That’s so woke: time for a language of emancipation
The far right pose a threat in Scotland too, and we can’t be complacent by saying ‘independence will save us’ especially if the independence we offer is built on the economics which have given rise to the far right, i.e. austerity and the sustainable growth commission.
Image: Nigel Farage at Trago Mills 2024, by Owain Davies // Creative Commons
Just as those Democrats in the US were saying America as two countries should split, so too have a number of pro-independence supporters used the recent local elections as a renewed call for Scottish independence. To them I say, do you think that nation states should be made up of solely identical political views? If so, your strategy is flawed, and neglects to trust the ordinary Scot’s conviction that they know the current economic system isn’t working for them, and while all the main parties offer up more of the same but with tinkering around the edges, they will either not vote (don’t forget that is a contributing factor) or vote for a non-traditional party.
The answer isn’t to segregate our political views from theirs, its to go out and meet them on the doorstep, listen and learn, and implement redistributive policies which can give them a sense of ownership, control and belonging back. It worked in Finland and Denmark, and it worked up to a point under Corbyn and Sanders, but concerted establishment efforts (inside the Labour Party, and from the liberal-right mainstream media) got in the way.
I have grown tired of seeing on-the-street interviews (voxpops) in towns across the UK and the US trying to ‘catch out’ Trump and Reform supporters. It’s condescending and does nothing but show the navel-gazing arrogance of liberals and leftists. This isn’t to say that some of these interviews aren’t useful in revealing the political ideology of the hegemonic class, for instance interviewing landlords at a landlord expo in London, or Israeli settlers in the West Bank. But exploiting ordinary people for a few clicks who have been abandoned by mainstream political parties through their commitment to neoliberal economics, by portraying them as whackjobs whose political ideas are silly, is wrong.
Speaking of silly… Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party, including Esther McVey’s brief role as ‘Minister for Common Sense’ and the Reform MPs - all perfectly legitimate targets. They all share a penchant for ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric, and specifically using the phrase ‘woke’ to categorise the inclusive identity politics many on the liberal-left stand for (myself included). But the term has lost all meaning and is weaponised with a specific purpose. Let’s unpack that…
“Woke” itself came from black slang largely in reference to racial (in)justice in America. Over time it has expanded to encompass LGBTQ+ rights, anti-racism, pro-immigration, diversity, equality and inclusion, feminism, disability rights… arguably I think it is now also being used to target supporters of the Palestinian cause. It’s not an exclusive term. However, a number of moving parts under the surface have shifted (again over time) to support its weaponisation by bad actors such as the far-right.
“As it stands, we’re still stuck in David Cameron’s Britain: austerity, gay marriage and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. And our language as political activists is still frozen in this time period.”
Firstly, its optics, right? For me, of course I think that advancements on all of these issues is a good thing. But combine the improved representation of groups affected by these issues, with a press that has an agenda against social progress (guardians of capital an’ all that), as well as an economic model that is not seeing improvements for the working class, and leaving (largely white) communities behind, and the visceral reaction against the groups benefiting from progress is hardly surprising. Of course it can feel like you’re losing out while all these others are getting handouts - actual arguments I’ve heard from people I know.
Secondly, being strategic is key. Clearly the likes of Farage have capitalised on this, identifying the grievances of the “left behind” and finding a way to exploit this anger against groups that appear to be a small minority (despite the fact that gay, black, and disabled people exist in these left behind communities too). Anti-woke politics, therefore, is the ‘freezing’ of this anger into something convenient: “the woke”. It’s convenient to freeze their anger into this word, not necessarily because they hate what it stands for, even if they do oppose much of the rights being advocated for, but rather because elections are fought and won on the economy it means that can avoid talking about economics (the brand of which they promote is demonstrably failing to improve living standards). If they didn’t have a symbolic phrase like “woke” to use as proxy for “the left” / “socialism” / “redistribution” / “investment-less economics”, their pro-cuts, pro-wealthy, anti-tax ideology would be shown up for what it is: unfair, exploitative, extractive and discriminatory. And the fact it is built off exploitation of all those groups for whom they believe “woke” to represent, is a bonus!
I think we have failed strategically to counter this narrative. Typical Marxist, I blame the liberals. I’m not rushing to defend the term woke - it has become toxic, with no cut through other than to people who think improved representation is a good thing, broadly liberals. And representation, or recognition, is important, but it isn’t enough. I believe I’ve fallen back on Nancy Fraser’s argument in the past, that there needs to be balance between a politics of recognition and a politics of redistribution,
“Cultural domination supplants exploitation as the fundamental injustice. And cultural recognition displaces socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle. That, of course, is not the whole story. Struggles for recognition occur in a world of exacerbated material inequality—in income and property ownership; in access to paid work, education, health care and leisure time.”
A strategy, therefore, which solely focuses on the recognition of cultural rights is inadequate in tackling the far-right because it fails to address the underlying social inequality - apart from anything else it ‘legalises’ struggle, thus struggle ends when the legal right is won, rather than being ongoing (again following Fraser). Simultaneously, a strategy which only prioritises redistribution of wealth without thinking about who is affected by that redistribution, only serves to reinforce structural inequalities around race, gender, sexuality etc. We must do both.
Case and point, I knew Kemi Badenoch would be a bad Tory/opposition leader because her leadership campaign (and the mainstay of her time in any government office) was centred around battling “woke”. For the right as much as the left, if you fail to offer something on economics you sound silly and unserious.
Lastly, let's not forget that the “overnight success” of Reform is not all that it seems - it's 30 years in the making. Farage has failed 7 times to become an MP, and utilised European elections as a protest vote to campaign on a single issue (the echoes of ‘freezing’ politics into one phrase like reverberate here), which journeyed through two political parties. The flip side of this coin is that neoliberalism has been eating away at our sense of belonging and our ownership of the economy for 40 years. Combine this alienation with a slow-burn campaign by Farage picking up on these anti-establishment sentiments and bang OVERNIGHT SUCCESS.
As it stands, we’re still stuck in David Cameron’s Britain: austerity, gay marriage and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. And our language as political activists is still frozen in this time period; a time period which saw rapid advances for the far right across Europe at a national scale, whilst municipal leftist political parties made a genuinely positive impact at a local scale. Acknowledging this would acknowledge the emphasis that these groups placed on making material improvements to the lives of ordinary people. So our language must reflect that and embrace the social improvements that we’ve made, but also move the debate forward in terms not dictated to us by those who weaponise our old language. To properly tackle the far right we need a new political language - the language of emancipation - which balances the forces of redistribution and recognition.