A CURIOUS EPIPHANY

On Ash Sarkar's Anti-Woke Turn

“What you are shouts so loudly in my ear, I cannot hear what you say.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

That was fast. Not entirely unexpected, sure, but pretty damn fast. I am talking about the recent volte-face of the arch-woke Novara media contributor Ash Sarkar, currently on a tour to promote her forthcoming debut book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War, “a Marxist critique of left-liberal politics that delivers its message with punch and panache” if we are to believe The Guardian.¹

I admit, I haven't read the book, and chances are I never will, for I can think of a dozen better ways of spending £61,42 (£17,09 for a hardback copy, £41,40 for the subsequent, unavoidable visit to the psychiatrist, and £2,94 for a box of Alprazolam/Xanax 1mg – all calculated according to current conversion rates). Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against materialist critiques of left-liberal politics; after all, I wrote one myself, long before anti-wokism or “vibeshift” were a thing. But allow me to have a few misgivings about instant redemption stories or heartwarming happy endings, especially those that involve luminaries who made a career out of spewing hatred and bile, using their vast platforms to gleefully smear their opponents and launch random pile-ons until, as Victoria Smith pithily put it, “five minutes ago”!

Redemption stories are good, inspiring. They instill hope – hope that one could see the light, and that maybe one day everyone would see the light. But are these stories real? What motivates them, and what accounts for their timing? In this particular case, how did “Britain's loudest Corbynista”, whose X (formerly Twitter) bio once read “Literature bore. Anarcho-fabulous. Walks like a supermodel. Fucks like a champion. Luxury communism now!”, come to realize that the left has lost its way?

Luckily, Sarkar doesn't leave us in the dark. “The reason why I start [the book] with the left rather than in any other place”, she says in an interview she gave to PoliticsJOE on 18 February 2025, “was because when I looked at the strategies of the right, weaponized grievance and victimhood, the more I realized that these had their origins on the left”. One particular moment seems to have left an indelible mark on our heroine’s psyche. “[There was this] event that I was facilitating in Liverpool, so there's like a couple of hundred people, everyone wants to discuss what the left has got wrong, where do we need to go next”, she recalls. At some point, Roger Hallam, the notorious co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, gets up and tells the enthusiastic crowd that what he believed went wrong with the left is that “everyone in this room is a fucking cunt”. Sarkar was unimpressed. “I think it's the funniest thing anyone could have said”, she tells us. “At the end of the day it's an old dude who looks like Gandalf swearing ... It's not a big deal”. And yet the audience begged to differ. All of a sudden you have “all these people who were saying you've brought violence into the space. I've been harmed, everyone's been harmed, this is white anger, like somehow it became a racial thing”. “How is it that a room full of adults can be derailed in such a way and can feel comfortable making their distress the object of everyone's attention”, Sarkar asks, looking perplexed. “It's because they've sort of been primed to look for victimhood”, she then responds. And so Ash Sarkar's journey to redemption begins.

And what a journey it is! Over the course of the 53-minutes-long inteview, few of Sarkar's erstwhile dogmas remain unscathed. She points fingers to Arts and Humanities education at universities for making us obsessed with the self and “epistemic harm”, quoting a member of the Combahee River Collective, the Black feminist lesbian socialist organization which invented the term “identity politics” in 1977, who allegedly said that individualists “take the identity and leave the politics on the floor because they're encountering this not in a political space but in a university one”. She takes a swipe at the idea of white privilege, saying that even though this explains a lot, it's not clear “what white people are meant to do with that, like you're still going to be white at the end of the day. No one can change that and so this way of understanding particular dynamics in society then gets turned into demands which are nonsensical”.

One can even detect traces of regret, an all-too-feeble sense of guilt and shame. In an era when everyone is consuming more media than ever, Sarkar confesses:

You know ad revenues are falling through the floor, you need things to go viral and so that's the incentive for calling up someone like me when I'm in my 20s and being like do you want to debate whether or not Apu [the Indian owner of a convenience store in The Simpsons which was accused of perpetrating racial stereotypes] is racist and because I'm like, well I'm broke and I'm scared that the left isn't going to get a chance to put across its point of view. I'll say yes and there I am like an idiot like thinking that what comes out of my mouth is going to be more important than the visual on the screen of brown person telling you something's racist.

