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Josh Howie@joshxhowie

The principle failure of leftism (wokeism, regressive progressive, whichever term you prefer) aren't the bad ideas. There are plenty to be found in any ideology. It's that when faced with new or contradictory information, it totally lacks the ability to adapt, retract, or

1:40 PM · Aug 21, 2026 · 1.15K Views

9 Replies · 14 Reposts · 53 Likes

The standard right-wing account of woke politics is that it cannot admit error. Josh Howie put the case neatly this week: confronted with new or contradictory information, “leftism” lacks the capacity to retract or reappraise and can only deny or double down. A reply from the account Stand Up To Marxism supplied the theoretical gloss. “Critical Social Justice”, it claimed, operates through a closed epistemic loop in which contrary evidence becomes further proof of oppression. There is a familiar caricature here. A varied collection of arguments about race, gender and power is turned into a single doctrine, which is then accused of treating Western knowledge as intrinsically fraudulent. But the more interesting problem with the argument is that Aaron Bastani has just done precisely what it says someone formed by this politics cannot do.

Bastani reconsidered his treatment of Jason Arday, admitted that calling him a “conman” had been wrong and apologised. His formulation was unusually stark: he had erred professionally, but ethically had “really screwed up”. It is difficult to square that with the claim that the contemporary left is structurally incapable of processing disconfirming evidence. Yet the argument did not finish when Bastani acknowledged his error. Instead, the error itself became something to be interpreted. The question moved from whether he had been wrong to what kind of social or racial position might explain why he had been wrong.

Aaron Bastani@AaronBastani

Watch this presentation by Jason Arday at UCL. He says nothing for over 40 minutes. It's genuinely impressive to talk for so long and say nothing. This isn't someone who was over-promoted - you can still be smart and have that happen. This is a conman. youtu.be/2S8JUO3M_04

12:41 PM · Aug 7, 2026 · 2.21M Views

625 Replies · 566 Reposts · 6.09K Likes

Nafeez Ahmed’s long response to Bastani makes the distinction unusually clear. Ahmed watched the UCL lecture Bastani had circulated as evidence that Arday could speak for forty minutes while saying “nothing”. He did not pretend it was a masterpiece. Arday was repetitive, discursive and jargon-heavy, while some empirical claims were asserted rather than established. But he was plainly saying things. He discussed racial inequalities in universities, the construction of curricula, academic hierarchy, awarding gaps and the relationship between participation and institutional racism. One can reject those arguments, but their existence is not seriously disputable.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed@NafeezAhmed

I watched the Jason Arday lecture Aaron Bastani repeatedly circulated to 1.4 million people as supposed proof that Arday was a “conman” – someone who, he said, could speak for more than 40 minutes while saying “nothing”. That is an extraordinary characterisation of what is

Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani

2:47 PM · Aug 17, 2026 · 333K Views

246 Replies · 612 Reposts · 2.82K Likes

Ahmed therefore had a good evidential case against Bastani’s language. A weak or meandering lecture does not demonstrate fraud, and there is a substantial difference between saying that an academic argument is poor and calling its author a con artist. That should have been enough to establish the point. Ahmed then made another move, however, describing what Bastani possessed not as evidence but as “his own racist contempt for Arday’s performance”. The argument had travelled from the adequacy of Bastani’s judgement to an explanation of the judgement through racial motivation.

Maryam Aldossari pushed the same logic further when she described Bastani’s refusal to stop arguing as an expression of “white privilege”. Bastani replied by pointing out the awkwardness of assigning this category to someone of Iranian background who had been assaulted by a fascist and told to “go back to Iran”. The exchange became almost perfectly recursive. A dispute about Arday’s academic record became an argument about Bastani’s criticism, which became an argument about the racial position from which Bastani had criticised him, which then required Bastani to invoke his own experience of racism in response. Biography entered the disagreement as evidence.

There is a temptation to treat this simply as another example of identity politics disappearing into absurdity, but that would miss what is interesting about it. Evidence remained central throughout. Ahmed actually examined the lecture, made concessions and produced reasons for thinking Bastani’s allegation excessive. Bastani then retracted the most serious language he had used. The problem was not that nobody could change their mind. It emerged after the ordinary work of argument had already taken place, when error itself became something that demanded social diagnosis.

