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Yes, another top level comment about The Origins of Woke from me, in the same thread on the same week. But this is about something else. I had an epiphany while reading the book.
I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.
California has a state law against firing people for their political beliefs, but it didn't protect James Damore, who was fired in compliance with the law against creating a hostile work environment for protected groups.
It all adds up.
I would question Marxism being more socially acceptable than racism. Maybe in a blue tribe bubble, but there’s also bubbles which are the opposite.
I think the real question, instead, is ‘why are the blue tribe pinkos’, and that’s because 1) the Soviet Union spent decades and millions of dollars on infiltrating the western intelligentsia and 2) because Marxism is just uniquely designed to appeal to intellectuals lacking in specific knowledge, particularly intellectuals who don’t themselves work very hard. That’s what Marx was, basically, and it’s more or less an oversystematization of the view of someone in that position- workers(who produce things) work for owner-men who provide access to capital, so wouldn’t it make more sense to just do away with the owner-men and have the workers as a collective own the capital? That’s a nice idea, if you’ve never been on either side of that relationship. And if you have it’s probably tough to explain how the workers benefit from not owning their own capital. And, you know, the blue tribe mostly does things which might be valuable, but which are at remove from actual production. Hence Marxism feels true to an HR lady or a college professor or a journalist in a way it doesn’t to a mechanic or a farmer or a plumber.
This doesn't really account for Marxism being extremely popular with manual laborers in Europe for decades.
You're probably already familiar with the Orwell quote but for those who might not be, in 1936 George Orwell declared that "socialism draws toward it with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England."
Which would suggest that socialism has not fundamentally changed it's 'magnetic force' over the last century away from manual labor and toward the sandal-wearers, sex-maniacs, and fruit-juice drinkers it continues attracting today.
The Marxist parties (communist and social democratic together) commanded a solid majority of working class support in most European countries up through the middle of the 20th century.
That's a historical path dependency thing and you can tell because of the way the working class majority has moved away from Marxism.
The working class was attracted to left wing parties of all sorts in the 19th century. Over the course of that century and into the 20th, Marxism slowly won an internal power struggle amongst the left wing parties and factions of many countries. Even those which maintained a non-Marxist policy bent often adopted Marxist language and trappings (if only formally -- see: the Social Democratic parties in Scandinavia, who were never interested in actually going through with a Marxist revolution but often put Marxist goals in their platforms early on).
As the Cold War heated up, this started to drop away. Social Democrats started to explicitly and consciously disassociate from Marxism, many transformed over time into more or less social liberal, welfare capitalist parties as the big state post-war consensus fell apart, and now much of their voting base has switched sides to right-wing or conservative populist parties.
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