Impressive, right? The earnest redemption narrative of a once lost soul who decides to return to the fold, even make amends. But it's Ash Sarkar that we're talking about, not a random culture warrior or a youngling recruited by the Jedi Order to be taught the ways of the Force. Thriving under the protective canopy of Jeremy Corbyn, Owen Jones and the mighty Momentum network, Sarkar has always been much more than a broke journalist in her 20s – how many broke non-White female journalists in their 20s receive an invitation to Sky News to discuss systemic racism, and get paid for it? On the contrary, as she herself somewhat inadvertently concedes, “it's an immense privilege like I get paid to have opinions”, a privilege, one must add, that comes with a huge platform (at the time of writing, Sarkar had 407,2k followers on X, 141k followers on Instagram), and the licence to go after anyone who refuses to toe the party line. Ash Sarkar has been a dedicated ideologue of “liberal identity politics”, a highly decorated general of the culture war which she believed needed to be won if the far right were to be defeated. “Corbyn is the promise of ‘jam tomorrow’ – the far right urgently needs defeating today”. She has also been a master provocateur who liked to stir the mud either by sending her solidarity to the Polish-British freelance journalist Ewa Jasiewicz who sprayed graffiti on a wall in Warsaw Ghetto in 2018 or tweeting in the wake of the Titan submersible implosion on June 18, 2023 that “If the super-rich can spend £250,000 on vanity jaunts 2.4 miles beneath the ocean then they're not being taxed enough”.

No wonder, then, that the PoliticsJOE charade is promoted with a clip of Sarkar lamenting, in all her arrogance and her trademark self-admiration (“Anarcho-fabulous. Walks like a supermodel. Fucks like a champion”, remember?), “I'm not saying that that all of these ideas are bad or that they're always bad but I think that good ideas have become blown out of proportion and applied to everything and at no point has anyone gone get a grip”.

At no point has anyone said “get a grip”? Really?

Well, this is where it gets personal. Is Sarkar referring here to the fairly obvious fact that nobody was allowed to say “get a grip” on mainstream/liberal/left media? But if this is the case, then she should ask her friends at Novara Media, The Guardian or The Observer why they were busy amplifying the anti-immigration screed of far-right Farage wannabe Matthew Goodwin at the time when we were trying to find a non-right-wing platform to promote Cancelled: The Left Way Back from Woke, the first book-length attempt to say “get a grip” from within the left (save a few notable exceptions). I don't recall how many times our publicists at Polity contacted Aaron Bastani, or other lefty editors and writers, to alert them to the publication of what was at the time a quirky (for it attacked identity politics on both the right and the left, pointing to Black feminist activism as a launching pad for an unabashedly materialist “politics of identity“), yet in retrospect highly prescient, manifesto. I lost count of the number of emails and messages I sent to colleagues and friends who were either too coy or scared to respond, let alone considering to engage with the arguments of the book.

That wasn't surprising, of course. 2023 was still the peak “woke”, a time when gender critical feminists were being hounded in droves for objecting to the erasure of the boundary between biological sex and socially constructed gender, and those who sounded the alarm on the neoliberal takeover of social justice activism were being dismissed as “reactionaries” or “far right enablers”. I knew what I was walking into, and I didn't expect my attempt to shout “get a grip” to become a Sunday Times bestseller. But that doesn't mean I don't hold any grudges, or feel a residual sense of bitterness which resurfaces when I see others usurp my ideas and claim them as their own, now that they have become “conventional wisdom”. And I certainly don't appreciate it when someone who once tweeted “the war on woke is a pretext for increasingly authoritarian and reactionary state interference in civil society” telling me, telling us, that “woke is dead”. When telling that entails no price. When telling that has indeed become profitable.

If Sarkar means well, then she should'nt simply recant and “spam us with promo”, because she's “got a cat to feed and it's gotta be done”, but first atone for the sins she's committed and the lives she's wittingly or unwittingly ruined. She should also try to learn humility – to be more “anarcho” and less “fabulous” – and acknowledge her debt to those who paid a price for saying “get a grip”. Then and only then may we believe that she's a genuine convert, not a late bloomer with a nose for profit.

1. The photos used in this piece are taken from the following: “Ash Sarkar: How the Left is DESTROYING ITSELF!”, The News Agents, 22 February 2025; “This Is Why The Right Are WINNING | Aaron Bastani meets Ash Sarkar”, Novara Media, 16 February 2025; “Woke is dead: this is the future of politics | Ash Sarkar interview”, PoliticsJOE, 18 February 2025.