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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26325 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Is there something wrong with this? I mean I doubt the person who said it is some kind of doctrinaire Marxist criticizing profit(or at least, I doubt that they're criticizing Home Depot for profit), so they're criticizing construction as something inherently bad.

Why would you doubt a leftist activist in Berkley could be a doctrinaire Marxist? If they aren't explicitly Marxist they at least believe some adjacent far left ideology that borrows heavily from Marxist theory.

Basically what @netstack says below- it wouldn’t surprise me if this person has some ideas adjacent to Marx’s stance on profit. But it seems clear that they’re not arguing from that stance, they’re trying to paint the construction company as something inherently immoral because of what it does, not because of business practices. It’s similar to eg ‘profits from war’ ‘profits off fossil fuels’- even when Berkeley leftists who claim to be Marxists say it, they’re not criticizing Exxon for making money, they’re criticizing it for oil production.

There’s a decent chance the speaker would, if pressed, endorse something like Marx’s stance on profit. I don’t think the statement given looks like an argument from that stance.

The statement has a clear meaning if interpreted through a Marxist lens. Home Depot and other capitalist organizations and individuals are pressuring directly and indirectly UC Berkley to engage in actions that promote capitalism and the interests of the capitalist class. That UC Berkley is really run by a bunch of communists is irrelevant in Marxist theory. I doubt they really believe Home Depot or other capitalists really did anything to pressure UC Berkeley on this issue. They don't care if they did. It's a part of their ideology that everything that exists is a superstructure built on a capitalist base. Everything bad must be linked to capitalism no matter how tenuous the claim.

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