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Some people are only in the left because they want to “win” and it shows. Zero principles, they just do whatever they can to get their Ws.
Which in turn shows how quickly they’ll swap out their red shirt for a brown one if they actually took any sort of power.
The last few years of patsocism evolving show this is correct. I made the observation in 2022 already; all they have to show for their supposed vanguard strand of marxism is twitch streamers and twitter accounts. Social-democrats have done it already and they do it better on breadtube.
2 years later, and 4-5 years of patsocism existing, and they are only entrenching themselves further in this dead-end (well, organizational dead-end; I’m sure it pays off quite well for their bank accounts). Their fans are mostly 13-15 year olds, and patsocs are now further diluting marxism, further vulgarizing it so that it only looks a certain way, regardless of context or deeper meaning. They take quotes and excerpts out of context, carefully cropping the parts that precede or follow it, to present a certain reading of marxism that is simply about buzzwords. It’s only about hitting the right words for them.
This sort of analysis makes me think they’re more of an OP than just grifters. As leftist thought becomes more prevalent, it makes sense that the powers that be would want to muddy the waters as much as possible and turn socialism into yet another empty lifestyle bought and sold by capitalism.
Hinkle is almost certainly an op. Larouche himself was likely a fed – he liked to deride his opponents as feds, but almost assuredly had contracts with the CIA and FBI to provide them with intel. The Schiller institute was good at doing that in the 70s-90s.
Hinkle has a strange public upbringing; he was close to some political figures (especially Tulsi Gabbard, who is the commander of a battalion in the US Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations) as a senior in high school. Keep in mind he’s only 24 today.
Next he emerges and gets boosted not once, but twice by the Zionist entity, each them getting him tons of followers. His entire brand is about repeating what others have said, stealing their words and repackaging them as his own analysis or news. I can’t count the number of tweets he’s stolen from other people lol.
There’s more to it but I don’t remember all of it, there’s an account on Twitter that tracks him pretty consistently: https://twitter.com/jonnysocialism
woke bad
Opinion rejected
The only correct thing to say in these situations is “Sorry, I don’t speak Nazi”
reactoid located
quickest way for me to dismiss anyone out of pocket lol
Ended up blocking them and their guys’ personal accounts on the ProleWiki twitter, I got tired of seeing them in our mentions lol. They don’t like that we criticize them on their respective pages, I told them MWM is free to say stuff about ProleWiki if they want to. It’s like they’re scared of criticism and consider it unmarxist – that’s a huge red flag.
Midwestern Marx is being cringe here, what does being “non-woke” even mean? I don’t think that communists should adopt the language of the reactionary right which is obsessed with labeling all their ideological opponents as “woke”.
On the other hand, i also think that sometimes this community uses “patsoc” in the same way, as a label that allows us to put someone in a box, associate them with positions they may not even hold and then entirely dismiss them. It reminds me of the way that liberals throw around “tankie”.
We should be careful not to fall into that same trap ourselves of overusing a poorly defined derogatory term that just generalizes and dismisses everyone on the left we don’t agree with. I think we should engage with and criticise ideas not personalities and this does the exact opposite of that.
Normally I’d agree but patriotism for a genocidal settler colonial state is inherently reactionary, and that’s what these people are. These people are trying to appeal to reactionaries and “patriots” by engaging in tailism, and that’s why they’re dangerous to any real revolutionary movement.
This is why I never could get behind Midwestern Marx, or for that matter anyone on RBN who sounded the same way (think it was CJ who was complaining about how his linking up with brownshirts that way was being seen bout a year back or so; and that channel was how I even learned MM was a thing). There is nothing Here for community to be proud of. This is a nation of slavemasters who won’t give us what they’ve owed since antiquity; why the black-and-red-fuck would we ever uplift the stars and bars? Tailism is correct.
Facts, and I’ve been asking it since I became conscious: what exactly do we have to be proud of? Every time someone tries to explain it, it’s always the same vague platitudes of freedom and being the great country in the world…like freedom from what? Best in the world in what? This whole joint was built on the backs of our ancestors and paid for with their blood, and we are the subjects of the empire.
