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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

> So how to communicate in a legal way ‘We want more female engineers cos we think it’s gonna be really good for the business and all.’ without being discriminative?

A bit OT, but I wonder why DEI is frequently chalked up as a "left" topic. Racial/feminist /etc injustices in society do have a lot of similarities (and alliances) with class struggle - but I think traditional leftist theories see this more as an indicator of a fundamentally unjust system, and don't promote a hundred contradictory DEI initiatives inside companies as bandaid solutions.

...and now, apparently DEI even does away with the reason of fundamental rights at all and just present it as something that "is good for business".

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In the 60s and 70s, there was a thread of Western academic thought in Marxist circles that mapped connections between traditional leftist narratives like the exploitation of labor to things like race and gender. Of course, socialist feminism has a longer history, and can be traced back to the early 20th century. It's debatable how much influence the academics had, beyond their simple existence adding some weight to the previously only political movement.

Within those circles, it seems they like to think of it as extending Marxism to include feminist (and race-related) thought. Having read (only) a bit of it, I'd probably say the connection is a little forced and fraught with motivated reasoning. Though Marx criticized colonialism, I read him as more focused on its relationship with the capitalist system, exploitative by his measure at home as well as overseas. Furthermore, on race, Marx (and Engels) wrote some things that would be hard to utter in polite company today.

Yeah, I heard about that and I think would be really important to understand that connection to make sense of the various movements that exist today. I think it was connected with the western "new left" movement, but I'm still weak on details unfortunately.

The thing is however, that modern DEI seems to have morphed into yet another thing, which I think some leftists describe as "woke capitalism": It kept the feminism and diversity angles but threw out Marx altogether - hence why we now have DEI initiatives that justify their actions with "diverse employees increase profits".

I don't see what part of that is still left-wing.

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