Review: Left Is Not Woke, by Susan Neiman

When a civilisation begins to unravel, the first symptoms will often appear in its language. As its population drifts apart into mutually hostile camps, certain words will start to be used as epithets to hurl at each other as a precursor to hurling stones. ‘Woke’ is currently one of those words (another is ‘fake’). Susan Neiman observes that the first recorded appearance of the phrase ‘stay woke, keep your eyes open’ was by folk-blues singer Lead Belly in 1938 when discussing his song ‘Scottsboro Boys’, which he recorded to support the campaign to save nine black teenagers wrongly accused of rape in Alabama. He meant by it, stay aware of various forms of oppression that people were suffering, by white against black, rich against poor or men against women.

Revival of the word ‘woke’ began sometime around 2010–13 on social media and US student campuses during the agitation over Black Lives Matter, and its application has since expanded rapidly from racial to many other forms of perceived social discrimination and disadvantage, even to hurtful speech and matters of identity. There is, however, a significant difference from its 1938 meaning: the campaign to save the Scottsboro boys was organised by the US Communist Party which was committed (nominally at least) to universal emancipation by abolishing capitalism. In contrast, most current campaigns for increased diversity—of race, gender and more—appeal to the importance of having people who ‘look like me’ in positions of authority. Susan Neiman claims that woke has ceased to be universalist: ‘Universalism is under fire on the left because it's conflated with fake universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others in the name of an abstract humanity that turns out to reflect just a dominant culture's time, place and interests.’ Each kind of wokeness now experiences its own oppressed minority like a separate ‘tribe’.

Alarmed by a worldwide swing toward reactionary nationalism, everywhere from Hungary and India, Norway, Israel and, perhaps soon, the USA, Neiman declares that the purpose of her book is not merely to oppose this return to tribalism, but to demonstrate that the woke left is falling into the very same trap by abandoning the Enlightenment ideal of universal rights in favour of defending various sectional interests in highly divisive ways: ‘The right may be more dangerous, but today's left has deprived itself of the ideas we need if we hope to resist the lurch to the right. Woke reactions to the October 7 Hamas massacre underline how poor theory can lead to terrible practice.’

Neiman is currently director of the Einstein Forum and previously a professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv, who has written several academic works of moral philosophy, tackling the lessons of the Holocaust and the problem of evil in modern thought. The book reviewed here is however short, readable and tightly focussed on the specific problem of wokeness, which she frames in philosophical terms as the difference between universalism and tribalism. To brutally condense her argument, she believes the left needs three founding philosophical commitments: to universalism; to a hard distinction between justice and power; and to the possibility of progress. But a return to tribalism erodes all three of these and woke represents such a return.

The principle of tribalism is that you can only truly connect with those who belong to your own tribe, and need have no deep commitments to anyone else: tribalists of both left and right find it easier to ally with their own than with those who remain committed to universalism. For Neiman this rejection stems from a view of power first examined all the way back in Plato's Republic where the sophist Thrasymachus claimed that morality is nothing but rules imposed by those in power for their own benefit, that justice is nothing but the advantage of the strongest. This brutal realism, beloved of autocrats and dictators throughout history, waned somewhat during those eight hundred years when Christianity pretended that power belongs only to God, until, in the eighteenth century the Enlightenment tried to tame it with those ideas of universal liberty, equality and progress that founded—in theory at least—modern liberal democratic nation states.

Neiman blames the current resurrection of sophist scepticism on two thinkers—Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt—whose ideas proliferated among academic radicals, particularly in France and the USA from the 1960s. Foucault was a man of the left, famed for his criticism of the punitive state, who claimed that power is entwined into the very structure of society, institutions, habits, even language itself. Deconstructing such structures to reveal power relations is hard work, but removing them is harder still and most likely impossible, which over several decades has led to the distortions and absurdities now called woke. Carl Schmitt was a jurist theoretician and active member of the Nazi party, who proclaimed the basis of tribalism as distinguishing friends from enemies: he saw conflict as the law of life. An acute observer and analyst of the weaknesses of liberal constitutionalism and cosmopolitanism—but with no desire to cure them—his critiques were nevertheless influential in some left circles.

In a chapter entitled ‘Justice and Power’ Neiman takes on the neoliberal claim to be an expression of intrinsic human selfishness, and its purported scientific support from evolutionary biology, while the following chapter ‘Progress and Doom’ explores the compulsory optimism that neoliberalism requires of citizens: ‘Optimism is a refusal to face facts. Hope aims to change them. When the world is really in peril, optimism is obscene.’ She regards woke as a product of, rather than an opponent of neoliberalism: if we're all individuals competing in the market, we can promote our ‘brands’ more effectively by banding together into tribes. To do that we need to control the way in which we're described, and the censoring of library books and school curriculums in Republican-governed ‘red’ states in the USA is merely the mirror image of the left's cancelling and no-platforming on college campuses.

In an impassioned final chapter, Neiman tackles the ill effects of tribalism on current left politics: ‘The woke call to decolonise thinking reflects the belief that we will not survive the multiple crises we've created unless we change the way we think about them. I agree that we desperately need fundamental changes in thinking, but I've urged another direction. For, as I've argued, the woke themselves have been colonised by a row of ideologies that properly belong to the right.’

Like Thomas Piketty, she recognises that flight back into identitarian politics is in part a result of disillusion with progressive politics following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also a product of the rage caused by escalating economic inequality and indifference shown by university-educated ruling elites:

Much of that rage is a reasonable response to conditions that are profoundly unreasonable, though few Americans can imagine any others. That's because they are missing what other wealthy countries call rights: health care that pays for the drugs needed to treat diseases, sick leave that covers the duration of an illness, paid vacations and parental leave, higher education and childcare. Americans call those things benefits, granted or denied at the will of their employer—a very different concept from the concept of rights.

This book was largely written before Hamas's atrocious October 2023 massacre, but Neiman mentions it in her introduction, supporting justice for Palestine as legitimate left policy, but condemning celebrations of the Hamas attack by the postcolonial wing of woke (for whom ‘Israel has long been located in the Global North, while Palestine belongs to the Global South’) as ‘resistance’ or ‘poetic justice’. As for Netanyahu's grotesquely brutal policy of retaliation, ‘I will not hazard to guess whether its leader will manage to stay out of jail by undermining Israeli law and waging war against thousands of Palestinians by the time this book is printed.’

The UK Conservative Party briefly believed that ‘anti-wokery’ was the weapon that might turn around their trailing position in the polls, but they were doomed to disappointment as it turned out to be blunt—dulled by post-Boris shenanigans?—and left them routed in the 4 July election. Post-election analysis suggests that Keir Starmer's prescient decision simply to refuse to engage in culture-war was a prime reason, though it cost him a loss of young voters and several winnable seats with large Muslim communities, and might allow Nigel Farage to reforge and sharpen this weapon. I'm writing this review on the weekend that Joe Biden stepped down as US presidential candidate in favour of Vice President Kamala Harris—black, female and regarded by MAGA voters as left-wing—so in November we might be going to learn whether woke can defeat proto-fascism. Neiman's neat conclusion may be of some comfort: ‘If you want to establish a dictatorship, your best chance is to convince your fellows that humankind is naturally brutal and needs a strong leader to prevent it from tearing itself to bits. If you want to establish a social democracy, you will magnify every instance of natural cooperation you can find.’

Left Is Not Woke, by Susan Neiman. Polity. 160 pp. £15.17.