cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/258745
There are a lot of self proclaimed ML’s online who have mostly agreeable politics but are also very socially reactionary. They often post something decent like ‘NATO provoked the conflict in Ukraine’ and at the end randomly say ‘this is similar to when liberals pretend trans identities are valid’ they talk about trans identities as part of western societal decay etc. (One thing I have noticed is that they praise tomboys but condemn trans women or even cis men in dresses). How does one expose their lack of materialism around this issue? I honestly think some could be swayed.
I would have them read Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression to learn how internal racism within the CPUSA broke the movement in the US. I find transphobes also tend to be implicitly racist even if they claim not to be. But my thesis in reading about these sort of events is that the most marginalized people in society are the most radicalizable, in agreememt with Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, and in disagreement with Marx. IMO pulling from the marginalized will generate the revolutionary energy needed for things to snowball. When Browder ignored the needs of the majority of CPUSA members who were poor/black, he basically killed their spirit.
PatSocs and Nazbols want to appeal to people who look and think like them. They have no creativity. And tbh that’s why I don’t think their movements will ever get bigger than little conspiracy-theory groups because their tendency only works on specific subsets of a class that’s normally comfortable in liberalism. What we do have to worry about is the spread of their ideas into other communities through osmosis. I very often see posts with Nazbol/Patsoc adjacent talking points (“what if we dressed like nazis?” “What if we adopt nazi memes?”) without the person identifying with that group themselves.
They need to be educated that being uncreative in your thinking isolates you to your own social class. In order to appeal to multiple classes and subclasses you need a universalizing ideology that accepts them all as they are and hope to make them into their best selves.