Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
Journalist Oliver Eagleton begins a recent article in Jacobin by warning us against “sanewashing” Donald Trump. The idea? We shouldn’t attribute any deeper strategy or long-term plan to Trump, because that’s not how he thinks. Rather, short-term gain and perceived self-interest drive him.
Naturally, Eagleton goes on to disregard this warning. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
I’ll say a brief word here about the web Eagleton thinks the Trumpists are spinning.
DSA held its 2025 National Convention earlier this month, and the ‘DSA Left’ landed another series of wins. From anti-Zionism to a new NPC with a larger ‘left’ majority, the DSA Left built and expanded on its work at the 2023 Convention. In response, a variety of people claimed that ‘entryists’ have taken over DSA and held its members hostage to their ‘revolutionary socialist’ demands.
But they ground these claims in a misunderstanding of DSA. They miss how and why DSA grew around the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and general election.
Let’s take a closer look at the details.
The political far right has made a great deal of hay in the last decade out of the phenomenon of ‘woke capitalism.’ Of course, they rarely bother explaining what the term ‘woke capitalism’ even means, beyond vague gesturing toward corporate DEI programs. To get a sense of things, we have to turn to the left.
On the left, we hear more interesting questions about the relationship between racial justice progressive activism and woke capitalism. The original Black Lives Matter movement sparked some of these issues. But we hear it far more in the wake of the pandemic era 2020 resurgence.
In short, does woke capitalism co-opt racial justice movements? Or do racial justice activists simply promote ideas that woke capitalism likes?
Let’s take a moment to examine the contenders.
One side says that the world of corporate diversity co-opts the genuinely radical demands of true racial justice activists. We find this view expressed well, for instance, in the book Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. I also profiled an especially egregious case in an earlier post that fits this model quite well.
The other side thinks that racial justice progressivism actually aligns with woke capitalism by pushing class to the margins and placing race in the driver’s seat. They think woke capitalism has no problem with racial equality, so long as the class system remains in place. We often find this view in the pages of Jacobin magazine or the books of Adolph Reed Jr. And, of course, I’m on record arguing that an ‘anti-racist capitalism’ is at least theoretically possible.
Just about everyone who tries to explain Kamala Harris’s loss loves talking about the working class. They point to Harris’s loss of the working-class vote as a starting point. And then they explain the decline of the Democratic Party’s electoral fortunes as a decline in their support among workers in states like Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Of course, they draw very different conclusions from this starting point.
Bernie Sanders, for instance, explained Harris’s loss as a loss of support among black and Latino working-class voters. Others, more friendly to the professional classes, thought Harris alienated working-class voters by running too far to the left on social issues. But they shared a focus on loss of working-class votes in swing states.
At one level, that’s a fair enough starting point. Harris did lose the aforementioned states after Biden won them in 2020.
But the politicians and pundits glide through these debates without justifying how they define the term ‘working class.’ And it’s no mere academic debate.
How you define the word matters. A lot. Competing definitions put entirely different groups of people into the ‘working class.’ They thereby recommend very different strategies and tactics for bringing them back into the fold.
I recently read Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. It’s a book by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, two co-founders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) and early backers of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN), a collection of tenants unions around the country.
As I read, I quickly realized I wish I had the book 5 years ago. In those days, I was working with our local DSA chapter to organize a tenants union, and I joined the Iowa City Tenants Union (ICTU) as one of its founding board members. I also joined the city housing commission in the fall of that year.
This book could’ve prepared us for the struggles ahead. It would’ve been a great resource to share with early tenants union members. Instead, we learned many lessons the hard way.
So, let’s talk a bit about the book and what it might teach us.
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