Universalism & The Anti-Woke

In the name of “class struggle” and “the unified interests of the working class,” the Left has always selected certain sectors of the working class as revolutionary subjects and condemned others to a merely supportive role in the struggles these sectors were waging. The Left has thus reproduced in its organisational and strategic objectives the same divisions of the class that characterize the capitalist division of labour. ^[1]

Woke is dead! To the cheers of his fans, and the tears of airplane enthusiasts, the Trump administration has been leading a campaign to eradicate the threat of wokeness, diversity, and Marxism from the American state. But it is not just the right who are cheering at the end of “woke.” There also appears to be a growing contingent of voices from the left doing so. Several prominent voices including Ryan Grim have claimed that the Trump administration's attacks on woke diversity policies are actually helpful to the creation of a universal working class politics.^[2] Similarly, in the UK, prominent left media figure, Ash Sarkar has been giving various interviews to promote her new book, Minority Rule, during which she has blamed the corrosive impact of “woke” for the failure of the left at winning power. An astonishing claim to the power of people being a bit annoying on Twitter compared with the immense accumulation of the power of capital!

For many left critics, “woke” or “identity politics” are indicative of the left’s retreat from a universal class-based project. The focus on “identity” so the argument goes, obscures that we all share the same interests. Identity politics is fundamentally a politics which divides the working class, tells working class men they’re just privileged,^[3] and disorganises movements through narratives of competing victimhood. In a review of Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman, Jacobin writer Dustin Guastella argued that “To be woke is to be [...] allergic to claims of universalism and appeals to objective standards of goodness.”^[4] Following Neiman, Guastella argues that wokeness is actually close to the philosophy of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Organising around “horizontal” (in Guastella’s words) divisions between racial and gender groups, rather than seeking to overcome the objective labour-capital dialectic, is what has, in his view, led to the resurgence in fascist politics. From this perspective, the antidote to woke division and disorganisation is the overriding power of a universalist—and frequently populist—economic agenda. Universalism is positioned against the divisions of woke identity politics.

This is not a new argument. For some leftists, the Marxist project has always been about truly realising the universal emancipatory promises of liberalism. This liberal intellectual history can be traced back to the natural rights writing of such authors as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. They emphasise that the individual, before society, is imbued with certain natural rights to freedom and property. The role of politics is to effectively secure the conditions in which these universal natural rights can be enjoyed. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ambitiously declares: “all human beings are born in equal dignity and rights.” The promise of liberalism may seem intuitively attractive. After all, we should indeed pursue universal freedom. Some may even argue that the right to property is compatible with a quasi-marxist view that workers are entitled to the entire value of their labour, rather than just the portion they receive in a wage.

However, in adopting liberal universalism, such Marxists cannot escape the problematic abstractions that characterise liberal thought. In the liberal tradition, universalism is an abstract condition. It is presented as a transhistorical value, unmoored from the specificities of actually existing society. This abstract liberal universalism requires a specific universal subject: the individual rights holder. However, political subjects are not, in reality, abstract figures but a mass of complex and differentiated people. By projecting a supposedly abstract ideal of the universal political subject, liberalism took a specific figure, the white, male, market subject and generalised his interests as the interests of society as a whole. In universalising this specific political subject, the societal conditions which uphold those interests are naturalised. When one political subject is naturalised as the subject of history, others are necessarily excluded and when the corresponding social arrangement (for example, market capitalism) is naturalised the limits of political action can only be a teleological project of constant progressive reform to better realise that social arrangement. Alternative subjects must be dismissed or subsumed within the universal liberal ideal. Liberal universalism, therefore, has a double character which must generate its own exclusions.

This is not simply the failure of liberalism to uphold its own promises, but rather the immanent contradictions inherent to liberalism as a philosophy. Yet, there is a school of “liberal socialists” who believe that by reorienting the subject of history to the revolutionary proletarian and overcoming the exploitative capital-labour relation, they can push liberal universalism beyond the limits of its contradiction. The teleological power can smash the limits of reform to produce revolution. For such people, it is the role of socialist universalism to create a movement more liberal than liberalism.

