So, historical materialism time: certain other banned subreddits with lemmy forks had issues early on rooting out racists and transphobes. There was a lot of pushback from the aggressively white/masc subset community for what they considered overreactions to microaggressions. But when push came to shove, they would often show their whole ass and post the most vitriolic and honestly boomer chud shit to grace the modlogs.
Please keep your minority comrades in mind when posting and moderating your communities. We are service workers, factory workers, and low-level clerks in this together with everyone else, and we would like to believe that socialists care about us too. This is not to say I doubt this community at all, but just wanted to convey lessons from the past.
Trans issues, pronouns, and race issues also make a great litmus tests for weeding out Maupin-type “nationalists” who are mainly self interested.
Hoping to see great things from this community, and nice to meet you all! (っ_)っ
Full agree. There is no class war without our marginalized comrades. Anyone who doesn’t defend trans rights or race rights is no ally to me.
So China is not an ally? They have traditionalist views on many social issues.
Dismissing someone who supports the enmies of the American Blood Empire because they are traditionalist seems idealistic.
This sub literally supports China. We need to have some perspective, although I personally believe we should be outright supportive of trans rights and gender equality. I’m gender fluid and bisexual so please don’t ban me.
Some urban parts of China are slowly moving toward lgbt acceptance (while smaller AES states like Cuba/Vietnam are moving much quicker to support lgbt activists) and the USSR was explicitly anti-racist in stated policy. But countries are much more complicated beasts than individuals and shouldn’t be judged on the same metrics.
That last line is such a great way to put it
This sub literally supports China.
I thought we critically supported China.
Realistically speaking “support” from outside of china by us Genzedongers is immaterial, and a non factor. By support I meant ideologically agree with.
do we have to define ourselves by the rules of china?
My point is that communist revolution is not fundamentally premised around trans or gender issues globally, that is just the material reality. So even though Caleb Maupin does not take an aggressive stance on these issues, that does not mean he is not a communist.
There are no “trans or gender issues”. There is no “issue”. There is only a trend of certain genders and types of people being oppressed by the dominant power structures, and if you have a wrong take on them you are wrong. You are not a good communist. Sure, you can be a communist. But you’re being willfully ignorant. Not something to hold up as a great example.
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I think you are being rather ignorant regarding the time and place. What is the “left” today? The left is AOC, Bernie Sanders, Bowman.
I’m that regard, none of us are leftists.
Caleb was speaking to a Russian audience. I find it very arrogant to simply view this clip and say “he’s not a leftist by his own admission”.
Relative to what is referred to as the “left” today, I would hope to fucking God you’d say you’re not a leftist, because if you did then you’d be a capitalist.
Again, understand the audience he was speaking to before making such an idealistic, abstract analysis regarding what he said.
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If I see any white supremacy, misogyny, or queerphobia in my lemmygrad I swear to Marx…
You’ll report them, and we’ll take care of it 😎
Thank you for safeguarding the revolution o7
This is why we explicitly include transphobia in Lemmygrad’s second rule “no bigotry”. It’s not merely a community rule, it’s valid for the whole website, and all users are encouraged to report those who openly display their chauvinism in any community. The administration has even intervened in the past to address transphobic tendencies from an administrator, which has left us since. Our anti-bigotry stance is non-negotiable.
Lemmygrad is a space where different people can learn with each other, united by the banner of communism. You don’t have to fully understand the subjective and objective experience of trans people to fully respect them as human beings.
But it should be clear to anyone who has at least superficially studied the matter: being anti-trans is anti-Marxist. Trans people have existed in all cultures throughout history, from the Sumerian gala priests to African and American societies which had up to 5 different conceptions of gender. Even the most patriarchal and male supremacist societies have had trans people, albeit under terrible circumstances, having to hide their true selves from the world.
This article by Red Fightback is a great introduction on the subject
This is great. When you are a minority there is nothing that stings quite like a comrade showing you they don’t ser you as their equal after all. It’s hard to have solidarity with a person who betrays your trust in a way that feels so personal. Let’s encourage conversations to understand and learn from each other, but let’s not force each other to defend our basic humanity.
chuds will be terminated on-sight
o7
I love this. There are plenty of opportunities for education and for critical analysis that can correct this behavior. However, the reality is that moderator policy and structure (having open lines of communication with prominent members of marginalized communities, for example) will always involve tradeoffs in who is being empowered and who is being centered. Some people are so used to being centered and unchallenged that they will leave at the first sign of accommodations for others. It’s easy to say the slogans and repeat the theory. It is another to actual engage with that practice and do the relevant self-criticism.
