Let me call your attention to a thought-provoking analysis of the current situation in the West.
Know Your Enemy - Contemplations on the Tree of Woe (substack.com)
To simplify a little, Marx’s predicted revolution of the Working Class in advanced nations never happened. Instead, there was a revolution in then-relatively backwards Russia. Neo-Marxists subsequently developed two possible explanations:
Leninists claimed that Capitalists had suborned their Working Class by exporting poverty to the Third World through imperialism. This kept the Capitalists’ own Working Class satisfied through cheap goods & commodities imported from exploited colonies. Leninists therefore concluded that the way to undermine Capitalism was through Third World Liberation.
In contrast, Gramscians claimed that Capitalists ruled by controlling the culture as well as by controlling the physical means of production, which resulted in the Working Class accepting the status quo as the natural state of affairs. Gramscians concluded that the solution was a Long March through the Institutions, to break the Capitalists’ control over the culture.
Eventually the two schools of Neo-Marxist thought came together in a synthesis which provided the basis for the Woke movement. “[T]he straight white male Christian proletariat willingly participated in the oppression of people of color and religious minorities in the Third world because in exchange they got to oppress women, religious minorities, LGBT groups, and people of color at home”. This synthesis is now the accepted Woke narrative throughout the West, promulgated by academics and media.
But there is an irony. By controlling the culture through the Gramscian Long March, the Neo-Marxists also gained control of the means of production. The Neo-Marxists have thus effectively become the Capitalist ruling class they once opposed. This created a cognitive dissonance among those Woke Capitalists, which explains the irrational self-defeating behavior of our rulers as evidenced in everything from Disney’s failing Woke movies to Bud Light’s failed Woke marketing campaign to the failing Woke US military.