At what point does someone who is mostly reasonable, with a few bad takes become someone not worth listening to? Also, can we separate the art from the artist? For example with Badempanada, he has a couple bad China takes and is kind of toxic online, but he’s well researched, so it really depends whether ML’s I’ve met listen to him. Do you listen to Maoists who are good 95% of the time, but might have a bad Gonzalo take from time to time? Or is there enough agreeable content on the internet that you can just listen to those you agree with? Are certain bad takes just too bad? Will you stop listening to someone after they say something transphobic, even if they’re good the rest of the time like Paul Cockshott? Or if someone is willing to talk with someone like a Larouchite, are they automatically a right deviationist with nothing worthwhile to say, or are the just forming a United front on a specific issue?
Absolutely. We have to apply scientific rigor and analysis to whatever the given topic is at hand. We shouldn’t assume that because someone has bad ideas in one area, that they don’t have something worthwhile to say in others.
Paul Cockshott is a great modern example: reactionary when it comes to many topics like gender and unequal exchange, but has worthwhile things to say on a variety of other topics, and applies a materialist analysis lacking in many other supposed marxists.
An even larger number of MLs have notorious blind spots when it comes to things like the sex trade, animal liberation / veganism, settler-colonialism, and unequal exchange.
You’re right to reference Mao in avoiding book and hero worship: no person, not even Marx, Engels or Lenin should be considered outside of revolutionary critique.
Modern students of sciences like physics, chemistry, or psychology, often rarely study the original founders or texts, except to passingly place them in a historical context, or to quickly reference their still-standing theories and axioms, quickly moving on to more recent updates and additions to those theories. They mostly study what is new, on the forefront, and of immediate use. As students of scientific socialism we should do the same.