Damir Marusic and Christine Emba at Wisdom of Crowds: Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He joins Christine Emba and Damir Marusic to discuss his new book, We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality, and the Rise of a New Elite. Don’t worry: the book is not another culture war polemic. Instead, it’s something much more useful: a work of social science that explains what “woke” means in terms of class and culture in the United States.
In our conversation Musa describes the inner workings of a group that has gone by many different names: the PMC (Professional-Managerial Class), the New Class, the cognitive elite or the symbolic capitalists. This group enjoys higher wages and more autonomy than most workers, and its power is derived from knowledge-based work, which requires (at the very least) a college degree.
Damir thinks that the PMC is merely hypocritical and self-interested, while Musa sees things differently. He argues that while this group has sincere interests in advancing social justice, they also have an interest in maintaining their own elite status. This contradiction is the source of so much of the insanity we see in American society today. Christine presses Musa for details about this insanity: to what extent is the symbolic capitalist class actually sabotaging positive social change, in order to preserve their privileges?
Among the topics discussed is the nature of symbolic capital; whether self interest and political idealism are necessarily contradictory; how wokeness and anti-wokeness have similar incentives; violence and social change; and the economics of victimhood. This practical and illuminating episode will make you smarter about how America works.
More here.
