October 1, 2026
Why must a socialist also be woke?
If the left could separate economics from culture, capitalism would have more to fear
By Janan Ganesh
Because his writings turned the world upside down, it is natural to forget what a normie Karl Marx could be. He quit Soho for a life of suburban routine when circumstances allowed it. His attitude to various ethnic groups was of its time, at best. The great snob was also, according to one biographer, “ridiculously proud of having married a bit of posh”. A “von”, no less. You can kick the boy out of Prussia . . .
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.
The District of Columbia is about to join New York in having a mayor from the Democratic Socialists of America. Soon, Michiganders will be able to vote for a US senator of a similar bent. In 2028, perhaps in an atmosphere of AI-induced job anxiety, someone DSA-ish could become the Democratic nominee for president. I can hear a tapping sound, as readers of a certain financial bracket dial the phone numbers of their wealth managers. But there has been talk of a socialist breakthrough before, for example in Britain under Jeremy Corbyn and more lately under the Greens’ Zack Polanski. If it never quite materialises, the reason tends to be the same.
In the end, the hard left will always pair a conceivably popular economic programme with a provably hated cultural one. The mystery is why.
The DSA wants to “disempower police unions”. (Some workers, as ever, are more equal than others.) The ultimate aim is “fully abolishing the police”. There would be no Department of War. The group also calls for race reparations and an end to visa caps. Some DSA candidates have de-emphasised these ideas in favour of economic populism. Zohran Mamdani is one. In a presidential race, however, no one could survive even tangential association with this cultural prospectus. The Republican attack ad writes itself. It would gloss over the tax-the-rich stuff, which after all polls well, highlight instead the police-bashing, and that would be that.
In 2026, the rich are lucky in their enemies. If a politician could decouple socialism from the set of cultural ideas known as “woke”, he or she would be difficult to stop. Bernie Sanders half-tried, though no one was going to trust a man in the autumn of his life to face down as tenacious a movement as the cultural left. After that, examples dry up. If anything, Corbyn regarded socialist economics as a diversion from the real fun of nuclear disarmament and uniting Ireland. The one place that might have produced a culturally conservative or at least culturally neutral socialism is continental Europe, but even the French left has absorbed American woke jargon, perhaps recognising in it the authorial stamp of Michel Foucault.
And so capitalism glides on, never quite facing what would be its sternest political test. The question is why the left allows it to happen.
Perhaps they know what they are doing. Perhaps the appeal of woke is underrated. Almost half of all voters support the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A US that is failing to win in Iran, as it failed to win in Iraq and Afghanistan, could become receptive to the DSA’s line against foreign wars.
But I don’t sense it is as calculated as all that. Marx himself would have put forward another answer. The fact that socialists pick vote-losing cultural fights is proof of the “superstructure”: the intellectual atmosphere of society, which subtly protects the interests of the asset-owning class. Woke has been such a godsend for capitalism — making its enemies look ridiculous — that it can seem almost engineered for that purpose.
Whatever the explanation, we should not normalise, just because we have grown up with it, the strange blend of command-and-control economics and ultra-progressive culture. Nothing about the one implies the other, except that both constitute a kind of rebellion. If anything, it is capitalism that pairs better with woke, in that both emphasise the individual. The right to keep one’s earned income, the right to cross national borders and the right to self-define in gender terms all spring from the same root.
One day, a political entrepreneur will notice the unmet demand for a culturally moderate-to-conservative socialism. At that point, the game will be on.
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.
As middlebrow cinema, this is harmless enough. As electoral politics, it is pure denial. Socialists are in the business of winning and holding power. It could happen, if they did not keep offering economic dirigisme and identity politics as bundled software. Those who want them to lose on both counts are forever grateful.