fucking bills and when they turn to the political left for solutions, all they find is us lecturing them on Critical Race and Gender theory.
No wonder the working classes turned on the Democrats and voted in Trump.
So that’s ‘Woke’. Identity Politics activists suffering the narcism of petty difference and subjective triggering who put their identity above all else.
They engage in outrage olympics and cancel culture because it’s easier to shut down an idea because you have feelings than actually put together a cohesive intellectual argument.
It’s middle class and it’s very virtue signalling.
We get it wokies, your self created identity is more important than our shared humanity.
The problem is the Right keep using woke to provoke culture war over reaction that the Right points to and says, ‘I told you so’.
Now that feelings are the dominant currency over thinking and rational objectivity (because rational thinking and objectivity are a heteronormative white cis male privilege), peoples feels get hurt and they vote against their economic interests.
Wokeness wouldn’t be so toxic if the Woke hadn’t launched online cancel culture pogroms.
The Left needs to focus on the material well being rather than empty hashtag virtue signals.
The recent Ipsos survey highlighting the deepening cynicism of the NZ electorate should be seen for what it is.
Truth.
The study, conducted in February 2024, also shows a significant consensus among New Zealanders that the system is rigged in favour of the rich and powerful, with 65% agreeing to this statement.
That’s because it’s the fucking truth!
In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth
By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals
In 2018, it was 42
In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
And in 2021, 20 people owned more than 50% of the entire planet.
We need a new taxation and regulation model to stop the neoliberal rot. We need to remove the yoke of taxation from the 90% and reset it to the 10% richest.
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.
Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
This isn’t progress.
Unfortunately the Left are culturally too busy micro aggression policing everyone under the rules of the new woke dogma while the Right are silently harvesting that alienation for more neoliberal exploitation.
The Political Left respond to rising extremism in NZ by leaning into the populism with Broadchurch Politics rather than alienating pure temple middle class Identity Politics woke dogma!
Rather than demanding to know why healthy, nutritious, job creating free school lunches aren’t be expanded to every school so all our kids benefit from the mutual coming together to eat, we are having bullshit debates about whether or not sushi is woke food!
Woke middle class activism has made our movement an alienating unfunny joke that the Right have weaponised.
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“And in 2021, 20 people owned more than 50% of the entire planet.”
Once we get to that level, and indeed long before we get to that level, it doesn’t matter how much of the planet the billionaires own.
Let’s say that one person owns the whole planet. He would no doubt want to make himself comfortable. Extravagantly so perhaps. But with every personal indulgence he would only be consuming a negligible fraction of the world’s resources. What would he do with the rest? Would wisdom persuade him that in order to protect his own position (never mind moral imperatives) he should set about making a fair, just and equal society? Would he intervene in social issues in the apparently random manner of Elon Musk? Or would he insouciantly allow the world to carry on in whatever way it will? How much difference would be made by his choice of the available options?
Actually, this line of logic leads to the conclusion that the super-rich do not really matter that much. Yes, while these twenty incredibly rich people could do a lot of good if they chose to, they cannot do us much harm. It is the eight billion of us with less than half the world’s assets who will make or break the world. The moral successes and failures of people like ourselves count for more than the distribution of wealth.
So let us just regard this story of increasing inequality of wealth as an interesting fact, and get on with the job of making the world a better place.
“Woke” has become another tool for the Professional Managerial Class to bash working people with. And the sad reality is Jones is one of those from the Professional Managerial Class who like to punch down any chance he gets.
He’s a sad little tosser. Historically on the states dime.
While you get credit for defining woke you are almost 2 thousand years to late in describing societies problems,
Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!
And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
You could follow with all of Matthew 5 although verses 3 to 10 would be a good start. The problem with any of the “isms” is that they are unable to change our hearts (minds) which is where the problems start. Since we cannot make people “good” your idea of regulated capitalism seems to be the best option which to me includes progressive taxation and health, education and welfare to provide the needs of the population.
I dunno but it seems as if you have over egged the pudding where the word woke is concerned, by misappropriation of a term that had its genus in black American culture and which then got used as a term of abuse by the right the world over. It’s racism. You should find another word to describe what you term as woke in the left ideology. This is not a hill you wanna die on, because it’s plum ignorant usage and you did not originate it.
Hear hear hear!
Martyn we would better reinforcing what the definition of corruption is, in this fast becoming, backward country.
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