They're not relevant in the slightest IRL.
Anyone want to explain why I see so much shit about patsocs in every online leftist space, all of which is totally divorced from things people actually give a shit about IRL?
It seems there's this trend where some patsocist says something absurd online -> everyone rushes to dunk/criticize/make fun of it -> the patsoc's message gets amplified to the millionth degree. Do content creators not realize that shitting out 500 videos/threads/posts/etc dunking on something that only exists online is only going to amplify it further?
Eh, Maupin was caught sexually abusing people and trying to form a sex cult. It's more real than you think. The LaRouchites, in particular, are very, very real. You shouldn't see the patsocs as a bunch of terminally online losers (which they are), but the LaRouchites adapting to modern politics, which is stepped in online culture. LaRouche himself had connection with the feds, which explains why patsocs, like the rest of the LaRouchites, act like feds as well.
The LaRouchites have been around since the 60s. And they are doing now what they did then: to lead people who understand why capitalism sucks away from revolutionary politics. Unlike more open fascists like neonazis, they cloaked their reaction with leftish sounding slogans. But keep in mind that the original Italian fascists and nazis themselves were cloaking their reaction with leftish sounding slogans as well.
The real danger is the merger of social democracy and fascism into some neo-Strasserite abomination where you get to be a giant racist who fellates the police state and rants about blue-haired woke SJW's but you also get healthcare and pensions if you are part of the in group. This has a potential to convince huge parts of the population of the west.
That's also been a huge drain on the American left historically too, where you've got all these libertine socdem chauvinists who maybe performatively oppose imperial wars but are most concerned with their own personal safety and their own access to treats. They don't even need to form a discrete fascist bloc because they're already bonded to the American civic cult and its fascism-except-it-predates-fascism-as-a-concept nationalist ideology, all it takes is for them to be told that the outgroup is coming for/infecting their favorite treats and they pivot entirely into supporting the far-right establishment.
That's basically what gamergate did, it scooped up all these chauvinist libertines who previously had been vaguely left of center because it was the theocratic right, the pearl-clutching suburbanite reactionaries, and uptight big-businessmen threatening their treats, and it converted them into frothing fascists by telling them "women are coming for your fun-time treats!"
That's why the formation of any such bloc of self-serving chauvinist treat lads has to be countered and dismantled wherever possible, because they're at best fair-weather-friends who'll eagerly be reincorporated into the establishment, and at worst they're a festering rot that can flip over to fascism at any moment.
more it disorganises resistance to fascism with promises to some segments of the population. the ""left"" of any fascist movement is immediately cast away when they get a lick of power.
strasserism/red-brownism, it cannot exist in an actual state that needs to implement policy, its a marriage of the opportunists and delusional ideologues trying desperately to get power
To strangle it in its crib so they fuck off and we don't have to deal with them like we do Vaushites.
One of the main reasons Vaush is so widely known is the hate spreading and feeding the troll and ragebait. The way to make Vaush go away is to stop talking about him, just like it is with Patsocs.
Nah this is completely wrong.
Vaush was absolutely killing it with growth until we started /r/enough_vaush_spam and made an extremely concerted attempt to utterly fucking destroy him.
He was reached out to beforehand by a group of us who began the project, we outstretched a hand and basically said we didn't give a shit what he did as long as he dropped the sectarian anti-tankie shit as it was just punching left and not useful. When he laughed us off and refused we stepped up, made mega lists of everything he's ever done and got bots made in dozens and dozens of subreddits that auto-replied to his name with that shit, we trawled through every single discord and every single big of social media he's ever been involved in and dug out every last disgusting fucking thing there was. We then spread that everywhere, so that the only thing anyone ever thinks of when Vaush's name is mentioned is what a fucking trans hating pedo defending freak he is. We then moved to spreading it across twitter. We mailed every single person that worked with him all the clips and evidence. We made sure real organisers all rejected him too. Nobody would work with him anymore because his name became cancer.
This stopped his growth in its tracks. He was exploding and would have been a major influencer the size of Hbomb if the push didn't happen. He was absolutely blowing up at the time.
Can't speak for the patsocs as I Haven't been involved in any campaign against them, but I can absolutely vouch that we took a data-driven approach to Vaush and our impact was extremely measurable. It killed all of his momentum. He has admitted this very publicly in mini-breakdowns about it, he knows full well his brand is shot to shit now.
