Why must a socialist also be woke?
ft.com
ft.com
The tl;dr here would be "it's blindingly obvious they don't have to be", and many aren't especially older ones like me who have different ties to an older world feminism, and anti racism world view which clashes with the current ones.
Hitchens (Chris, not Peter) said things in a very unwoke manner, which despite his clear non socialist world view, many on the left agree with. Of Peter his brother, the less said the better.
Works for me - https://archive.is/BLOgt
In his 2001 book, “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, Christopher Hitchens wrote the following as a warning:
PS: Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I’ll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of identity politics. I’ll rephrease that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying “The Personal is Political.” It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of small difference, because each identity group begat its subgroups and “specificities.” This tendency has often been satirised – the overweight caucuse of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs – but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.
Anyway what you swiftly realize if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighborhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn’t change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that “humanity” (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, this way.”
> For two years, Ganesh was a researcher at Policy Exchange, a Westminster-based think tank on the political right set up by Conservative MPs Nick Boles, Michael Gove and Francis Maude.
I'm... er, not sure, were I a socialist, that I'd be taking this guy's advice.
When you are socially conservative but economically left wing, you are going to spend your debates arguing with a right wing / center guy who has 60 "non-partisan" studies about why liberal economics are good.
When you are in the DSA, you evacuate the question by mentioning Gaza at will. DSA is basically an American version of the french LFI, and they are constantly able to stonewall or turn any debate by going to moral issues.
Only with debaters who let them. "I take that as an admission that you have no answer to all those studies that state that you're wrong economically. Let us note that well, and then move on to talking about Gaza, since you seem to want to go there."
Questions like this are a dead giveaway that the person asking is a male who has more conservative male friends. That's not the way to measure effective politics. People in tech are especially susceptible to this pernicious idea. That's reflected in the current crop of effective altruism weirdos who can't see the future elite is dominated by educated women.
I know it wasn't originally so, but nowadays it seems to be just thrown around as a generic insult.
> Like, what do you mean by woke
The author is positing that:
"From the beginning, it was possible to be a socialist, the socialist, and culturally middle-of-the-road. It was possible to believe in seizing the means of production without being avant-garde on matters of sex, race, crime or war. That point has got lost over time, to the left’s immense cost
...
[a] political entrepreneur will notice the unmet demand for a culturally moderate-to-conservative socialism
...
A century or so after Das Kapital, some British dockers marched in defence of Enoch Powell, a Tory minister who had been fired for a speech against non-white immigration. The march wasn’t, and isn’t, peculiar. The conservatism of even the organised working class should not be news. Unable to come to terms with it, the modern left retreats into a sort of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh fantasy world, in which Christian and Muslim, native and migrant, blue-haired teenager and laid-off steelworker, are forever teaming up to fight the real Other, which is neoliberalism."
What the author is leaving out (and this is what makes it just a complaint, rather than analysis) is why the coalition formed. Instead, he just says "The mystery is why," and hand-waves it as "whatever the reason..." But it's the reason that's central to the issue. This didn't happen out of nowhere.
Some of the reasons are just arbitrary. It is just coalition arithmetic. There's an argument that it was racial politics that flipped the parties (cf. Carmine and Stimson, Issue Evolution (1989)). It's disputed, but it's less ideological than it is political calculus (at least in America). People want to win elections. Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights. And then eventually, Nixon looked at a map in 1972 and turned it into strategy. Nobody sat down and reasoned from Marxism to racial equality, it's the side-effect of a two party system. You can say the same for why there are a lot of conservatives who are both fiscally and socially conservative, so much that being "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" became a meme and clarification.
The other reason is de-industrialization. In the 50s, if you were young and left-wing, you go to your union hall. The labor movement was a huge part of the ground operations for the Democratic Party. Fast forward to today. The same person would probably be going to college, in large part because manufacturing employemnt has been dropping for decades. The factory is not culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. The campus is culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. At the end of the day, we work, and these are real social forces that move people in certain directions.
