Who the fuck runs this twitter account and why haven’t they been purged yet?
The account is run by the three admins of ProleWiki, including me. I personally disapprove of this “like”, but you need to understand that it’s hard to apply democratic centralism over the internet, under three different timezones, and we haven’t systematized what to do with the profile yet. Mistakes can and will be made here and then, and the administration will be discussing this “like”.
I know who probably liked this, and I have called out the person’s lack of theoretical grounding many times, even publicly. I’ve noticed they definitely lean towards an utopian, idealist understanding sometimes. But the concrete reality is, this person has helped ProleWiki numerous times, especially in terms of finance and labor towards improving our wiki. Without them, ProleWiki wouldn’t have lasted more than a year.
And we have few administrators, people who are available to improve the encyclopedia. “Purging” any administrator for a Twitter “like” would remove a third of the current administration, and this would be stupid. We simply cannot afford ideological purity in our Twitter “likes” while compromising the whole project at this point in time.
But I would like for you to present an actual critique of this tweet instead of simply lashing out. What’s wrong with this tweet, in particular? When we critique PatSocs, we usually critique specific personalities, such as Caleb Maupin, Haz/Infrared, etc., and their followers. This tweet in particular, as far as I understand, does not seem to advocate that. So can you elaborate specifically what’s wrong with this tweet so that the administrator who liked it can have a better understanding of it? I’m personally from the global south, so I’m ignorant on some particulars of US radical politics and I wouldn’t be able to do this myself.
Thanks for the detailed response. It was an overreaction and for that I apologize. I’ve been on edge the past few days due to the news and just needed to vent a bit I guess. It was just very alienating for me to see a resource that I’ve recommended to beginner Marxists in the past appear to be endorsing this kind of view. But I don’t know this person and what they’ve done for the project in the past so it was out of line for me to ask for them to be removed.
As for your question, the tweet is an insult to all oppressed peoples that the USA has trampled on. What does the Cherokee think of the Stars and Stripes, waved by the US Army as they pursued a policy of total removal of indigenous peoples from the East Coast? What about the people of Laos, who are still struggling to remove the millions of undetonated bombs dropped on them over the course of an illegal war? Ask the victims of American imperialism in Indonesia, Cambodia, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Iraq, Grenada, Libya, Yugoslavia…the list goes on and on and on. Any support for patriotism in America should be a slap in the face to every comrade in the Global South. And it’s a perversion of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, etc to equate their patriotism, as leaders of liberation struggles, to the America Über Alles style patriotism at home. Lenin was famously for revolutionary defeatism for example. And you need not look further than Lenin, as he writes “The place of those who advocate the slogan of national culture is among the nationalist petty bourgeois, not among the Marxists.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/crnq/2.htm#v20pp72-023 The tweet ignores all of that context and blasts those of us pushing back against people like Haz. If you look through the author’s tweet history it’s quite clear he’s a follower of Haz. All in all, it’s pure idealism and historical revisionism to suggest that the US left should adopt patriotic imagery.
I appreciate you taking action on this and hopefully some good will come out of it.
The account is run by the three admins of ProleWiki, including me. I personally disapprove of this “like”, but you need to understand that it’s hard to apply democratic centralism over the internet, under three different timezones, and we haven’t systematized what to do with the profile yet. Mistakes can and will be made here and then, and the administration will be discussing this “like”.
I know who probably liked this, and I have called out the person’s lack of theoretical grounding many times, even publicly. I’ve noticed they definitely lean towards an utopian, idealist understanding sometimes. But the concrete reality is, this person has helped ProleWiki numerous times, especially in terms of finance and labor towards improving our wiki. Without them, ProleWiki wouldn’t have lasted more than a year.
And we have few administrators, people who are available to improve the encyclopedia. “Purging” any administrator for a Twitter “like” would remove a third of the current administration, and this would be stupid. We simply cannot afford ideological purity in our Twitter “likes” while compromising the whole project at this point in time.
But I would like for you to present an actual critique of this tweet instead of simply lashing out. What’s wrong with this tweet, in particular? When we critique PatSocs, we usually critique specific personalities, such as Caleb Maupin, Haz/Infrared, etc., and their followers. This tweet in particular, as far as I understand, does not seem to advocate that. So can you elaborate specifically what’s wrong with this tweet so that the administrator who liked it can have a better understanding of it? I’m personally from the global south, so I’m ignorant on some particulars of US radical politics and I wouldn’t be able to do this myself.
Thanks for the detailed response. It was an overreaction and for that I apologize. I’ve been on edge the past few days due to the news and just needed to vent a bit I guess. It was just very alienating for me to see a resource that I’ve recommended to beginner Marxists in the past appear to be endorsing this kind of view. But I don’t know this person and what they’ve done for the project in the past so it was out of line for me to ask for them to be removed.
As for your question, the tweet is an insult to all oppressed peoples that the USA has trampled on. What does the Cherokee think of the Stars and Stripes, waved by the US Army as they pursued a policy of total removal of indigenous peoples from the East Coast? What about the people of Laos, who are still struggling to remove the millions of undetonated bombs dropped on them over the course of an illegal war? Ask the victims of American imperialism in Indonesia, Cambodia, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Iraq, Grenada, Libya, Yugoslavia…the list goes on and on and on. Any support for patriotism in America should be a slap in the face to every comrade in the Global South. And it’s a perversion of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, etc to equate their patriotism, as leaders of liberation struggles, to the America Über Alles style patriotism at home. Lenin was famously for revolutionary defeatism for example. And you need not look further than Lenin, as he writes “The place of those who advocate the slogan of national culture is among the nationalist petty bourgeois, not among the Marxists.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/crnq/2.htm#v20pp72-023 The tweet ignores all of that context and blasts those of us pushing back against people like Haz. If you look through the author’s tweet history it’s quite clear he’s a follower of Haz. All in all, it’s pure idealism and historical revisionism to suggest that the US left should adopt patriotic imagery.
I appreciate you taking action on this and hopefully some good will come out of it.