I entirely agree but lets be clear that UK Labor, Australian Labor, NZ labor, US Democrats, Canada's Liberals etc are no longer "the Left" in the traditional sense. And more importantly those "progressive" parties (as they pretentiously like to call themselves) never considered themselves Marxist/Communists and only ever had a small fringe that identified as "socialists". That's the first thing.The second thing is that we need to recognize the important shift in those parties from the 1990s.
Capitalism was the undisputed winner after the fall of the Berlin wall and thereafter "the Right" of those parties came to dominate their parties, first in the number of members and in turn the policies their parties adopted. In no time, these "progressive" parties fully embraced neoliberalism and supply side/trickle down economics.
But with that came a dilemma. How would these "redefined" "Left" parties keep the bulk of their support-base on side while they were proposing and implementing policies that their conservative counterparts would only contemplate in their wildest wet dreams. That's where woke comes in, or identity politics as we referred to it then.
So while the nuvo Labor parties were privatizing, winding back medicare, re-introducing university fees and supporting regressive taxation, they were also careful to make all the right "socially" woke noises to appease their upwardly mobile latte sipping support-base. And within no time being on the Left no longer meant fighting for fairer wages, work conditions and trade barriers to protect local jobs etc but weeping over the plight of a handful of refugees and demanding that homosexuals could obtain the exact same piece of paper that heterosexuals got to say that they are married. In other words, those parties that used to be Left and that we still call Left are no longer Left, but an entirely new and distinct beast that pretentiously calls itself "progressive". They are NOT Communists, they are NOT Marxists and they came to embrace wokeism for reasons that have nothing to do with Communism, Marxism or for that matter, Socialism.
