The Woke, the Left, and the Materialist

I. The Problem With “The Left”

The first problem is that “the Left” is no longer a precise political category. It often functions as a negative coalition: not the Right. Inside that coalition sit socialists, social democrats, communists, trade unionists, progressive liberals, environmentalists, activist anti-capitalists, and various forms of recognition politics. These groups may oppose the same enemies, vote for the same parties, or appear on the same side of public controversies, but they do not necessarily share the same political tradition.

This matters because a coalition is not the same thing as a philosophy. A socialist, a liberal, and a conservative may all oppose poverty, cruelty, arbitrary power, or social breakdown, but they will not explain those problems in the same way. They will disagree over what counts as injustice, what causes it, and what kind of institutional correction is justified. The existence of a shared enemy does not prove the existence of a shared theory.

One of the ways this confusion enters the Left is through the idea that socialism is, at root, a politics of anti-oppression. There is a partial truth here. Socialists have always opposed forms of domination, especially those rooted in class power, ownership, labour dependence, and the extraction of surplus. But socialism is not defined by opposition to oppression in the abstract. If it were, socialism would lose its specific object. It would no longer be primarily concerned with production, labour, ownership, surplus, class power, and social reproduction, but with a general moral claim against harm or exclusion.

The problem with “anti-oppression” as a defining category is that it is too elastic. A conservative can oppose oppression. A liberal can oppose oppression. A nationalist can oppose oppression. A religious traditionalist can oppose oppression. Each will identify different victims, different oppressors, different causes, and different remedies. The decisive question is therefore not whether a politics opposes oppression, but what theory of society tells it where oppression comes from and how it should be corrected.

This is where liberalism can be smuggled into socialism as a gatekeeper. Once socialism is treated as anti-oppression in general, the next question becomes whose account of oppression decides what counts as left-wing. In much contemporary discourse, the answer is supplied by liberal recognition politics: identity, autonomy, subjective experience, language, inclusion, anti-discrimination, and social acknowledgement. These are not neutral categories. They come from a particular tradition, one that gives moral and political priority to the individual subject and their recognition by others.

The result is that liberalism can present itself as the moral test of the Left. A person may be socialist on labour, ownership, unions, production, surplus, public infrastructure, and the power of capital, but if they refuse liberal recognition ontology, they can be described as insufficiently left-wing or even centre-right. This gatekeeping does not operate only through formal denunciation, cancellation, or exclusion. It also operates through repulsion. Many people who might otherwise be closer to materialist socialism encounter a political culture organised around expressive individualism, identity declaration, therapeutic language, moral accusation, and elevated social-justice rhetoric, and they find it morally alienating or even repellent. They are not always rejecting solidarity, equality, or public provision. They are rejecting the demand that material politics must be conducted through a liberal moral vocabulary they do not share. This is not a serious account of socialism. It is a collapse of socialism into liberalism.

A materialist socialist starts from a different place. The question is not first “who feels excluded?” or “which identity lacks recognition?” but “what material structure produces this pattern?” How is labour organised? Who controls production? How is surplus extracted? Which institutions reproduce dependency? Which classifications track real constraints, risks, or social functions? Subjective experience may reveal a problem, but it does not by itself settle the structure of reality.

This is the central confusion the essay is concerned with. The contemporary Left often treats liberal recognition politics as though it were the essence of left-wing politics itself. But socialism is not liberalism with stronger moral language. Nor is it simply anti-oppression in general. Socialism, in the materialist sense, is a politics of labour, production, ownership, surplus, and social reproduction. If being left-wing requires accepting liberal ontology first, then socialism has already been subordinated to liberalism.

II. Why the Single Spectrum Fails

The usual left-right spectrum is not useless, but it is too crude to do the work often demanded of it. It can describe rough parliamentary alignment, historical blocs, or broad ideological association. It cannot, by itself, explain the difference between socialism, liberalism, conservatism, communism, social democracy, libertarianism, woke politics, and nationalist populism.

The problem becomes worse when the spectrum is treated as one-dimensional. Someone can be economically socialist while socially conservative. Someone can be socially liberal while economically capitalist. Someone can be anti-capitalist for liberal reasons, conservative reasons, religious reasons, ecological reasons, or socialist reasons. These positions may overlap on particular issues while remaining grounded in different theories of society.

