there’s a guy that i’m mutuals with on other social media who’s on the young side, like just out of college, and he’s figuring out what he thinks about politics. he’s pretty smart and hangs around cool marxist(-leninist) people, but he’s definitely trying to figure out stuff on his own, which is really cool and he’s critically engaging with stuff well.
however, it seems like he’s seen a lot of patsocs and ACP members bring up weird corners of Marx’s writing to try to justify their positions. the particular case he brought up recently was about an ACP guy on twitter using the productive vs unproductive labor distinction to call baristas (you know, people who make coffee for usually really low wages) enemies of the working class because they are unproductive labor. my friend was worried that this kind of weird nonsense argument was necessary for marxists in general. me and some other people explained that no, the ACP guys are picking weird bits of Marx to try to justify their reactionary bullshit and we actually mostly focus on class and not this other stuff. so like no harm done here, but it makes me wonder how often those kind of things go unchallenged in other people’s experience.
I think with the hindsight we now have we can formally say that patsocs are distorters of marxism (Lenin had to contend with them already in his time!) and their role is to drive people away from marxism-leninism. There’s a reason they are almost entirely indistinguishable from fascists and rally all the most insufferable and toxic persons together. I also think there’s a reason the “ACP Chapters” that apparently exist have so far only done garbage clean-up instead of organizing reading groups, roundtable discussions or seminars and participating in protests. If they do it, they’ve never advertised it. Garbage clean-up is something any lib NGO can and already do.
They cherry-pick the most obscure excerpts and give it the most tortured reading to make arguments. In this way they seem like authoritative sources, giving you passages from books directly. Most of the time they cut out the very next paragraph that disproves their claim entirely. They attach themselves to these figures and also to other orgs so that they get authority by proxy. It’s very blatant once you notice it.
Marxism isn’t fundamentally difficult or obscure. It’s actually the opposite, it demystifies the world. It can’t be a proletarian ideology if it reproduces the behaviors of bourgeois ideology: that of being inaccessible in language, requiring years and years of studies to even start to grasp, requiring the reading of earlier philosophers in an academic manner (pouring over every word), and attaching itself not to the substance – despite what patsocs say they do – but to the form.
I see this in “academic” marxists too (I’m putting it in quotes because I’m not sure if they’re in academia or just very invested). They pour over every word, arguing over whether the inclusion of “the” changes the meaning of the sentence, whether you need to read Hegel to properly get Marx*, etc. They get bogged down into debates that surely interest them and their circle, but has very little bearing on the struggle.
Marxism is not a dogma passed down from Moses, and in a way it sucks to have to write that because I thought that whole topic had been settled and abandoned by 2021. Marx made mistakes too, he worked with the information he had available to him, and maybe on some days he was feeling a bit under the weather and didn’t write something properly while he was fleeing from the police! The gist of it is perfectly understandable without having to pull out oracle bones to interpret every single sentence he wrote and the order he put the words in. We are also capable of reason, the same reason Marx used, and make our own conclusions too.
It’s like, what are the actual implications of baristas doing “unproductive” labor? They’re attaching an emotional meaning to it, but unproductive for Marx only means that the labor does not reproduce capital, the M-C-M’ process is interrupted. So what’s the problem? That capitalism has bullshit jobs? That some people make minimum wage undeservedly? To patsocs, the problem is fabricated entirely: baristas perform unproductive labor and thus are undeserving of solidarity. But petit bourgeois business owners are actually productive [because they reproduce capital, a very capitalist thing to say lol] according to them. They’re not doing anything novel or even very clever, they’re just taking a body of theory and turning it upside down to say the opposite. Anyone can do that, Twitter blue checks have been doing it with Nietzche for years already.
On the barista thing, it’s funny because I saw patsocs arguing that you should try to “buy the latte, turn around and sell it to someone else”, implying nobody would buy a latte from you. They’re reinventing the subjective theory of value lol.
But to detach your friend from patsocs I would actually probably focus on their grift instead of their theory. This user on Twitter https://x.com/jonnysocialism has spent a lot of time exposing patsocs’ ties. You can see on his account the metamorphosis of Edward from Midwestern Marx into an actual fascist in real time. Hinkle’s ties to the feds too. I don’t think there’s a lot on Haz out there, he seems more like the muscles of the operation than the brain tbh. And then of course go into Larouche, there’s this podcast episode that’s pretty good https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/larouche and we transcribed/rewrote it for Larouche’s ProleWiki page if he prefers reading (said no one ever). It doesn’t go into the patsocs’ ties to Larouche though, for that you’ll need other sources. Probably just using search engines (reddit/twitter/google) and typing “Hinkle Larouche” or “Haz infrared Larouche” will yield results, or replace Larouche with the Schiller Institute which is for a fact presided over by his wife, from their website directly: https://schillerinstitute.com/inalienable-rights-man/.
Hinkle and Haz have talked about Larouche positively before, plenty of times, and Maupin was even selling his books (Maupin is now a moonie because I think even the larouchites wanted to distance themselves from him after the scandal lol).
*To add to the asterisk: read Hegel if you want to and you like philosophy, then read idealists and the Ancient Greeks too… again if you like philosophy and want to learn it deeply. I just don’t think it’s realistic to expect anyone, even cadres, to become doctors in philosophy, economics, history and socialist history to even be considered an “effective” marxist.
Johnny is such a bad faith reader.
literally a post from Hinkle saying “give women time off for their periods” but I guess that’s patriarchy because it suggests inferiority. so I’m only a communist if I tell my wife “suck it up buttercup”?
news flash: pain and stress alter thinking. it’s why I can’t do math well for a minute after I hit my finger with a hammer.
other news flash: feminism can morph into strange toxic substances, just like masculinity.
It can’t be a proletarian ideology if it reproduces the behaviors of bourgeois ideology: that of being inaccessible in language, requiring years and years of studies to even start to grasp, requiring the reading of earlier philosophers in an academic manner (pouring over every word), and attaching itself not to the substance – despite what patsocs say they do – but to the form.
Lmao having a vocabulary is bourgeoisie. You seem to have a an anti-intellectual view of academia. Tell me, do you think the world is understandable to a proletarian because the world carries with it an affectation of simplicity that can work with the proletarian character, or because proletarians simple must engage with the world?
Also it’s just wrong to say academics pour over every word. Do you think people can read hundreds of books that way and get anywhere? Please return your caricature of academics to wherever you found it.
That’s not what I said at all 👍
baristas […] unproductive labor
The coffee beans and hot water don’t turn into coffee without the barista’s labour.
The existence of instant coffee doesn’t make it unnecessary labour: in the case of instant coffee the work was done earlier.
The fact that I can brew my own coffee doesn’t make it unnecessary or unproductive labour either. It’s production whether I do it or pay a barista to do it.
And it’s not unskilled labour: if the coffee machines in any of the coffee shops I go to were self-service, they’d break down within hours from misuse. And when you have a really skilled barista, you can taste it.
You should tell your mutuals-with acquaintance that whoever’s insisting to them that baristas are unproductive ought to be chewing coffee instead of drinking it.
But have you considered that some baristas have pink hair? That makes me mad so they must be unproductive.
Barista or barber or clerk or driver aren’t a fucking landlord but some of those people want to treat them just like that. This isn’t even blue collar reductionism (which is usually also coming from the chudlike unionists lacking theory), it’s pure madness. Though maybe it’s their kind of a roundabout way to arrive at communism (primitive) after everyone would do just a strictly productive jobs causing supply chains to collapse in few days and remnants of humanity getting back at subsistence farming within a year, at least if we ignore the roving cannibal gangs and slaver warlords.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: