Do the RCP's critiques of "wokeism" and "IDpol" miss the mark?
Posted 13 Apr 2025
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Posted 13 Apr 2025
“The death of woke: What does it mean?” asks the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), née Socialist Appeal, in issue 22 of the Communist.1
The RCPs criticisms of “wokeism” and “identity politics”, as specific political tendencies, aren’t too far off the mark, but they have offered little to a fresh reader, who might be anxious about the social backlash taking place, or to anyone looking for the way forward.
It is too easy to miss, bookending the 3,800 word article, the RCP’s two single-sentence claims that they oppose discrimination and oppression.
They give no perspective on how to fight the current social backlash, either, beyond the (accurate, but insufficient) argument that the “only way to truly end oppression… is to unite the working class of all backgrounds against the capitalist system as a whole… and replace it with a socialist plan of production” as a basis.
While pointing to the need to organise on an “independent class basis”, the RCP here have ignored the ability of the working class throughout history, even without the overthrow of capitalism, to unite on social issues and win important victories, completely without regard to the “wokeness” or otherwise of the existing establishment, on exactly such an independent class basis.
This approach has, throughout the history of the workers’ movement, been the best medicine to postmodernism, separatism, and similar dead-end ideas. It has been the best weapon with which to fight against prejudice and oppression, and the best way to win anti-oppression movements to the ideas of genuine Marxism.
The RCP, politically, hopefully aren’t a million miles away from the position outlined here. I would hope that they have already articulated their position better elsewhere. Certainly, it has been the historical method of the Militant Tendency tradition that they also claim to share.2 I hope that they take this “editorial criticism” in the spirit in which is is offered.
