Culture wars and attacks on ‘woke’ can’t be fought by identity politics, argues Lindsey German

There have always been those who oppose equality. Women’s rights have had to be fought for. The campaign against racism in all its forms has achieved a great deal but has been constantly hampered not just by overt racists but by forms of institutional racism. Church and state have combined at various points to ensure that the oppressed stay ‘in their place’.

But recent attacks on those people who already suffer a disadvantage in capitalist society have taken a particular form: the identity politics subscribed to by many on the left and often promoted in however limited a way through many of society’s institutions have been denounced in strident campaigns as ‘woke’. This attack on ‘woke’ ideas has shot up the political agenda.

Unsurprisingly, the election of Trump, the slump of Labour in the polls and the rise of Reform UK here have all helped this process, as have the repeated retreats from any principled or, indeed, merely humane stance by most politicians on the question of migrants. While most people might have been unaware of the terms ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke’ just a few years ago, they are hard to avoid. In 2019, for example, there were only ten mentions of ‘anti-woke’ in UK newspaper articles, whereas by 2022, there were 882.

They are seen as a way of gaining political capital by right-wing politicians. So Nigel Farage recently attacked what he termed a ‘banter ban’ – which turned out to be a provision in the Employment Rights Bill going through Parliament to prevent harassment of staff in pubs or restaurants. Farage claimed that this would make it impossible to discuss veganism or trans rights in a pub without being under threat of prosecution. In this, he hoped to tap into a wider resentment that people are frightened to speak their minds for fear of prosecution or social ostracism.

At the heart of the way in which ‘woke’ – which might otherwise be described as awareness of and support for issues of equality and climate justice – is approached is a kind of sense of resentment and unfairness that everything ‘has gone too far’. The argument goes that, of course, there needed to be a redress to the great inequalities facing women, black and Asian people, and LGBT people, to give them a legal and social right to equality. But now, this threatened to become a sort of thought policing where people feared to say what was in their minds. 

Mangagerialism

In this sense, the complaints are not the open racism of Enoch Powell in 1968 when he talked about ‘rivers of blood’ caused by immigration or the open misogyny of Andrew Tate with his disgusting attitudes to women, but something more insidious, if not less dangerous. Those attacking woke will be the usual crew of embittered racists and misogynists, but the general feelings are more widely shared and fit with a ‘common sense’ held by many, both that their own miseries and injustices are being ignored in favour of minority groups, and that there is a growing authoritarian managerialism which is constantly directing and penalising certain sorts of behaviour.

This form of managerialism is usually connected to identity politics, which see the answer to inequality as lying in re-education, often through courses held by institutions or employers, instilling the need of those who might hold oppressive views to improve morally as individuals. This is often linked to demands for changes in language or terminology, the assignment of particular times to celebrate an oppressed group, and the need to foreground those from oppressed minorities.

Why is all this happening now, and why are the ‘anti-woke’ arguments gaining some purchase among people who are not hardline racists, sexists or homophobes? It certainly isn’t because equality has ‘gone too far’. Work, public life and society are dominated by white upper and middle-class men. The position of women is still inferior to men economically, socially and politically. Ethnic minorities are subject to institutional racism throughout their lives. LGBT people are discriminated against because they don’t conform to the ‘norm’ of the nuclear family.

Instead, we need to look at the acute social crisis facing capitalism and the way in which different groups can be pitted against one another in such circumstances. The right and its friends in the media are trying to weaponise these longstanding divisions in order to win support and roll back successes in challenging oppression over recent decades. In many areas, they find this extremely difficult, if not impossible. There is not massive support in general for the conservative and backward ideas put forward by the Farages and Trumps, especially not from women who tend to be less favourable to the far right in voting intentions.

In general, attitudes towards sex, race and sexuality in Britain have become remarkably more liberal and favourable to equality over the past few decades. But there are problems with the way in which equality issues are conceived. In addition, there are several notable areas where attitudes have gone backwards in recent years:  those towards trans rights, immigration, and Muslims have all become more contested. So, while the British Social Attitudes forty-year anniversary survey showed that in 2023, 81% of people thought it alright for people to live together unmarried, compared with 61% in 1994. By 2023, those who thought a same-sex relationship was never wrong stood at 67% compared to only 17% in 1983. Similar more liberalised attitudes applied to abortion, single parents and so on.

However, on trans rights, 64% described themselves as ‘not prejudiced’ in 2023 compared with 82% who did so in 2019. Similarly, there have been more negative attitudes developing towards migrants and Muslims. 

What happened to emancipation?

But what is true is that the great emancipatory movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which put the ideas of equality on the map politically, have waned, and the politics they fostered have become institutionalised in the narrowest ways designed to fit comfortably with corporate capitalism. The middle class has grown in all oppressed groups and has become incorporated into capitalist society in a way it wasn’t in the 1960s. While the verbal commitment to equality is widespread in business, corporate, government and academic circles, the levels of discrimination and inequality in exactly those areas remain very high.

