Has “real” wokery never been tried?
Wokery was never going to be defeated by the political Right – but high-profile left-wing figures distancing themselves from it could trigger a “respectability cascade”
In late 2021, I spoke on a panel on classical liberalism and freedom of speech. Given the complete cultural hegemony of woke progressivism at the time, it inevitably turned into a debate on the Culture War, and on whether liberals should take part in it.
During the Q&A session, one of the attendees asked me an interesting question:
“You used to write a lot about the rise of “Millennial Socialism” in the past. If you had to make a choice – who do you think classical liberals should see as their main opponents these days? Is it the woke? Or is it still the socialists?”
I replied:
“I know that this will sound like an evasive answer. But I don’t think it is. My answer is simply that we don’t have to make that choice. Because the woke and the socialists – these are largely the same people. Yes, if you look for them, you can find the odd socialist who is not woke, and the odd wokester who is not a socialist. But the overlap between those two groups is so large, you don’t lose much information if you just treat them as one and the same thing.”
In 2021, this was absolutely true. It remained absolutely true throughout 2022, 2023 and 2024. I was reading a lot of woke nonsense in those years, and could not help noticing that any publication which started out as a rant about “structural racism”, “white privilege”, “decolonisation” or some such shibboleth would sooner or later morph into a generic rant against capitalism. Wokery and anti-capitalism were joined at the hip. The BLM-mania of the early 2020s was really just a continuation of the Corbyn/Sanders-mania of the second half of the 2010s, with a change in emphasis but not in substance. That is why the question of whether we should focus more on the socialists or on “the woke” struck me as a rather academic one. You could not meaningfully separate the two.
This has begun to change in recent weeks.
In January, the socialist Jacobin magazine published an interview with Prof Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University, in which he criticised Identity Politics specifically from a socialist perspective. I rarely remember individual articles in Jacobin, because they all follow the same template, and they are all extremely predictable. But this one stood out.
It is not that I had never seen a socialist critique of wokery before. But up until this point, such critiques had always come from stuffy old Stalinists, never from cool and trendy hipster socialists.
Remember, up until five minutes ago, the fashionable opinion on wokery was to defend all of its manifestations, while at the same time denying that it exists. There is no such thing as wokery, the woke would insist. It only exists in the imagination of angry white Boomers, who have been driven mad by watching too much GB News. If you have been “silenced” – why can I still hear you? If you have been “deplatformed” – what exactly are you speaking from right now? If you have been “cancelled” – why are you still here? What, you cannot, off the top of your head, produce a precise definition of Wokery, which covers all aspects, and which could be printed in the Oxford English Dictionary? Well, then, that is clearly proof that wokery cannot exist.
It is a deeply dishonest rhetorical trick. The Great Awokening is real, and it takes a lot of effort not to see it. But the woke gaslighting strategy has worked. The woke made it low-status to acknowledge the existence of wokery, and in this way, they preyed on the status-anxiety of The Sensibles, who are terrified of being seen anywhere near a low-status opinion. Under different circumstances, The Sensibles might have positioned themselves somewhere in the middle, which is usually where they are most comfortable. They would have defended wokery as necessary overall, while also critiquing its excesses. Instead, The Sensibles became complicit in the Great Awokening by reserving all their ire for its critics. This is how the far-Left sets the tone.
And now, they are subtly changing that tone. Shortly after Prof Chibber’s socialist critique of wokery, Ash Sarkar from the communist Novara Media followed up with a similar critique, expressed on the Corbynista channel PoliticsJOE as well as on the spiritual home of The Sensibles: the News Agents podcast. Had someone associated with the political Right criticised wokery, the News Agents presenters would no doubt have performatively scoffed, rolled their eyes, and said something like: “What does woke even mean? I don’t even know what that means! Define “woke”!”
But now that the criticism comes from the trendy Hipster Left, The Sensibles suddenly know perfectly well what “woke” means, and have no problem acknowledging its existence. They now have permission.
So what explains this sudden divergence between the socialists and the woke? As mentioned, until five minutes ago, the overlap between these two groups was so large, it did not really make sense to think of them as distinct groups at all. For all intents and purposes, the socialists were woke, and the woke were socialists. Why is this suddenly no longer true?
Let’s answer that question by reversing it first: why was it ever true?
