Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - What is Woke Culture? (Redux)

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Feb. 23, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

25:28

What is Woke Culture? (Redux)

The leopard doesn't change its spots.

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	There are some people on the communist left who are aware that the tide is turning and actually minority identity politics is giving rise to a kind of nativist identity politics.
	And they're realizing that they're going to be on the wrong side of the issue, because when this burgeoning new philosophy starts to flex its muscles, it's going to find that they are strong and deep and rooted.
	And they are well aware that they are going to be found on the outside.
	of this new paradigm.
	One of those people is Ash Sarkar of Novara Media, the woman who told us precisely what her political opinions were.
	I'm not for Obama!
	I've been a critic of Obama!
	I'm a critic of the Democratic Party because I'm literally a communist.
	And when the English were being ethnically cleansed from London, she cheered about it.
	When he points out that the number of electoral awards with a majority non-white population has increased from 119 in 2001 to 429 today.
	Similarly, he points out that in London, the white British population has decreased by 600,000, while the minority population has increased by 1.2 million.
	So yes, lads, we're winning.
	And she has famously praised her communist great-great-great aunt, who was a terrorist against the British in India, who murdered British people.
	And look at this framing in The Guardian.
	A women's action went beyond politics.
	She was a murderer.
	She was a murderer.
	And Ash Sarkar praised a murderer of British people.
	And Ash Sarkar praised her.
	Now, she is trying to do an about-face.
	She's trying to turn around and say, well, hang on a second, guys.
	I was trying to say that this identity politics stuff was going too far.
	To which I say, bullshit.
	In Britain, she was one of the primary merchants of this identity politics because for her, it was going in her direction.
	For her, being a brown woman, it opened doors that would otherwise be closed to me, a white man, and she knew it.
	She leveraged it for all it was worth.
	And it's only that now that the inevitable reaction is coming up, that the pendulum is swinging back, that she is trying to dig her heels a little bit and say, whoa, guys, I didn't want to go that far.
	To which I say, again, bullshit.
	What she's disappointed with is the fact that she's lost this battle.
	And so what I'm going to do is, after this little introduction, play a video I made in 2020 when Ash Sarkar still felt that she had the cultural winds at her back.
	And remember just how dishonest, just how destructive, and just how loathsome her position was.
	She will outright tell you that she, as a second-generation immigrant, is using communism to steal land and wealth and political power from the native people of this country.
	She will outright tell you this.
	So now when she comes to you and says, well, hang on, guys, I just wanted multi-racial solidarity in the working class, you can know that she has retreated to the mott because we have successfully managed to storm the Bailey.
	Do not trust these people who play turncoat to their own ideology.
	They are not giving up their beliefs.
	For example, only yesterday did she brag that we're bringing Marxism to The News Agents Baby, one of the mainstream neoliberal podcasts in Britain.
	She has not given any of this up.
	What she is doing is trying to hide it because she understands that the winds of change are blowing and not in her favour.
	This is a video from 2020, but the points remain just as valid now because Ash Sarkar has a million hours of podcasting behind her where she explains every single part of what it means to be woke, what it means to promote identity politics, how that fits into a Marxist framework and why she took advantage of it.
	And this video, which is called What is Woke Culture, exemplifies all of these points and demolishes all of the arguments as in as valid a way now as it did then.
	And it was on another channel as well.
	So I've decided to re-upload it onto my Sargon channel where I think it actually belongs.
	And I think that it should help us understand the kind of people that we are dealing with.
	In a recent podcast, a small group of radical leftists called Novara Media decided to address the controversy surrounding Lawrence Fox's Question Time appearance, in which he essentially said that woke culture is ruining everything.
	Ash Sarkar, a contributing editor for Novara Media, thought that this was an idea worth interrogating, because she has many questions about the subject, such as...
	What precisely do you mean by woke?
	What exactly do you mean here?
	What is woke culture?
	This is what no one has been able to explain to me.
	What is woke culture?
	To answer Ash Sarkar's totally honest question of what is woke culture, we now turn to respected television academic Ash Sarkar from later in that very same podcast.
	Woke is accepting that LGBT identities are valid and should be protected under the law.
	That woke culture is an acknowledgement that there are racialized outcomes reproduced through institutions in society and people of colour measurably are treated differently.
	What I want at an interpersonal level is understanding empathy and solidarity.
