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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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because Marxism is just uniquely designed to appeal to intellectuals lacking in specific knowledge, particularly intellectuals who don’t themselves work very hard

Yes, the kinds of people who fancy themselves in the role of chief central planner are friendly to a system that would give them the power to do that. (Everyone else is correct when they call them on this.)

I would question Marxism being more socially acceptable than racism.

Outright racist behavior is absolutely socially acceptable today; where it is most acceptable (in Blue tribe bubbles) it is overwhelmingly acceptable, and unless you venture into alt-Red bubbles it's not acceptable in most Red ones either because they're stuck in the time period when racism stopped being acceptable. (Newer Reds don't usually understand what racism was because they come from parents and grandparents that broke the machine that made the old kind of racism work; of course, doing that gave rise to the new kind of racism that, progressives being progressive, would be first in line to adopt.)

it’s probably tough to explain how the workers benefit from not owning their own capital

The answer to that is trivial- insulation from risk. Workers hate hearing that, of course, but (corruption of self-interest aside) a good chunk of them are either unwilling (risk tolerance is a personality trait, so is laziness) or unable (insufficient g; you have to be skilled labor to escape being a worker, and you also need some capital to bootstrap it) to free themselves from the cycle of work.

The reason Communism gets popular with the late 19th-mid 20th century working class is that the ratio of "risk and effort by worker" and "risk and effort by capital" was a lot more skewed against the former at that time period due to the dominant professions being either resource extraction or sweatshop and a correspondingly huge demand for those things... making the worker's assessment of capital's risk more accurate. Add the fact that automaton jobs like those tend to exacerbate certain issues with bad management and suddenly "the people doing all the work should own the place" starts to look a lot more attractive.

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.

The former professions are exclusively the insulated-from-risk types (they are as much UBI in 2020 as the average sit-down-and-sew or show-up-and-swing-the-hammer-or-sickle position was in 1920) and the latter professions tend not to be that way to the same degree, so I think that explains most of it.

Whether they actually produce anything is not relevant to how they feel.