At the same time, the mass of working-class people – which includes, of course, the mass of women, black and Asian, and LGBT people – find that their lives in many ways worsening through low wages and poor working conditions. The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) schemes posited by management do little to change this. In fact, some discontented working-class people often experience these as a form of management-speak. These EDI courses are almost totally performative and reject any wider analysis of class. The attempt to introduce any such analysis into such courses is usually rebuffed, and the identification with privilege theory is often used as a weapon by management. It’s unsurprising that they are sometimes viewed as patronising and even authoritarian behaviour.

They have certainly failed to challenge the fundamental inequalities and reactionary ideas at the heart of capitalist institutions. The Metropolitan Police for example, has been found institutionally misogynistic, racist and homophobic. But this doesn’t stop it parading its EDI credentials or claiming to be the arbiters and judges of supposed racism on Palestine demos.

Missing from the analysis of oppression here is the question of class, usually an also-ran when discussing intersectionality. But it is by raising the class nature of oppression and how to fight it that we can begin to undercut the attacks from the likes of Farage over the need to fight oppression. Otherwise, we face more divide and rule.

The movements of the 1960s were not simply working-class, but they took place against a background of growing struggle and presented a fundamental challenge to the status quo and laid the basis for much greater equality. They also took place alongside legislation which liberalised attitudes to women, ethnic minorities and gay people. However, it was the social movements that strengthened the legal and social changes and were linked to class and economic struggle. The black civil-rights movement in the US moved to embrace the fight against poverty and to recognise that segregation did not just exist in the southern states.

The women’s movement came out of these struggles and in Britain was tied to trade unions and the rising tide of industrial struggle.

By the 1980s, the working-class movement internationally was in retreat: a weakened labour movement, the growth of identity politics, and the institutionalisation of some limited equality all contributed. There was also something of a backlash towards some of the ideas and the beginning of the sense that male workers were experiencing crisis, some said because of women’s advances.

We need class

There was more recognition of oppression than before the 60s, but it was regarded as an individual question. To develop a view of oppression which did not challenge the structures of capitalism but was rather compatible with the system in its neoliberal phase, it effectively ignored class almost entirely. Instead, it saw overcoming oppression as a personal endeavour from those oppressed and a passive sense of ‘allyship’ from those who were not. 

As this approach took hold, it effectively subsumed class oppression and exploitation. It also tended to relegate the question of women’s oppression alongside many others. So the fight for equality became one of overcoming inequalities for minority groups rather than seeing this as a systemic question which needed to challenge the oppressions affecting the majority.

This has also led to these same identity politics being used by the right against the left. There has been a peculiar inversion in that complaints of sexist or racist behaviour have been targeted at the left. This is most obviously the case with the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn used by the right to attack the whole left. It is also apparent in the way a succession of black and Asian right-wing Tory ministers have pushed through reactionary policies damaging to working-class people, including blacks and Asians. The response to this by some on the left that such people cannot be ‘really black’ demonstrates an ignorance of class and political differences among people of every race, as if the world had never seen Papa Doc Duvalier, or Idi Amin, or come to that Narendra Modi.

Part of the legacy of the retreat from class and organisation has been a highly moralistic and denunciatory politics which has affected some of the left. There has been confusion between the need to maintain a principled opposition to oppression and the need to win over large numbers of working-class people to a similar recognition. There is also the need to distinguish between people who are, for example, hard-line racists and those who may accept some racist arguments but who can be won over through debate and discussion.

Simply denouncing all those people for being racist or claiming privilege for people who clearly are not privileged is not the way to achieve that. Nor is the refusal to debate over issues such as trans rights or the nature of racism – the ‘there’s no debate’ mantra is totally counterproductive. The left has nothing to fear from open debate since even if we are in a minority, we can use the debates to increase our influence and support. No platforming should be reserved for actual fascists, as they want to destroy that freedom to debate.

Instead, no platforming has become much more common – in some cases against feminists who are gender critical, which is wrong. Some of the worst aspects of these sorts of reactions to oppression are the way that they, too, become institutionalised, especially in universities. Pro-Palestine students and staff have been told they can’t speak out – or sometimes demonstrate – because it might offend those who support Israel.

Much of the debate around being ‘woke’ comes up when these issues are discussed. Some comes from people who don’t want to fight oppression but much from people who are more open.

Socialists’ response should be to continue to oppose all oppression and fight at every level, but also to challenge some of the ways of dealing with inequality, including the way EDI is used institutionally. Socialists should insist that in dealing with the ‘anti-woke’ onslaught, there needs to be a process of winning people over, not writing them off because they don’t accept the analysis 100%.

That also means fighting for a class analysis of oppression – one which locates different oppressions in the capitalist system of exploitation.