Like immune cells attacking each other instead of the pathogen.
Culture war / language policing / … is a symptom of fragmentation and low coherence. Small circles endlessly debating terminology, completely disconnected from mass consciousness / material conditions. Everyone has their personal politics, their identity , their discourse.
A (claude assisted) response to culture war in tech / the obvious answer to culture war / (anti-)wokeness
There was a period where tech (and academia, media, etc.) got very invested in symbolic language battles. Renaming branches, policing terminology, endless discourse about representation.
The Marxist take is that both the obsession with language AND the backlash against it are symptoms of the same thing: politics divorced from material conditions and class struggle.
The language police treated words as if changing them would change reality. It’s idealism—the belief that consciousness shapes being rather than the other way around. Institutions adopted it precisely because it costs nothing.
The culture war is empty on both sides. That’s not a reason for political apathy—it’s a reason to stop looking at that axis entirely.
The feeling of “both sides are bullshit” is correct. But “both sides” here means both poles of a bourgeois debate. Liberals doing symbolic language games vs. conservatives doing symbolic anti-wokeness. Neither threatens anything. Neither changes material conditions. That’s why it’s allowed to be so loud.
Actual politics—who controls production, how surplus gets distributed, who has power over whose labor—that’s not on TV. That’s not the Twitter discourse. When workers strike, when tenants organize, when people actually threaten property relations, suddenly the “divided” political establishment finds unity real fast.
The conclusion shouldn’t be “politics is fake” but “this spectacle is fake, and it’s fake on purpose, to absorb energy that might otherwise go somewhere dangerous.”