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
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.