5 ms·

Why must a socialist also be woke?

12 points by alephnerd 2mo ago

ggm 2mo ago
A question I won't be able to read about because the FTs boundary defeats my usual archive.is wall jumping. The tl;dr here would be "it's blindingly obvious they don't have to be", and many aren't especially older ones like me who have different ties to an older world feminism, and anti racism world view which clashes with the current ones. Hitchens (Chris, not Peter) said things in a very unwoke manner, which despite his clear non socialist world view, many on the left agree with. Of Peter his brother, the less said the better.
- alephnerd 2mo ago
  > the FTs boundary defeats my usual archive.is wall jumping Works for me - https://archive.is/BLOgt https://archive.is/BLOgt
- quinncom 2mo ago
  Freedium now supports FT: https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://www.ft.com/content/1b0a8ed9-d55a-49ea-971e-39e01e588632 https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://www.ft.com/content/1b0a8...
- casefields 2mo ago
  He saw identity politics/woke coming for decades. In his 2001 book, “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, Christopher Hitchens wrote the following as a warning: PS: Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I’ll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of identity politics. I’ll rephrease that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying “The Personal is Political.” It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of small difference, because each identity group begat its subgroups and “specificities.” This tendency has often been satirised – the overweight caucuse of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs – but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. Anyway what you swiftly realize if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighborhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn’t change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that “humanity” (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, this way.”
amanaplanacanal 2mo ago
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.
- alephnerd 2mo ago
  > Can't read the article https://archive.is/BLOgt 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] political entrepreneur will notice the unmet demand for a culturally moderate-to-conservative socialism ... A century or so after Das Kapital, some British dockers marched in defence of Enoch Powell, a Tory minister who had been fired for a speech against non-white immigration. The march wasn’t, and isn’t, peculiar. The conservatism of even the organised working class should not be news. Unable to come to terms with it, the modern left retreats into a sort of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh fantasy world, in which Christian and Muslim, native and migrant, blue-haired teenager and laid-off steelworker, are forever teaming up to fight the real Other, which is neoliberalism."
  - techno_tsar 2mo ago
    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 mystery is why," and hand-waves it as "whatever the reason..." But it's the reason that's central to the issue. This didn't happen out of nowhere. Some of the reasons are just arbitrary. It is just coalition arithmetic. There's an argument that it was racial politics that flipped the parties (cf. Carmine and Stimson, Issue Evolution (1989)). It's disputed, but it's less ideological than it is political calculus (at least in America). People want to win elections. Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights. And then eventually, Nixon looked at a map in 1972 and turned it into strategy. Nobody sat down and reasoned from Marxism to racial equality, it's the side-effect of a two party system. You can say the same for why there are a lot of conservatives who are both fiscally and socially conservative, so much that being "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" became a meme and clarification. The other reason is de-industrialization. In the 50s, if you were young and left-wing, you go to your union hall. The labor movement was a huge part of the ground operations for the Democratic Party. Fast forward to today. The same person would probably be going to college, in large part because manufacturing employemnt has been dropping for decades. The factory is not culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. The campus is culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. At the end of the day, we work, and these are real social forces that move people in certain directions. That said, it's not entirely arbitrary. Robin Kelley wrote this book, Hammer and Hoe, and in it he talks about black communist organizing during the Depression. The gist is that the Communist Party thought it was just going to educate industrial workers on straightforward class politics, but what they got instead was black workers taking over and bringing their own institutions with them: the black church, spirituals as organizing songs, people reading Lenin and scripture in the same evening, and so on. The author of the FT article is being pretty narrowminded or is just simply ignorant, to talk about "moderate socialism" and ignore the history of black communism, which is as significant as it gets, at least in the United States. So the fusion -- even if it's not necessary nor sufficient for left-wing politics -- makes sense, and extends beyond race. We're looking at a social phenomenon where groups of people are left out, either by not having money or being the wrong kind of person. And I think when we're talking about a "culturally moderate socialism", it's inevitably going to invite the question "Who gets to count?" I don't have any theories on whether this is 'good' or bad for socialism, and I'm not interested in debating pros and cons of leftist versus neoliberal theories, but that's where it comes from, and I think the author should at least bother to think about it before dismissing it as a "mystery".
k310 2mo ago
These terms are effectively dogwhistles, with whatever meaning du jour the propaganda machine decides. A large number of people simply use words as weapons, for effect. Expletives detached from meaning. If you asked one of them for a meaning, you might get a real word salad, concealing the unspoken meaning basically: "someone who supports Foreigners, Minorities, Women, Socialists, Gays and Liberals" [0] Since the Lee Atwater "Southern Strategy" days the poor have been conned into supporting the very oligarchs who take away their health care, education, jobs and opportunity. [0] https://i.ibb.co/JtSWj63/Voterep-1.jpg https://i.ibb.co/JtSWj63/Voterep-1.jpg
- matchbok3 2mo ago
  Weird, given how more non-whites voted for the GOP last time around. It's almost as if things are not as simple as you are hoping them to be.
  - Roland303 2mo ago
    No its even simpler, they voted to be white.
  - k310 2mo ago
    Misogyny, machismo, braggadocio. Many people sadly vote for someone who expresses their fears rather than their hopes. I've been to a lot of these rodeos.
    - matchbok3 2mo ago
      What an odd view of your fellow citizen. To simplify their aspirations as simple fear rather than a complex, human, genuine need. My only question if this: is this tactic working for your side? Given your historic loses to horrible people (Trump) and the general public rejecting your policies (open borders, identity politics, etc), do you think it's the right approach?
      - tenuousemphasis 2mo ago
quantified 2mo ago
Without reading the article (also paywall), it's helpful to be woke because that's basically now just "caring about others in general, not just selfish" but not required. You could be a selfish racist socialist, for example socialist with respect to white straight christians but at war with muslims and gays.
mamonster 2mo ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
  > 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."
rsynnott 2mo ago
> 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.
Zigurd 2mo ago
If by woke you mean sufficiently aware the women exist that you might want to support them in defending their bodily autonomy, then yeah. Questions like this are a dead giveaway that the person asking is a male who has more conservative male friends. That's not the way to measure effective politics. People in tech are especially susceptible to this pernicious idea. That's reflected in the current crop of effective altruism weirdos who can't see the future elite is dominated by educated women.

