Marxists
Article
Marxists is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between February 18, 2021 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “But it’s why I get confused when other people who aren’t obvious Marxists complain about “meritocracy” in the second sense”; “weird-but-not-woke political groups (libertarians, Marxists, alt-right, neoreactionary)”; “As the Marxists always say”. It most often appears alongside America, Scott, US.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: February 18, 2021
- Last seen: July 15, 2025
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On Cult Of Smart
- Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality
- Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims
- Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
Related Pages
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 15th Commandment (1 shared issues)
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- 1957 (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal Australia (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal society (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigine (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigines (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigines of Australia (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
External Links
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.
This is a dead-boring, standard-issue capitalist argument and wouldn’t surprise DeBoer one whit. But it’s why I get confused when other people who aren’t obvious Marxists complain about “meritocracy” in the second sense. If you think incomes should be a little more equal but it still makes sense for a surgeon to earn more than a janitor, being against “meritocracy” seems like an especially bad way to frame your complaint.
Separately in both men and women, weird-but-not-woke political groups (libertarians, Marxists, alt-right, neoreactionary) were less likely than the average person to report Long COVID, and less likely than mainstream conservatives. I find libertarians and Marxists, who I would expect to be less interested in the right-wing project of minimizing COVID than conservatives, sort of interesting. But I won’t claim to have fully debunked this concern.
In this case, the advantage of the Muslims voting for Trump isn’t that they’re showing their willingness to defect, it’s that they’re organizing. As the Marxists always say, organized political blocs can get more concessions than unorganized political blocs. Partly this is out of an implied threat of doing what the Muslims are doing now - switching en masse in a coordinated way - but among savvy political operators, nobody ever has to come anywhere close to making this threat and it’s taboo to try. The organizers just gently remind the candidates that they’re organized, the candidates give them some level of handouts proportional to their power, and everyone stays friendly.
In the early twentieth century, anthropologists embarked on a more ambitious project - demonstrating that something about primitive culture proved that their own political faction was right about everything. Marxists discovered idyllic tribes untouched by capitalism, peacefully sharing their communal resources. Missionaries discovered that every primitive religion was merely a distorted form of Christianity, with a few extra gods and rituals added in to serve local appetites. Feminists discovered that women everywhere developed unique indigenous forms of resistance to patriarchal domination. Postcolonialists discovered that all the other anthropologists were racist. Freudians discovered so many things that it would take ten books of this length to even begin to talk about them.