I’d like to add that a strategy which found success at Hexbear was essentially to deputize core community members to assist in boosting marginalized voices. We want to give people the chance to participate in liberatory learning, but the people the most qualified to teach are the marginalized people themselves, who were very prone to burnout from having to answer the same questions over and over and constantly feeling the need to defend their own existence in what was supposed to be a community opposed to bigotry.
The solution? In the case of trans issues, we basically created a coalition of trusted trans users who would consult each other on the party line for various issues. We found that some cis users would do a full 180° flip in reactions based on whether the person they were talking to was cis or not. So trans users would literally write the party line and cis users would copy paste it in to do the frontline work of explaining or arguing. The trans users were of course welcome to join in, but the point was to make it so they didn’t feel obligated to across the board. And these party lines became part of the site culture so that most people who have been around long enough know them and can help spread the info.
Thanks! I am also wondering, is this also something in your opinion that cult/religion survivors could be taken in consideration before commiting apologism which ex-believers of those particular sects not only know they aren’t true but also triggers them into important traumatic issues? (Religious Trauma Syndrome is real)
This is a bit more of a niche thing that I don’t have experience with, so I wouldn’t be able to speak to it properly. But it is something you, as someone who has experienced it, would be able to bring up as a consideration.
You mean that I should write some say of essay-like statement for clarification? Sorry, I’m having a super headache right now and English is like my 3rd Language…
But I understand the thing about niches. In fact, I thought it was a good idea to bring the subject precisely because you were talking about a minority and I wanted to talk about one minority that is systematically oppressed one way or another, while they see the producers of most of their individual material problems be praised even from non - believers and even a lot of communists, which alienate them towards other places or apolitical tendencies. Have you seen the ex-muslim subr*ddit, or the life experiences from exJW, exMormon, etc? You will see a huge social and analytical problem we as a political group are forgetting and even forsaking for the sake of compelling idealist static and even reactionary ideologies because they are held by a majority, and I feel that I am being seen by mods to be banned because what I am saying is too much uncomfortable for what it looks is a huge majority unwilling to not held criticism and keep stepping in the neck of apostate-runaways that wanted to also have a group they found they could be kept at least minimally safe from their basically PTSDs.
Stupidpol dipshits are welcome to stay on Reddit.
🇨🇳Qvrr liberation 🏳️🌈
Yes!
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See ya, bozo 👋
Uphold anti-bozo thought
Bozo is one of my favorite insults.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but I also believe figured like Maupin should not be utterly dismissed.
Caleb does a LOT of good work, is a staunch anti-imperialist, and supports the AES states working to reign I’m the American Empire.
Caleb does have some conservative, traditionalist views, but that does not make him not a socialist.
After all, the US isn’t going to change because of our ideals.
What comes first is the destruction of the US Empire, and in that endeavor, Caleb is still on our side. He should not be dismissed.
Edit: please don’t ban me I’m literally bisexual
He wrote an entire antisemitic book “Satan at the Fountainhead” and constantly dog whistles about “bankers” this dude is not a leftist. He had a conference with Dugin where he talked about how he wasn’t a leftist but a populist. He certainly is educated about history at least which is more than I can say about breadtubers but c’mon our standards can’t be that low.
Not to mention his anti-vax Jimmy Dore Dick riding, these people who support China and their covid response but then rail against lockdowns demonstrate massive amounts of cognitive dissonance.
None of this is anti-Semitic. Railing against “bankers” is not anti-Semitic, unless you view it idealistically and removed from the reality that Caleb is an anti-capitalist and communist.
When he calls himself not a leftist, I’d argue that no genzedonger is a leftist either, because he is most likely referring to what actually exists as the “left”, which is really just fascism.
So no, relative to what “leftist” means today in the mainstream, none of us are leftists. We are communists in that sense.
I have no idea how we got to the vaccine now. But also, being against the mandates in the imperial core and being pro China’s response with lockdowns is not cognitive dissonance.
One is being carried out by a bloodthirsty regime (US) and one is being carried about by a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The mandates in the US are designed to protect corporate profits, the laws in China are meant to benefit the people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjNksk1iOuw
^ You don’t have to agree with everything this streamer says (I certainly don’t), but she page-by-page overviews Maupin’s writing and it’s surprising how transparent he is with anti-semitic dogwhistles.