	And at a political level, I want the pursuit of redistributive goals, whether that's power, whether that's wealth, whether that's land, in order to pursue aims of social justice along class, gender and race lines.
	So according to Ash Sarkar's own definition, woke culture is a movement to accept new identities invented by left-wing academics that believes our institutions to be racist and desires the redistribution of power, wealth and land to be done along class, gender and race lines, which would constitute understanding empathy and solidarity.
	And this could be described as social justice.
	This is actually an excellent definition of woke culture because it shows us that we are dealing with a radical movement that violates some of the fundamental values of modern liberal Britain.
	Primarily, that we do not think that arbitrary characteristics like race, gender, and anything else should be factors that contribute to outcomes wherever possible, and that we believe that a person's private property should in fact be protected by the state using the law and not taken away from a person by the state instead.
	Appropriating people's wealth and land, then redistributing it along race, gender and class lines seems like an abhorrent violation of those values and would naturally be seen as unethical by someone who is not a part of woke culture and follows the traditional values of modern Britain.
	If you're a socialist or if you're a Marxist or if you're someone who is looking for A demolition of the class system as we have it and is looking for a working class movement to do that work of class abolition, whether that's from a revolutionary moment or gradual wealth redistribution, whatever.
	Um, is that you sort of need an idea of like, well, here's a working class with a shared material interest in pursuing certain political goals.
	So, woke luxury communist and respected TV academic Ash Sarkar wishes to destroy the traditional social structures of the United Kingdom and replace them with communism.
	Okay.
	Why does she want that exactly?
	Because I'm literally a communist.
	She's literally a communist, but nobody has been able to explain to her exactly what the mystical term woke culture means, but also she is perfectly capable of defining it.
	Isn't that fascinating?
	I thought you were an academic.
	Respected television academic Ash Sarkar obviously knew what woke culture meant, but why would she lie?
	Pretending she did not know what her own day job was is a strategy designed to evade answering for the negative consequences of something that she herself is working towards.
	This is what no one has been able to explain to me.
	What is woke culture?
	If Ash pretends that there is no actual meaning to the term woke and it can never really be defined, then there is nothing to be argued over.
	How can someone answer for something that does not even exist?
	And therefore, any corollaries that can be derived from it, such as the crying foul of cancel culture fueled by the woke police, that has no meaning either.
	The act of complaining about wokeness is reduced to its function as a strategy, which she next attacks for being unjustified because, as far as she is concerned, there is no definition of a thing called woke.
	There is no reason for it to be, and therefore it must be based on some kind of intuition or prejudice.
	But what's really interesting is the way in which woke is a placeholder, which itself prevents further political interrogation.
	If there's one thing respected television academic Ash Sarkar has proven here, it is certainly that woke people will prevent further political interrogation of their ideas when challenged on them.
	They will even go as far as to muddy the waters by pretending that there is no woke culture, even as they then proceed to define it.
	And of course, they are well aware of what the complaints against woke culture consist of.
	Woke people have been terrifying everyone else into not saying what they think.
	And now that people like Lawrence Fox are bravely standing in front of studio audiences and calling black women racist, this is now finally turning the tide and the Emperor has no more clothes.
	They also appear to understand that these people believe that woke culture is a form of oppressive force that a certain kind of independent-minded person is actively fighting against.
	And the people who are celebrating him are suggesting that this could be a turning point in the backlash against woke culture.
	That this is even a question is a part of a strategy to win a culture war in the service of changing the political direction of modern Britain for reasons that David Starkey had accurately identified.
	And I think that the problem is that this so easily turns into the hatred of the West, which of course Corbyn exemplifies.
	Corbyn and his branch of the left fundamentally hate Britain, hate Britain's allies.
	They do!
	They do!
	Absolute nonsense!
	On the contrary, the evidence is overwhelming.
	To find out if respected television academic Ash Sarkar does actually hate Britain, we turn to respected television academic Ash Sarkar to describe how she feels about Britain.
	If you're a socialist or if you're a Marxist or if you're someone who is looking for a demolition of the class system as we have it, I'm literally a communist.
	Is it charitable to say that if someone wants the demolition of something, then they hate that thing?
	In the case of respected television academic and literal communist Ash Sarkar, it would mean that she hates the class system of Britain.
	Judging from the way she talks about it, that doesn't seem like an unreasonable impression to receive.
	The question is, can you separate the class system from the concept of Britain?
