this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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I’ve been following a TikToker who’s well read and is constantly arguing this. His position essentially boils down to race being the primary contradiction, not class. And his anti-Marx stance seems to boil down to the need to de-center white thinkers and that the adoption of Marx doesn’t by revolutionaries of color doesn’t inherently make Marxism an anticolonial ideology. It’s hard to have high quality discussion with him unfortunately because white leftists are constantly making asses of themselves in his lives.
If he's arguing for something this stupid then he's either not actually reading or not understanding what he's reading, allowing his evaluation of marxism to be affected by the actions of random individual white people makes no sense
This is a complex topic, but most marxists think that class and race aren't extricable, but intertwined, and to try to separate them into this situation is "class struggle" and this one is "race struggle" is a false premise.
race is obviously a social construct to maintain an economic relation. People do lose the tree for the forests. By mystifying it, you make it impossible to defeat.
This can be true or false, but it entirely depends on the specific society you are talking about. For example, in China today, I do not think racism is the "primary contradiction," although it certainly does exist. The decisions that the Communist Party has to make in regards to going along with global capitalism or pushing to expand socialism internally and externally are the primary contradiction in China now.
South Africa during Apartheid? Yes, racism had to be addressed first and foremost. But even there, class was so aligned with race that the most popular and successful figure, Nelson Mandela, was a socialist who believed that capitalism and wealth inequality were also harmful to society.