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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.
I grew up in a conservative rural area, and even there being a Marxist may make you stupid and naive, but being a racist makes you evil. Explicitly anti-immigration conservatives will often go to great lengths to distance themselves from anyone who has ever said something that could be interpreted as racist, in a way that urban progressives would never think about with their Marxist brethren. In a 100% conservative org a single video of drunken teenage you saying "blacks are inferior" can easily be enough to get you kicked out, while you can offer a talk on abolishing capitalism (and the police, and everything else you don't like) at university without anyone even batting an eye.
Maybe America is different, but at least here in Germany the number of people who either self-identify as racist or tolerate self-identifying racists in their orgs is a rounding error. Even the far-right AfD doesn't actually consider racism acceptable. People may disagree on the exact definition of racism, but they generally agree on central examples such as Nazis being evil.
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