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I have no particular desire to defend Woke 1.0. Most of it was stupid. The obsessive policing of language, the public denunciations, the elevation of disagreement into harm, the endless effort to sort people into ever more exact categories of victim and oppressor. At its worst, politics became a test of personal virtue conducted through terminology. A badly phrased sentence could generate more fury than somebody’s position on wages, housing or ownership. I thought much of this was politically useless at the time and I have not since discovered a reason to change my mind.

There are therefore parts of Lee Siegel’s essay in the New Statesman that I recognise. He is right that there has been no proper accounting for that period. The left has mostly preferred to move on, often quietly dropping positions that only a few years earlier were treated as moral tests. “Defund the police” is the obvious example. There are others. What is less convincing is what Siegel does after making that point. Having defined Woke 1.0 as a politics of race, gender, policing and cancellation, he discovers that its successor is apparently a politics of rent, healthcare, taxation and inequality. He calls this Woke 2.0, which is useful only if the word woke is now allowed to mean almost anything.

The phrase he is responding to, “Woke 1 was crazy”, was borrowed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York councillor Chi Ossé. AOC was talking about the atmosphere around Covid and about positions associated with the progressive left during that period, including defunding the police. Her wider point was more qualified than Siegel allows. Some of those discussions mattered. Some of the conclusions did not survive contact with politics outside activist circles. That is hardly unusual. Movements overshoot, slogans collapse, arguments which sound compelling inside a particular milieu turn out to have very little purchase elsewhere.

Chi Ossé@OsseChi

Woke 1 WAS crazyyyy, Madame President

Chi Ossé @OsseChi

@billiceberg Woke 1 was crazyyyy

2:46 PM · Aug 9, 2026 · 7.11M Views

603 Replies · 678 Reposts · 15K Likes

A good deal of what came to be called woke politics replaced an examination of power with the administration of identity. Representation became confused with redistribution. Institutions discovered that the language could be learned very quickly because adopting it often cost them almost nothing. Universities could recruit another diversity officer. Banks could change their branding. Employers could encourage people to place pronouns in their email signatures without giving up an inch of managerial authority. A company could become considerably more sophisticated in the language it used about inequality while remaining exactly as unequal in the distribution of power between those who owned it and those who worked for it.

PoliticallyAnnoyed@MillieOfferman

@OsseChi What's crazy is that the "journalist" did not pin her down on what this meant, nor her role in it.

3:51 AM · Aug 10, 2026 · 803 Views

1 Reply · 1 Repost · 20 Likes

That was always one of the Marxist criticisms of this politics, which makes Siegel’s next move particularly odd. He treats the return of material questions as evidence that the same disease has simply changed form. Zohran Mamdani speaks about rent, buses, grocery prices and inequality, but for Siegel this is somehow the old politics transposed from race into economics. The term “systemic inequality” particularly irritates him, as though attaching the word systemic to economic inequality is merely a linguistic inheritance from “systemic racism”.

But economic inequality really is systemic. A tenant handing half of their wages to a landlord is not suffering from an excessively sensitive sense of self. Somebody unable to afford medical treatment does not need lessons in psychological resilience. A worker whose pay has stagnated while company profits rise is not describing an identity problem. These are relationships between people, property, institutions and money. They are not abstractions simply because somebody has used the word class to describe them.

Siegel almost reaches this conclusion himself. One of the better sections in his essay describes an American society in which almost every aspect of life has been monetised, competition has intensified and people are left with the constant sense that they are falling behind. There is a serious explanation of contemporary politics available from that starting point. The difficulty is that he turns away from it. Instead of asking what happens politically when people have fewer collective institutions through which to act on those pressures, he retreats into a story about psychic fragility.

The politics called woke did not emerge because millions of Americans suddenly became unstable. It emerged inside a society in which trade unions had been weakened, working-class institutions had declined and the organised socialist left remained marginal, while universities expanded, professional employment grew, human-resources bureaucracies became more powerful and social media created a new arena in which political identity could be displayed and rewarded. Grievances remained, but the places in which they were expressed changed. Culture became one of the main terrains on which political conflict was fought because changing culture often looked more achievable than changing property relations.

This is also where Anton Jäger’s idea of hyperpolitics becomes useful. When I reviewed his book, what struck me was the distinction between political intensity and political power. We live in an extraordinarily politicised culture, but one increasingly detached from the organisations that once gave politics weight. The mass party, the trade union and much of the associational infrastructure of working-class politics have declined, while political argument itself is everywhere. People spend hours fighting about politics online without belonging to anything capable of changing very much. Jäger calls this “extreme politicisation without political consequences”. It is mass mobilisation without mass organisation, a politics of heads increasingly detached from bodies.

