The increasingly stupid Left Anti-Woke Debate

Friends, Enbys, Comrades lend me your ears, for a fortnight a debate has rolled through the online left that has metastasised so gravely that I fear it threatens to breach containment and consume us all. I speak of the Left Anti-Woke debate, kicked off by of course a British Leftist, Ash Sarkar whose media tour for her new book has involved discussing the tired and objectively untrue premise that the problem with the Left (ambiguously defined) is that it is too woke (ambiguously defined.)

Woke in politics these days means whatever the Right or contrarians find annoying. It also can be used generally by far right actors as a replacement for a racial slur, the term DEI is also used interchangeably, again just meaning stuff the right doesn’t like. Woke did have an original meaning (being awake to injustice in society), but like the ancient symbols adopted by fascists, their original meaning is subsumed by the extremists who use it. This right wing framing of this term woke or equivalent right wing slang and our adoption of it in our Left and Liberal discourse should give us pause. Why are we using their definition of this term? Why are we debating about their term? Why are people arguing that we should adopt their critique and analysis of society, in part or in full?

We need to look ourselves in the mirror and deeply question why we are spending hours fighting amongst ourselves while the fascists are on the march? In the last weeks the transatlantic alliance was blown up by MAGA, the Russian Federation and the US have realigned on Ukraine and global issues against most of the world, the far right did their best ever in Germany since 1945, and Elon Musk the richest man in the world has fired hundreds of thousands of US civil servants and eliminated a massive chunk of global foreign aid. You think it was wise to be arguing whether about “woke” or do you think it seems petty, stupid and a massive waste of time in a moment of revolutionary reaction against everything to the Left of Mussolini?

Our enemies, actual fascists that now control the countries with the two largest nuclear stockpiles and 1st and 3rd strongest militaries in the world love our impotence and this debate club level of discourse. If you truly believe that class discourse is missing from the Left, the you need to be creating content to teach people about proletarian identity and class analysis. Especially Novara Media the largest left wing voice in the UK online media space and they spend hours having a meta discussion about whether other leftists are too woke. And worse several contributors go on far right GB News to also spout off about the “woke left” to fascists whose ultimate goal is to defeat the left and enact their far right fantasies. It is like performing with a vampire.

Now I fundamentally reject the idea of wokeness, as causal to the failure of the left in any way, not in the UK and definitely not in the US. To believe this idea that voters turned away from the left to the far right because the left was annoying or out of touch is to place way more power in the left that has existed this century. It also does not ask the material question of why this belief is so common. The clear and well documented answer is because massive international networks of right wing media constantly hammers home this view into the screens of billions every single day, of this century, and it only increases. For every left voice there is a legion of better funded and coordinated right wing activists and groups.

A recent report found on TikTok for example that 72% of the political content was Pro-AFD, all other views were the remaining 28%. The problem is structural and the fact we do not own the means of communications, and the ones we participate in we are the minority. Take for example the reality that there are several major social media sites built explicitly for the far right. Gab = Twitter for Nazis (ironic now), Rumble = Youtube for Nazis, and Truth Social = Twitter for MAGA & Nazis (also painfully ironic now.) These are social media spaces that Leftists would not and should not go on. Well unless you really enjoy seeing nonstop Nazi content, crypto and weird AI art of Trump.

These are spaces and algorithms built to be perfect echo chambers and places to build stable incomes for right wing influencers. These are also spaces that have tens of millions of users, from around the world, and these are just the most mainstream ones. There are discord servers with thousands and thousands of members who promote right wing politics, organised and radicalise each other. These can range from more banal manosphere or reactionary streamers to overt fascist or intel ideologies.

And what do they do with all these people, these influencers and that massive audience and the financial resources that allow this all to work full time? They amplify the most extreme moments of any remote leftist or liberal, or they completely fabricate things the left and liberals are doing. Additionally they use their resources to directly attack individuals who speak out or gain significant followings. All the while anyone who falls into the eye of the right online faces actual physical danger. Again and again people have ended up dead due to these tactics, for goodness sake SWATting is a known term it is so common.

For example, Ben Shapiro’s show on his network alone has a multi-million dollar annual budget, financed in large part by an oligarch. This isn’t new or news, this is a known reality. If I had that budget I could overthrow a government with the amount of content I could produce with my team and creator friends. By the way, join my Patreon and send me something on Paypal, cause I have have no sugar daddy capitalist to pay my bills.

So this is painfully clear that we are talking about a fundamentally asymmetric cultural warfare going on right now, and while there are some big trees, Hasan, Novara, etc. These are individual trees in an empty valley, it is not that we are missing the forest for the trees in this issue, it is that they have a forest and we do not. Until we are completely exceeding what our right wing opponents are doing on the cultural level we will remain losing and people will continue to be convinced of the validity of the right because that is who they keep hearing from morning, noon and night.

Frankly if the left had the power to turn off voters by our actual speech, instead of our speech as filtered or invented by the right we would have so much more political, social and cultural power than we actually do right now. It is embarrassing that people still do not see the much more grim picture of our cultural relevance, and what we need to do is produce more of everything, not have a meta discussion on whether we want to adopt right wing ideas, framing and communications strategy. To put a bow on it: it is hilarious that people who critique the centre for tacking right on climate, migration and asylum are seriously entertaining tacking right on social and cultural issues…because the right keeps telling them that if they did they promise to like them again. Like what, what, what are you doing?

Anyway this whole argument is beneath us all, we are woke, because these are things are enemies have claimed for us, they call our values bad, evil, degenerate. But why should we listen? We do not hold values because our opponents like them, we hold values because we believe them, we wish to make them real, to live by them. If your values are merely stickers to be removed depending on the day or situation then they are not values at all, merely political cosplay. And if our opponents are against something so intensely that they will spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to convince people it is bad - perhaps our first response should be to ask why, because no one spends that much money convincing people of something if those people supposedly already believe it. The panic around “wokeness” isn’t common sense, it is a well executed propaganda campaign being run all the time by the right because that is their entire political sales pitch. They don’t offer material solutions, only culture warlordism.

You’d think the second Trump election would have made that super clear to people. If you say enough bullshit loud enough, enough times to the same person, they believe it at some point. It’s just marketing people.