However, especially in the context of our current fascist-inflected anti-woke moment, liberal socialists have been unable to break through the contradictions of liberalism either philosophically or politically. The exclusionary contradictions of liberal universalism are not so easy to wave away. Instead of crystallising the interests of society into the figure of the individual propertied white man, it is those subject to the wage relation who are blessed with the universal interests of the proletariat as a whole. Despite the strong history of revolutionary peasantry, there is still a drive to centre the waged worker, as the revolutionary subject. The waged worker, however, is a category which remains discursively gendered as is evidenced by Guastella's description of the poor white man as one of “the real economic victims.” Moreover, as the singular revolutionary subject, not only are those outside the wage relation excluded from the universalist project, but the nature of the waged worker is flattened and homogenised. It is assumed that all waged workers carry the same interests.

But the world’s waged-workers are a diverse bunch! I don’t mean this superficially, that there are many different races, genders, sexualities that make up the working class, but that the capital-labour social relation has distinct manifestations across the globe and across “identity” divisions. In this sense, there is not a singular capital-labour relation, but multiple. For example, global imperialism, especially since the period of globalisation, has produced a global labour arbitrage between the global north and global south, placing global south workers in the condition of super-exploitation whereby their wages are lowered below what is required for them to survive on a wage alone. They often take on extra subsistence labour to survive. These relations of super-exploitation are not confined to individual enterprises, but are a general feature of global divisions of labour. Division which makes possible the relatively high consumption lifestyles of global north workers. To flatten the struggle against global imperialism to a singular universal waged worker under a singular capital relation is to subsume global south workers under the relatively privileged (gasp!) interests of the global north workforce.

Similarly, in universalising the interests of the waged-worker, there is a tendency to deny real racial divisions in the working class. There is a longstanding, simplistic narrative within those who make claims to liberal universality, that racism is simply an ideological trick of capitalism which hides its fundamentally colourblind nature. In contrast to such perspectives, scholars like Cedric Robinson re-examined capitalism as a fundamentally racial project. Arun Kundnani has argued that race appears as an ideology not to create divisions between sets of workers, but as a manifestation of pre-existing racial divisions of labour.^[5] The success of race as a ruling class ideology is not because the workers are necessarily easy to dupe, but because the very economic structures of society depend on racism. Claiming a simple universal waged-worker subject doesn’t just flatten our understanding of capitalism, but obscures the ways in which whiteness is a material benefit to sections of the proletariat and in doing so can subordinate racialised labour to the domination of whiteness.

W.E.B Du Bois extensively documented the role of white labour in perpetuating white supremacist divisions of labour in the name of maintaining its own narrow interests. While today divisions along race and immigration status continue to, in the terms of Stuart Hall, shape the modality in which class is lived to the benefit of segments of the working classes. Marx long ago understood that the interests of the working class were divided along racial lines. He eventually saw that Irish liberation could only be achieved by Irish workers themselves and not through a generalised (English) labour movement. The English worker had a vested interest in the continued subordination of the Irish. Today, in a global economy where the mass of cheap commodities which sustain global north standards of living are produced by super-exploited cheap labour in the global south, there is an interest for global north labour to remain in a dominant position. Racism is not a superstructural ideological phenomenon, but a method of materially organising labour for exploitation. In universalising the waged-worker relation, racial capital relations are subsumed within a colour-blind struggle, and reduced to matters of pure ideology. Racialised proletarian subjects must either be assimilated into the colour-blind struggle or rejected as wreckers dividing the working class. Liberal socialist universalism, like its antecedent, therefore generates its own contradictory exclusions.

