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The little “patsoc” civil war is getting a little worrying, lack of understanding and clear definitions leading to ad hominem bullshit and ridiculous strawmans. Really hope we don’t end up banning half the userbase over it.
On a serious note: I hope the issues get solved soon
I love this meme ahahahaha
We ought to have a pinned post summarizing what Lemmygrad’s “official” definition of PatSoc is
How can we? The ones to answer that are leading patsoc thinkers.
Could you give an example of a definition given by such a person? I think it would be useful to know how they use the term
No, not me. I don’t follow them. Caleb Maupen or someone who knows what he thinks could.
Emphasizing a working class history and promoting pride for that history is already an aspect of socialism. Adding a new name seems childish or wrong headed to me.
I’ve seen people like Hinckle and Haz promote the bourgeois national myth under the name, pilgrims and Indians, Manifest Destiny. Overall it seems like there are two schools of thought; the Caleb school which seems to be socialism but emphasizing the People’s History, and the Haz/Hinckle school of adolescent pretenders.
I don’t know how well these two schools blend together. I don’t know what if anything I’m missing, as I don’t pay close attention to anyone mentioned. My concern is that the former school would provide cover for the latter.
At best the Caleb school is an exercise in branding. I have books up to my knees that deal with a proper understanding of history. If you’re having trouble understanding what patriotic socialism even is, it’s because it’s just socialism rebranded to emphasize proletarian history.
All right. By “proletarian history”, do you mean a necessarily distorted form (downplaying the genocide of indigenous people, etc.)?
What do you think proletarian means? Read People’s history of the United States or counter-revolution of 1776. The latter being written by a renowned black scholar.
Why would we downplay it when our point is to show how evil the bourgeoisie is? I don’t believe the goal should be to downplay. Nor should it be to reinforce an association between the subject and the slaver or the colonizer. The goal is to present a history of class struggle and to associate the working class with that history.
Proletarian History is an attempted to present history from the perspective of the proletariat. The purpose is to break through the national myth and expose the history of class struggle and generational injury.
If your asking me what somebody else thinks on the issue I don’t know. As I said I don’t follow them close enough to know everything they say.
I’m aware of what the word means. You wrote that patriotic socialism is “just socialism rebranded to emphasize proletarian history”, but you also mentioned people who seem to be considered PatSocs (Hinckle and Haz) yet promote a distorted version of history (glorifying the past of the US), which would contradict the definition – however, re-reading your previous comment, I suppose you meant that you don’t actually consider these two PatSocs.
I personally just call myself a socialist or ML if people need more information. I wouldn’t add anything to it.
I don’t know how legitimate the movement is. I’m generally suspicious of qualifiers of any sort. Think democratic socialist or Anarcho Socialist. The one word in front of Socialist is there to negate Socialism. It’s Socialism but not really.
For that prejudice I’m suspecious of anyone calling themselves patsoc. That and it’s a little too close to national socialist.
Like I said I’m just a socialist. I’m not anything else. My point wasn’t that it was one thing or the other, but that it might be this or it might be that. It could be benign or it could be senister. Both camps exist. I think it better to just be socialist.
Addendum:
I think some people just like to wear different hats. They can never just be socialist. They have to be socialist plus their hat. I’m sure a not insignificant amount of patsoc’s just want to try on a new name. How many of them are in their early twenties or younger? They don’t know anything yet.
I’ll relay this to the mod team. My personal inclination is that while we should allow some discussion around the topic, we should ban people that outright deny the importance or existence of settler-colonialism, or think decolonization means not returning land to those it was stolen from. But ya I’ll get back to ya.
Can we please just stop using this damn word altogether, forget this ever happened and continue our lifes and talk about more important stuff? This wannabe sino-soviet split is so dumb, we are fighting because of misunderstandings, badly worded texts, and because of a bunch of clowns said some stupid shit on twitter and youtube. Its so not worth it to even put energy into this, i am starting to think this is not even about patsocs anymore. Also muad’dibber constantly menacing to ban people because of this is not helping at all. I dont even get what patsocs actually are, and so do most people here, this feels like a bunch of children having angry rants about communism on school, when they dont even know the definition of it, i know this for self experience.
You make a very good point. Solidarity should be the priority. Even if we disagree on things like symbolism or the meaning of patriotism or whatever it is. Class struggle should be uniting us.
The problem is not with the anti-pat-soc crowd. The problem is that when leftists adopt intersectionality, particularly with LGBTQ+ and indigenous minorities, it always happens that some people start arguing that because a particular segment of the working class disagrees with these things that we should abandon intersectionality because it will not be able to build a mass movement because the working class will reject it.
This argument arises predictably from active enough discussions that address intersectionality and inevitably lead from tolerance of anti-LGBTQ+ to denial of settler colonialism to espousal of patriotic socialism as a means of organizing a mass movement. And no matter how much writing and theory we pull out to show how lack of intersectionality is a non-starter for a sustainable socialist revolution, it’s the people who espouse patriotic socialism who accuse everyone else of being bourgeois reactionary idealists.
This continues until, inevitably, enough anecdotes are gathered from public figures that espouse patriotic socialism to demonstrate that, in fact, patriotic socialism is reactionary and the people espousing patriotic socialism continue to spew their talking points about tolerating intolerance and we basically have to make the choice between admitting reactionaries who genuinely believe we can build a socialist revolution that denies some of its members the right to exist as equals or repressing these tendencies within our community to prevent the community from devolving into a reactionary one.
Yes please, i agree. Lets stop with the threats and attacks. I already explained my position, if others dont agree or dont understand then thats that. Not worth the fight.
I don’t see why it should come to that.
You should see Muad’dibbers recent comments, I hope cooler heads prevail.