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I'm nutpicking quotes, but I'm actually trying to make a substantive point. Well, more substantive than the obvious.
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.
And I feel like zeroing in on this; "construction is inherently bad" is kind of nutsy. Not just "duh, where are people supposed to live"- it's an attitude of opposition to doing things, going out in the real world and making a change. I feel like this is my leviathan shaped hole-sized hock, but at the end of the day numbers, names, things on paper, vibes, these are just reflections of what's happening in the real world. You can fuck around with renaming things but it doesn't change what it is that you're renaming. Calling a luxury apartment building "affordable housing coop" with no other change does not actually stop the rent from being $3k/mo, you might as well call it kruphnewdala or something. At least it'd be less confusing- after all, you'd be inventing a new(very stupid) word instead of lying. "Point deer, make horse" only goes so far. You still can't ride a deer(most of the time; I'm sure you can find a youtube video of a crazy Russian guy riding a reindeer or a moose or something). It remains an eating animal, not a "but officer, the horse wasn't drunk" animal. In like manner, you can change zoning on a park(as it seems they did 50 years ago), but it has no actual effect until the bulldozers roll in. It's still a vacant lot full of drug addicts fighting. And I think this is behind a lot of weird far-left hobbyhorses; changing the real world instead of empathizing is morally wrong. It's wrong to send cops to intervene in a mental health crisis because they have an actual effect; it should be social workers who provide empathetic nonsense and don't change the situation. It's wrong to respond to a housing shortage by building housing; instead official figures should hand out money to the losers(which, following the laws of supply and demand, just raises the price of housing).
No, it shouldn't. Various weirdos should just get out of the way. The logical end point of that idea- that things requiring a militarized police state are verboten- is that nothing requiring coercive power should ever get done. That's obviously bad; you can't run a society without coercion of some kind. Like freedom is great, but not the freedom to shit in my neighbor's pool. Or the freedom to prevent him from building on property he owns. Etc, etc.
I think the argument the argument very much is about the profit part. Fleshed out, the argument is that profiting from an action incentivizes you to convince others to want that action. For example, for-profit prison systems would advocate for sending more prisoners their way.
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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.
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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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