That helps explain both Woke 1.0 and what has followed it. The extraordinary intensity of arguments about language, identity and representation took place alongside the weakness of institutions capable of challenging ownership or reorganising economic power. Politics became easier to perform because it had become harder to practise. The transition from the Twitter pile-on to the political streamer does not necessarily represent an escape from that condition. Hasan Piker may speak far more about class, imperialism and capitalism than the corporate diversity politics of a decade ago, but his enormous audience still belongs to the world Jäger describes: permanently mobilised, highly political and organised primarily around a personality and a platform rather than an institution capable of exercising collective power.

This also complicates the comparison with Nick Fuentes. Both are creatures of hyperpolitics, though their politics are radically different. Their power comes partly from the decomposition of older political organisations. They can gather enormous audiences, turn politics into something close to a daily lived identity and exercise influence over politicians without having to construct the slow, difficult institutions that mass politics once required. The danger on the left is that visibility starts to look like organisation and audience size starts to look like power. They are not the same thing.

It also helps explain some of the intensity of those years. If you cannot alter who owns the workplace, you can argue about the language used inside it. If reorganising economic power seems beyond reach, you can reorganise the training programme. If the structure appears immovable, individual behaviour becomes the thing that can still be corrected. Social media made all this worse because it rewarded conflict, accusation and certainty. Siegel’s sequence of exposure, investigation, accusation, condemnation and cancellation is recognisable enough, but it was not simply a moral pathology. It was perfectly suited to platforms whose business model depended on keeping people angry and watching.

There was something deeply compatible with neoliberalism in all this. The individual remained the centre of political life: your identity, your trauma, your language, your public moral standing. Even virtue could become a form of competitive capital. You accumulated it, displayed it and used it against others. That was one of the stranger features of a politics which often imagined itself as anti-capitalist while reproducing the culture of personal branding and competition that capitalism had already imposed elsewhere.

None of this means the problems attached to that politics were invented by it. Racism did not disappear because corporate diversity programmes became ridiculous. Police violence did not become unimportant because “defund the police” was a bad slogan. Women did not achieve equality because some elements of #MeToo became punitive. Trans people did not cease to encounter discrimination because parts of trans politics became doctrinaire. The mistake was not to address those questions. It was to imagine that language, representation and individual conduct could carry a political weight they were incapable of bearing.

Nor does the answer lie in declaring that only class matters. That would merely reproduce the same flattening in the opposite direction. A material politics has to understand how class, race and gender operate together without turning politics into the management of identities. The useful question is not which category should take precedence in every argument but where power sits, how it is exercised and what institutions reproduce it.

Siegel’s treatment of Mamdani shows what happens when that distinction is lost. He complains that Mamdani has not delivered much of his programme and then attributes New York’s soaring rents and shortage of apartments to the rent freeze secured by his administration. The problem is fairly obvious. The newly approved freeze applies to rent-stabilised leases beginning on 1 October 2026. It cannot plausibly have produced conditions already visible in August. There may be serious arguments against rent controls. There are certainly serious arguments about supply, construction, landlord incentives, planning and public housing. But Siegel wants the consequences in advance because he needs Mamdani to illustrate the irrationality of Woke 2.0.

The city-backed grocery programme gets similar treatment. It appears among Mamdani’s broken promises as though the failure of a multi-year policy can be declared after a matter of months. You can think the proposal is weak, expensive or beside the point. You can argue that a handful of city-backed shops will do very little against the structure of food pricing in New York. That would at least be an argument about the policy itself. Siegel instead turns incomplete implementation into evidence of ideological futility.

What seems to trouble him more than any particular programme is that parts of the American left have started talking again about landlords, billionaires, corporate power, healthcare costs and the distribution of wealth. America has not become socialist. Mamdani’s programme would barely qualify as radical social democracy in much of Europe. Siegel knows this and mocks Americans for calling things such as universal pre-kindergarten socialism. Fair enough. But this makes it harder to understand how the same programme can simultaneously be evidence of a new and dangerous phase of woke radicalism.

The difference from Woke 1.0 is not difficult to see. Corporations proved perfectly capable of accommodating a large amount of progressive language. Amazon can celebrate diversity. Banks can mark Pride month. Universities can hire more administrators. None of this necessarily interferes with ownership or profit. A politics concerned with rents, wages, taxation and public provision is more awkward because it begins asking who gets what and, eventually, who owns what. The answers can still be bad. Policies justified in the language of equality can be clumsy or counterproductive. Democratic socialists are quite capable of stupidity. But that is different from saying that the return of economic politics is simply another manifestation of woke psychology.