EDIT: I will go so far as to say that Vaush's rep being destroyed was a Hexbear project, even if it didn't specifically organise on Hexbear. It was members of this crowd that set about the task of doing it and it was the megathread of his bullshit that was maintained here that formed the start of all the facts bots that were created and spread among the leftist subreddits. Hexbears were the vanguard of that entire shitstorm against him. Also big kudos to Tronaldo who put shitloads into it and is the scrappiest scrapper I've ever seen, not without flaws but he knows how to have a fight. He's doing offline organising for now though.
Do you have like, a chart or something that shows his growth numbers slowing down? I like seeing it as a picture :blob-no-thoughts: I definitely haven't heard nearly as much about him since what felt like the peak in 2020
https://i.imgur.com/7iQbBvQ.png
Our collective efforts started in December 2020 and really kicked into high gear in January. He was absolutely blowing up in growth at the time and then his momentum was completely shredded. He has not recovered that growth since.
He was allowed to pretend to be a leftist for like a year and was featured on fellow channels occasionally, calling himself a Leftcom. Particularly piggybacking on Destiny, etc. All before he started saying the dumb shit.
Destiny is not a leftist, he doesn’t even pretend to be.
I don’t really get what you mean by “allowed” as if we have any control over random twitch channels or whatever
He didn't get big rage-baiting people, he got big riding YouTube and Redditt's content algorithms pandering to breadtube people while saying really vague leftist stuff, usually getting stuff wrong: like not knowing who the CNT-FAI were, calling peasants part of the proletariat, thinking Night Of The Long Knives was a beta-run for Kristallnacht, etc. This is actually what Haz was doing and was getting bigger until people who are actual Marxists outside the Breadtube sphere started seeing his videos and Haz/PatSocs started really dropping the ball and saying dumb shit that outs them as fascists.
"Containment theory" and "don't feed the trolls" only let /pol/ flourish and spread like the malignant nazi tumor it always was.
Content creators have content brain where they see dumb shit and feel the need to turn it into entertainment
I guarantee you they don't think that far into it
I have appreciated the pushback against patsocs and hazites by people here and elsewhere through the use of applied theory to completely dismantle their non-arguments, like the dumb fuck who was saying that baristas aren't workers and don't add value because they merely transform raw materials, not realising that the transformative processes that convert raw materials into a finished product are literally the core element of labor adding value. This, in addition to being a fantastic dunk (thanks @Alaskaball ), is also a great way to educate those who don't know basic theory and might be led astray through the simple tempation of mere redistributive economics along national lines, rather than class lines.
It's easy to say "ignore them and they'll go away", but first things first it's next to impossible (even if we magically all shut the hell up about it someone else will blab), and second, they do their own self-amplifying if nobody pushes back. The alt-right /pol/ to nazi pipeline went through the same cycle of "ignore-them-and-they'll-go-away-cum-self-amplification" and they got Trump elected. It's not to be completely underestimated.
What is probably most true, however, is that their tactic of focusing not on explaining marxism or communism to Republicans, but rather on expressing reactionary politics and then going "See, even us cool communists hate the gays, please notice us sempai", will end disastrously for them as there is nothing that the MAGAs hate more than communists, real or self-proclaimed, and they will be the first to be violently purged. It will be self-selecting up until they simply claim to be fascists, and even then I wouldn't rate their chances.
It’s easy to say “ignore them and they’ll go away”
Plus fighting with them releases dopamine and cortisol that I need to feel anything.
Because it’s the new replacement snarlword for “tankie” and will spread to include all Marxist-Leninists and anti-imperialists more generally. Patsocs make up maybe 0.00000001% of the population but get a ton of attention because they are clowns that are obviously stupid, so they will be a useful outgroup later to label people with (similar to nazbol, etc)
You can get mad at this take, but we’ll see in a couple years if radlibs are calling us Maupinites/MAGA Communists/Patsocs. Already get called a Putinist, Assadist, Nazbol, tankie, etc. Cant wait for libs to overreact about this one and absorb another label to use
Get ready to be called “MAGA communist”
"but I don't want to make america great, I want to burn it down to the ground"
The second American Civil War was fought between two former political parties turned insurgent groups: The Democrats (Marxist-Leninist-Hoxhaists) and The Republicans (Marxist-Leninist-LaRouchists). Neither faction were communist in any way, shape or form.
