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Analytical Summary: "What is Woke? Culture War vs Class War"

Spectre Of Communism · 2024-10-10

Core Argument

The central thesis is that the so-called "culture war" is not a genuine political conflict between left and right, but a managed theatre in which both liberal and right-wing wings of the ruling class deploy identity politics to divert class anger away from its real target: the capitalist system. The episode argues that "woke" functions as an empty signifier — nobody can define it precisely, but it serves the ruling class by allowing right-wing demagogues to channel genuine material grievances into cheap cultural battles, while liberals use the language of anti-racism, feminism and LGBT rights as a fig leaf for austerity, imperialist war and attacks on working-class living standards. The argument is that both sides of the culture war are forms of identity politics rooted in the same idealist philosophical error: explaining oppression through identity rather than through class society and the capitalist mode of production. The only genuine path to liberation, the episode claims, is the unified class struggle of the working class against capital, which alone can abolish the material basis of all oppression.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on classical Marxist understandings of ideology as a weapon of class rule, specifically the function of divide-and-rule in maintaining capitalist social relations. The argument that capitalism needs division — between migrant and native workers, between men and women within the family, between racialised groups — is grounded in the material requirements of capital accumulation: the reserve army of labour, the unpaid reproductive labour extracted through the family, and the suppression of working-class solidarity. The critique of identity politics as idealist — explaining oppression through consciousness, language and representation rather than through the material relations of production — places the episode firmly within the Marxist tradition's long-standing polemic against subjectivist and reformist currents. The distinction between fighting for reforms and being reformist — judging reforms by whether they increase working-class activity, consciousness and organisation rather than by their immediate content — is a classic Leninist position. The episode also implicitly draws on the Marxist theory of the state: liberal and right-wing politicians are presented not as fundamentally opposed forces but as competing fractions of the same ruling class, both ultimately serving capitalist interests.

Conjunctural Relevance

The episode is situated in the current period of deep capitalist crisis — the cost-of-living crisis, climate catastrophe, collapsing confidence in established political institutions, and the visible decay of the post-war social democratic consensus. It references specific conjunctural phenomena:

  • The weaponisation of anti-Semitism to suppress Palestine solidarity movements, particularly in Germany and Austria where the Nazi past is used to delegitimise criticism of Israel.
  • The Corbyn movement in Britain, destroyed through a sustained campaign of identity-based slander (sexism, racism, anti-Semitism) that the reformist left could not answer because it lacked a firm theoretical grounding.
  • The rise of right-wing populists (Trump, Meloni, Milei, the AfD) who combine anti-woke rhetoric with demagogic appeals to class issues (bringing back jobs, opposing globalisation) while representing the same capitalist interests.
  • Liberal hypocrisy exemplified by David Lammy using his identity as a black man to justify imperialist war funding, or the German foreign minister's "feminist foreign policy" that includes gender-sensitive export controls on weapons.
  • The crisis of reformism — the collapse of the German Left Party and the rise of Sahra Wagenknecht's new formation, which mixes anti-wokeness with anti-migration rhetoric, filling the vacuum left by the absence of a genuine class-based alternative.

Where the Argument Continues

The episode deliberately leaves open the question of how communists should concretely organise to build that class-based alternative. It gestures towards the RCI's founding conference and the School of Communism podcast for a fuller treatment of right-wing populism. The argument about reforms versus reformism — and the criteria for judging whether a reform advances working-class consciousness — is a thread that runs through the broader Marxist tradition and is developed in Lenin's What Is To Be Done? and the Marxist debates on the transitional programme. The critique of identity politics as a ruling-class weapon within the workers' movement itself — used to destroy left-wing union leaderships, mass movements, and revolutionary organisations — is a theme that connects to the RCI's ongoing analysis of opportunism and the need for a vanguard party. The episode's claim that the working class must be organised to realise its revolutionary potential points towards the RCI's project of building revolutionary communist parties in each country, with the Austrian founding congress on 9 November as a concrete next step.

Connections

  • Against the Stream / Spectre of Communism — other episodes on reformism, the crisis of social democracy, and the analysis of right-wing populism.
  • School of Communism — the RCI's sister podcast, particularly the lead-off on right-wing populism from the founding conference.
  • Lenin, What Is To Be Done? — on the relationship between spontaneous working-class consciousness and revolutionary theory, and the critique of economism and reformism.
  • Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto — on the bourgeoisie's need to divide the working class and the revolutionary role of the proletariat.
  • The Marxist tradition on the woman question — Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and the subsequent Marxist feminist tradition on the material basis of women's oppression under capitalism.
  • The RCI's analysis of the Palestine question — the use of anti-Semitism accusations to suppress solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is a recurring theme in the RCI's output.

Key Quotes

  1. "The fundamental proposition even if you're a very well-meaning person will never work to actually get rid of oppression. You cannot get rid of women's oppression by abolishing men, and you cannot get rid of LGBT oppression or racism by abolishing white people or heterosexuals. But you can abolish oppression if you abolish classes."

  2. "What we have here, and this is the essence of the culture war, is one side of identity politics against a different side of identity politics. Both sides serve the capitalists and they play with it consciously."

  3. "Capitalism needs the working class divided. They can never give up oppression fully because they need the working class divided, they need them put against each other, and for many reasons this is very profitable for them directly."

  4. "If you do not have a firm theoretical basis where you can confidently say 'your attacks are baseless and designed to ruin a movement', if you do not have the confidence and ideas to push back these attacks, this makes you very vulnerable."

  5. "We judge reforms on whether they not only actually improve the lives of the masses but also get them active, get them thinking, get them involved, and give them confidence that you're not alone, we're actually in this together and we can fight."