	If Britain's world-famous class system is an intrinsic part of Britain, how can she destroy it without also destroying Britain?
	All of British society is built on the emergent class system that we have inherited from the country's long past.
	It does seem very difficult to be able to identify things that wouldn't be quintessentially British that are not also touched by the class system.
	It does seem fair to say that David Starkey is correct and that she and the other woke communists do hate Britain.
	I want the pursuit of redistributive goals, whether that's power, whether that's wealth, whether that's land, in order to pursue aims of social justice along class, gender and race lines.
	And why should she not hate it?
	As she just described, the class system is standing in the way of her goals.
	It is the thing she seeks to overthrow.
	But why use allegations of racism to attack British society?
	Well, the obvious answer is it is one of the tools by which the job can be done.
	Being called a racist is more offensive to our values than it is to be a participant in a racist society.
	It's effective.
	She knows it's effective.
	She knows it's one of the most damning accusations that can be levelled against a person in British society.
	It can be career-ending, and it's really easy to do.
	And as a woman of colour, Ash Sarkar stands to personally benefit from this.
	It is for her the path of least resistance.
	It's really easy, isn't it?
	You make a series of declarative statements, which don't have to be well researched, which certainly don't have to be true, and you will have the media traipsing after you, panting, begging for your next word.
	And that's because, you know, producers and editors love novelty, and they especially love culture wars novelty.
	That was actually Ash Sarkar explaining why she thought the media was giving time to Lawrence Fox.
	But the same also exactly applies to her fellow woke activists too.
	Public allegations of racism are controversial and drive traffic to the website that is reporting on them, which is both true when done by woke communists or by Lawrence Fox.
	Was he being racist in that clip though?
	Okay, what I would say is this, is that when you've got a hostile and quite antagonistic shutting down of a person of colour and saying you can't be trusted to describe your social reality and in fact it's racist of you to try, I would say, well, yes, that's shaped by racism.
	Well, I suppose she would.
	But what exactly does she mean by race and racism then?
	Race and racism are kind of indivisible, right?
	Race is a technology of governance.
	It's not the mere presence or deficiency of melanin.
	And it's something which gets invented at a particular point in history.
	It doesn't always exist.
	These are not standard English definitions of the words race or racism.
	Race is commonly understood to be a group of persons related by common descent or heredity.
	Racism is commonly defined as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.
	The standard dictionary definition of racism is subjective.
	Race is an intrinsic part of an individual and racism is a description of negative beliefs that can arise from this understanding of human differences.
	Ash Sarkar's woke definition is objective.
	Race is not intrinsic to a person, it is external to a person, and it is defined by the actions and consequences of the institutions of the country, both by the state and in private society.
	Put simply, Ash Sarkar and the woke communists are not talking about race as everyone else understands it.
	So when they have a conversation with Lawrence Fox and the far right, they are in fact talking about two different subjects.
	Fanon's work in Wretched of the Earth in particular looks at the way in which race is, you know, a class hierarchy on a global scale.
	He talks about colonized peoples as, you know, the global lumpen proletariat.
	And then you've got racism as it shapes our day-to-day lived reality, particularly in diaspora contexts.
	So, you know, here or in France or in America.
	And you can experience it through contact with institutions and the way in which institutions reproduce racialized outcomes.
	So you might think of the criminal justice system, you might think of the education system, you might think about housing.
	Here, Ash Sarkar is using her external definition of racism to speak to something that is not the intrinsic properties or beliefs of an individual, which means that Ash is not talking about the same subject as Lawrence, the subject which she then goes on to address.
	And then there's also the interpersonal stuff.
	And the interpersonal stuff can be overt and it can be covert.
	And this is the really contested bit.
	Because how we tend to talk about racism in this country is that one, everything I've just said about history, institutions and class composition out the window.
	And what we're going to talk about instead are those few instances where it's overt.
	So someone literally has to call you a slur.
	They've got to say the N-word.
	They've got to do it with a hard R, and they've got to do it in English.
	And you're not going to talk about all those covert things that happen.
	Ash confirms that instances of what she distinguishes as interpersonal racism, the kind of racism Lawrence was referencing, are few in number, confirming Lawrence's statement that Britain is not a racist country.
	That is, a country where most people hold and act upon racist beliefs.
	She knows that he is not talking about woke culture's conception of institutional, external racism.
	It is a different subject.
