Preface: I say this as a leftist who believes in reparations and cooperative ownership of capital.
When I hear fundamentalism I think less about the proseltyzing aspect and more about the divergence from the core ideology. Fundamentalist is probably a misnomer, maybe "radical" or "sectarian".
For example, someone sufficiently "woke" would understand that the slave and sharecropping economy of the rural south impacted the majority of whites negatively and that racism was a tool used to prevent them from developing class consciousness.
With this knowledge, any discussion about anti-racism w/ respect to the US south needs to also be explicitly anti-capitalist to help the "poor white trash" understand that their economic anxiety is being redirected unproductively. These people do benefit from white privilege in some ways, but solidarity should be the primary message here as there is a spectrum of victimization going on.
A concrete example of how you could respond to someone saying "immigrants are taking our jobs" is to reframe it (correctly) that US immigration laws are being taken advantage of by employers. The immigrants and workers have no leverage in the system and the decision-makers are the capital owners. It is not productive to call this person a bigot and leave it at that (even if it is true).
People who want to fit into the cultural zeitgeist but without the fundamental understanding of the system they criticize will just use these people as a punching bag, which doesn't help anyone. These types of people are easily co-opted into positions of power that don't fundamentally challenge the system. The head of a DEI initiative at a college does not challenge the existence of legacy admissions or donations from war profiteers and oil companies. They are smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds them.
There's also a purity aspect to it. When there's no solid basis for the ideology you can just start measuring people against their purity level. "No true scotsman" and all that.
Would it fair to say that racism has really largely been about classism? I’ve always thought that if capitalists wanted to make a campaign that would misdirect people’s sense of injustice, that blm and subsequent woke ideology would make the perfect foil.
> Would it fair to say that racism has really largely been about classism?
Please do some reading on the subject. Cursory reading on the history of labor unions, immigration in America, or literally any book on the US south that isn't Lost Cause mythology will tell you resoundingly yes.
I am not even talking about Marxist authors or Howard Zinn. You can easily find primary sources, the people who historically weaponized racism, telling you exactly how and to what end they are weaponizing their racism.
Secondly, capitalism is great at co-opting all sorts of messaging. Since you are on HN I assume you are familiar with the concept of a Paperclip Maximizer. The "machine" in this sense does not love you or hate you. You are a customer and they will adopt the aesthetics of your ideology to sell to you, inherent contradictions be damned.
Every oil company that spent the last 50 years denying climate change now pours their money into showcasing their green energy products. Companies who benefit from convict labor of African Americans adopt BLM banners on their websites. Companies who donate to the political campaigns of every republican in both houses of legislature change their logos to pride flags in June.
I dont want to assume but your phrasing makes me think (unless I am misreading it) that you think blm and "wokeness" are elite belief systems manufactured by "the machine", and that more reactionary "working class" ideology (a la Tucker Carlson) is grassroots. I really implore you to consider the Paperclip Maximizer idea and realize that the ideologies you are presented with on TV and print are the ones that have been passed through a corporate filter and sanitized to pose no threat to the machine. What you are seeing is a facsimile of what was once probably a more nuanced belief system.
When was the last time you heard Georgism or Anarcho-syndicalism or de-growth discussed by any talking heads? The answer is never because these concepts are inherently antithetical to capitalism and cannot be co-opted.
When I hear fundamentalism I think less about the proseltyzing aspect and more about the divergence from the core ideology. Fundamentalist is probably a misnomer, maybe "radical" or "sectarian".
For example, someone sufficiently "woke" would understand that the slave and sharecropping economy of the rural south impacted the majority of whites negatively and that racism was a tool used to prevent them from developing class consciousness.
With this knowledge, any discussion about anti-racism w/ respect to the US south needs to also be explicitly anti-capitalist to help the "poor white trash" understand that their economic anxiety is being redirected unproductively. These people do benefit from white privilege in some ways, but solidarity should be the primary message here as there is a spectrum of victimization going on.
A concrete example of how you could respond to someone saying "immigrants are taking our jobs" is to reframe it (correctly) that US immigration laws are being taken advantage of by employers. The immigrants and workers have no leverage in the system and the decision-makers are the capital owners. It is not productive to call this person a bigot and leave it at that (even if it is true).
People who want to fit into the cultural zeitgeist but without the fundamental understanding of the system they criticize will just use these people as a punching bag, which doesn't help anyone. These types of people are easily co-opted into positions of power that don't fundamentally challenge the system. The head of a DEI initiative at a college does not challenge the existence of legacy admissions or donations from war profiteers and oil companies. They are smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds them.
There's also a purity aspect to it. When there's no solid basis for the ideology you can just start measuring people against their purity level. "No true scotsman" and all that.