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Notes -
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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