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Why must a socialist also be woke?

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Re: Why must a socialist also be woke?

#21

Post by mamonster »

Author is basically very scared of DSA, because he knows that it's ready for power politics on their own terms.

When you are socially conservative but economically left wing, you are going to spend your debates arguing with a right wing / center guy who has 60 "non-partisan" studies about why liberal economics are good.

When you are in the DSA, you evacuate the question by mentioning Gaza at will. DSA is basically an American version of the french LFI, and they are constantly able to stonewall or turn any debate by going to moral issues.

Re: Why must a socialist also be woke?

#22

Post by rsynnott »

> Ganesh was active in Labour Students, the student wing of the Labour Party, having been inspired to join when he was 17 by Tony Blair's 1999 annual Labour Party Conference speech. In a 2001 interview with The Guardian, Ganesh described himself as "essentially a Portillista", indicating views the newspaper described as "liberal on social affairs, centre-right on economics". Ganesh opted not to attend his local constituency Labour Party meetings as they were "too dominated by Trots"

> For two years, Ganesh was a researcher at Policy Exchange, a Westminster-based think tank on the political right set up by Conservative MPs Nick Boles, Michael Gove and Francis Maude.

I'm... er, not sure, were I a socialist, that I'd be taking this guy's advice.

Re: Why must a socialist also be woke?

#23

Post by UncleMeat »

vga1 wrote: post #14
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #3

Can't read the article, but I hate the title framing. Like, what do you mean by woke? If I'm against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc, is that woke? Or does it require something special I don't know about? I know it wasn't originally so, but nowadays it seems to be just thrown around as a generic insult.

Like AOC has said (and Mamdani apparently supported), "Woke 1.0 was crazy". https://www.axios.com/2026/08/12/aoc-democratic-socialists-2...

But that is literally not what she said.

Re: Why must a socialist also be woke?

#24

Post by UncleMeat »

RestlessMind wrote: post #19
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #3

Can't read the article, but I hate the title framing. Like, what do you mean by woke? If I'm against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc, is that woke? Or does it require something special I don't know about? I know it wasn't originally so, but nowadays it seems to be just thrown around as a generic insult.

> what do you mean by woke? There are two parts - one which most of us would support (being against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) and one which most of us would oppose (defund the police, abolish ICE, trans women in sports, DEI quotas and promoting people because of their race or gender, etc). Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together and faced an appropriate backlash which resulted in Trump's reelection.

It is funny how your list of unpopular policies are all things that never happened except one, which was around for decades with minimal complaint before the right decided to make it a big deal.

Re: Why must a socialist also be woke?

#25

Post by red-iron-pine »

defrost wrote: post #20
RestlessMind wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what do you mean by woke? There are two parts - one which most of us would support (being against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) and one which most of us would oppose (defund the police, abolish ICE, trans women in sports, DEI quotas and promoting people because of their race or gender, etc). Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together and faced an appropriate backlash which resulted in Trump's reelection.

> Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together Having watched the past years unfold from outside the US and reading papers across the media spectrum I would assert that most of the work of smearing the meaning of Woke to include supposedly advocating for litter boxes in classrooms for furries, etc was work gleefully carried out by the US conservative right wing media. > and faced an appropriate backlash which was t…

> was work gleefully carried out by the US conservative right wing media.

they own all media, mate.

the goal of the right since Bismarck is to get the left to combine the pursuit of economic change with social change as a way of muddling the discussion and splitting the effort.

Re: Why must a socialist also be woke?

#26

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mamonster wrote: post #21

Author is basically very scared of DSA, because he knows that it's ready for power politics on their own terms. When you are socially conservative but economically left wing, you are going to spend your debates arguing with a right wing / center guy who has 60 "non-partisan" studies about why liberal economics are good. When you are in the DSA, you evacuate the question by mentioning Gaza at will. DSA is basically an…

> they are constantly able to stonewall or turn any debate by going to moral issues.

Only with debaters who let them. "I take that as an admission that you have no answer to all those studies that state that you're wrong economically. Let us note that well, and then move on to talking about Gaza, since you seem to want to go there."

Re: Why must a socialist also be woke?

