The death of socialism and the rise of the woke

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I was delighted to talk to Professor Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv university. He’s a radical member of a very small group of people: the Israeli left. It once dominated the country and now barely exists. I wanted to talk to him about the near death of leftwing politics among Israelis and Palestinians. Does it matter that there are no longer socialist and labour movements in Israel/Palestine and, indeed, in the wider Middle East? Does it make peace easier or harder to achieve?

I admire Shlomo. He is a Marxist and anti-Zionist but he faces hard truths. His Brief Global History of the Left, just out from Polity, like my own What’s Left, which I wrote about earlier this week, takes the collapse of socialism in the 20^th century seriously.

You can listen to the interview via the links above.

In the place of the old Left in the UK and US has come wokeism, the ideology that dare not speak its name. I have lost count of the number of people I have heard say that there is no such thing as woke or identitarian politics, and you should not play into the hands of the right by using the term. It strikes me that two ideas can be true simultaneously. A new and distinct “woke” ideology developed  in the early 2000s in American academia, and boorish right-wingers use “woke” to mean “whatever I don’t like”.

Below is a long read from me on where woke ideology came from, and why it feels so different from traditional left-wing thought. There’s a paywall, but as I always say, it’s paying subscribers who allow me to keep working. You also allow me to provide free pieces for readers who cannot afford to subscribe. So that should give you a warm glow of self-satisfaction. In any case there’s a free trial on offer so no one needs to commit right away.

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The roots of wokeness

Where it is from and why it will fail

There are two dishonest conversations about wokeness, or identity politics if you prefer the less contentious term. The first from conservatives is wearily familiar.  For some on the right “woke” is now a synonym for “anything I can’t abide”.  Overuse has made the insult meaningless.

On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology even exists. Nothing has changed, we are told. To be what Conservatives sneeringly call “woke” is simply to be a decent person who cares about the rights of others as progressives have always done.

“They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things,” cried the actress, Kathy Burke.  “If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re not homophobic, oh, you’re woke. Be woke, kids. Be woke. Be wide awake and fucking call it out.”

At least Burke had the self-confidence to use the word. Elsewhere in leftish circles uttering “woke” is frowned on. The censure comes even though, unlike so many political labels, “Tory” or “suffragette”  or “queer,” for instance, “woke” did not begin life as an insult, but as an authentic African-American injunction from the 1930s to stay alert to injustice.

We should be able to accept that, just because conservatives use “woke” as a catch-all insult, does not mean that a distinct and peculiar version of leftism did not grow up in American universities at the beginning of the century and then went on to take over large sections of the rich world’s left in the 2010s.