Mao: We should literally kill every landlord
Harris: We should fund a first time home buyers grant of $20,000 for pell grant recipients who have owned a small business for 25 years
Vaush: These are literally the same thing
That was Mao's problem tho right? He didn't liquidate the landlords but instead allowed them to form a counter revolution.
We've done it. We've finally manufactured and deployed the wrongest man.
Him going back to this well every election year has to be intentional lol
The “[historical figure] would’ve supported [modern candidate/movement/policy]” is the most brain dead argument. Obviously, they’re not here to tell us otherwise. But more importantly, despite the iconography being fun, figures like Lenin, Mao, etc were not prophets delivering holy truths from on high. They were just people making the best of their situations and figuring out what worked in the moment. Which is the best we can do, and often that means taking a different tactic than leftists of old. Ironically, playing games of “What would Lenin do?” is the exact opposite of conceptualizing theory in the modern context because it ties leftist politics to people who had decades of evolving context since their deaths.
For anyone curious about the Harris housing plan: https://nhc.org/the-harris-walz-housing-plan-detailed-serious-and-impactful/
It includes:
Tax breaks for builders
Different tax breaks for builders
Up to $25k for first time home buyers who have not missed rent in the last two years. Also sounds like it might be limited to 1 million buyers a year
Funds for local govt to distribute to non profits/housing services
Deregulation ("cutting red tape and bureaucracy")
Remove tax benefits for corporations that buy single family homes to rent
Some vague "rent control" that isn't
who have not missed rent in the last two years
Come the fuck on. What in the hell kind of means tested bullshit is this?
So funneling money to local government jobs stacked with friends and relatives of the DNC? What else is new?
Damn, that's so radical! No wonder everyone's calling her a communist.
Is that really the shit that republicans froth at the mouth over?
Is that really the shit that republicans froth at the mouth over?
Yes. They froth at literally anything, then the dems attempt to "triangulate" (IE attract fascist voters, which doesn't work anymore, if it ever did) and move further right to compensate, which then lets the GOP go even furtherer to the right in reaction. This is fairly common knowledge even among liberals, but they don't think a better world is possible.
Remove tax benefits for corporations that buy single family homes to rent
Wait are we actually encouraging this specifically right now? Even libs know its contributing to the housing crisis.
Well it seems she's proposing removing the benefit, so not exactly penalizing but no longer encouraging (she won't actually do anything of the sort)
This is some of the absolute dumbest shit I have ever read. What on Earth could Vaush have ever read beyond Wikipedia that led him to this conclusion?
I believe in this context he quoted something Marx wrote about supporting "revolutionary parties in Bourgeoisie elections" and either missed the "revolutionary" part or he claimed the Democrats to be revolutionary.
He took a quote about Marx supporting Communists running in Bourgeoisie elections and twisted it to support voting for Bourgeoisie parties.
and either missed the "revolutionary" part
Lmao
or he claimed the Democrats to be revolutionary
LMAO
He took a quote about Marx supporting Communists running in Bourgeoisie elections and twisted it to support voting for Bourgeoisie parties.
Yea, there's no genuine way to read this other than Marx supporting PSL or other actual Leftist parties, surely people have pointed this out, right? Right?
Sort of, I'm showing how even taking him at his best, he is still the worst. As a rule I try to assume good faith before dunking, because even good-faith readings of Vaush are terrible.
The fact that he provided zero quotes to back up his claims about this, given that he positioned himself as having read these figures works thoroughly, says it all.
It's insulting to people who have actually made the effort of doing so, and is immediately transparent for those who have.
I recall he made a video during the lead up to the 2020 election where he took Marx and Lenin quotes out of context to make it sound like they support voting for Biden.
Specifically it was the Lenin segment on whether communists should participate in bourgeois elections, where Lenin argues that communists should participate by organizing as a communist party. They will have no expectation of winning, because bourgeois democracy is a myth, but it will be useful to spread propaganda and explicitly to show that bourgeois democracy is rigged.
Saying this means "LENIN WOULD HAVE VOOTED FOR BIDEN" was one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen, and the bar for liberal politics streamers is already in hell.
Lmao "radical"
Her policy proposal is extremely conservative and unlikely to meaningfully change the course of the housing crisis
Mao is evil and everything he did was evil.