This is why the horseshoe model is especially weak. It often amounts to saying that the further someone moves away from liberalism, the less liberal they become, and then treating this as an insight. There may be cases where far-left and far-right movements share authoritarian methods, hostility to parliamentary institutions, or suspicion of liberal pluralism. But this does not mean their political content is the same. It may only mean that both are non-liberal.

The horseshoe confuses distance from liberalism with similarity to each other. A socialist and a fascist may both reject liberal individualism, but they do not reject it for the same reasons or toward the same end. The socialist rejects liberalism where it masks class power, private ownership, exploitation, and the domination of labour by capital. The fascist rejects liberalism where it weakens hierarchy, nation, authority, inherited order, or ethnic unity. Those are not the same politics.

A better model begins with traditions rather than a single line. Socialism, liberalism, and conservatism are not merely positions on a spectrum. They are different traditions with different starting points. They can converge on policies, but convergence does not mean identity. A socialist and a liberal may both defend civil liberties, but the socialist may do so because coercive exclusion damages social participation and labour reproduction, while the liberal may do so because individual autonomy is morally primary. A socialist and a conservative may both criticise global capitalism, but the socialist may do so because capital dominates labour and extracts surplus, while the conservative may do so because markets dissolve inherited community and national continuity.

The same policy position can therefore have different political meanings depending on the tradition that grounds it. This is why it is not enough to ask whether someone supports a particular measure. The more important question is: what theory of society makes that measure intelligible?

III. Three Traditions, Not One Spectrum

The three traditions most relevant here are socialism, liberalism, and conservatism. They are not the only traditions, and each contains many internal disagreements, but they provide a better starting point than the single left-right line.

Socialism begins from the material organisation of social life. Its central concerns are labour, production, ownership, class power, surplus, social reproduction, and the institutions that organise economic dependency. Socialists disagree over whether the answer is state ownership, worker ownership, cooperative ownership, guild institutions, public planning, market socialism, democratic socialisation, or some mixture of these. But the central socialist question is not whether individuals feel recognised. It is how society organises the material conditions of its own reproduction.

Liberalism begins from the individual subject. Its central concerns are liberty, rights, autonomy, equal moral status, consent, and protection from arbitrary coercion. Liberalism can take economically right-wing forms, as in libertarian or neoliberal thought, where markets and private property are treated as expressions of liberty. It can also take socially progressive forms, where recognition, inclusion, anti-discrimination, and self-definition become central political demands. These forms can differ radically in policy, but they still share a tendency to begin from the individual as the primary moral unit.

Conservatism begins from inheritance, continuity, authority, obligation, and the fragility of social order. It is suspicious of abstract redesign and tends to give weight to existing institutions, family structures, national continuity, religious inheritance, custom, and historically embedded forms of belonging. Conservatism can be market liberal, paternalist, nationalist, religious, communitarian, or reactionary. It can criticise capitalism where capitalism dissolves inherited order, but that critique is not socialist unless it is grounded in labour, ownership, class, production, and surplus.

These traditions are not sealed containers. They interact, borrow, hybridise, and form coalitions. Social democracy often combines socialist labour politics with liberal constitutionalism and parliamentary welfare-state reform. Woke socialism combines socialist economics with recognition-liberal social ontology. Conservative anti-capitalism combines hostility to market dissolution with defence of hierarchy, nation, or tradition. neoliberal libertarianism combines liberal individualism with market absolutism. The point is not that traditions never mix. The point is that their underlying logics are not the same.

This is why the Left cannot be treated as one philosophical object. The Left is often a coalition space in which different traditions temporarily align. But when one tradition inside that coalition gains gatekeeping power, it can redefine the others. In the present case, liberal recognition politics often claims the authority to determine what is acceptably left-wing, even over socialist questions that should be settled materially.

IV. Progressiveness as a Retreat Term

The essay also needs to address progressiveness because the word often appears to solve the problem while actually preserving it. “Progressive” seems to name the forward-moving or emancipatory wing of politics. But this may hide more than it explains.

Progressiveness can mean several different things. It can mean a general preference for reform over preservation. It can mean social liberalism. It can mean the expansion of civil rights. It can mean institutional modernisation. It can mean a belief that history moves toward greater inclusion and equality. It can mean a coalition label for those who oppose conservative social policy. It can also function as a moral self-description: those on the side of progress against those who resist it.

