/lit/ - Literature

>>6967241
This probably won't completely satisfy you, but the general strategy is to disarm identity politics by expanding the context to the point where individual identity conflicts are insignificant compared to the larger issues of materialism that shape the course of history in Marxist thought. The best example is the parable is the blind men and the elephant, each different identity cause célèbre is a blind man confusing a part for the whole. Even things like intersectionalism fail to acknowledge the truth in materialism, disparate issues meeting (intersecting) rather than all stemming from the same source that is modern capitalism. Now there are good counter-arguments, W.E.B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison are some of the best but 1) your average college student has not read them and 2) you can always claim that American socialists sold out to the system for trinkets and that the CPUSA fell into a Stalinist circlejerk and thus neither were truly satisfactory representations of Marxism in action.

Coates, like so many leftists in modern America, each with their own form of 'identity politics', miss the point entirely. 'White supremacy' is just one form of historical materialism and capitalism in America. We know Coates rejects Marxist discourse on race when he misunderstands the concept of false consciousness in a passing statement in The Case for Reparations. As long as people keep confusing the effects for the cause we are going to be rereading these same stories over and over. However, it is important to note the critiques made by W.E.B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison that the white socialist and communist movements ditched African-Americans to appeal to the white working class or in Ellison's case, dropped black people to circlejerk to Stalinism.