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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 explanation doesn't track for me. In practice most nominally communist nations got their start on the backs of a huge stock of peasant farmers, not HR departments.
In America, the unionized working class were highly sympathetic to socialist ideals for a long while. It's only relatively recently that this has changed.
and
And in most of the times and places where Marxism was a real political movement that threatened to take power, this was even more true (China is an exception). The Bolshevik power base really was the urban working class and the enlisted men of the Petrograd garrison. The German SDP really was a movement of industrial workers organised through unions. So was the French Socialist Party. So was the (not technically Marxist) British Labour Party. These movements were mostly led by educated men, but that was inevitable. And they actively sought to identify educate smart workingmen and incorporate them into leadership. Friedrich Ebert began his career as a saddle-maker. Keir Hardie was a miner.
21st century PMC Marxism is a LARP - most modern Marxists don't believe in, or even understand, the economic core of Marxism. Most of them run around denouncing slavery as an incident of capitalism, for crissake. But orthodox Marxism absolutely felt true to the mechanics and plumbers (not, admittedly, the farmers) of its day.
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