Woody was a fan of Will Rogers.

Pete said although he, Pete, wasn't a member of the CPUSA, he called himself a communist with a small c. I suspect that's what Woody would have said, too.

If we dig into the term "communist" it can mean different things. There's the Bolsheviks, the Mencheviks, the Trotskyists, and all kinds of Socialists. I don't know if Woody had read Marx. I suspect that he had. Like so many of us, he was a critic of Capitalism.
Not to understand this is to miss who Woody was.

Howard Zinn, the historian (People's History of the United States) was inspired in his career by Woody's song "Ludlow Massacre" in Colorado where the striking coal miners took arms against
the militia who tried to break the strike. That's not in the high school history books.

Woody liked my banjo playing because it was like Pete's. I always tried to accompany him in his tunes and never overshadow him in any way.

He was a man of a few words. But those few words found their way into powerful songs.
I mentioned Steve Earle in earlier posts but IMHO even closer to Woody's writing style and tradition was the output of Jean Ritchie. Woody would probably have sung "The L and N Don't Stop Here Anymore" or "Black Waters"

I believe there is a direct line between Woody and Joe Hill (the father of the modern protest song).