Is Woke Dead?
Yes, no and what is woke anyway?
Marxist have made a distinction between oppressed people and exploited people. From a revolutionary standpoint oppressed people are ill-equipped to rebel. The attraction of the proletariat was that this was class of disciplined manual, semi-skilled and skilled workers, whose interests were in opposition to the interests of the capitalist ruling class.
It’s easy to take concepts like ‘capitalism’ and ‘ proletariat’ and unravel them, or to dismiss them as phoney propaganda tools, for revolutionary fantasists. But these concepts are not fixed and eternal.
We can see that in Western societies there has been no working-class revolution. Marx’s critics might say, ‘Marx said there would be a working-class revolution and there wasn’t, so Marx was wrong’. They might even say this with some glee.
But if when we look at social science, the clue is in the name. Social scientist work with models, these models might for example explain society, or economics or individuals at a particular time and/or place. These models might in time lose their predictive or explanatory powers, the models may be modified, replaced or discarded. If we dismissed every ‘wrong’ social scientist, we would not have many or any left.
Today we have a continuing discussion about ‘woke’. Woke is a shorthand for a variety of cultural or political attitudes and ideologies. So, what happened to class? Critics - we can call them the anti-woke, characterise woke as the ideology of the left or the progressive centrists. We can observe that the left, disappointed by the failure of the working class to produce a revolution, turned their attention to the politics of identity. That’s part of the story but nothing is ever that simple.
Today in the UK we often hear the term net-migration, and we assume that there are more people coming in that going out, before the 1950’s this was not the case, many British people were emigrating to Australia, South Africa and Canada. In the 1950’s race and immigration were closely identified, and both were identified with black West Indian immigrants. Today West Indians are subsumed under the ‘black’ banner, and our ideas about immigration and race have evolved, although this change is not widely recognised.
My parents came to the UK in the 1950’s from the West Indies (my mother from Guyana, my dad from St Kitts). Growing up in the 1970’s we had a sense of ourselves as a minority, so while there were some rebellions and activism, we did not have the confidence and expectations that are more widespread among black Britons today.
To be specific about West Indians, it is a cliche now that many of them believed that they were coming to ‘the mother country’. They were English speaking, received an English education, they were Christian and unlike other black or brown communities they did not have a unique language or religion of their own. The obvious difference was skin colour. Back then there was not so much talk about racism, it was colour prejudice, and liberal or tolerant people would protest about the injustice of judging a man ‘by the colour of his skin’.
The left did not speak with one voice. Some argued that racism or racial prejudice divided the working class in the interest of the ruling capitalist class or bosses. Others in the Trade Union movement campaigned against the threat to their own jobs by immigrant labour.
By the 1980’s there were other immigrant groups, a growing community from Africa, mainly Nigeria and Ghana and Asians from East Africa, notably Kenya and Uganda. The 1970s and 80’s saw the coming of age of the children of the West Indian immigrants, there were conflicts between young black men and the police, coming to a head with a series of inner-city riots in the 1980’s.
In the 1970s and 80s West Indians had a sense of being under siege, slogans such as ‘send them back’ and ideas such as repatriation, were still commonly held within the British establishment; politicians, police and media.
Black people did not fit neatly into the class system. There was a sense among black people that nationalism united the British people against them. The political right consciously sought to unite British people around the flag. We can see here the left were confirmed in their suspicion of nationalism.
In the 1980’s even in the Conservative Party some saw the need for a black middle class, the establishment had always sought to neutralise disrupters and the ambitious working classes, and some saw this as a way to address the problem of black militancy.
In the 1990’s the left turned to the academy, and we can also see a break between working class and professional and middle-class blacks. Black scholars aware of their own political weakness looked to theory and found kindred spirits among left wing academics and intellectuals, perhaps deluding themselves that they were fighting these intellectual and cultural battles on behalf of the black community in general.
Today intellectual life has been professionalised, and there are many more black students than there were in the 1980’s when I was one of two black students in my year at grammar school and the only black student on my economics and politics course at university. The black live matter protests in 2020 were like a student union protest and quickly fizzled out. Identity politics is middle class politics.
Some continue to ask if woke has peaked or if it is in retreat, as though some sane and normal service will be resumed. But identity politics as we understand it today began in the 1980s it’s approaching its half century, and we can expect it to evolve into some other form. At the beginning of the 1990’s the critic Robert Hughes wrote about the Culture of Complaint, others wrote about the Therapeutic Society and the Compensation Culture, so what exactly will we go back to?