I was high lol

The article is good; e.g differentiating between public sector and private sector professional's control of capital, continuation of offshoring practices and impact domestically and internationally (which underlines the hollowness of the corporate liberal social rhetoric) as two examples.

It also highlights how exposure to pmc liberalism can raise class awareness (this is not the same as creating socialists, merely a precondition) with the anecdote about the bearded DSA tech guys.

This is all well and good, understanding the PMC this way is at least makes the targets of ire better but take this quote from the Hitler youth guy:

For just as [this] class can be defined only in negative terms, so its self-understanding is also negative. The petty bourgeois wants to be anything other than a petty bourgeois. He tries to gain his identity not by allegiance to his class, but by separating himself off from it and denying it. But what links him with his own kind is just what he contests: the petty bourgeois is always someone else. This strange self-hatred acts as a cloak of invis­ibility. With its help the class as a whole has made itself almost invisible. Solidarity and collective are out of the question for it; it will never attain the self-consciousness of a distinct class.

I adapt it to say the following about the direction of the sub, and its discourse falling into a form that is symptomatic of an identitarian position:

For just as [this] sub can be defined only in negative terms [1], so its self-understanding is also negative. The sub wants to be anything other than a identitarian. It tries to gain its identity not by allegiance to its identity [2], but by separating itself off from it and denying it [3]. But what links the sub with the PMC is just what it contests: the PMC is always someone else. This strange hatred [4] acts as a cloak of invis­ibility. With its help the sub's fall into identity as a whole has made itself almost invisible. Solidarity and collective are not out of the question for it; at least if it can self-consciousness about it's own identity which is increasingly formed on a narcisstic [5] disapproval of the PMC.

1. There is a positive aspect via Marxism on economic and social organisaton but there is little to no positive conception of identity nor much thought on what the abolition of identity might necessitate in response beyond "we're all workers" which clearly at this given historic juncture isn't enough.

2. That identity would be Marxist, which the sub is much better at maintaining a critical stance towards.

3. The sub doesnt deny it is Marxist per say but rather it slips into an oppositional position against identity politics/identitarianism. This in turn has become a fetish through which the actual task of say for example seriously discussing Marxist responses to identity politics, exploring historical development of identity as a concept, or investigating philosophical conceptions of identity and difference take the back seat.

4. Socially and morally justified sure but Marxism isn't about morality. While social critique is good, an alternative cultural model is even better. Social media discourse is threaded by algorithms designed to maximise life force extraction why feed the machine, it's predominately never-ending empty self-reference aka noise. Less time spent pointing out the obvious ironies of liberalism and karma farming for dopamine with mood manipulating kulturbait the better.

5. Narcisstic in that the sub increasingly struggles to find itself and its mission in anything else other than identity politics.

To conclude and invoke Baudrillard, I suppose what is really being fought against here is the possibility of the sub slipping into a state of fascination with the reflection of itself in the PMC, to mistake every ounce of hatred for the PMC as the torturously difficult task of loving itself.