Moreover, in centering the waged labourer as the universal subject, those whose struggle lies in whole or in-part outside of the workplace are excluded from revolutionary subjecthood This is particularly relevant when considering the essential gendered divisions of socially reproductive labour. Marxist feminists who organised around unwaged household labour and who recognised that their labour benefits men have been routinely dismissed as “dividing the working class.” Their attempts to bring the concrete gendered labour-capital relation to complicate the sterile universality of the wage-labour relation has been viewed as simply divisive and is therefore marginalised in the universal struggle. It was not all that long ago that British trade unions opposed the payment of benefits directly to women on the grounds that it would disrupt men’s position as head of the family unit and undermine class cohesion. Still today, women carry out the vast majority of unwaged social reproductive work and yet this is rarely spoken about in the same breath as more traditional labour issues.^[6] Even when misogyny in society is acknowledged, liberal socialist universalism cannot account for it as anything more than a second order prejudice, like racism, while refusing to consider the abolition of gendered labour divisions as of equal importance to the abolition of employment relations. Liberation for women is understood as only possible on the terrain of waged labour. When Federici and Cox argued that “[t]he Left has thus reproduced in its organisational and strategic objectives the same divisions of the class that characterize the capitalist division of labour” this is what they meant. Even when women enter waged work, their unwaged labour remains hidden by both capital and left tendencies which focus exclusively on supposed universal interests of the working man.

It is only by recognising the labour-capital relation not as a singular universal category but a collection of divided and sometimes contradictory social relations that we can properly understand racism and patriarchy. They are not simply images of “false consciousness” which will come out in the wash of workerist politics, but a manifestation of economic relations of production and reproduction which benefit capital and some segments of labour. When left critics of woke, identity politics, or DEI make the case for universalism in the face of apparent divisions of the working class, they are replicating the exclusions of liberal universality. They are imposing the specific interests of the white, male, waged-labour subject in the global north on top of the specific interests of several segments of the working class. It is a universality defined by exclusion. One which leaves intact the conditions of exploitation and domination. It is an abstraction away from the material divisions within society, and crucially, from divisions within the working classes too. This tendency is not “universal” in the sense that it actually describes the universal character of the working class as a whole, but rather it is universalising a static particular. The diverse interests and material divisions between the various oppressed classes across the world are obscured and the specific interests of the waged working man are imposed.

A recent article from Jacobin contributor Ben Brurgis provides a particularly galling example of some of the tendencies described here.^[7] Written amidst the recent violent explosion of settler-colonial genocidal violence in occupied Palestine, Burgis’ intervention calls for a rejection of liberation in Palestine based on understandings of Palestinian indigeneity. For Burgis, neither Israelis nor Palestinians have an inherently legitimate claim to the land, but rather the “universalist principles that have always formed the rock-solid normative basis of the socialist movement” insist that all occupants of the land should share the same rights. In this example, Burgis’ claims to abstract universal rights, necessarily flattens the political reality of settler-colonialism and the concrete reality which constructs Palestinian genocide. Burgis claims erroneously that to describe Palestinians as indigenous and Israelis as settlers would be to engage in “blood and soil” rhetoric. In doing so he conflates the conditions of Palestinians and Israelis, delegitimates Palestinian liberation and de-colonisation, and in doing so elevates Israeli political subjecthood above Palestinians. His appeal to “rock-solid” universalist principles requires the exclusion of Palestians from the subjecthood.

Burgis’ example is particularly identifiable as nonsense precisely because of the clear political context which he is obscuring. Indeed, when we bring the political context of anti-woke universalism back into the picture, its absurdity slaps you in the face! Anti-woke politics, as it appears today, is clearly being structured by the far-right movement towards resurgent fascism. In America, Trump’s attacks on woke identity politics not only represent general attacks against women’s bodily autonomy and the very existence of trans people, but are also fundamentally attacks on labour rights. When Ryan Grim celebrated the end of DEI, he was not celebrating some victory for the recognition of the universal working class, but celebrating the further entrenchment of racial, gender, and sexuality based divisions of labour (let’s not pretend us gays won’t be fired as soon as the straights are able to do so). I am sure that some people will respond to this argument by saying their critique of “woke” is confined to liberal manifestations of identity politics and wokeness in “PMC” university settings. But the die has been cast. The right have set the terms and woke is anything a fascist doesn’t like. Like the liberals, these socialist critics of woke are trapped in a failing reformism. The only correct socialist response to “the death of woke” is therefore not celebration, but solidarity.

