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Last summer over a pint after a trade union event in Trinity I asked about a split. A group of 30 activists, a Dublin city councillor among them, had just left People Before Profit. It was explained to me. I thought I understood. But I had to check: OK but they’re all still Trots right? Oh yeah, for sure, still Trots.

This summer there was another resemblance of a split in People Before Profit, party members leaving a constituent group. Their resignation letter made it to the Irish Times. Asked to comment Richard Boyd Barrett said, “There are some debates about strategy and tactics. It’s not something I’m terribly worried about. It’s an ongoing discussion and I think you will find it in any vibrant political project.” Again, most importantly, they all remained Trots. I say this not to criticise Trotskyism nor Trotskyists but to recognise that all involved are part of a whole. (They should though keep these debates and disagreements in house, away from the Irish Times, away from the people who’ll make People’s Front of Judea jokes.)

Last week the same paper published details of a motion on its way to the Fine Gael ard fheis. “Fine Gael grassroots seek ard fheis motion to break with ‘woke left’,” as the headline put it. Irish Independent columnist and Brendan O’Connor show regular David Higgins is one of the members who want to end Fine Gael’s “woke era”.

Pozzo in Waiting for Godot talked about ridding himself of the slave tethered to him. “Instead of simply kicking him out on his arse, in the goodness of my heart I am bringing him to the fair, where I hope to get a good price for him,” he told Didi and Gogo. He was going to the fair and trying to discard something fundamental to him. These Fine Gael members are doing the same, attending their ard fheis bound to what they consider the party’s progressive period.

It’s not for me to tell them how to affirm their identities. But if they seek some level of vulgar evolution, a rebirth from woke, they should begin by understanding their own relation to woke and just how woke their analyses are. If defeat of Fine Gael progressivism is what they want, they first need to accept their own connection to progressiveness, their parts in that whole of Fine Gael. Otherwise they’ll find that changing the temperature won’t get the job done, as Mao Zedong wrote in On Contradiction, “In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken.”

Identity over class, the aesthetic over the material, the individual over the collective

“The word ‘progressive’ is now tainted by association with the woke left and most voters already perceive Fine Gael to be on the right,” Higgins told the Irish Times, leaving off mention of the woke right.

Woke means everything. It means nothing. I don’t like using the word, partly because of its imprecision, partly because of my rejection of the way it’s been stolen from African-Americans. (Pretty woke, no.)

It’s rarely used as a positive identifier, aside from elder liberals who enjoy variations of, “Well if it’s WOKE to*…* – inserting some mild liberalism – “… consider me WOKE.” Though meaningless it can be occasionally evocative, a relatively useful shorthand.

I’m ambivalent about whether the politics popularly considered woke are left, as consensus has it, but certain that woke can come from the right. It’s a way of thinking rather than coherent ideology. Where I’m coming from, on the left, the politics that I understand to be woke are those that prioritise identity over class, the aesthetic over the material, the individual over the collective. But this is how Higgins, the Fine Gael anti-woke and their media think.

The motion is about identity, said Pat Leahy in the Irish Times. For Ivan Yates it “did resonate with me”, explaining that Fine Gael’s problem is, “If you’re all things to all people and if you’re trying to help everybody, you actually lose your identity, and this motion speaks to an identity crisis.” What resonated for him was its implied emphasis on “personal responsibility as opposed to the nanny state, about actually speaking for the million people who pay the higher rate of tax and pay for everything in this country”. Radio Kerry asked “Has Fine Gael Lost Its Identity?”

Higgins tried to explain what the motion means practically in an X post and gave eight points on what Fine Gael needs to abandon. Of these eight, I’ll allow that one, to cut government spending, was a material suggestion coherent with a centre right project. The others were either identitarian, incoherent, or both, all coming from the woke right.

One problem, wrote Higgins, is “non-EU workers now accounting for the majority of job additions.” The left would live with fewer jobs for the non-EU engineers and executives staffing US tech multinationals if it meant moving the half-free state away from its dependence on foreign capital. For the woke right though, as long as white Europeans should run our little colony, we’re good.

Higgins also took issue with his party “siding with Gaza flotillas”, referring to Simon Harris calling the attempted journey to Gaza undertaken by Irish people like Naoise Dolan, Sarah Clancy and Tadhg Hickey an “act of courage”. He doesn’t like what he considered Fine Gael’s support for the Ulm 5 either, a group standing trial in Germany for an action against an Elbit Systems factory, the Israel Defense Forces’ largest weapons supplier. TD Barry Ward attended one of their court appearances.

It’s unclear whether Higgins wants explicit support for the identitarian Israel or just neutrality on the Zionist state. Either way he should be content with the real support the Irish state gives it, its blocking and weakening of the occupied territories bill, its admission of illegal weapons flights through its territory, its prosecution of anti-genocide activists.

He of course included the necessary, for the anti-woke, hyperbolic reaction in gender politics, opposing “gender quotas in all areas of life” and “transgender rights to the detriment of biological sex”. He also chose to define his politics against two advertising campaigns, one from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, the other what’s reported as the state’s anti-tradwives campaign planned for next year.

Woke 1.0 was crazy

This intervention is part of Fine Gael trying to resolve a contradiction within itself, a contradiction among themselves rather than with opponents, not unlike AOC(IA)’s attempt to disavow what she called Woke 1.0. It was crazy, she said, woke as ever herself, no more than the Fine Gael grassroots now attempting their own renunciation. But neither Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez nor a faction of Fine Gael can make something so inherent to all disappear. As long as they consider these politics something external, they’re bound to them.

For Mao Zedong, “The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the fundamental law of nature and of society and therefore also the fundamental law of thought.” This contradiction, the clash of opposites, defines every aspect of life. “To deny contradiction is to deny everything.”

Higgins and his Fine Gael centre right only see one side of their party, failing to understand the woke and anti-woke share the same political assumptions. “To be one-sided means not to look at problems all-sidedly, for example,” he wrote, “only the favourable conditions but not the difficult ones, only the past but not the future, only individual parts but not the whole, only the defects but not the achievements, only the plaintiff’s case but not the defendant’s, only underground revolutionary work but not open revolutionary work, and so on,” wrote Mao.

It was woke when Josepha Madigan said The Kerryman should change its name to something gender neutral and when Fine Gael decided, in an affront to the Bolshevik women most associated with International Women’s Day, to hold their family and care referenda on 8 March, 2024.

It is woke when the party’s Christian democrats now seek to shift back to a place with “the family and communities as a core unit of society” and “personal responsibility” a returning priority.

Which does Fine Gael’s woke, progressive era condemn more: the party or wokeness, progressivism? Both. If, as Higgins said, the word progressive is tainted by its association with the woke left, rather than its meaninglessness, the woke left is tainted alike by its association in the other direction.

Pozzo never did sell Lucky. He knew he wouldn’t even before he made it to the  fair. “The truth is you can’t drive such creatures away. The best thing would be to kill them,” he said. They can’t.

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