Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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Welcome to the Qualette Podcast. I'm Jonathan Kay.

And today we're going to talk about wokeness,

but not in the usual dismissive mocking way.

Wokeness usually is kind of a punchline. It's a term we use to describe those who are performatively progressive and perhaps even insincere. But my guest today is someone who takes the idea of wokeness seriously,

because he sees it not so much as an ideological movement, but as a kind of strategy that well-educated upper-middle-class people are increasingly using as a way to generate and occupy high-paying jobs as consultants,

communicators, equity and diversity specialists, human resource managers, and educators.

In this view, wokeism isn't a manifestation of left-wing political thought because it isn't really about helping workers or the downtrodden.

Rather, it's more like an enabling creed that helps people who are already privileged

justify their increased influence and income within lucrative

white-collar sectors.

This was the subject of my guest Malcolm Shayuna's article entitled, Wokism, the highest stage

of managerialism, which appeared in the Spring 2022 edition of City Journal.

Mr. Shayuna, whose intellectual roots are in Marxism by the way, spoke to me last week over Skype from his offices in

Uppsala, Sweden. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

One thing you mentioned early on is you talk about how traditionally the nations of Scandinavia, I think Sweden in particular has been held out by the left as being much more progressive than the United States.

But could you describe a little bit how maybe in the last decade or so things have been flipped,

...