This ambiguity makes “progressive” politically useful. When a stronger claim becomes difficult to defend, progressiveness can operate as a retreat term. The motte-and-bailey pattern is familiar. The bailey is the expansive claim: that the Left, socialism, anti-capitalism, identitarian politics, anti-oppression politics, and liberal recognition politics all belong to the same moral and political family. When challenged, that position retreats to the safer motte: that these are simply “progressive” causes. But the retreat does not solve the problem, because “progressive” is itself left undefined.

The result is a chain of false equivalences. Progressive becomes treated as left-wing; left-wing becomes treated as anti-capitalist; anti-capitalist becomes treated as socialist; socialist becomes treated as anti-oppression; anti-oppression becomes interpreted through liberal recognition politics. At each step, a more specific tradition is absorbed into a more nebulous moral label. What begins as socialism can end as social liberalism with socialist language attached.

This is why the term needs to be disaggregated. If progressive means simply “socially liberal,” then it is not identical with socialism. If it means historically necessary improvement, then it risks becoming idealist, as though the direction of history can be read off from the language of those who claim to represent progress. If it means reform that improves the material conditions of social reproduction, then it may be compatible with materialist socialism. But that compatibility has to be demonstrated materially, not assumed from the label.

Not every progressive is a socialist. Not every socialist is progressive in the liberal sense. Not every anti-capitalist is socialist. Not every change described as progressive is materially progressive. A policy or category shift should not be judged by whether it moves in the direction currently marked as progressive, but by whether it accurately tracks material reality and improves the reproduction of social life.

This matters because “progressive” often allows liberalism to appear as the natural language of the Left without having to defend itself as liberalism. It lets recognition-liberal claims present themselves as left-wing, anti-capitalist, or socialist by association. A materialist socialist should therefore be cautious with the term. Progress is not whatever moves away from conservatism. Progress is only meaningful if we can say what material condition is being improved, for whom, by what mechanism, and at what cost.

V. The Woke as Liberal, Not Socialist

Woke politics is often treated as an intensified form of left-wing politics. That is only partly true. It is better understood as an intensified form of liberal recognition politics that often sits inside the contemporary Left.

The term is contested and often used polemically, so it must be defined carefully. In this essay, woke politics does not mean simple concern for injustice. Almost every political tradition claims to oppose injustice. The disagreement is over what injustice is, where it comes from, and how it should be corrected. A conservative can oppose injustice. A liberal can oppose injustice. A socialist can oppose injustice. That does not make them the same.

Woke politics is better understood as a framework that treats identity, subjective experience, social acknowledgement, language, representation, inclusion, and anti-oppression as primary grounds of moral and institutional legitimacy. It is concerned with who is recognised, who is validated, who is included, whose language is accepted, whose identity is affirmed, and whose experience is centred.

This is why woke politics belongs more naturally to liberalism than to socialism. Its central unit is not labour, production, surplus, ownership, or social reproduction. Its central unit is the individual subject, or the identity group understood through recognition, harm, and status. It does not necessarily reject socialism, and it can be combined with socialist economics. But the woke element is not socialist in itself. It is recognition-liberal.

A woke socialist is therefore possible as a political combination. Someone can support unions, public ownership, wealth redistribution, strong welfare institutions, and worker power while also accepting recognition-liberal social ontology. But that combination is not automatically materialist. It may be socialist in economics and liberal in social philosophy.

The contradiction appears when woke politics claims to be materialist while giving epistemic priority to subjective identity, felt harm, recognition, and language. A materialist approach can take experience seriously as evidence, but it cannot allow subjective experience to become sovereign over the structure of reality. Individual experience may reveal a problem, but it cannot by itself establish the social ontology of a category or justify institutional reclassification.

This is especially important where categories track material constraints, asymmetric risks, reproductive realities, labour functions, institutional roles, or embodied capacities. Categories can change, but a materialist account must show how the underlying social and material relations have changed. It cannot simply replace material analysis with recognition claims.

The problem with woke politics is therefore not that it notices harm. The problem is that it often treats recognition of harm as sufficient to settle questions that require material analysis. This is why it can become idealist. It moves from the world of labour, production, reproduction, and institutional constraint into the world of moral language, subjective recognition, and symbolic correction.

VI. Liberal Anti-Capitalism

There is also a form of anti-capitalism that is not socialist in the materialist sense. Much modern activist anti-capitalism is best understood as liberal anti-capitalism. It objects to capitalism primarily because capitalism imposes constraints on the individual. It objects to bosses, work discipline, hierarchy, conformity, consumerism, debt, bureaucracy, and dependence on wages because these things obstruct autonomy, self-expression, authenticity, and personal flourishing.