Being in favor of AES states, the global south, and global multipolarity is fine. But we should consider the workers’ needs over the needs of the state. Caleb intellectually puts the ideal of the state and certain social classes first despite his lipservice to ‘ordinary workers’.
it’s surprising how transparent he is with anti-semitic dogwhistles.
Very skeptical of this, considering how many accuse every mention of the “elite” as an anti-Semitic dog whistle.
Dog whistles are a ridiculous concept when applied to communists, no? Caleb is a literal communist who has read a lot of theory. I’m not a patriotic socialist and I don’t buy into that, but I have a hard time believing that Caleb wants to harm Jewish people because he talks about “bankers” and shit.
Dog whistles are a ridiculous concept when applied to communists, no?
No it’s not.
First of all, whether you want to phrase it as him being a “good communist” or him being a “communist” at all, this is begging the question. You can’t presuppose he’s operating in good faith as a way to prove that he’s operating in good faith.
Second, communists use dog whistles all the time. When I’m talking to people about how “workplace democracy”, what I actually want to be talking about is class warfare and the need to overthrow the bourgeoisie. People who are familiar with theory will know this immediately, but the libs I’m talking to are getting the stuff that’s easy for them to digest. I’ve even had it happen where I do this and someone responds, “so you’re trying to party like it’s 1917”. I did not know this person was a communist, but it let me pull them aside later and talk more openly. The libs did not know what the significance of that year was, so they kind of just wrote it off. That’s all a dog whistle is.
The last thing I’ll say is that, if you’re not Jewish, you generally wouldn’t be able to hear the dog whistles. There’s a certain amount of trusting the effected communities that needs to happen. Antisemitism had always been used against communists as a smear, but that doesn’t preclude there being legitimate concerns of antisemitism within our ranks any more than it precludes all self-professed communists from being racist.
I don’t think Caleb wants to destroy the USA. Like this is the heart of being a patsoc, they want to redeem the USA, remake it and share “it’s” wealth amongst its people. While they talk a good anti imperialist game, they often side with the wrong people, Netflix over workers, Petit boug truck owners over employee drivers, they are oportunists - bonapartists as Caleb would say.
Yeah, that’s problematic but I see where he’s coming from. I mean, I want the American Empire to be destroyed, and if that harms the American people temporarily that is simply an unavoidable reality.
But desiring to destroy the USA, I guess it’s semantic, there are a lot of people here who are oppressed severely they should be liberated in the end. Idk lmao if I’m wrong I’d love to hear why
What you’re talking about is the difference between a government and its people. But patriotism is a means of conflating those two things in order to justify particular actions of the government. It works because it creates an in and out group and makes people less critical of actions of the in group. In the case of patsoc in the US, it’s advocating for particular actions contrary to the US’s current interests and its ingroup can fluctuate wildly depending on who is advocating for it.
Maupin aside, patsoc has major potential for cooption specifically because it is not critical in nature. Patriotism is just not a vehicle for self-criticism, particularly for people benefiting more from the existing system. If you’re not familiar with Freire, he talks in Pedagogy of the Oppressed about how critical consciousness is always liberating for oppressed people. Those who are accustomed to power will insist that oppressed people learning of their oppression will make them angry and irrational. In reality, oppressed people experience liberation when exposed to truth of their situation. Putting a group of people (patsoc’s ingroup) up on a pedestal is not an act which encourages critical consciousness. It encourages a sectarian worldview, which in turns creates taboos around certain subjects.
I get why you don’t want to dismiss Caleb, he is well read and he seems genuinely interested in educating people and he even seems like a nice person. Of all the patsocs, him and Mid Western Marx seem like the most genuine.
But should we let his followers into our movement? Of this I am very skeptical. I know he has no control over the vast majority of his community but he put Infrared Haz up on stage to speak at his CPI conference.
I can understand why caleb went to other conferences and spoke with questionable people like Dugin but when he does his own thing, who he puts up on stage does matter.
You can find caleb’s books online (Z library) rather than subject yourself to a multi hour breadtube video.
Caleb is clearly building his own movement with the CPI, if you want to be involved with that then I guess that’s your choice and if the CPI wants to collaborate with other orgs on issues where we align I could even go along with that.
Caleb does have some conservative, traditionalist views, but that does not make him not a socialist.
It does mean that these incorrect lines should be opposed and criticised.