	Under an external definition of the word racism, that is, one that is not based on an individual's prejudice, it is meaningless to accuse an individual of being racist.
	Only a system can be racist.
	So any allegation of racism against an individual is extremely indirect, accusing them not of personal bigotry, but instead complicity with a much wider interpretation of events and motives, which are much more diffuse and far less easy to defend.
	For example, if Western liberal democracies are white, then each white person is complicit with a tyrannical racial hegemony that is oppressing the marginalised minorities.
	people such as multi-millionaire drill rapper Stormzy, the distinguished scholar Baroness Chakrabarty, or Member of Parliament for Hackney North and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott.
	A sensible person recognises the inherent contradiction between a tyrannized black woman like Diane Abbott and her apparent position as a lawmaker.
	It is demanded of us to believe that she is powerless while occupying a position of power.
	This is the argument that Ash Sarkar really wants to advance because it's something I think she at least wants to believe, but the weakness of this argument is down to the external definition of racism and is why Ash Sarkar is forced to retreat to the interpersonal definition of racism when she is looking for a stronger argument.
	It probably is true that at some point in her life, someone has insulted or degraded her because of her race and heritage.
	No reasonable person would doubt that there are not some people on Twitter or in the street even who might shout such a thing, but that isn't what Ash is referring to in her argument about what race and thereby racism constitute.
	This is an argumentative strategy called the Mott and Bailey, by which a person who must defend their ideas can advance a weaker argument under the cover of a stronger argument.
	The Bailey is comfortable to live in, but it is not secure.
	The mott is uncomfortable to live in, but is secure.
	Ash Sarkar's Mot is the interpersonal argument for racism.
	Calling someone the N-word is obviously racist.
	However, her Bailey is the comfort zone, from which she can blame social problems not on the behaviour of the people involved, but instead on some vague notions of systemic racism.
	When her comfortable bailey is attacked, she can retreat to her mot.
	The bailey is far less easy to defend, as we've seen, because to defend it, one is forced to condemn a racist system that facilitated non-white people to become famous millionaires, peers of the realm, and front-bench politicians.
	It is far easier to claim that being called a racial slur on Twitter is proof of racism, but that isn't really what she's saying.
	Even her mot is weak, however, because she's already admitted that instances of interpersonal racism in Britain are rare, and that they don't represent the whole.
	Neither her mot nor her bailey are secure, which is why, even when attempting to trick the person with whom she's having the argument, she still loses that argument.
	But even the allegation of external institutional racism fails to really make sense under Ash Sarkar's woke definition.
	If race is not an intrinsic part of a person, how does it connect to any particular individual?
	If race is not about your biology and your beliefs, and is instead about something external to the individual, it is unclear how racial systems choose who will get power and who will be oppressed.
	However, if race is an intrinsic part of a person, then Lawrence Fox is correct, that Britain is not a racist country, and Ash Sarkar has already admitted it.
	The right-wing populists are right about Britain, and she knows it.
	It turns out that, for example, most black people in Britain do not feel they are being unfairly discriminated against by our institutions.
	So what does this do for the corollaries of the external definition of racism?
	White people are privileged because they don't experience racism.
	Why not?
	What kind of racism is he even talking about, intrinsic or external?
	People who are not white can hold negative opinions about other races, so it certainly cannot be intrinsic, and a country could have institutions that target white people in the implicit way that Ash Sarkar describes, or in an explicit way, such as race-based property seizures from white people by the South African government.
	All of those social cues which remind you that your humanity is not being recognised.
	And those social cues can be individual and they can be cumulative.
	If Ash is correct that an external system of racism can use social cues that cumulatively demonstrate that a person's humanity is not being respected, is Lawrence Fox not correct then that allegations of white privilege are a form of racism?
	They are only made against white people with the intention of rendering their opinions inherently invalid on the basis of their race.
	You can't understand because you are white and because you are white, you have privilege.
	What worries me about your comment is you are a white privileged male who has no experience in your life.
	I can't help what I am.
	I was born like this.
	It's an immutable characteristic, so to call me a white privileged male is to be racist.
	The lady making the allegations is an academic from Edge Hill University and is only making them on the basis of his race, in order to frustrate his attempts to defend against allegations of racism.
	which individually are annoying and cumulatively feel like an attempt to deny one's humanity.
	It is no wonder that he and other like-minded folk feel so exasperated by what is, according to Ash Sarkar's Mott and Bailey definition of racism, racist.

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