The (Self) Service Economy

In 'We Have Never Been Woke,' Musa Al-Gharbi disentangles webs of social deception

I initially avoided this book because I suspected that its title was indicative of shooting fish in a barrel (it’s also got a really weird cover). By this point, wokeness—a term now used almost entirely pejoratively—has been pretty widely condemned in American culture at large, and criticisms of it, many of which I’ve made myself, have begun to seem self-righteous. But then I heard Musa al-Gharbi (a mixed-race working-class Catholic who converted to Islam, though none of that should matter as much as his ideas) on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast and was quite intrigued. It took a few more fleeting encounters in my travels before I finally picked it up. I’m really glad I did. We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of the New Elite is one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time. In part that’s because he makes clear that I’m part of the problem the author anatomizes.

Al-Gharbi grew up near a military base near the Mexican border—he comes from a military family, with a twin brother who died in Afghanistan—and as he tells it he might have ended up a shoe salesman had he not been denied a promotion by a boss who considered him overqualified. So he made a turn into academe, was accepted into a doctoral program in sociology at Columbia, and brought a wife and two kids to New York to begin life as a graduate student.

The relocation was a shocking experience for the casual exploitation that everyone around him seemed to take for granted. Uber, Grub Hub, Amazon: affluent people hiring underpaid workers, many of them of color, answering to their beck and call, insulated by technology that makes it easy to ignore the implications of what they’re doing. Many of these services aren’t available in much of the country, he explains, because the infrastructure for it simply isn’t there. But in the heart of blue America, such exploitation is so widespread as to be invisible. And so it was that he came to write We Have Never Been Woke.

The foundation for al-Gharbi’s critique is the work of late-twentieth-century French theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the term social capital to describe a phenomenon whereby a stratum of Western society gains a livelihood—and, more importantly, power and prestige—through the manipulation of words. Essentially, we’re talking about the intelligentsia, broadly construed, which has gone by other names, such as the New Class described by Daniel Bell in his classic 1979 book The Coming of Post-Industrialist Society. These people administrate, teach, and interpret—they don’t make products or perform manual labor on the one hand, or live off investments on the other. Again, this is a phenomenon that has been described and understood for a half-century by social scientists like Richard Florida (Rise of the Creative Class) and Robert Reich (who coined the term “symbolic analysts”).

But al-Gharbi proceeds to make some fascinating observations and inferences about these people. The first is that he historicizes a series of crests for social capitalism dating back a century, with peaks in the late 1960s, late 1990s, and the years around 2020 when the prestige of this class—which generally refuses to recognize itself as such in the name of meritocracy—made significant gains. One irony he notes is that the various causes promoted by the social capitalists, such as the welfare state and civil rights, actually peaked prior to their prominence: most of the gains of the Civil Rights movement, for example, were achieved before its advocates institutionalized it in foundations and universities. Feminism did open up possibilities for women, but mostly for white women who already had the family and educational advantages necessary to access new opportunities. Social capitalists ended up benefiting themselves more than the people whom they purported to champion.

In our time, the coin of entry into this realm is a college degree, which serves as a basic sorting mechanism for haves and have-nots. The so-called diploma divide has been widely noted, but al-Gharbi sifts it carefully. He notes both the many tiers that exist within social capitalism and the relative privilege of those even at the bottom of it. Some of this privilege is financial—many jobs with a living wage today don’t really require a college degree, but you need one to qualify for them—but it’s more powerfully cultural. An adjunct professor might well be better served by taking a job outside an academic job market severely bifurcated between disposable and tenured labor, but the status and prestige of academe keep many faculty hanging on to university life and an often-illusory notion of scholarship making a difference in society. At the other end of the spectrum, many rich people see meaning and value in channeling their surplus wealth into causes—relatively few of which actually benefit working-class people—geared to their self-esteem more than anything else, for which they need social capitalists to channel and administer for them.

Al-Gharbi is at times brutally frank about the way social capital is accumulated within elite institutions. He says the quiet part out loud, for example, in the way educational institutions tout their People of Color populations, most of which are Asian and mixed race (and in which colorism remains a significant factor for African Americans). He notes the sharp rise in reported bisexual populations, mostly among younger women who are currently in heterosexual relationships, and that transgender identity for most people who embrace it is usually little more than a matter of preferred names or pronouns. But laying claim to membership in a marginalized population can be a key to accessing privileges and approbation (what Al-Gharbi labels “totemic capital”) that is at best thinly legitimate and at worst obscures the real privation of those without elite, often linguistic, tools at their disposal that can allow them access to everything from good health insurance to Affirmative Action programs.

The author repeatedly notes that he is not accusing social capitalists of hypocrisy, simply calling attention to the gap between what they say and what they do as a response to the state of play in contemporary society. And he notes that many of the most censorious critics of this regime are every bit as bought into the importance of social capital over financial capital and no more willing to commit to meaningful change than those who tout luxury beliefs. This can be sobering for those of us whose mockery of social capitalists has become a form of complacency.

We Have Never Been Woke is densely documented—it runs about 300 pages, with over a hundred pages of references with some notably rich footnotes—but al-Gharbi cannot finally hide the anger, even fury, that can seem relentless and perhaps a bit repetitive. You can see it, for example, when he speaks of sites like Amazon “saving symbolic capitalists some trips to the store” for service where “prices are low, and the shipping is fast and ‘free’ because others are paying the cost,” or when he excoriates families with two incomes “offloading domestic responsibilities onto other women—poorer women, typically women of color disproportionately immigrants.”

Some of al-Gharbi’s anger is perhaps rooted in his own implication in the problem he describes, and his confession at the outset that he’s not sure what to do about it. But insofar as honesty can make a difference—an open question, perhaps—his critique deserves a hearing. I hope this book will find a durable audience.