This critique is not necessarily false. Capitalism really does constrain people. Workplaces can be degrading. Wage dependence is real. Debt can discipline life choices. Consumer culture can be hollow. But all viable social systems constrain individuals in some way. The socialist question is not whether constraint exists, but what kind of constraint it is, what structure produces it, whose power it serves, and whether it reproduces or undermines the material conditions of social life.

A materialist socialist critique begins elsewhere. It asks how labour is organised, how surplus is extracted and allocated, how productive capacity is reproduced, and whether the institutions governing the economy sustain the conditions on which society depends. The problem with free-market capitalism is not merely that it limits individual freedom. It is that it allows private accumulation, asset values, price signals, employer power, and market pressure to diverge from the requirements of labour reproduction, infrastructure, public capacity, and long-term productive stability.

This distinction matters because liberal anti-capitalism and neoliberal libertarianism can appear as opposites while sharing a liberal structure. The woke liberal anti-capitalist rejects capitalism because it frustrates autonomy, inclusion, recognition, and self-expression. The neoliberal libertarian defends capitalism because market exchange, contract, and private property are treated as expressions of individual liberty. Their policy conclusions may be radically different, but both begin from the individual as the primary unit.

The materialist socialist does not begin there. The primary question is not whether capitalism allows individuals to express themselves. The primary question is whether capitalism organises production, labour, surplus, infrastructure, and reproduction in a way that sustains social life. If it does not, then it must be disciplined, socialised, or replaced in the relevant domains.

This also clarifies the meaning of anti-capitalism. A socialist does not need to oppose every mechanism associated with capitalism: money, prices, markets, firms, risk, initiative, or decentralised production. The question is whether those mechanisms are subordinated to social reproduction or whether social reproduction is subordinated to them. Markets may coordinate some forms of production. Prices may transmit useful information. Entrepreneurial initiative may generate useful experimentation. But none of these should grant capital sovereignty over labour or allow the costs of production to be externalised onto workers, families, public institutions, and the future.

VII. The Materialist Position

The materialist socialist position developed here is not socially conservative in the ordinary sense. It is not grounded in religion, inherited hierarchy, moral nostalgia, family-order conservatism, or the preservation of tradition as an end in itself. It is small-l liberal in coexistence: people should be free from persecution, arbitrary coercion, unnecessary moral policing, and exclusion from ordinary social life.

But it is not liberal in ontology. It does not treat the individual subject as the final authority on social categories. It does not treat recognition as the foundation of reality. It does not assume that the moral status of an identity claim is enough to reorganise institutions around it. Social categories must track material structures, social functions, embodied constraints, institutional consequences, and predictive realities.

This is why the position can be socially liberal in practice while refusing recognition-liberal philosophy. A society can protect people from persecution without accepting that all social categories are constituted by self-description. It can allow wide personal freedom without rebuilding institutions around subjective identity. It can treat people with dignity without making individual recognition the organising principle of social ontology.

Economically, the position is socialist because it begins from labour, production, ownership, surplus, and social reproduction. It is not anti-market in the simplistic sense. It does not demand the abolition of every price signal, firm, contract, or private initiative. Instead, it asks what must be socialised in order to prevent market competition from degrading labour and undermining the conditions of production.

Competitive Guild Socialism gives one institutional answer. It does not require the state to own every workshop, office, factory, warehouse, or software team. Nor does it abolish capital formation, entrepreneurial risk, private initiative, market testing, or product development. It separates the useful functions of capital from the domination of labour. Capital may still invest, speculate, own commodities, develop products, and sell into markets. What it should not automatically possess is sovereign command over labour.

The central socialist task is therefore to socialise the reproduction of labour. Training, skill formation, progression, bench support, worker security, standards, reallocation, fallback employment, and the maintenance of productive capacity should not be left to the convenience of individual employers. If employers compete by degrading wages, deskilling labour, weakening safety, casualising employment, or externalising the costs of reproduction onto households and the state, then market competition becomes socially destructive.

The goal is not to abolish every market mechanism by decree. The goal is to prevent market pressure from being resolved through labour degradation. Guilds, unions, public enterprises, public infrastructure, regional banks, and strategic social control of natural monopolies all become ways to subordinate capital to the reproduction of social life.

