It’s all a fight within the right. Italy’s woke/anti-woke debate is a family quarrel between two individualisms: the identitarian kind and the meritocratic kind, both heirs of Nozick more than of Marx.

Woke measures oppression by the self-perception of the individual: my identity, my lived experience, an ultimate criterion unverifiable by any authority outside the person who declares it. Mainstream anti-woke measures worth by the same principle, with the sign flipped: individual merit, personal responsibility, the freedom of the individual from collective constraint. What gets rewarded changes; the unit of measurement stays the same.

The class-based critique that should dismantle both positions already exists, in books: Walter Benn Michaels wrote it back in 2006, arguing that identity politics displaces class analysis and, in doing so, serves the very neoliberalism it claims to fight. That critique has no real political representation in Italy: no party, no movement has made it their banner in public debate over the past several years.

To demonstrate this, one has to start from where woke — what Yascha Mounk calls the identity synthesis — betrayed its own sources, and show that the betrayal leads, at every step, to the same destination: the sovereign individual, the shared home of two sides that believe themselves opponents.

Foucault describes power as relational: in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume I, it runs through every social relation, produces subjects rather than merely repressing them, and implicates even whoever happens, at a given moment, to occupy the dominant position. A network model, in which no position is fixed once and for all.

Woke borrows this model’s vocabulary and turns it into something else. Whiteness, patriarchy, privilege become fixed substances, possessed by birth by one group and imposed on another: the very oppressor/oppressed binary that Foucauldian genealogy was built to dismantle. Susan Neiman makes this argument from the left, in Left Is Not Woke (2023): the........

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