12 points by alephnerd 2mo ago

ggm 2mo ago

A question I won't be able to read about because the FTs boundary defeats my usual archive.is wall jumping. The tl;dr here would be "it's blindingly obvious they don't have to be", and many aren't especially older ones like me who have different ties to an older world feminism, and anti racism world view which clashes with the current ones. Hitchens (Chris, not Peter) said things in a very unwoke manner, which despite his clear non socialist world view, many on the left agree with. Of Peter his brother, the less said the better.

alephnerd 2mo ago
> the FTs boundary defeats my usual archive.is wall jumping Works for me - https://archive.is/BLOgt https://archive.is/BLOgt
quinncom 2mo ago
Freedium now supports FT: https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://www.ft.com/content/1b0a8ed9-d55a-49ea-971e-39e01e588632 https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://www.ft.com/content/1b0a8...
casefields 2mo ago
He saw identity politics/woke coming for decades. In his 2001 book, “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, Christopher Hitchens wrote the following as a warning: PS: Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I’ll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of identity politics. I’ll rephrease that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying “The Personal is Political.” It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of small difference, because each identity group begat its subgroups and “specificities.” This tendency has often been satirised – the overweight caucuse of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs – but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. Anyway what you swiftly realize if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighborhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn’t change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that “humanity” (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, this way.”

amanaplanacanal 2mo ago

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.

