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
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’.
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.
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.
It does mean that these incorrect lines should be opposed and criticised.