The imaginary dialectic

A generation raised on the romance of resistance is increasingly seeking conflict where it doesn’t exist.

It is fairly obvious from his essays that George Orwell would have despised the woke movement. With its revising of history, its contempt for free speech, its antagonism towards tradition and patriotism, its privileging of bourgeois concerns over those of the working class, and its rejection of the very notion of authentic truth, wokeness appears to distil Orwell’s most keenly felt bêtes noires into a united belief-system.

Perhaps most of all, the appropriation of the concept of ‘anti-fascism’ would have surely prompted a few caustic diatribes from the great man’s pen. Orwell fought against genuine fascists in the Spanish Civil War – his experiences were recounted in 1938’s Homage to Catalonia – and took a bullet in the throat for his trouble. He would have had nothing but contempt for today’s self-proclaimed ‘anti-fascists’, those who have rejected the class struggle in favour of identity politics, who punch women for stating biological facts, and who mislabel their opponents as ‘Nazis’ in order to justify their own status as righteous warriors in a noble cause.

Liberalism was locked into the marrow of Orwell’s being, which is why he found Marxism so unsatisfactory. The Marxist believes that history is a product of the dialectic, that change comes about due to the inherent contradictions in a system compelled to contain opposing forces. The Marxist believes that free speech and the marketplace of ideas are irrelevant given that the parameters of acceptable discourse are determined by the ruling class. The Marxist believes that it is only through struggle and coercion that his utopia might be reached. The liberal, by contrast, emphasises free inquiry, pluralism, individual rights and the rule of law. For Orwell, such principles were non-negotiable.

What the modern woke activist inherits from Marxism is not class analysis but a distorted sense of historical inevitability. We might call this an imaginary dialectic in which conflict must emerge even when reality refuses to cooperate. This typically takes the form of nebulous power struggles, asserted rather than evidenced, epitomised in phrases such as ‘structural racism’ or ‘heteronormativity’. The belief in inevitable struggle demands an enemy, and so the activist fabricates one: a phantom ‘fascist’ that justifies the defensive reaction that, in turn, actuates societal transformation. In this new battlefield of straw men, Marx’s emphasis on materialism has become immaterial.

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