This is one reason the usual political labels can obscure more than they explain. Many people are placed culturally outside the Left, or come to see themselves as outside it, because they do not share the assumptions of the Woke Left. Yet some of those same people may be closer to socialism than to free-market conservatism on labour, unions, public infrastructure, employer domination, national economic sovereignty, and the need to discipline capital. What moves them rightward is not necessarily a deep attachment to capitalism, but alienation from a Left that increasingly treats liberal recognition politics as the test of political belonging. Once that happens, materially socialist instincts can be misread as conservative, reactionary, or centre-right simply because they are not expressed in the approved liberal vocabulary.

VIII. Prejudice, Solidarity, and Material Equality

This raises an obvious question. If materialist socialism rejects liberal recognition politics, how should it approach racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, and other forms of prejudice? The answer cannot be that these issues are simply ignored because they are often discussed in liberal terms. But nor can it be that socialism must accept liberal relativism, identitarian ontology, or the idea that subjective recognition claims should govern institutional design.

A materialist socialist approach begins by separating private belief, social judgement, and institutional legitimacy. People do not have to believe the same things about race, nation, sex, sexuality, gender, religion, or identity. They do not have to share the same moral vocabulary. They may hold views that others find wrong, backward, unpleasant, or offensive. A socialist society cannot require everyone to possess the same inner theory of social life before they are allowed to participate in common institutions. That would not be socialism. It would be moral policing under another name.

The institutional question is different. To justify unequal treatment in law, employment, housing, public services, education, policing, healthcare, or labour organisation, a claim must be materially grounded. It must show that the distinction being made tracks a real structural difference relevant to the institution in question. If that cannot be shown, then the distinction has no legitimate place in legislation or public administration, whatever private opinions people may hold.

This applies directly to race and ethnicity. A person may believe, for example, that the original people of a nation have some deeper or prior claim to belonging. That belief may be culturally powerful, emotionally sincere, or historically understandable in particular contexts. But unless it can be translated into a materially valid institutional claim, it cannot justify different worker rights, different legal protections, different access to public services, or different treatment under common law. Once a person is legally present within the country, participating in the labour force, paying taxes, raising children, using institutions, and contributing to the reproduction of society, they are part of the social system that socialism must organise.

The same principle applies to sexuality. A person does not need to hold a liberal theory of sexual identity in order to accept that gay workers, lesbian workers, and bisexual workers are members of the same labour force and the same civic order. Unless a restriction can be justified by a real material harm, not by disgust, religious objection, inherited stigma, or cultural discomfort, it has no place in socialist institutional design. The socialist reason for opposing discrimination is not that every identity claim must be affirmed in liberal terms. It is that arbitrary exclusion fractures the social body, weakens common institutions, and allows sections of the workforce to be degraded.

Sexism can be approached in the same way. A materialist account can recognise that biological sex, reproductive asymmetry, violence distributions, care burdens, and embodied vulnerability may matter in particular institutional contexts. But recognising material difference is not the same as licensing subordination. Where sex does not materially justify differential treatment, exclusion is simply domination. Where sex does matter, the task is to design institutions around the actual constraint, not to convert statistical difference into a general hierarchy of worth, capacity, or social authority.

Trans questions require the same discipline. A materialist socialist does not need to accept every claim made by liberal gender theory in order to oppose harassment, exclusion from work, arbitrary cruelty, or civic degradation. A trans worker is still a worker. A trans tenant is still a tenant. A trans patient is still a patient. A trans citizen or legal resident is still part of the social order. In ordinary civic and economic life, the socialist position should be straightforward: people should not be denied work, housing, healthcare, safety, or basic participation because others dislike or reject their self-understanding. At the same time, this does not mean that every institutional category must be re-grounded around identity. Where sex, risk, safeguarding, medicine, or embodied capacity remain materially relevant, the category question has to be settled by the structure of the institution and the evidence it must track.

This is the distinction liberal recognition politics often fails to preserve. It moves too quickly from dignity to ontology, and from protection from mistreatment to institutional reclassification. A materialist socialist approach should not do that. It can defend people against cruelty, exclusion, and degradation without treating subjective identity as sovereign over institutional reality. The relevant question is not whether a person’s self-description is morally meaningful to them. It is whether a proposed institutional change tracks the material function the institution has to perform.

