All the best.

what did he say about the petit bourgeois?

IIRC he said at some point they'd find themselves allied with the working class after getting squeezed by the capital class.

I don't agree with this. Corporate wokeness could be construed as this, but in general the practice of treating everyone with kindness and the achieving of equality in part by promoting visibility of minority or oppressed groups is not at all anti-Marxist. The existence of some in the bourgeousie that support wokeness in either the general form I'm proposing or the specific form that conservatives use does not make it a bourgeousie movement, there are many plenties who are working class and proclaim woke values.

I just don't think what you describe is the purpose of the woke movement anymore. And yes at this point there's a ton of corporate influence.

If you could remove corporate wokeness i.e. pandering, you'd be left with a highly class-conscious movement, even if identity and individuality intersect here. Working class people are overrepresented amongst trans, black, disabled, and so on - trying to represent their interests is thus a form of Marxism even if it doesn't explicitly place class as a guiding feature. Don't allow our enemies to define stuff. That we can agree on corporate wokeness being an issue, and thus I won't go to a Pride event sponsored by Barclays or featuring a float by Lockheed Martin, but those individuals attacked by the right as being overly woke for their ideals that attack racism and homophobia are fighting the good fight.

Are you familiar with Walter Benn Michaels? There is a good piece he wrote called The Political Economy of Anti-racism which spells out the points Victor is making.

I wasn't. I don't think I agree with much of that article. I got about halfway before I got distracted (I have at times pretty bad ADHD). A lot of it seemed over my head in terms of bases of knowledge i.e. assuming an american audience. The crux of the article seems to be this idea that efforts towards equity via the dismantling of racist structures shouldn't be attempted because you'll still be left with individual inequality. Which is true, but isn't a good reason to do what you can where and when you can, and fixing overall inequality i.e. dismantling capitalism itself (you could also do radical stuff like 100% inheritance tax that should eradicate individual inequality within a generation) is far less on the table than trying to undo the ill effects of ~200 years of racist policymaking.

this is the crux of the article imo.

and its inevitable. all movements get usurped and used for other purposes by those more powerful.

The article is about class vs identity and the argument is that the focus on identity is a right wing project designed to take the focus away from class. To make that argument he brings up the intentional focus on what is termed "horizontal inequality" and contrasts that with what eliminating individual inequality would mean

The thesis statement is here: The argument isn't that we shouldn't work to eliminate racism, but that the focus on racism (and other issues of identity) exist specifically because they are not focused on class.

Lol, that article had a thesis?

You must have missed the day in your 9th grade English class when they covered those.

It read more like a Bret Easton Ellis sequel.

Okay, thanks. I think that idea is garbage and is itself a right-wing idea. Racism exists. That there are other worse inequalities out there should not, cannot take focus away from the fact that racist policies in a wide variety of forms have been in place in the US since its inception, alongside structural racism, and the result is an unjustified wage gap that should be treated. Saying 'well what about poor white people' is like pointing to a random other injustice and claiming that's a reason not to abolish slavery. That other injustice exists means we should also try to treat that other injustice at the appropriate time, and not make this particular injustice our only focus, not an argument not to focus on the historical and present effects of this particular huge injustice. If the argument takes the form of 'hey let's just tear down all of capitalism and solve all our issues in one go rather than focussing on identitarian issues' i'd be all for that, but it's not on the table, so focussing on it is a distraction from what we can put on the table here and now.

The notion that racism is purely an "identity" issue and not fundamentally linked to economics is one of the dumber memes the right has introduced into the discourse. No, you can't have lefty socialism without anti-racism coming along for the ride, sorry.

It's like you to distort an argument, but no one is saying that racism and economics aren't linked or that racism is "fundamentally an identity issue".

My suggestion is that you read better.

Chatgpt seems to agree with Luckbox, there is a thesis, and it seems relevant, key points:

I think this model speaks to my point about the fragmentation of wokeism being the beginnings of a class based conflict. And that there are the elite that simply want control over it all but then people who's intention is civil disrest.

IF we accepted that as true, I don't know who would be left to argue that its not describable as a type of neo-Marxism in its roots or in disguise.

It is probably true that the fetishisation of race distinction, which is what US wokeism does, is a bourgeois tactic to conceal the fact of class distinction. US society seeks to divide the right people from the wrong people on the basis of ability to pay for health insurance and, while black Americans often find themselves on the wrong side of that peculiar divide (not found in any other Western democracy), it is essentially a class divide.

Metaphorically I think yes..." a bourgeois tactic to conceal ".

Introduction to The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

This is another good piece from the actual left that discusses the NYT's 1619 project and the identity vs class debate, for those interested.

Another long-ass article that just feels like a secret fascist put on a tankie uniform and has learnt some of the language and is now on a full-blown false flag effort to take down the wide tent that is Marxism / anarchism / socialism. I cannot in my experience to date account for the existence of a slice of the political pie that is truly socialist and anti-anti-racist. NYT could well be garbage, I don't know and don't care, but also seen on that website was 'Marxism vs critical race theory'. I mean, I could see a Marxist critique of critical race theory the way it's presented by republicans, but not the actual critical race theory as it's taught in universities, which I'm led to believe is highly Marxist / Engelsian. Its lineage is Critical Theory as taught by the Frankfurt School, none of whom I've read directly (tried) but am also led to believe they were steeped in Marxist theory. I don't think they are in good faith and nothing in that article led me to believe they were.

David North, the national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party and chairman of the editorial board of the World Socialist Website is a secret fascist/"tankie"...

It's possible for sure, but it sounds more like "everyone I disagree with is Hitler"

It would be great though if you quoted some parts that you explicitly disagree with for discussion purposes.

Like how about this:

History is not the only discipline assaulted by the race specialists. In an essay titled “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Professor Philip A. Ewell of Hunter College in New York declares, “I posit that there exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory.” [21]

This degradation of music theory divests the discipline of its scientific and historically developed character. The complex principles and elements of composition, counterpoint, tonality, consonance, dissonance, timbre, rhythm, notation, etc. are derived, Ewell claims, from racial characteristics. Professor Ewell is loitering in the ideological territory of the Third Reich. There is more than a passing resemblance between his call for the liberation of music from “whiteness” and the efforts of Nazi academics in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s to liberate music from “Jewishness.” The Nazis denounced Mendelssohn as a mediocrity whose popularity was the insidious manifestation of Jewish efforts to dominate Aryan culture. In similar fashion, Ewell proclaims that Beethoven was merely “above average as a composer,” and that he “occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years.” [22]

Academic journals covering virtually every field of study are exploding with ignorant rubbish of this sort. Even physics has not escaped the onslaught of racial theorizing. In a recent essay, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant physics professor at the University of New Hampshire, proclaims that “race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics,” and introduces the concept of “white empiricism” (italics in the original), which “comes to dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena.” [23]

It's not really happening, it is happening but it's overstated, it's happening and it's a good thing, or you agree that not every academic field needs to be treated through a racial lens?