Astral Codex Ten

Marxist

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Marxist

Article

Marxist is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between February 25, 2021 and January 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Economic class warfare is Marxist”; “turn them Marxist”; “It also seems a bit Marxist”. It most often appears alongside Donald Trump, Trump, Darwin.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: February 25, 2021
  • Last seen: January 06, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"
February 25, 2021 · Original source
Yeah, yeah, "class" sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you're supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? Wrong. Economic class warfare is Marxist, but here in the US class isn't a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture. You're already doing class warfare, you're just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words "class" and “classism”.
Inline links: also about culture
It could appeal to blacks and Hispanics. They’re mostly working-class, so they hate the elites as much as anyone else. So far the left has kept them voting Democrat by scaring them with stories about how racist the white working class is, and convincing them that only Democratic elites can keep them safe. Your job is to make the Marxist argument that this is the typical ruling class tactic of using racial animus to keep the working classes divided and powerless. If you do this right, you can get a bunch of minorities on your side without driving away any whites; mutual enemies are the duct tape of political coalitions. The pro-Trump shift among blacks and Hispanics in 2020 proves that minorities are willing to vote Republican once someone frames the conflict in class terms. And success stories like Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley prove that white Republicans are friendly to minorities once they're convinced they share their values. All you need to do is drag both sides to the altar and tie the knot.
Ambidexterity And Cognitive Closure
April 01, 2021 · Original source
Total sample size of 8,106. The largest category, Social Democratic, had n = 2486; the smallest category, Marxist, had n = 144. ANOVA says the differences here are statistically significant, p = 0.01, which is also the impression I get just looking at the table. But if anything, more authoritarian philosophies seem to have more ambidextrous proponents.
The second possibility is that I ran into a Lizardman Effect. Ambidexterity, supporting Donald Trump, and being Marxist were all uncommon positions in my survey. The sort of uncommon answers that trolls might endorse to confuse people, or that somebody who wasn’t taking the survey seriously might put down randomly in a rush to finish. We should expect a very small level of correlation between all uncommon positions just because of this effect. I’m eyeballing this as bigger than the Lizardman Effect alone usually gets us, but I don’t know how to prove that.
Inline links: Lizardman Effect
The SSC survey population comes from all over the world, but it's centered in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you grow up in the San Francisco Bay Area, then maybe flirting with forbidden ideas means you end up more likely to support Donald Trump, rather than less (cf. the cellular automaton theory of fashion). This isn't to say that low-need-for-cognitive-closure necessarily turns Californians right-wing. It could also turn them Marxist (the most ambidextrous political position on the survey). It just means they're more likely to end up somewhere far away from the local norm.
Inline links: the cellular automaton theory of fashion
Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples
June 17, 2021 · Original source
This model is enticing because it seems, in McNeill’s narrative, persistent since the dawn of humanity. It also seems a bit Marxist. Like any overarching model of reality, it will overfit and underfit. Regardless, models can be useful or at least beautiful. When picturing this dynamic, oscillating system I keep coming back to a Ranier Maria Rilke poem translated by Joanna Macy:
Inline links: Ranier Maria Rilke poem translated by Joanna Macy:
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
There’s one point in the book where he mentions contact with Marxism, and that’s when he was travelling to Brazil to get some data on the moral intuitions of people outside the US. He mentions that he went to a conference but people were all Marxist so he left and went somewhere else. This was in the sense of their approach to psychology, and to be honest I’ve heard what I think is the kind of “theory” he’s gesturing at hearing there and I’d leave as well, but it’s a real weakness that this is the only time that any sort of Marxism or socialism really turns up in a book that’s supposed to help liberals understand challenges to their ideology and empathise with other points of view, and supposed to provide a sort of “theory of everything” for political differences.
Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
August 04, 2023 · Original source
When I resume active work it will be necessary to pursue a new policy. Instead of working to achieve power by armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies. If outvoting them takes longer than outshooting them, at least the result will be guaranteed by their own constitution. Any lawful process is slow…Sooner or later we shall have a majority—and after that, Germany.
This was a tremendous opportunity for Hitler to expand his share of the electorate. As he wrote in a column at the time: “Never in my life have I been so well disposed and inwardly contented as in these days. For hard reality has opened the eyes of millions of Germans to the unprecedented swindles, lies and betrayals of the Marxist deceivers of the people.”
Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target
October 10, 2025 · Original source
Few people use fascism in a purely innocent denotative way; if they did, it would serve their purposes equally well to replace it with a synonym (like “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist”) or even a more specific subvariety (like “Francoist”). But it wouldn’t serve Gavin Newsom’s purpose to call Stephen Miller a far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist, because Gavin Newsom specifically cares about the negative connotation of “fascist”, rather than its meaning. I trust he’s relying on some sort of weaker negative connotation, like “far-right nationalist etc who is a bad person”, rather than going all the way to “far-right nationalist etc who it’s acceptable to kill” - but it’s connotations all the way down. This isn’t necessarily bad - maybe you need some connotations to make a rhetorical case exciting enough to influence anyone besides a few political philosophers. But against this, most people who say “communist” would be happy enough to replace it with some applicable superset/subset/near-synonym, like Marxist, socialist, anticapitalist, far-leftist, Maoist, etc - and people seem to argue against communism just fine.
Highlights From The Comments On Boomers
January 06, 2026 · Original source
Ethiopia was an economic basket case in the early 80s. Thanks to warfare, their economy is again doing poorly. But in between, they had a miraculous recovery. I read that the catalyst for their resurgence was radical land distribution quickly followed by the return of a capitalist government. A government that enforced free markets and relatively strong rule of law, but refused to undo the redistribution of their Marxist forebears.
This combination of redistribution plus free markets was an accident of history, of course. No Marxist ideologue would admit that a one-time redistribution was the only necessary Marxist policy. Nor would a capitalist ideologue initiate even a one-time redistribution, or admit that the benefits of such a program would outweigh its moral hazards.