#27

Post by krapp »

RestlessMind wrote: post #19
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #3

Can't read the article, but I hate the title framing. Like, what do you mean by woke? If I'm against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc, is that woke? Or does it require something special I don't know about? I know it wasn't originally so, but nowadays it seems to be just thrown around as a generic insult.

> what do you mean by woke? There are two parts - one which most of us would support (being against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) and one which most of us would oppose (defund the police, abolish ICE, trans women in sports, DEI quotas and promoting people because of their race or gender, etc). Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together and faced an appropriate backlash which resulted in Trump's reelection.

Woke 1.0 was black culture, where the term originated, as far back as the the 1930s.

Woke 2.0 was when white liberals co-opted it and used it as an umbrella term for social justice in general, particularly in the context of online activism.

Woke 3.0 was when the right wing co-opted the term, as they tend to do with all leftist terms, and it became simply another pejorative. This is where we are now.

Re: Why must a socialist also be woke?

#28

Post by AnimalMuppet »

techno_tsar wrote: post #17
alephnerd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't read the article https://archive.is/BLOgt > Like, what do you mean by woke The author is positing that: "From the beginning, it was possible to be a socialist, the socialist, and culturally middle-of-the-road. It was possible to believe in seizing the means of production without being avant-garde on matters of sex, race, crime or war. That point has got lost over time, to the left’s immense cost ... [a] polit…

It's something worth thinking about, because it's trivially true one could be a socialist and socially conservative, the same way someone can be "socially liberal and fiscally conservative," and so on. More precisely, it's trivally true one can believe anything. What the author is leaving out (and this is what makes it just a complaint, rather than analysis) is why the coalition formed. Instead, he just says "The mys…

As a non-leftist and therefore an outside observer on these things, it seems to me that the "left" (= Democrats) really blew their messaging from, say, 2016 to 2024.

They moved too far to culturally left issues (gays, trans, and immigration, in particular), to the point that they lost the factory workers who were economically liberal but socially conservative. Those people were made to feel that if they had reservations about gay marriage, or trans people in womens' sports, or immigrants in the numbers (and lack of documentation) that were happening, then they were viewed as moral lepers, incapable of redemption by anything short of permanent abasement for their views. There was nowhere for them to go that would represent their economic interests without cultural suicide.

Well, that didn't work out for the Democrats. Too many of their normal base of voters (the blue collar workers) turned their backs, and we got Trump twice.

Re: Why must a socialist also be woke?

#29

Post by RestlessMind »

krapp wrote: post #27
RestlessMind wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what do you mean by woke? There are two parts - one which most of us would support (being against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) and one which most of us would oppose (defund the police, abolish ICE, trans women in sports, DEI quotas and promoting people because of their race or gender, etc). Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together and faced an appropriate backlash which resulted in Trump's reelection.

Woke 1.0 was black culture, where the term originated, as far back as the the 1930s. Woke 2.0 was when white liberals co-opted it and used it as an umbrella term for social justice in general, particularly in the context of online activism. Woke 3.0 was when the right wing co-opted the term, as they tend to do with all leftist terms, and it became simply another pejorative. This is where we are now.

> when the right wing co-opted the term, as they tend to do with all leftist terms, and it became simply another pejorative

Even AOC is now running away from woke 1.0 and admitted that there was a lot of craziness. That says a lot.

Re: Why must a socialist also be woke?

#30

Post by krapp »

RestlessMind wrote: post #29
krapp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woke 1.0 was black culture, where the term originated, as far back as the the 1930s. Woke 2.0 was when white liberals co-opted it and used it as an umbrella term for social justice in general, particularly in the context of online activism. Woke 3.0 was when the right wing co-opted the term, as they tend to do with all leftist terms, and it became simply another pejorative. This is where we are now.

> when the right wing co-opted the term, as they tend to do with all leftist terms, and it became simply another pejorative Even AOC is now running away from woke 1.0 and admitted that there was a lot of craziness. That says a lot.

Democrats betraying their principles because they want to be in the cool kids club is nothing new. They basically threw the election to Trump because appealing to right-wingers was more important to them than having the stink of "leftism" on them. Meanwhile the other side is bathing in the muck and couldn't care less.

If "woke 2.0" (although actually it would be 4.0) means embracing some kind of milquetoast neoliberal centrism that seeks to maintain the status quo of respectability politics, capitalism and American exceptionalism above all else, I'll have none of it.

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