As mentioned, there have been socialist critiques of wokery before. Old-school orthodox Marxists have hated identity politics right from the start, because they see it as a distraction from the class struggle. For them, there is only one type of oppression that truly matters, and that is the oppression of the working class by the capitalist class. There might be some gradation within that pattern, with some groups of workers being slightly more oppressed, and some slightly less. But those distinctions are trivial and unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
For woke socialists, on the other hand, wokery was never supposed to be a “distraction” from the class struggle, but a component of it. It was not supposed to be one or the other, but one through the other.
Woke socialists believe that there is nothing natural about the identity categories we think in today. They have been invented by the capitalist class. That is why woke socialists talk about racialised groups rather than racial groups. Western Capitalism, they believe, was originally built on the enslavement and colonisation of non-white peoples. In order to legitimise those practices, non-Europeans had to be “othered” in some way, and so, modern racism was born.
The capitalist class then went on to build societies stratified along racial, gender and other lines, in order to trick white male workers into supporting capitalism. In this storyline, white male workers act like a labour aristocracy of sorts. They are still exploited, sure, but less so then other groups, and these gradations matter. They are fooled into collaborating with their capitalist oppressors.
The capitalist class then relentlessly whips up fear and hatred of minority groups, in order to keep the proletariat divided and distracted. They trick the straight white cisgendered non-Muslim worker into thinking that their enemy is the black worker, the trans worker and the Muslim worker, when those workers should really all be teaming up against their common enemy.
Old-school socialists and woke socialists ultimately reach the same conclusion: the problem is capitalism, and the solution is to overthrow it. But they want to get there in slightly different ways. The former would rather not talk about race, gender, sexual orientation etc at all: they just want to talk about class. The latter agree that the class struggle is ultimately the struggle that matters, but they also believe that class oppression runs along racial, gender and other “identity” lines, and cannot be properly understood if we just ignore those categories. The former want class struggle plain and simple. The latter want a class struggle infused with awareness of group-specific oppressions.
What this is supposed to mean in practice has never been quite clear. But then, that is always the issue with modern-day socialists: they deal in abstractions and generalities. I suspect, though, that it was not supposed to mean getting people fired for using a wrong word on Twitter, or middle-managers berating employees for not wearing their pronoun badges. It was certainly not supposed to mean different brands of leftists constantly purity-policing each other and cancelling each other for minor deviations from the correct line. Wokery has clearly not worked out as intended.
Does this mean that “real” wokery has never been tried? Has woke progressivism just been tragically misunderstood?
Absolutely not. Wokery turned out the way it did, because it reflects the character of the modern Left. Leftism is hipsterism, and this is what hipster subcultures do: they gatekeep access while engaging in internal status competitions. Hipsters do not want all and sundry to join their subculture, because if everyone does it, it ceases to be hip. They have steep status hierarchies, with late converts ranking lower than early adopters (i.e. those who already did it “before it was cool”).
People elsewhere on the political spectrum do not need to engage in such behaviours, and it would be ridiculous if they tried. Calling yourself a libertarian or a conservative, for example, does not, in any way, boost your social status – if anything, it does the opposite. Thus, libertarians and conservative have no reason to suspect newcomers of opportunism. They have no reason to try to prove to each other that they are “more libertarian” or “more conservative” than the next guy. I predicted in 2014 that wokery would get more and more extreme over the coming years, because of intra-Left status competition. That is precisely what happened. Until now.
That fact that figures like Chibber and Sarkar are now distancing themselves from wokery could have far-reaching implications. There has been a well-deserved backlash against wokery in recent years, which has made some good progress. But ultimately, wokery was never going to be defeated by Talk TV or GB News. Nor was it ever going to be defeated by means of persuasion. That has been tried, and it failed. In 2020, the government set up a Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which was tasked to lead an inquiry into whether Britain was a “structurally racist” country. The commission’s report, published in 2021, concluded that, no, it was generally not. Far from calming down the woke hysteria of the period, though, the report inflamed it further, provoking angry denunciations. In 2021, to say that Britain was not a structurally racist country was simply not a socially permissible thing to say. There is no point trying to persuade people of X, Y or Z when they know that they are not allowed to say it. The issue was not persuasion, but permission.
Only high-profile left-wing figures have the cultural clout to trigger a respectability cascade. Wokery can only be defeated from within the Left.
 | A guest post by
|