The labour point is central. If one section of the workforce can be degraded, capital will use that degradation against the rest. If migrant workers can be paid less, made more insecure, housed more badly, threatened more easily, or denied ordinary protections, then they become a lever against domestic workers. If women’s work can be treated as naturally cheaper, more flexible, or less skilled, then the whole structure of labour reproduction is weakened. If gay, trans, racialised, or otherwise marginalised workers can be pushed into insecurity, informality, or dependence, then capital gains another route through which labour standards can be lowered.

This is why equal labour protection is not sentimental moralism. It is a material necessity. A divided workforce is easier to discipline. A workforce split by race, nationality, sex, sexuality, or gender status gives capital multiple surfaces on which to apply pressure. The socialist answer is not to demand that every worker adopt the same liberal theory of identity, but to insist that every worker inside the labour system receives the same protection against exploitation, insecurity, arbitrary dismissal, unsafe conditions, and institutional degradation.

This may lack the elevated moral rhetoric of the Woke Left, but it has a stronger material foundation. It does not say that every person must understand every other person in exactly the way they understand themselves. It says that people who share a society, a workplace, a public infrastructure, and a system of reproduction have material reasons to maintain common protections. They may disagree deeply about culture, identity, religion, sex, gender, nation, or morality. But they cannot allow those disagreements to become routes through which capital fragments the workforce and weakens the conditions of everyone’s life.

The materialist socialist position is therefore neither liberal relativism nor social reaction. It does not require the state to validate every identity claim as ontology, but it also does not permit prejudice to become institutional licence. The rule is simple: where a distinction has material relevance, specify it; where it does not, it cannot justify unequal treatment. Workers do not need to share a metaphysics in order to share a struggle. They need institutions that prevent their differences from being turned into weapons against them.

IX. The Rise of Reform

The consequences of this confusion are not merely theoretical. They are visible in the political space now occupied by Reform.

Reform is not a socialist party. It belongs to the Conservative tradition, and more specifically to the right-populist or radical-right current within it. Its politics centre national identity, immigration control, anti-woke backlash, law and order, hostility to net zero, and distrust of established institutions. But this requires a careful distinction. Nationalism cannot simply be used as a shorthand for racism, xenophobia, militarism, or fascism. There are civic, democratic, and sovereignty-based nationalisms, including forms compatible with social democracy, constitutional self-government, or anti-imperial politics. The problem is not national sovereignty as such. The problem is when national politics is organised through scapegoating, ethnic exclusion, authoritarianism, militarised identity, or racialised blame. Reform matters here because it borrows fragments of material language: broken public services, betrayed communities, national decline, economic insecurity, and the failure of the political class. The result is a party that can sound more materially grounded than the official Left while offering no serious socialist restructuring of labour, ownership, surplus, infrastructure, or productive capacity.

This is why Reform matters for the argument of this essay. Its rise exposes a vacancy. There are many people whose grievances are closer to materialist socialism than to free-market conservatism, even if they do not express those grievances in ideologically rigorous terms. They experience low wages, insecure work, housing pressure, degraded public services, regional decline, loss of control, and institutional contempt. But if the Left presents itself primarily through liberal recognition politics, and if socialism is recoded as anti-oppression in a recognition-liberal sense, those people are easily cast as backward, bigoted, or centre-right before their material position is even analysed. Even where no one is formally excluded, the effect can be the same: the cultural form of the Left becomes repellent before its economic content is heard.

Reform then offers them a home. It does not offer socialism. It offers a conservative-populist translation of material grievance. Some of the bigotry is sincerely believed; some of it functions politically as defiance, a way of raising two fingers at a liberal-progressive class that many people experience as morally superior, institutionally powerful, and materially indifferent. But either way, the political mechanism is the same: material alienation is captured by the Conservative tradition because the Left has allowed liberalism to police the boundaries of socialist legitimacy.

This is why the claim that criticism of woke politics “feeds the far right” is inadequate. The opposite is closer to the truth. What feeds the far right is not a materialist critique of woke politics, but the absence of a credible anti-neoliberal, non-woke socialist alternative. When liberal recognition politics becomes the moral language of the Left, opposition to that language is pushed outward into conservative and reactionary forms. The far right then gets to present itself as the only force willing to reject liberal cultural authority, while borrowing just enough economic rhetoric to appear responsive to material decline.