Piker is where Siegel’s argument becomes more interesting, because here something closer to Woke 2.0 really can be seen. Not in Mamdani talking about rents or billionaires, but in the political culture that has grown around Piker himself. The language has changed. Much of the corporate DEI vocabulary has gone, class has returned, Palestine and imperialism occupy far more space, and the politics is considerably more hostile to the Democratic establishment. Yet some of the habits remain familiar: moral absolutism, denunciation, the treatment of disagreement as evidence of corruption, and the constant pressure to prove authenticity by saying what respectable politics considers unsayable.

Piker is often described as a Marxist, although his politics are also recognisably campist. That matters. Campism divides international politics into hostile blocs and tends to judge states and movements according to which side of the confrontation they occupy. In its contemporary left form, American power and its allies become the principal imperialist camp, while governments and movements opposing them are granted a degree of indulgence that their internal politics would not otherwise earn. This is how somebody can be rhetorically ferocious about American capitalism and imperialism while becoming markedly more relaxed about authoritarianism when it appears under the flags of China, Russia or movements positioned against the United States.

There is an older political tradition at work here as well. Piker’s admiration for Mao and his willingness to play with Maoist imagery sit awkwardly alongside attempts to present him as simply another democratic socialist broadcaster. I would hesitate to call him a Maoist in any strict sense, because that is a specific ideological tradition and not a label he appears to claim. But the fascination is real enough, and it feeds into a broader tendency to treat authoritarian communism with a kind of indulgence that would be unthinkable if the same forms of repression appeared on the right.

This is where the comparison with Nick Fuentes becomes useful, although not because the two men believe the same things. Fuentes is a white nationalist and antisemite. Piker comes from the socialist left. What they increasingly share is a political form produced by the same online world: hours of streaming in which ideology, grievance, entertainment and personality merge together, where crossing a line becomes evidence of authenticity and where an enormous audience can make politicians reluctant to keep their distance. Fuentes has done this on the far right. Piker is increasingly doing something similar on the left.

That does not make Piker the inevitable destination of everything called woke. It does suggest where one strand of that politics could lead. Woke 1.0 trained people to experience politics through moral identity and public denunciation, while social media rewarded those who could turn that moral certainty into spectacle. Piker has stripped away much of the therapeutic language, added class, anti-imperialism and an older campist tradition, and made the whole thing considerably more aggressive. The subject matter has changed, but some of the political machinery has survived.

That makes Siegel’s mistake clearer. He is looking for Woke 2.0 in Mamdani’s economic programme when the more interesting development lies elsewhere. The return of class politics is not itself the problem. The problem comes when class politics inherits the habits of the culture it was supposed to replace.

James Lindsay, anti-Communist@ConceptualJames

Woke 2.0 is coming. It's starting already. Rather than foregrounding identity politics, it will push: 1) Affordability (Marxist materialism); 2) Anti-corruption (ironic but an excuse to go after Trump); 3) Anti-Israel (pro-Palestine). It will be warm to political violence.

2:15 AM · Jul 2, 2026 · 947K Views

846 Replies · 1.23K Reposts · 6.9K Likes

There is a legitimate point here about the way the online left and MAGA exist inside the same attention economy. Both can reward certainty, humiliation and aggression. The platforms themselves are indifferent to ideology as long as conflict continues. But similarity of form does not erase political content. A movement arguing for cheaper healthcare does not become equivalent to a movement demanding mass deportations because supporters of both behave badly online. Tenant organising does not become ethnonationalism with a different logo because each can produce angry people.

By the end of Siegel’s essay the argument has almost inverted itself. He begins by criticising woke politics for abandoning material reality in favour of feelings and ends by treating the return of material politics as another psychological disturbance. That leaves him unable to distinguish between a politics of symbolic recognition and one concerned with distribution, ownership and economic power. Piker complicates that distinction rather than destroying it. He shows that a politics can return to material questions while carrying over some of the worst political habits of the previous era. That is a more serious problem than pretending a rent freeze is simply DEI by another name.

There is a reckoning to be had with Woke 1.0. Parts of it were politically destructive, parts were absurd and some of its habits have not gone away. The left should be capable of saying so without pretending that every concern which became entangled with that politics was false. It should also be capable of recognising that the alternative to corporate identity politics is not a return to campism, Mao nostalgia or the online politics of transgression.

If politics is moving back towards rent, wages, healthcare and ownership, that matters. It may be one of the better developments on the American left in years. The danger is not that these questions are woke. It is that some of the people now asking them have carried the old culture of denunciation and moral certainty into a politics that believes itself to have moved beyond it.

Class Politics Is Not Woke 2.0

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