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  • 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.

  • 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:

      • 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 )
      • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • "If Mao was alive today" as if Mao lived in 700 BC or someshit, bro he knew what American imperialism was

  • I feel theres a certain bloc of leftists who, post-bernie, have been ingesting vast amounts of copium to support dems. instead of taking the difficult route of organizing locally and starting from scratch, these guys decided to call it a day and support Kamala. So lame and sad.

    • At that point they aren't leftists though, if they ever were to begin with. I get the feeling that a lot of these people go one of three routes:

      • continue consuming the streamer slop and never read any theory so they're liberals who have the aesthetics of radicalism.
      • Or they abandon their aesthetics and return to liberalism as normal.
      • And finally they might get disillusioned by these "leftists" who only seem to support liberalism, and actually begin to read Marxist theory (past and present), then they may look deeper into AES states with a more crtically supportive lense.

      • continue consuming the streamer slop and never read any theory so they're liberals who have the aesthetics of radicalism.>

        Rad libs.

        Or they abandon their aesthetics and return to liberalism as normal.>

        I used to have a friend who ran for office in 2018 that supported Bernie that fit this mold to a T. He ended up supporting Biden and getting involved in the young dems and has otherwise reverted to being a lib. Hes also one of those super political types that gets a hard on at the idea of running for president some day so i can only imagine how sociopathic this guy really was. Truth be told, I used to be more involved in electoral politics and was super involved in the Bernie campaign but these types really ruined it for me.

        And finally they might get disillusioned by these "leftists" who only seem to support liberalism, and actually begin to read Marxist theory (past and present), then they may look deeper into AES states with a more crtically supportive lense.>

        Dont underestimate the dems ability to fuck things up. I think 2016 was a major disillusionment point and I feel that 2024 will be as well. Even if kamala wins, all these "progressive" libs are gonna be disappointed when shes just Trump lite like Biden.

  • stalin would have personally led a gang war so big that cascadia would be a country and vaush thinks the old man would have been a staffer

  • This has to be him baiting us

    Please god let it be bait

    • It's both

      It's bait but he also believes it, at least partially

      These are symptoms of late stage terminal-onlineness-associated irony poisoning

      Occupational hazard involved in being a liberal debate pervert

  • I thought Vaush was anti-Mao because he was "authoritarian."

    Though I guess this is just the usual lib thing of pretending everyone else is a secret lib isn't it?

  • Kamala and Mao are similar in that neither of them are white.
    They are different in that Kamala is a woman (political)

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