Labour cannot solve this by trying to out-Reform Reform. If Labour keeps neoliberal economics while abandoning liberal progressivism, it simply becomes a weaker version of the Conservative Party after the Conservative Party has already failed. Nor do the Greens fully occupy the vacant space. They challenge neoliberal economics more directly, but remain tied to the liberal-progressive cultural formation that many alienated voters also reject. The missing position is anti-neoliberal without being fascistic, materially socialist without being recognition-liberal, and small-l liberal in coexistence without accepting liberal ontology.

That vacant position — anti-neoliberal, materially socialist, non-woke, and non-fascistic — is the political space this essay is trying to name.

The task is not to become socially conservative. Nor is it to excuse bigotry because some of it is attached to real material grievance. The task is to rebuild a materialist socialism capable of addressing those grievances before they are captured by the Conservative tradition. A socialist politics must be able to say: your wages, housing, public services, working conditions, training, infrastructure, and institutional power matter; but the answer is not xenophobic scapegoating, racialised blame, militarised identity, or authoritarian social policy. National sovereignty may be necessary for democratic control over production, infrastructure, borders, public finance, and social reproduction. But nationalism becomes destructive when it converts material grievance into ethnic suspicion or treats the nation as a substitute for class analysis. The answer is to socialise the conditions of labour and reproduction, discipline capital, rebuild public capacity, and refuse both neoliberalism and liberal recognition politics as substitutes for socialism.

X. Conclusion: Recovering the Materialist Left

The central claim of this essay is not that socialists should become conservative, nor that every form of social liberalism is incompatible with socialism. The claim is that socialism cannot be made dependent on liberal ontology without ceasing to be socialism in the materialist sense.

The Left has become an unstable coalition held together by opposition to the Right. Within that coalition, liberal recognition politics has often claimed the authority to decide who counts as properly left-wing. This produces a serious distortion. A person can be socialist on labour, ownership, production, surplus, unions, infrastructure, and capital, yet be treated as politically suspect because they do not accept liberal accounts of identity, recognition, and category formation.

This is not a defence of reaction. It is a defence of socialism as its own tradition. Materialist socialism begins from the reproduction of social life. It asks how labour is organised, how surplus is extracted, how institutions classify people, how public capacity is built or destroyed, how capital dominates production, and how society maintains the conditions on which it depends. It can support civil liberty, tolerance, and protection from persecution, but it does not derive its ontology from individual self-definition or recognition claims.

This argument would need revision if liberal recognition politics could be shown to strengthen socialist organisation without displacing material analysis, without alienating materially aligned constituencies, and without re-grounding socialist categories in individual recognition claims. The claim is not that collaboration with liberals is impossible, nor that socially liberal reforms are inherently anti-socialist. The claim is that socialism becomes incoherent when liberal ontology is allowed to define its categories, boundaries, and tests of legitimacy.

The future of the Left cannot depend on forcing socialism to pass through liberalism before it is allowed to speak. If the only alternatives offered are neoliberal liberalism, woke liberalism, and conservative populism, then materialist socialism will remain politically homeless. The task is to recover it as its own tradition: socialist in economics, materialist in method, small-l liberal in coexistence, and unwilling to let either liberalism or conservatism define the limits of the possible.

Author’s Note

This essay is not intended as an attempt to fracture the Left. The purpose is almost the opposite: to clarify the terms on which people can participate in, support, and work toward a socialist agenda without being alienated by a political culture that treats liberal recognition politics as the necessary language of socialism itself.

Where socialist and liberal interests align, collaboration is both possible and necessary. There are many areas where socialists, liberals, trade unionists, social democrats, and others may find common cause. But collaboration is not the same as surrendering the language, assumptions, and boundaries of a socialist movement to liberalism. A socialist movement should be able to work with liberals without allowing liberals to define what socialism is, what counts as left-wing, or which forms of disagreement are permitted inside the socialist tradition.

There is an obvious limitation in writing essays of this kind while not currently organising or participating heavily in the wider political argument on social media. These articles are written alongside a full-time job and other interests. They are not a substitute for organising, institution-building, or practical political work, and I do not present them as such. I have tried to involve myself in political organising in the past, did not get very far, and have very little appetite for the daily churn of Twitter-style debate.

That said, I do not think writing is therefore pointless. These articles are essays: attempts to clarify ideas, test arguments, and develop a more coherent socialist position. If they are useful, then good. If they are not, then I have at least found value in developing them. If someone is irritated by another person writing down their opinions in a space they are not forced to enter, then I suspect they would find reading books unbearable.