This capitalist infighting led to an opening for the anti-revisionist Communist Party (Libertarian) (not actually libertarian) to seize control of the government and institute a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Next week, we'll discuss how the Libertarian Party turned to Anarcho-capitalist Posadism after they captured several nuclear warheads and instituted M.A.D.N.A.P. (blockchain-based automated mutual annihilation, should the sanctity of property be violated) in several regions, before ultimately setting off 70% of the nukes over a contract dispute concerning the respective spheres of influence of the McDonalds and Wendy's fiefdoms.
:antelope-popcorn:
I'm here for more of this Hexbear-generated predictive near-future novel
because patsocs are annoying as fuck? but I agree, if people stopped talking about them or dunking on them they'd probably just fade away into irrelevance and join the republican party. I wish people would stop posting those infrared freaks in the dunk tank here because I hate even being reminded of their existence and there's probably some impressionable weirdos here who agree more with the patsocs than the people mocking them
Its a pretty good way to apply lessons learned through theory right?
Look :soypoint-2: that is what tailism is. I know we use the term occassionally and you might have read about in a book or an essay but there ya go :soypoint-2: that's what it can look like in real life.
Caring about others caring about things is just caring about things with extra steps.
Patsocs are revisionists - while it is exhausting, their obtuse paraphrasing of Marxian thought needs to be combated/dispelled.
I agree that they are irrelevant in the sense that conventional discourse surrounding Marxism is so undeveloped that it's no worse than the more traditional bastardizations, but in terms of people who are actively trying to develop their understanding of Marxism it presents an element of confusion.
Patsocs are fashy and in a way that appeals to liberals that think of themselves as anti-capitalist
The tendency that concerns me most is some sort of Strasserite or Longist movement on the right in response to the economy and climate failing. Redistributive politics tied to nationalism rather than class. It speaks to everyone who tries to get rich through pyramid schemes and gives a fascist something to point to as doing more than liberals would, like Trump's COVID stimulus payment versus Biden's.
Patsocs are ass dummies, but they're the most visible form of that kind of tendency waiting for a non-ass dummy to use whatever arguments test best with them. They're like the disorganised conspiracy theory communities before Qanon. I watch them because they're funny but could turn scary as things get worse.
Redistributive politics tied to nationalism rather than class.
I don't think that's going to happen with this current generation in power, but I could see that happening to the young on the right. So PatSocs of today could be the America First Party of twenty years from now.
lots of weird niche shit on the internet became problematic in a big way and maybe didn't seem like it mattered before. i kinda just accept that if i'm hearing a lot about something online, it's going to eventually spill into the mass culture too. look at qanon, i thought i was terminally online talking about it for a while but then my 70 yr old neighbors had stickers on their cars and everyone around me knew someone deep in it.
i don't see the same potential for the patsoc angle, but all it takes is some rich asshole to see the potential in this movement as a disruption and then funnel some cash into it and whew boy you're gonna hear more about it than you want. in fact, the rise of this patsoc shit (which wasn't anywhere on my radar before the past few weeks) is kinda setting off my alarm bells as something that would be really attractive to the intelligence community. so idk, i don't think people talking about it now as a means to nip it in the bud as much as possible is a bad thing, i'm pretty indifferent to it and i'm glad someone is keeping their eye on it so that if it becomes bigger in the cultural consciousness that at least there is a foundation for de-legitimizing it.
i don't know
please stop fucking posting about neo-larouchites, you have to actively seek out their reeking shit to even notice them otherwise
there's not much else going on atm, plus as irrelevant as these contradictory dead end """socialist""" branches are, the anti-NATO, anti-Biden left is somehow smaller
How many people sucked off Biden for that fucking awful student debt relief package? He should have felt the need to announce that insult of relief behind one of those bulletproof popemobile windows (to the members of the 4th Reich that would harass/arrest people for posting this, I do not encourage anyone to act violently nor do I have any plans myself), but even on here you had people saying "well, it's better than nothing, why are you complaining?"
Besides, these meme tendencies come and go, as they have since 2016 (and probably before). How many people still call themselves egoists unironically?