I’ve never considered myself to be Amerikan and I never will, and it’s why I consider anyone patriotic to be an opp.
If you’d prefer, we could just call these people national socialists instead. Because that’s what they are. They’re usurping socialist language as a means of pushing people towards fascism. Should be we giving fascists the “benefit of the doubt?”
Exactly right. They push a cynical and loveless socialism that has disunity baked into it.
The people they are pandering to aren’t being won over. Their beliefs are being reinforced when they see that even the lefties can be bigots.
It would be silly to call anyone who claims to be ML but has reactionary social position a patsoc, but these guys are “patriotic socialists” and are associated with other pazis. It’s an objectively terrible position with historic Ls.
The problem is they chose to include “non-woke”. They could have said “the emergent anti-imperialist left”
edit: we may be agreeing and the rest of your comment past the first paragraph was talking about something else! On patsocs, one of the traits they share is that they are quite good at downplaying their “power level”, only slowly testing the waters here and there and seeing if it’s safe enough to drop the mask.
I have some experience with dealing with online fascists (not like patsocs are doing anything IRL either lol), and I see the same methods being used there. For example the Pamphlets account, which recently got a huge boost on Twitter, seems to be at that stage. If 3-6 months from now they become openly patsoc, my theory will be vindicated lol.
At this point I am personally not giving anyone who displays patsoc tendencies the benefit of the doubt, when they start with the dogwhistles it means they are far deeper into it than they let on and it’s only a matter of time until they drop the mask and start getting a piece of the streamer pie for themselves.
Indeed and that is a weird and cringe thing to do. I don’t see the point of it and it’s not like “woke” or “non-woke” are even serious terms anyway. There is an educated discussion that could be had about liberal identity politics and the way that progressive struggles (or rather the language thereof) have been co-opted by capitalists and imperialists, defanged of their revolutionary and radical character and made compatible with the status quo. But rather than doing that they chose to stoop down to this rather boorish level of using the language of the reactionary right. So the accusation of opportunism is accurate in this particular case, but i think the real crime committed here is that this is an ineffectual strategy. By using the right’s language we would be ceding ideological ground to them and at the end of the day it won’t work anyway. The kinds of people who have this obsession with the “woke” boogieman are never going to be a solid base for the kind of revolutionary movement that we are interested in building.
On the other hand, i also think that sometimes this community uses “patsoc” in the same way, as a label that allows us to put someone in a box, associate them with positions they may not even hold and then entirely dismiss them. It reminds me of the way that liberals throw around “tankie”.
Is there an example of someone prominent being called a patsoc erroneously? Because I think MidwesternMarx is certainly deserving of that title. Their main spokesperson, Eddie Smith, consistently defends and aligns with other patsocs like Jackson Hinkle.
We should be careful not to fall into that same trap ourselves of overusing a poorly defined derogatory term that just generalizes and dismisses everyone on the left we don’t agree with
I don’t think it is poorly defined. It indicates a right-deviationist strain of political thought that exhibits one or more of (a) revisionism (see Jackson Hinkle claiming that communists don’t want to abolish private property), (b) opportunism (in the form of accommodating rather than correcting reactionary view points amongst the proletariat), or (c) chauvinism (the rejection of self-determination for the United States’ marginalized communities, such as the indigenous population or the Black Belt).
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Patriotic_socialism
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Jackson_Hinkle
so happy to see prokewiki linked
Woke means “I am aware of social justice issues”.
Ironically enough some talking points pushed by anti-woke youtubers would be by definition woke. People like Synthetic Man, Act Man, YellowFlash, and TheQuartering are fully aware of corporate greed and malpractice ruining gaming and media in general which fall under the definition of being a woke talking point due to corporate greed being a social justice issue because of how they can get away with fucking marginalized groups.
Why must you always defend these guys? I don’t know if it’s weirder because you’re not from here (iirc) or maybe if you were you would understand our bdelygmia.*
*fun word I just learned
>as a label that allows us to put someone in a box, associate them with positions they may not even hold and then entirely dismiss them. It reminds me of the way that liberals throw around “tankie”.
We dismiss patcucks because their beliefs can compromise revolutionary movements.
Never realized water is wet