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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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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