Aaron Bastani@AaronBastani

Yes, it was white privilege when a fascist punched me on my street. And when I get told to ‘go back to Iran’. Presumably my auntie was also experiencing it while being bombed over the Summer. I’ve already admitted that language was unwise. What you really want is to ignore

Maryam Aldossari @maryam_dh

The pure definition of entitlement and white privilege is refusing to know when to stop. You’d earn far more respect by simply admitting that calling Arday a “conman” was a bad judgment call, rather than doubling down and embarrassing yourself further.

8:25 PM · Aug 17, 2026 · 112K Views

87 Replies · 9 Reposts · 471 Likes

Aaron Bastani@AaronBastani

You can’t just say you disagree anymore with some people, it has to be racialised. Which given I’m not white European is a minor inconvenience…

8:26 PM · Aug 17, 2026 · 16.1K Views

28 Replies · 1 Repost · 161 Likes

This matters because parts of the left are now attempting to move beyond the politics associated with the last decade. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent remark that “Woke 1.0 was crazy” attracted attention because it articulated a shift already under way. She did not need to define Woke 1.0 very precisely. The reference was understood: the political culture around 2020 in which arguments over race, gender, policing, language and representation acquired a peculiar moral intensity, and in which the identity of the speaker could become inseparable from the truth or legitimacy of what was being said.

AOC’s remark was not a conversion to anti-woke politics. Nor is the retreat from some of that language confined to America. In Britain, parts of the left are talking again about class, economic power and working-class solidarity. Novara itself has participated in this shift. The problem is that a political vocabulary can become embarrassing long before the habits of thought organised through it disappear. The left may be changing the nouns while keeping the grammar.

This is clearest in the new language of class. Working-class people, we are repeatedly told, have not been listened to. Their concerns have been dismissed, their attachment to place misunderstood and their values treated with contempt by graduates and metropolitan professionals. Politics needs more working-class voices, more politicians who understand ordinary life and fewer people telling workers that their concerns are illegitimate. Much of this is defensible, but the structure of the claim ought to sound familiar. A constituency has been marginalised, its experience carries a particular authority, and politics should recognise that experience more adequately.

Class begins to operate as another identity.

The problem is not terminological. Marxism never assigned a special political importance to workers because their lives were more authentic or because bourgeois society failed to listen to them respectfully enough. Class described a relationship. Workers depended upon selling their labour to those who controlled capital, and that dependence contained a potential power because labour could also be withheld. The interesting question was therefore not whether workers were correctly represented but whether the leverage inherent in their position could be converted into collective power.

Much of the contemporary return to class has almost lost this distinction. “Working class” increasingly describes a recognisable cultural type: non-graduate, provincial, patriotic, sceptical of immigration, distant from metropolitan liberalism. It is possible to possess nearly all these characteristics while owning a successful business. It is equally possible to possess almost none of them while working for wages in a hospital, school, distribution hub or railway depot. The category increasingly tells us what sort of person somebody is supposed to be rather than what relation they occupy within capitalism.

The phrase “white working class” makes the transformation particularly visible. It functions less as a description of a relation to capital than as the name of a cultural and electoral population. A Romanian warehouse worker and an English colleague might work the same shift, under the same supervisor, for the same employer. Yet contemporary politics can describe the Romanian as a pressure upon the English working class rather than as part of it. The class relation has not vanished materially. It has been overridden politically by a different classification.

The right has proved especially adept at this manoeuvre. Reform and the harder currents around it can acknowledge economic insecurity while detaching it from ownership. The millionaire businessman and the warehouse worker become members of the same national community, while the migrant working next to him appears as an outsider. What was once an antagonism between labour and capital is redirected laterally, towards a division inside labour itself.

This is why considerable wealth poses no obstacle to somebody presenting himself as the voice of working-class Britain. Authenticity no longer derives from material position. It is performed through recognition: saying the right things about immigration, patriotism, crime, social change and the elites who supposedly despise ordinary people. The representative demonstrates that he understands the authentic population and is recognised by that population in return.

