The capitalist system perpetuates itself by obscuring the underlying cause of individual problems. Some of these problems include: mass shootings, poverty and inequality, racism, military spending and over-incarceration.

Capitalism believes these problems can be addressed one-by-one with reform bills. There's no connection to or acknowledgement of the deeper problem. This is what the democratic party does. It treats the symptoms without ever identifying the disease.

Sometimes it's unconscious. Perhaps they are just educated, programmed and conditioned by the system to not be able to link things up. They don't have a dialectical or materialist approach to things. But sometimes it's very conscious. And the higher you get up the class ladder in the US, the more class consciousness has actually prevailed. The very rich know their class interests. And they are ruthless about pursuing their class interest at all costs, even at the costs of the stability of the society in which they live, and of the very earth which they utterly depend for their own family's health and safety.

Any person that wants to actually understand society must understand its specific symptoms in relation to the underlying disease which gives rise to them or else there is no hope of even solving those symptoms.

The new strategy being adopted for the last several years, is to use identity - not in relation to class to come to a deeper understanding of both - but as a bludgeon against any specter of class or anti-imperialist critique. That will continue to be the strategy for liberalism as a whole.

And so whether it's the right wing weaponizing white supremacy and racism, the strategy of dividing people by race, or the subtle attempt by the Liberal Democratic side to take on board, much of the woke rhetoric and the identity politics to use it as a bludgeon against class and anti-imperialist politics.

Economics, the media, political institutions and everything else in popular culture work to normalize the capitalist system and its social relations, often above and beyond the comprehension of any one individual engaged in understanding it.

Sometimes, of course, it is conscious, but often it's unconscious. We become trained in the very same ways of thinking that we turn around and propagate to others. And that is why education is essential to socialism.

Any hope of getting beyond Capitalism is a part of the popular struggle to educate away from these ways of thinking, to dive deeper into seeing things for how they actually are, to demystify the processes and relations of capitalism. Historical materialism and dialectical materialism are the methodologies of engaging in that demystification process.