How Companies Co-opt Progressiveness to Mask Oppression

While conservatives drum up conspiracy theories and scream “woke” and at anything deemed progressive, liberals embrace self-empowering, anti-bigotry corporative messaging as a sign of progress. However, a class-based analysis reveals US corporations do not support the communities they claim to nor even the reactionaries who deride them incorrectly. Just as American colonists and capitalists historically presented themselves as beacons of democracy, progress, and civilized society in a settler colonial slave state, they’ve continued to alter their appearance as social conditions change by employing new methods to conceal exploitation. As today’s workers and consumers grow more conscious of their employment and purchase decisions, the bourgeois state rebrands itself simply in the pursuit of profit. Identity politics, a product of bourgeois democracy, allows Democrats to offer Americans diverse exploiters and grant symbolic gestures to the oppressed sections of society without addressing material conditions (purplewashing, pinkwashing, greenwashing, etc). Meanwhile, identity politics encourages Republicans to embrace the most backwards tendencies rooted in class society such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and outright fascism. Both political factions however represent the interests of the ruling US capitalist class and the imperialist bourgeoisie. Both parties tailor their messaging only to appease the working class while maintaining a facade of democracy. This is done to thwart class consciousness and prevent an organized mass movement grounded in revolutionary socialism and anti-imperialism. The liberation of women, LGBTQ folks, colonized peoples, and the working class as a whole must be done through class struggle. This requires seizing political power and the means of production (base) while shaping ideology and culture (superstructure) through cultural revolution. Only through waging constant class struggle can the masses attain a stateless, classless, moneyless society.