The Fall of the Woke Left
Saoirse Éireann Ní Bhaoighealláin
I first realised there was something deeply wrong with the Left in 2023 when I found myself getting punched in the face by some bored teenager. The following day the Sandwith Street asylum seeker camp would be burned to the ground. At the counter-protest before the fire, I came to the worrying realisation that the far right agitators were making a good point: the protestors were from Pearse Street, the counter-protests were not. I knew a few were from the Liberties, a couple of computer programmers were from gentrified Smithfield and of course there were the Phibsborough squatters but that was about as inner city as it got.
After protestors faced counter-protestors down, the asylum seeker camp at Pearse Street was burned and the Left needed to find someone to blame. People Before Profit (PBP) framed the counter-protest as being anti-fascist while completely failing to separate the majority of locals from a few far-right organisers. AIA was more specific in blaming the agitators but had little to say on how we would go about preventing it. The day following IRSP would go door knocking within the community to listen to locals, the only left-wing group that seems to have thought to do so at any point.
A left-wing project which fails to organise around the community will only find itself organising against the community. Something that has always stuck with me from the day I got punched is that with the far-right agitators and anti-social teenagers was a man who had just been walking his dog. He disapproved of the encampment believing immigrants were getting priority over himself in securing housing he needed to gain custody of his daughters. Anti-Imperialist Action Ireland (AIA) members did little to give him faith that the Left had any interest in helping someone like him. Paul Murphy and other PBP activists pulling out their phones and heading straight to social media and painting him as a fascist only added oil to the fire.
Answering the concerns of the people who have been most deprived under capitalism is our most important work. The groundwork of revolution is being able to answer the needs of the people, showing people that the socialist is not the scary totalitarian from a George Orwell book but instead the person who is defending them and their neighbours from eviction, fighting for their rights and that of their coworkers, organising food banks and community fridges. As socialists, we have the answer we just need to apply it.
IPAS centres have been put in working class communities without asking the community, without providing extra services for the communities, often taking away hotels or other facilities which served as a source of income for the community. In turn, when the community feels neglected, the Left are ready to help by calling them racists. To that community, due to this elitism from the Left, the far-right seems like the only option, naturally.
The treatment of refugees in this country is as inhumane as the treatment of the communities that IPAS centres are being put into. The socialist answer is not one that focuses on immigration but one that creates solutions in a housing movement which can radically challenge capitalism. No more IPAS centres needs to be a central demand of any housing movement.
The immigration question has divided the left between the woke left and the socialist opposition. The woke left wishes to lead the people from above while the socialist opposition starts with the people, for the people, by the people. Many of those in the woke left today may have at one point been part of the socialist opposition of the time, but the decay is self-evident. The PBP of the water charges protests is nothing like the PBP of today.
Socialist Workers’ Party (now Socialist Workers’ Network) began developing People Before Profit in the early 2000s starting with the bin tax campaign. Following the 2008 financial crisis People Before Profit along with other left-wing parties would begin campaigns against the austerity measures that were being introduced. The horrific austerity measures that aimed to kick workers while they are down became the greatest advocate for People Before Profit and the Socialist Party. The 2014 local elections saw PBP and SP both earning 14 seats with other smaller socialist groups and independents gaining wins as well. Later in 2014, the Right2Water campaign would become central in the clash against wealthy elites and their lapdogs in the Dáil resulting in PBP/SP and I4C best election results in 2016.
Then it stopped. The 2020 elections would see I4C lose all but 1 seat and PBP/SP would also lose 1. Election results are not everything but they paint a picture and you can tell something must have changed. It would not be for another few years after PBP entered into decline that anyone had a solid explanation of why. Some even blamed the Shinners but the truth is that from 2003 – 2015 People Before Profits campaign was built surrounding the most pressing concerns of the Irish workers from anti bin tax to anti-austerity, all culminating with the Right2Water campaign.
In 2015, the gay marriage campaign would become a central campaign issue for the Irish left. This brought in a new set of young, highly progressive socialists and highlighted some that were already there, these activists had a lot more passion for organising on social causes. The same followed with the Repeal the Eight referendum but while these progressive and exciting new campaigns were taking place the anti-austerity and pro-worker movements and campaigns began to take a back seat in favour of social cause activism.
Lesser activists will draw the conclusion from this change as a reason to go against socially progressive causes but the problem clearly was not these focuses as it was the workers voting in favour of both referendums. The problem is that anti-austerity measures became of lesser importance to the party leadership, so the people who joined PBP/SP for the anti-austerity campaigns stopped being involved. Those who stayed were largely made up of the petty bourgeoisie and student base who taught workers issues as not worthy of campaigning for.
With the Black Lives Matter protests following in 2020 and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement after that the main focus of the socialists in Ireland have become issues that to many workers appear as unrelated to the Irish working class. That is not to say stop the Venezuelan or Palestinian solidarity, it is to say these solidarity campaigns must be interlinked with the struggle for sovereignty, neutrality and against the EU, especially any EU military.
Woke left ideology begins when the movement stops centering the worker in their socialist activism. Protecting the rights of minority workers is always going to be of the highest importance but that struggle can only be fought by acknowledging people not just as whatever minority group they are part of but acknowledging them as a fellow worker and as comrade in the struggle for a 32 county democratic socialist Irish republic!