>>158300This misunderstands the meaning of leftism.
What is missed in the critique of what we now call "woke" is that it emerges precisely out of the failure of the New Left, not its excess - rather, its perceived excess serves to conceal a lack.
Take the Civil Rights Movement for example. It was no coincidence that both Martin Luther King and Malcom X were assassinated soon after they began to converge towards class politics. What they slowly came to recognize was the historical-material base that was responsible for simultaneously maintaining and dismantling racialism, from slavery to emancipation to segregation and beyond. They were killed precisely when they shifted their focus away from civil liberties legislation and towards the economic conditions that could develop and maintain such legislation.
The neoliberal revolution and the crisis of socialism combined with the literal death of a nascent post-racial shift in the civil rights movement ultimately destroyed the New Left just as it was entering a period of transition. It now exists as a reactionary spectre, trapped in a perpetual limbo recognized only through floating signifiers such as "social justice" or "woke" or whatever else. What we call the left today is just the right.