alephnerd 2mo ago
> Can't read the article https://archive.is/BLOgt 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] political entrepreneur will notice the unmet demand for a culturally moderate-to-conservative socialism ... A century or so after Das Kapital, some British dockers marched in defence of Enoch Powell, a Tory minister who had been fired for a speech against non-white immigration. The march wasn’t, and isn’t, peculiar. The conservatism of even the organised working class should not be news. Unable to come to terms with it, the modern left retreats into a sort of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh fantasy world, in which Christian and Muslim, native and migrant, blue-haired teenager and laid-off steelworker, are forever teaming up to fight the real Other, which is neoliberalism."
- techno_tsar 2mo ago
  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 mystery is why," and hand-waves it as "whatever the reason..." But it's the reason that's central to the issue. This didn't happen out of nowhere. Some of the reasons are just arbitrary. It is just coalition arithmetic. There's an argument that it was racial politics that flipped the parties (cf. Carmine and Stimson, Issue Evolution (1989)). It's disputed, but it's less ideological than it is political calculus (at least in America). People want to win elections. Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights. And then eventually, Nixon looked at a map in 1972 and turned it into strategy. Nobody sat down and reasoned from Marxism to racial equality, it's the side-effect of a two party system. You can say the same for why there are a lot of conservatives who are both fiscally and socially conservative, so much that being "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" became a meme and clarification. The other reason is de-industrialization. In the 50s, if you were young and left-wing, you go to your union hall. The labor movement was a huge part of the ground operations for the Democratic Party. Fast forward to today. The same person would probably be going to college, in large part because manufacturing employemnt has been dropping for decades. The factory is not culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. The campus is culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. At the end of the day, we work, and these are real social forces that move people in certain directions. That said, it's not entirely arbitrary. Robin Kelley wrote this book, Hammer and Hoe, and in it he talks about black communist organizing during the Depression. The gist is that the Communist Party thought it was just going to educate industrial workers on straightforward class politics, but what they got instead was black workers taking over and bringing their own institutions with them: the black church, spirituals as organizing songs, people reading Lenin and scripture in the same evening, and so on. The author of the FT article is being pretty narrowminded or is just simply ignorant, to talk about "moderate socialism" and ignore the history of black communism, which is as significant as it gets, at least in the United States. So the fusion -- even if it's not necessary nor sufficient for left-wing politics -- makes sense, and extends beyond race. We're looking at a social phenomenon where groups of people are left out, either by not having money or being the wrong kind of person. And I think when we're talking about a "culturally moderate socialism", it's inevitably going to invite the question "Who gets to count?" I don't have any theories on whether this is 'good' or bad for socialism, and I'm not interested in debating pros and cons of leftist versus neoliberal theories, but that's where it comes from, and I think the author should at least bother to think about it before dismissing it as a "mystery".

k310 2mo ago

These terms are effectively dogwhistles, with whatever meaning du jour the propaganda machine decides. A large number of people simply use words as weapons, for effect. Expletives detached from meaning. If you asked one of them for a meaning, you might get a real word salad, concealing the unspoken meaning basically: "someone who supports Foreigners, Minorities, Women, Socialists, Gays and Liberals" [0] Since the Lee Atwater "Southern Strategy" days the poor have been conned into supporting the very oligarchs who take away their health care, education, jobs and opportunity. [0] https://i.ibb.co/JtSWj63/Voterep-1.jpg https://i.ibb.co/JtSWj63/Voterep-1.jpg

matchbok3 2mo ago
Weird, given how more non-whites voted for the GOP last time around. It's almost as if things are not as simple as you are hoping them to be.
- Roland303 2mo ago
  No its even simpler, they voted to be white.
- k310 2mo ago
  Misogyny, machismo, braggadocio. Many people sadly vote for someone who expresses their fears rather than their hopes. I've been to a lot of these rodeos.
  - matchbok3 2mo ago
    What an odd view of your fellow citizen. To simplify their aspirations as simple fear rather than a complex, human, genuine need. My only question if this: is this tactic working for your side? Given your historic loses to horrible people (Trump) and the general public rejecting your policies (open borders, identity politics, etc), do you think it's the right approach?
    - tenuousemphasis 2mo ago

quantified 2mo ago

Without reading the article (also paywall), it's helpful to be woke because that's basically now just "caring about others in general, not just selfish" but not required. You could be a selfish racist socialist, for example socialist with respect to white straight christians but at war with muslims and gays.

mamonster 2mo ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
> 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."

rsynnott 2mo ago

> 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.

Zigurd 2mo ago

If by woke you mean sufficiently aware the women exist that you might want to support them in defending their bodily autonomy, then yeah. Questions like this are a dead giveaway that the person asking is a male who has more conservative male friends. That's not the way to measure effective politics. People in tech are especially susceptible to this pernicious idea. That's reflected in the current crop of effective altruism weirdos who can't see the future elite is dominated by educated women.