Kamala Harris is good and everything she does is good.
If you like Mao, who is evil, then you should like Harris, who is good.
Harris and Mao actually have really similar policies, which you should be happy about if you like Mao, which you shouldn't.
Being a Liberal must be fucking exhausting.
it's actually really easy for them, because they're so bereft of intellectual rigor and honesty, and the cloud-like consistency of their idealism so unfettered by any material reality; context; or need for integrity and internal coherence, that none of these things actually create cognitive dissonance in them to have to confront and contort around in the first place. Their cognitive stride does not stutter or even notice the incomprehensibility and self-refuting in the garbage they say, because they don't in reality possess a methodological framework for their thinking which requires it. And if pressed too hard toward Our God's Green Planet Earth on their own statements and beliefs, they inevitably either:
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deflect: ( "but 100 gorillion vuvuzela ifone!" | "X fallacy!!" | "Yeah well every country does bad things" | "that sounds good on paper but [status-quo reinforcing trope]" | "You say Y movement/country did good thing or has lesson to teach, but Y country/movement [Imperialist or actual Nazi propaganda or half-understood historical circumstance learned from a youtube video or mid-argument-wikipedia-scan]" | "you're just a [thought-terminating juvenile insult ie. 'tankie/bot/social credit/wumao/putin asset' etc.]" | and so on )
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project/accuse: ( "not voting for Kamala means you want trump to win/support fascism!" | "so you're saying [Z outragious hypothetical that no one, in fact, said]" | "you think you speak for A,B,C, and treat them like a monolith!" then talking about the
'international community' or what 'people who really lived under communism think,' etc. | [baseless accusation of being an advocate for/denialist of some terrible thing] | and so on ) -
or otherwise 'indicate that the time for conversation has passed'.
.
It is Marxists who have to struggle against cognitive dissonance when holding or confronting contradictory ideas. Due to having our conceptions actually be necessarily rooted in material reality, and there existing analytical criticality in the foundation of the methodological framework of the marxist worldview.
It's from this that they derive their ability to seemingly-endlessly exhaust us and wear us down jumping all over the place with no rhyme or reason expecting us to slog through the 50 different ways the things they said are wrong or inapplicable, without ever engaging materially and critically with the things we ourselves say. There's no compulsion or need within them to chew on new information and how it jives with their preconceptions, particularly when they are still benefiting, or at least not sufficiently crushed by their material conditions to have any incentive to change their minds and seek alternatives to smug status-quo-reinforcing.
It is also why the revolution can't be built from propaganda alone, but from having the agitation and education already un-ignorably there loudly and vigorously critiquing all that is happening and will happen out of all that has happened, laying bare the mechanisms and consequences of maintaining the current way of things better and clearer than our opportunist and fascist opponents, at the same time as (and alongside) organizing and safeguarding better than them those alternatives and solutions our propaganda agitates for; so that when lived political experience and concrete material reality of their conditions and station in a system which only tolerates them insofar as they are needed as a class of laborers kicks their face in, they need only turn away from the boot to see the ways in which we were and are right, and are and have been struggling for what is right; to from there, having been brought back to reality by the tightening crunch of structures in which even their vaporous idealism can't escape its own reckoning, be in their masses obligated to move toward either active support for or passive sympathetic neutrality toward the communists; or otherwise for those among them who it applies, drop the mask of having been anything but a fascist-in-waiting and so lose the protection of the shell-game deniability that they previously so enjoyed.
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Well, if Kamala Harris wants to lead an uprising against the landlords that will be the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and lead to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the people, then I guess you've actually got to hand it to her.
Posting this very relevant video of Hakim destroying Vaush's "support" for this idea that Marx, Lenin, etc. would support bourgeois electoralism (40:28, so if you're interested, strap on your seatbelt)
Too many liberals have trouble contextualizing theory in the modern era. If Hitler, Mussolini, etc, were alive today, they would have been Bernie/Warren staffers, and would have endorsed Biden after Bernie dropped out. You'd know that if you read more than their Wikipedia articles.
This is like the opposite of great man theory, like sure these dead fucks arnt infallible but goddamn put at least a little respect on their names
could run
