Your article shows a lack of understanding of both Marxism and Capitalism.

The “identity politics” you attribute to the “updated” Marxism is actually directly contrary to what Marx wrote about. Solidarity, rather, is the theme of Marxism. Identity politics are the “artificial distinctions,” as W.E. B. DuBois (a communist) put it, which divide us, and prevent us from attaining a just society.

You criticize those of us who seek to overthrow oppression, as if we are crying about the sky falling. If you understood Capitalism, you would know that “oppression” is what it is based on, and cannot be eliminated as long as it rules us. Capitalism is based on the idea that we must take more than we give. Otherwise, the business is not profitable, and must fail. One must pay workers less than the value added by their labor. One must externalize the damage to the environment caused by business activities. Oppression is built into the system itself.

The “shadow” I write under at this moment is an orange sky, from the fires raging across the West Coast. As I write, farmworkers are risking their lives right next to those fires, to bring you the food you need to survive, and make sure the farmers can make a profit . They do this with little or no protection, for abysmal wages, and without the benefit of stimulus payments or other government benefits you and I enjoy.

Climate change is the inevitable result of capitalism. Capitalism requires we pay less for resources and energy than we charge, and that we externalize the environmental costs. So we burn up, in a few decades, the hydrocarbons it took tens of millions of years to build up. So we pour carbon into the air, without fixing it back into the ground, because that is what is profitable. Sustainability is an anathema to Capitalism.

Perhaps you will dismiss me as a wild-eyed radical. Why don’t you listen then to Albert Einstein, who advocated socialism:

“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”