John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism

Neither, he says, contrary to its right-wing critics, is it a version of Marxism (p. 111). This seems to me both true and important. The target of the old Marxist or quasi-Marxist left was economic injustice, which made it an enemy of capitalism. The target of the new, woke left, by contrast, is the stigmatization of minorities. This is why capitalist corporations enthusiastically embrace wokeism: by diverting leftish energies away from economic injustice it leaves corporations free to do the only thing that really matters to them—making money. Wokeism is an unwitting ally of capitalism and hence not at all a version of Marxism.
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity (Durham NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020).
See my review of Lear’s Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life in Society 60/4, 2023, pp. 628–630.

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Young, J. John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism. Soc 60, 792–795 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00894-1

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