That said, it's not entirely arbitrary. Robin Kelley wrote this book, Hammer and Hoe, and in it he talks about black communist organizing during the Depression. The gist is that the Communist Party thought it was just going to educate industrial workers on straightforward class politics, but what they got instead was black workers taking over and bringing their own institutions with them: the black church, spirituals as organizing songs, people reading Lenin and scripture in the same evening, and so on. The author of the FT article is being pretty narrowminded or is just simply ignorant, to talk about "moderate socialism" and ignore the history of black communism, which is as significant as it gets, at least in the United States.
So the fusion -- even if it's not necessary nor sufficient for left-wing politics -- makes sense, and extends beyond race. We're looking at a social phenomenon where groups of people are left out, either by not having money or being the wrong kind of person. And I think when we're talking about a "culturally moderate socialism", it's inevitably going to invite the question "Who gets to count?" I don't have any theories on whether this is 'good' or bad for socialism, and I'm not interested in debating pros and cons of leftist versus neoliberal theories, but that's where it comes from, and I think the author should at least bother to think about it before dismissing it as a "mystery".
They moved too far to culturally left issues (gays, trans, and immigration, in particular), to the point that they lost the factory workers who were economically liberal but socially conservative. Those people were made to feel that if they had reservations about gay marriage, or trans people in womens' sports, or immigrants in the numbers (and lack of documentation) that were happening, then they were viewed as moral lepers, incapable of redemption by anything short of permanent abasement for their views. There was nowhere for them to go that would represent their economic interests without cultural suicide.
Well, that didn't work out for the Democrats. Too many of their normal base of voters (the blue collar workers) turned their backs, and we got Trump twice.
That's the usual go-to, isn't it? Forcing your opponent to define the word woke to make them look dumb/hateful.
If we want to play semantics checkers, why don't we stick with the original meaning of the word, in which case being against only one of those things would be considered woke.
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/12/aoc-democratic-socialists-2...
There are two parts - one which most of us would support (being against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) and one which most of us would oppose (defund the police, abolish ICE, trans women in sports, DEI quotas and promoting people because of their race or gender, etc).
Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together and faced an appropriate backlash which resulted in Trump's reelection.
Having watched the past years unfold from outside the US and reading papers across the media spectrum I would assert that most of the work of smearing the meaning of Woke to include supposedly advocating for litter boxes in classrooms for furries, etc was work gleefully carried out by the US conservative right wing media.
> and faced an appropriate backlash
which was the entire purpose of relentless 24/7 Woke strawmanning.
they own all media, mate.
the goal of the right since Bismarck is to get the left to combine the pursuit of economic change with social change as a way of muddling the discussion and splitting the effort.
Woke 2.0 was when white liberals co-opted it and used it as an umbrella term for social justice in general, particularly in the context of online activism.
Woke 3.0 was when the right wing co-opted the term, as they tend to do with all leftist terms, and it became simply another pejorative. This is where we are now.
Even AOC is now running away from woke 1.0 and admitted that there was a lot of craziness. That says a lot.
If "woke 2.0" (although actually it would be 4.0) means embracing some kind of milquetoast neoliberal centrism that seeks to maintain the status quo of respectability politics, capitalism and American exceptionalism above all else, I'll have none of it.
People forget that Trump used to be a Democrat and a liberal and he was pals with the Clintons and congratulated Hillary Clinton when she became Secretary of State. None of these people are sincere.
And the Democrats fail not because "Woke 1.0 was a miserable failure" but because they alienate their base (which is actual leftists who do support trans people and defunding the police and the like) while the other side is willing to embrace even the most activist fringe of their base because that's never a risk for the right.
A large number of people simply use words as weapons, for effect. Expletives detached from meaning.
If you asked one of them for a meaning, you might get a real word salad, concealing the unspoken meaning basically: "someone who supports Foreigners, Minorities, Women, Socialists, Gays and Liberals" [0]
Since the Lee Atwater "Southern Strategy" days the poor have been conned into supporting the very oligarchs who take away their health care, education, jobs and opportunity.
Many people sadly vote for someone who expresses their fears rather than their hopes.
I've been to a lot of these rodeos.
I see you're not a serious person.
Looking at people like Clarence Thomas, who even voted to eliminate voting rights protection in states with a history of racial voter discrimination, that doesn't sound surprising.