The above examples show how appeals to universalism, founded in a contradictory abstraction, require exclusion to operate. But this is not necessarily a defeatist position. The aim of universal emancipation is not necessarily beholden to the imposition of static universal categories. The project of socialism can of course benefit everyone and our intersecting, sometimes conflicting interests are not an insurmountable obstacle. But to pursue total liberation requires a different kind of universalism, a universalism which is not an object but a process constructed through collaborative political action, founded on solidarity between sections of the global working class. One which doesn’t wish away material divisions but confronts them head on. A woke universalism, perhaps.

It is only by recognising, and then working through, the material divisions of the various segments of the global working classes and struggling towards a shared program of emancipation that a more productive universality can be achieved. Feminism, anti-racism, trans-liberation, and disability politics are all necessary elements to create a collective movement for emancipation. The goals of all of these diverse movements cannot be subordinated to a universal abstraction which obscures the hidden “privilege” of one reified grouping. On a simple strategic level, why would women or racial minorities join a movement which subordinates their interests to those of white male workers? When Sam Fender bemoans privilege discourse for turning young working class men to Andrew Tate,^[8] he is excluding from the argument the women from those same communities who still perform unwaged labour, and suffer devaluation in our misogynistic society. Why should those women believe their emancipation can be won in a working class movement which seemingly excludes them? Moreover, as “anti-woke” has increasingly become the frame for far-right politics, why would any minority group seek to join with a movement which appears to cheer on these measures in the name of universality?

While liberal socialist universality imposes a universal category upon the global working class, a woke universality seeks to collaboratively construct a universalising project through solidarity. Only then can we generate the collective power to overturn entrenched capitalism. Solidarity is founded not on the pretence that all of our struggles are exactly the same, but on the recognition that we uphold each other's struggles despite their differences. The movement of liberation from the exploitation and domination of capital within the workplace must be consciously tied to the liberation of women from the performance of unwaged labour in the household. The generalised performance of household and reproductive labour must be an essential aspect of every left movement so that patriarchal divisions of labour can be abolished alongside the employment relation. Moreover, methods of organising production via race, such as border regimes, must be abolished as part of a universalising labour movement. Those disabled by a society defined by an individual’s capacity to work must be just as central to the universal project of emancipation, as those who are included within the workforce. Through action, collaboration, and solidarity, the very form of universalism is altered from an imposition which generates its own exclusions, to a process towards an ever more collective struggle.

This is not a caricatured Hobbesian nightmare of war of all against all. This is not a call for competing victimhood and individual prejudice. It is a call to recognise the divisions hidden by shallow liberal universalist attacks on “woke” and instead build a truly universal movement defined by solidarity.

When Aimé Césaire resigned from the French Communist Party in 1956,^[9] he emphasised that racialised and colonial subjecthood could not be reduced to an addendum to the workers’ struggle of the International and the French communist party. He repudiated the French communists support of President Guy Mollet’s brutal campaign of colonial violence in Algeria and argued that “there are no allies by divine right.” If the French communists could not live their solidarity via the political practice of universalism and instead rely on an abstract, metaphysical divine right to subordinate the colonised world to their struggle, then their solidarity would remain nothing but “the coldest of cold abstractions.” For Césaire:

There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in “the universa” [...] My conception of the universal is that of a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.^[10]

We should follow Césaire and not Mollet. We should recognize the particulars of racial, gendered, disabled, LBGTQIA+—yes, the whole gamut of woke oppressions—and avoid mystifying abstraction. It is precisely the moment in which those “woke” particulars are under attack that we should grasp more tightly to solidaristic political action founded on that recognition that what divides us materially can unite us politically. A project in which universalism is not an imposition to fall in line with, but a goal to struggle towards. Rather than celebrate the death of woke, I say we revive and herald it.