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patsocs are a Problem for marxists getting our message out (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by bestmiaou@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

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there's a guy that i'm mutuals with on other social media who's on the young side, like just out of college, and he's figuring out what he thinks about politics. he's pretty smart and hangs around cool marxist(-leninist) people, but he's definitely trying to figure out stuff on his own, which is really cool and he's critically engaging with stuff well.

however, it seems like he's seen a lot of patsocs and ACP members bring up weird corners of Marx's writing to try to justify their positions. the particular case he brought up recently was about an ACP guy on twitter using the productive vs unproductive labor distinction to call baristas (you know, people who make coffee for usually really low wages) enemies of the working class because they are unproductive labor. my friend was worried that this kind of weird nonsense argument was necessary for marxists in general. me and some other people explained that no, the ACP guys are picking weird bits of Marx to try to justify their reactionary bullshit and we actually mostly focus on class and not this other stuff. so like no harm done here, but it makes me wonder how often those kind of things go unchallenged in other people's experience.

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[–] TheDoctor@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The official Hexbear Twitter posted a good thread on PatSocs a couple years ago:

https://x.com/chapo_chat/status/1583163442005147649

The thread for those who don’t wanna visit Ecks Dot Com

People defending Vaush by talking about PatSoc’s. Either this stuff is a psyop or the US is getting a lot of free labor from Twitter libs.

LaRouchites and Vaushites are two sides of the same coin. PatSocs are what liberals imagine “tankies” to be. Vaushites are what ML’s imagine anarchists to be. Both represent American chauvinism with a false veneer of anti-Americanism.

Social media facilitates the distributed creation of brand-personalities, which are much simpler to embody and to understand as an onlooker than genuine personhood. So the question is not, “are these figures assets or did they gain notoriety organically?”

The question is, “what brands are being formed here and how do they function?” In the case of these two groups, they are two poles on a spectrum of opportunism. Both facilitate this self-fulfilling cycle of anti-communism.

Both will point to each other as examples of why the “other side” is incorrect (and therefore why “our side” is correct). But they both implicitly agree on several things.

Things they agree on:

You can’t be an ML and care about marginalized people
You can’t be an anarchist and care about the global south/opposing American hegemony (see discourse about what qualifies as imperialism)
Internet discourse is central to working class liberation

All three of these are nonstarters to actually going out and effectively organizing in your communities, at least for those of us who identify with our ideological labels (remember the bit about how social media encourages personality-brands?)

When we wear our political tendencies as team jerseys, they stop being accurate descriptions of our actions/intentions and start being ways that we signal our morality to the world.

Haz, Vaush, and the countless others who take up otherwise valuable space in our heads just happen to be particularly good at the game of outrage growth. They are figureheads not by merit of their actions, but by the opportunism of their personality-brands.