John Galt@BristolGalt

We need a British worker’s union that is willing to stand up these companies that are importing cheap labour. They are undercutting the native workforce. Eventually, most jobs will become minimum wage. We need strikes, walkouts, protests, occupations and boycotts of any

John Galt @BristolGalt

I live in an 82% White area (officially) but the amount of foreigners in the last few years has doubled. I went to Tescos earlier and the staff was roughly 75% brown, 23% back with a single White girl making up the 2%. Boris Johnson stands shoulder to shoulder with Tony Blair

8:09 AM · Aug 23, 2026 · 892 Views

4 Replies · 6 Reposts · 39 Likes

The left risks answering this with a more sympathetic version of the same political form. “Listen to the working class” sounds like a return to class politics, but it may simply reproduce the representational logic of the politics it claims to replace. The worker becomes a bearer of lived experience whose authority outsiders should respect. University education, professional employment or metropolitan residence can then begin to function much like other forms of privilege, explaining not only why someone disagrees with a working-class political claim but why they are unable properly to understand it.

The similarity to the Bastani dispute should be apparent. In the Arday argument, the question shifts from whether Bastani made an unjustified claim to what his racial position explains about the mistake. In the emerging class politics, the same movement can run through educational background, geography or social status. Someone does not merely misunderstand a political argument; the misunderstanding becomes evidence of their distance from the experience being discussed.

That is not materialism. It is an epistemology of social position into which class has been inserted.

The right has already shown how flexible this form can be. Its opposition to identity politics has never amounted to opposition to organising politics around identity. Native identity, national identity, Christian identity and increasingly a culturally defined working-class identity are all mobilised through stories of recognition withheld, voices silenced and legitimate grievances dismissed. The complaint was never really against identity as such. It concerned which identities had been authorised to make claims.

The left cannot escape this simply by changing the authorised identity. Greater working-class representation in Parliament might be desirable, as might a media less dominated by a narrow professional stratum, but neither constitutes class power. More regional accents on television do not alter ownership. A politician raised on a council estate can administer policies favourable to capital as effectively as somebody educated at Eton. Representation and power occasionally coincide, but they are not the same thing.

This is where the post-woke turn becomes more interesting than the familiar argument that the left should “get back to class”. There is no culturally authentic working class waiting to be recovered once progressive elites learn to listen. The working class consists of people who differ enormously in nationality, education, religion, politics and cultural outlook. Many of them do not think of themselves primarily in class terms at all. Their potential unity cannot be read from an opinion poll or inferred from a shared identity because it has to be produced politically from material relations that do not automatically generate solidarity.

Class politics therefore asks a different sort of question from the politics of recognition. It asks not only what workers think but what they can do, where their leverage lies, what institutions might allow scattered struggles to reinforce one another and how divisions within labour might be overcome. A focus group can tell a party strategist what a warehouse worker thinks about immigration. It cannot tell us how that worker and the migrant beside him might acquire enough collective power to force their employer to increase wages.

The distinction is especially important because the language of authenticity can obscure disagreements within the working class itself. There is no single “working-class view” of immigration, trans rights, Palestine, taxation or anything else. To pretend otherwise is to turn an analytical category into a cultural mythology. It also hands enormous power to whoever gets to decide which workers are sufficiently representative to speak on behalf of the rest.

The Bastani episode is therefore more than another unpleasant argument on X. It catches a political form at the moment when parts of the left are beginning to question it. Bastani admits an error but resists the attempt to explain that error through racial identity. Ahmed demonstrates why Bastani’s claim was excessive and then moves from criticism to a theory of racial motivation. Aldossari invokes white privilege, and Bastani answers through his own racialised biography. Everyone remains inside a language they are also beginning, in different ways, to find constraining.

AOC’s “Woke 1.0 was crazy” does not resolve that problem. The language of 2020 can disappear while the political procedure survives. The coming Woke 2.0 may talk less about privilege and more about wages, less about marginalised identities and more about working-class communities. It may sound more material and recover arguments that the left should never have neglected. But if class is treated primarily as another standpoint from which authentic experience is spoken, little has changed beneath the surface.

The left would then have succeeded in rediscovering class only after forgetting what made class politically distinctive. Workers matter to socialism not because their identity deserves a privileged place in public discourse but because their relation to capital contains capacities that can be organised collectively. Without that organisation, “the working class” is simply another population to be surveyed, represented and spoken for.

The irony would be off the scale. The left could congratulate itself on moving beyond identity politics while completing the transformation of class into an identity. Woke 1.0 would be dead, its terminology increasingly embarrassing and its rituals publicly disowned, while the political grammar it established carried on under a new name. The working class would have returned, not as a force capable of acting upon society, but as the last identity waiting to be recognised.

The Last Identity

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