There seems to be a general consensus that woke is dying, some even going as far as to say that it is, just like punk, dead, except for some hangers on. The tide has turned. In the real-world tides don’t just turn, the moon’s gravitational pull causes tides to ebb and flow as an inexorable law of nature. No such law exists in society or politics.
But in politics we do perceive the tide turning, we just don’t always know what the political equivalent of the moon that forced it to do so is. It is turning because political forces stood like King Canute trying to do the impossible and beat back the tide. At times they seemed as impotent as Canute. But they did manage to do what he couldn’t. The forces involved were quite disparate ranging from conservatives, liberal feminists, left wing feminists and even some Marxists, though not many. This latter group were very much a minority in the fray, which raises questions about what will replace Woke. Many forces on the left were not just absent from the fight for women’s rights and class struggles, they were actively involved in the onslaught on them, attacking even the concept of women existing or the importance of class and engaged in oppression Olympics to see who would get a hand out to set up an NGO to work on an issue rather than fight.
The conservatives and some very far right elements have claimed the victory as theirs and the Left has little to say as it surrendered a long time ago. Trump comes out with some very reactionary policies and statements, but in amongst them he included some common-sense proposals: men serve their sentences in male prisons regardless of how they identify and men don’t get to participate in women’s spaces. It is hard to argue against such proposals, but that is what the Left had been doing for many years and some now feel that standing up on these issues is not a vote winner, they only thing they care about, and so have remained silent. Others are sticking to their guns.
As was always obvious, the pushback when it came was going to try and take away other established rights that are not controversial and should be defended. Gay rights had made huge advances with marriage and even adoption equality existing in many countries. Now those rights are under attack. Some liberals and right-wing elements such as the US Democratic Party (yes, it is right wing and I am tired of people pretending it is not), a number of governments throughout Europe, particularly the Irish one, wed the issue of trans to gay rights. It was inevitable that the push back would try to challenge gay rights as they had been set up as an integral part of a deeply unpopular and reactionary policy that women don’t exist as a separate category.
So, who will defend gay rights? Not the left. Not this time. Over at British woke central Novara Media they are already preparing a massive pivot on most things, except trans. Ash Sarkar recently published a book that said as much. She acknowledged that the oppression Olympics she, Owen Jones and Novara Media promoted was counterproductive, but doubled down on trans, as I pointed out in my review of the book. They will sacrifice gay rights on the altar of men, particularly sex offenders getting access to women’s spaces in jails. The stats on that are very clear. Not all trans are sex offenders, obviously, many of them just want to get on with their lives, not that those who championed the cause really cared one way or the other. But male prisoners who identify as trans are more likely to have been convicted of a sex crime than any other cohort in prison. According to official data on trans prisoners who have gender recognition certificates nearly two thirds had been convicted of at least one sex crime.[1] You can see how the defence of gay rights and even other minority rights will suffer, when what is left of the Woke rally the troops to fight. They have learnt no lessons and believe their misogyny will carry the day for them. Most people, see the absurdity of putting males in the female prison estate and the even greater absurdity when some of these men are sex offenders. And linking this issue to any other cause is a recipe for disaster.
On the right, we have the conservatives who have pushed back on trans, but are going to keep pushing and this means pushing women back into traditional roles, the very “traditions” the trans claimed to emulate and made them women. Again, the routed forces of the liberals and also some of the Left will sacrifice women in their last stand on the hill of misogyny.
When Trump took over, he issued a slew of Executive Orders, many of them illegal and nearly all morally deplorable. For some the issue after January 20th wasn’t genocide in Gaza but how badly trans children (contradicting claims that only adults transition) are doing under Trump. Complaints were made about Trump linking federal funding to not allowing men participate in women’s sports, but Biden had done something similar. Though a little more subtle, the upshot of it was that federally funded educational institutions should allow men to take part in women’s sports. Something even the fact checkers at USA Today had to grudgingly acknowledge, though they tried to spin it with half-truths.[2] These are identity politics flip sides of the same coin. He sacked workers, gave over confidential private information to Musk, closed down government offices, but it was all about trans.
It wasn’t just on the trans issue that the liberals and the Left dug their own grave. Trump has led a full-frontal attack on DEI. The Left was once the torch bearer for struggles against discrimination and for equality. Liberals introduced a series of initiatives that were all at the level of the individual. Quotas for individuals from certain backgrounds, but nothing for the collective as they abhorred the actual collectives, blacks, Latinos, migrants etc. And they also abhorred the idea that groups in society should not only struggle collectively but seek a collective solution. This individualism and tokenistic measures reached their zenith in California University were job applicants had to write diversity essays explaining what they had done or would do to promote diversity in their particular field. So, no matter how qualified a person was, the fact they couldn’t tick some liberal virtual signalling boxes meant they might not get the job. They were not being accused of racism, just a lack of zealotry in promoting whatever agenda was the flavour of the month and that could change. Latinos could find themselves further down the ladder in one year and further up it the next, depending on subjective changes in the opinions of university admins who were probably as white as the driven snow themselves. Thankfully these essays which sound like Stalinist declarations of loyalty to the Party or MacCarthyite declarations of not being Un-American have been dropped.[3]
Liberals have obviously learnt nothing, they rarely do. But the long slow walk away from Woke is happening. Even AOC has deleted her pronouns, long before companies who had forced their workers to use them, in an about face forced their deletion in response to Trump. She was ahead of the posse on this one. Like the university some institutions are washing their hands of DEI programmes in response to Trump, and some I suspect are simply taking advantage of the new Zeitgeist to get rid of programmes they felt obliged to support.
