This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

I have been looking forward to We have Never Been Woke, having used some of the data Musa al-Gharbi had gathered for it in my last book. An empirical sociologist providing measurements of the rise and — hopefully — the beginning of the fall of “wokeness”, as well as wider societal attitudes and reactions to the phenomenon, would be very useful. 

Unfortunately, large sections of the book do not seem to have been written by an empirical sociologist, but are primarily a polemic against almost all cultural commentators, as well as seemingly the entirety of the knowledge-production class.

To this end, al-Gharbi develops the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu on symbolic capital into the class of the “Symbolic Capitalist”. Symbolic capitalists are people, including al-Gharbi himself, who make a living in the realm of ideas, rhetoric, data, images, narratives and symbols and who take these very seriously. 

They provide no material benefit, only symbols, and their motivation is to accrue social capital to support their own material or ideal interests. The symbolic capitalists likely to read the book need to recognise how our “preferred narratives inhibit our ability to accurately understand and accurately address those problems” in order to “better illuminate the stakes and the contours of contemporary social struggles”.

The argument for the claim “We have never been woke” is that we have never really woken up to the true nature of social injustice but continue to perpetuate unjust power systems for our own social gains. This starting assumption of largely invisible power structures created by self-interested narratives which the perpetuators need to “do the work” of waking up to underpins and, I would argue, undermines the book.

This is not to say that the core arguments of We Have Never Been Woke are not sound. Al-Gharbi well evidences his contention that the currently dominant approach to social justice, most commonly referred to as “woke”, is not fit for purpose. 

Also convincing is his data-driven argument that it is the left-leaning, highly educated and mostly white middle classes involved in knowledge production who facilitate this problem by addressing issues of social justice in a mostly symbolic (or performative) way rather than doing anything productive to enable social mobility for the working class, amongst which people of racial minority are overrepresented.

His case that this class largely sustains its own lifestyle at the expense of other, poorly paid workers and creates narratives around totems of identity and focuses its critiques on the super-rich “one per cent” to avoid acknowledging this is also well-supported, detailed and far-reaching. Although this phenomenon has been identified and addressed extensively by other commentators ranging from socialists, left liberals and classical liberals to social conservatives and populists, al-Gharbi’s contribution could add to this important conversation.

My main criticism is that al-Gharbi seems not to acknowledge those pre-existing contributors to this conversation who begin from a different standpoint as making any kind of valid contribution. Instead, he produces a somewhat incoherent taxonomy of other critics of wokeness and a decidedly uncharitable assessment of their motivations and goals. 

It is unfortunate that, despite being a sociologist, al-Gharbi does not clearly define any of the ideological groups he critiques. He vaguely describes the phenomenon of “wokeness” as indicating a certain disposition towards social justice and offers a few (accurate) indicators of what he sees as its current manifestation. 

This vagueness necessarily undermines his criticisms of both the woke themselves and their primary critics — the “anti-woke”. This group, as described by al-Gharbi, consists of either “elites amongst elites”, who criticise wokeness as a “status demonstration” or, if not already influential people, individuals whose goal is “undermining the institutionally dominant elite in the hope of opening up opportunities for themselves”. 

The anti-woke “parasitically feed off moments of awokening to build and enhance their personal brand” and are motivated to keep wokeness alive for the sake of their own income and status. (It is not clear whether al-Gharbi regards his own book and critique of wokeness as similarly motivated.) 

Symbolic capitalists might not be cynical or insincere

Al-Gharbi also informs us that liberals and leftists have converged. But, whilst sketching leftists as more radical and anti-capitalist (in principle), he offers almost no description of liberals. He tells us that they vote left, but it is unclear whether this means that there is no defence of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness coming from the right, or if he is simply defining liberals as leftists — as some Americans (but not usually sociologists) are prone to do. If so, the convergence will be, necessarily, caused by his own definitions.

The anti-woke are not conservatives, we are told, without justification, but, confusingly, they often align themselves with the political right. Meanwhile, symbolic conservatives are something else, who mirror “mainstream symbolic capitalists” (the left?) in thinking that words, ideas and symbols are very important. 

The difference is that they favour the conservative ones that resonate with them. That conservatives think conservative ideas are important is, of course, straightforwardly true and precisely how political debate and liberal democracies function. Nevertheless, this observation seems to be made critically. 

This is the second big problem of We Have Never Been Woke — the distinct lack of charity when evaluating the motivations and goals of others. Al-Gharbi acknowledges that ideas have the ability to “transform the character and operations of society writ large” but leaves very little room for any members of his shadowy, undefined groups to be usefully making a good-faith critique of wokeness based on their own principles and genuine concern for society. 

Whilst acknowledging that symbolic capitalists might not be cynical or insincere but might instead be true believers, he insists that we have different political priorities blinding us to the role we play in social problems. Overwhelmingly, he presents the motivations of all, conscious or unconscious, as being intended to attain or maintain our own social status and power. 

This is regrettable, as there has never been a greater need for people to make efforts to understand the concerns and motivations of those with whom they disagree; to resist the temptation to dismiss all differing views as oblivious or self-interested power play; to really talk to each other. 

Although al-Gharbi might consider the anti-woke to be more motivated to keep wokeness alive than consign it to the dustbin of failed ideas, this is not typically the case. Achieving that goal will require its ethical critics to come together and communicate effectively about how to see woke out without inviting an alternative form of illiberalism in.

We Have Never Been Woke does contribute to this conversation, despite its flaws in coherence and charity, and those of us already involved in it should consider its offerings as a sincere, considered and well-intentioned engagement with the issues. It would be nice if its author had returned the favour.