I was inspired to write something on this subject when reading about newly elected President Donald Trump waging war on DEI programmes in the US, the latest round in the ongoing culture wars. While I agreed with his actions, I thought that somebody should be offering a critique of DEI from outside of the pro/anti woke division within imperialism.
What immediately jumps out at me when thinking about this matter is that promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in capitalist workplaces, is something that only liberals could make the case for without irony.
DEI programmes aim to address a range of issues around discrimination and lack of diversity in the workplace, based on categories that include; race, sex, nationality, and sexual orientation, that all align with the categories of ‘oppression’ used in liberal identity politics, a part the woke agenda. An agenda promoted by the ruling class as it is regarded as a ‘safe’ and anti collectivist worldview, the antithesis of any class based struggle, and of communism.
The logic of DEI would seem to be this: that if all forms of discrimination and under representation were to be eliminated from the workforce, then we would have fair, inclusive, and equitable workplaces. However, this cannot be the case, because capitalism is an economic system organised around the making of profit, the source of which is surplus value, extracted by paying the worker less than the value he/she produces. So we are being asked to believe a liberal deception, in which our diverse population (somehow) gets exploited in an equitable, fairer, more inclusive way. No mention in DEI of the inequities at the heart of the capitalist system. In our bourgeois country it is of no surprise that DEI programmes come with the full support of, and funding from, the ruling class. Put as a plain factual statement, you cannot make a system based on exploitation equitable.
DEI is a deception, a smokescreen, because its conception of equity is deliberately myopic in its exclusion of the realities of the relations of production in a capitalist economy, and so its illusions only help to sustain the capitalist Imperialist system. DEI thinking never questions the systemic cause of exploitation, only the unequal levels of it within that system, within capitalism. Equity in the context of exploitation is still exploitation. To claim otherwise would be to put bourgeois ideology above rational thought, an erroneous sleight of hand used to shield the internal logic of an irrational economic system.
To discriminate on the grounds of race, sex, religion, birthplace, or sexual orientation is irrational, and would certainly have no place in a rationally planned socialist economy. Capitalism, due to its internal contradictions, produces irrational outcomes which cause, at regular intervals, economic recessions, unemployment, and economic hardship for the working class.
The stark truth of the irrationality of capitalism is made real by this old Polish dialogue between a recently unemployed miner and his son.[1]
Son: Father why don’t we light the stove? I am cold
Father: We don’t have any coal son
Son: And why haven’t we got coal?
Father: I got laid off from the coal mine.
Son: Why did you get laid off Dad?
Father: Because there is too much coal.
This dialogue brings out the irrationality of poverty in the midst of plenty, the result of a crisis of overproduction.
It is clear that the solution has to be a rationally organised economic system, coupled with a working class consciously acting as a class for itself, that is unified, and not balkanised by the indoctrination of woke deformed characteristics. A rational social and economic order, a socialist economy, an economy that is rationally planned, profits in command abolished, no more surplus value extracted. Socialism, not capitalism with its fake bourgeois definition of equity that is promoted in DEI programmes based on liberal identity politics, is the route to workers emancipation, and the full development of the potentialities of the masses, and productive forces of the country. It is the task that falls to us, as communists, to organise effectively, and work ceaselessly, in an effort to make the dictatorship of the proletariat a reality, only then will we achieve true diversity, equity, and inclusion for all workers in Britain.
Ian Foster
Feb 2025
Class Consciousness Project 
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