The Left’s utter surrender to the liberals on this has meant they are now poorly placed to fight against discrimination and Trump whose army of knuckledraggers like Musk and Vance will push as far as they can on this, perhaps even for de facto legalisation of discrimination. Identity politics has meant they are no longer able to defend the identities they once championed, only to beg for crumbs for the elites amongst those identities.
Of course, in the new juncture the Left could discuss, argue and debate a way forward, far from the Woke rubbish. But they won’t. A perusal of left websites shows that many are distancing themselves discreetly from their previous religious like zeal without acknowledging their past, others are intent on just letting it fade away. Amongst the latter is Britain’s SWP and their junior partner in Ireland, PBP. We hear increasingly less from them on these issues. One day they will pretend they never supported any of this nonsense, just like they now pretend that they never described Al Qaeda as a progressive anti-imperialist organisation, or muted any criticism of the Taliban or that they didn’t support the Islamists who have now taken over in Syria. They did, although they were more explicit in speeches than in articles, careful not to leave as glaring a paper trail for a political audit. However, as far back as 2012 on Syria they did commit explicitly to supporting what they called the revolution.[4]
Nonetheless Woke is dying but as Catherine Liu has pointed out:
But the woke Left apparently hasn’t received the memo. Witness the social-media mobbing of Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University and the editor of the socialist journal Catalyst, after he dared to historically analyse wokeness as an illiberal, authoritarian tendency. Chibber made his comments last week on a Jacobin magazine podcast titled Confronting Capitalism: The End of Wokeness. It triggered a firestorm of angry “X” comments that ranged from mischaracterising him as a Right-wing goon to outright obscenity. Ajay Singh Chaudhary, the director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, dismissed Chibber’s critique of wokeness as “tripe” and a “carbon copy” of the Right’s.[5]
According to Liu, one of his cardinal sins was to define:
wokeness as a professional-class movement for social justice that excludes socialism from its political project and that is highly intolerant to boot.”[6]
And therein lies the problem and the answer to the question of what is replacing Woke. Woke is a middle class movement and is anti-working class and anti-socialist. Many of its adherents would not recognise this description, with the exception of the middle-class part, as they know Mammy and Daddy are paying their university fees. But when you push them on any issue, their socialist pretensions fall to the wayside and the liberal anti-working-class rubbish comes to the fore. But as the black Marxist academic Adolph Reed has pointed out “The real project of Woke was to diversify the ruling class.” Liberation of the working class has never been an aim of the Woke as there are no government handouts for NGOs that want to overthrow capitalism. Though, neither are there any NGOs that actually want to do that. So, it is a moot point.
The Right is replacing Woke and doing so with their own version of Wokeness complete with prohibited language, thoughts and ideas. The Left is on the backfoot unable to fully break with Wokeness and more importantly after a long period of screaming, screeching, demanding trigger warnings and safe spaces is unable and unwilling, in any case, to discuss a way forward. Having made the shutting down of debate their watchword, they are ill-prepared to begin the necessary debate of where to go from here.
Those minority Left groups that never bought into the nonsense and government largesse have a hard road ahead of them.
References
[1] The Telegraph (31/12/2024) Almost two thirds of trans women prisoners are sex offenders. Martin Evans.
[2] USA Today (n/d) Fact check: Posts criticizing Biden order on gender discrimination lack context. McKenzi Sadeghi.
[3] LA Times (19/03/2025) As Trump attacks DEI, UC bans ‘diversity statements’ in faculty hiring. Jaweed Kaleem.
[4] SWP (20/03/2012) Debate: Should socialists support the revolt in Syria?
[5] Unherd (04/02/2025) The Left won’t let go of woke So much for the ‘vibe shift’. Catherline Liu.
[6] Ibíd.
[2] USA Today (n/d) Fact check: Posts criticizing Biden order on gender discrimination lack context. McKenzi Sadeghi.
[3] LA Times (19/03/2025) As Trump attacks DEI, UC bans ‘diversity statements’ in faculty hiring. Jaweed Kaleem.
[4] SWP (20/03/2012) Debate: Should socialists support the revolt in Syria?
[5] Unherd (04/02/2025) The Left won’t let go of woke So much for the ‘vibe shift’. Catherline Liu.
[6] Ibíd.
⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.
The Mark Twain quip about his death being announced prematurely springs to mind. I increasingly draw a distinction between woke and woke evangelism. It is less the ideas that irk me but the manner in which the woke evangelicals try to impose them. As I said in another piece to Frankie - there is little wrong with diversity, inclusion or equality. The Left itself needs to sidestep class reductionism while staying focused on what has been described as the perpetual structural antagonism between capital and labour.
ReplyDeleteGood piece, as ever.
Yes, but the most class reductionist Left groups, now under the umbrella of PbP are now the most woke groups. Those of us who took a more nuanced approach find ourselves outcast from the latest fad. Just as the PbP components went from workerism to wokism , those of us whose position has remained consistent on this are the targets of their ire. My own position is that of the women who coined the phrase identity politics. They sought to work with others who were not them and always included class. Woke despises the idea of class and even the real oppression of those it claims to defend. It will argue for quotas for the middle class and tell working class blacks to vote for reactionaries like Obama in order to defend their middle class quotas.
ReplyDeleteI'm just not sure how that works. Class reductionism and Woke don't chime. They work against each other. Woke is much more expansive. The fad is anything but class reductionist. In fact you could say it ignores the question of class.
DeleteI always found the SWP class reductionist. They openly dissented from class plus, insisting on class.
As for voting for Obama, in principle I think in the absence of anything else it is acceptable to vote for those that will do less harm if by not voting for them, those who will do more harm get elected.
You might consider writing more at length on these matters.