Antifascism

Capital has an ability it has never lost: recycling rebellion as a product. It did it with rock in the 50s, with hippism in the 60s, with punk in the 70s. It has done it again with wokism. Woke isn't class struggle with new categories. It is its substitute. It replaces the struggle between those who own the means of production and those who don't with the struggle between identity groups — race, gender, sexual orientation, functional diversity. The political subject stops being the worker who owns nothing and becomes the individual who belongs to an oppressed category. Oppression stops being material and becomes symbolic. And the symbolic, unlike the material, does not threaten capital. It feeds it. Philosopher Mark Fisher described it precisely: identity politics seeks to lock people into their identity camps, where they will forever be defined according to parameters established by dominant power, paralysed by self-consciousness, isolated by a logic of solipsism. This is not liberation. It is the most sophisticated form of control that late capitalism has produced. Clouscard had anticipated it decades earlier. The capitalism of seduction does not eliminate class conflict — it conceals it. It segments desire into niches: gay, eco, punk, hipster, trans, wellness. Each niche becomes an identity, each identity a market, each market a substitute for class consciousness. The worker who should recognise themselves as such recognises themselves instead as the consumer of a specific niche. Their politics are defined by the algorithm, not by their position in the relations of production. The result is visible in any major corporation: rainbow flags in June, inclusive language in corporate communications, diversity quotas on boards of directors. And poverty wages, precarious contracts and co-opted unions the rest of the year. Capital has learned that it is cheaper to change the language than to change the material conditions. And here is what nobody in the WOKE space wants to say out loud: the political subject cannot be a trans girl, a racialised person, or any other identity category that capital has validated and packaged for consumption. The political subject was, is, and will continue to be the worker — the one who does not own the means of production, who sells their labour to survive, who has no power except collective organisation. That is not an exclusion. It is a material fact. Every other identity can be co-opted, marketed, and neutralised. Class cannot. The working class does not need capital to recognise its identities. It needs to recover the means of production. Everything else is decoration.