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CPI is a patriotic socialism organization. Aka Caleb and Haz are American Nazbols.
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Calling him a Nazbol for appropriating American aesthetics
This is Maupin “appropriating American aesthetics” with Dugin, an undeniably fascist figure from Russia. He simply casually met and discussed for more than an hour with a fascist whose ideas gave rise to NazBol.
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The guy literally wrote a book which is all about how the 2008 housing crisis was caused by a “Zionist conspiracy”. Come on…
I would not call him Nazbol. From what I have seen, he is the old school communist guy, who is not keen on the new fashion of communists. He may not out right be a racist, nor homophobic but what he is doing is tailism. Ready to accept many reactionay attitudes of the working class for attracting them into communist ideas. With his exceptional knowledge about history of communist movements in USA, he surely do have to know that, this strategy is nothing new. We can see that he clearly inspired by the past. The aesthetics he choosen to represent his politics shows that.Whether he will be successful or not it is the future to decide. I have a distaste towards his strategies. I can not read his mind so these are my observations.
Edit 1 I just remembered about his book about jew bankers and satan. There is great traces of anti-Semitism evident from some reviews. I’m not trying to trivialise his problematic actions and contents.
To be entirely fair: he pulled that book (it was called Satan at the Fountainhead: The Israel Lobby and the Financial Crisis) from publication after it got heavy criticism from Jewish communists. It’s actually really hard to find now for that reason.
I don’t think Maupin’s a fascist. I do think he engages in somewhat risky tactics, under the rubric of “let’s all just fight the imperialists now and sort out our differences later.” But he’s probably correct in stating that the specific party model pioneered by Lenin, and the specific tactics outlined in What is to be Done? are unsuitable for the particular material circumstances of 21st century America.
It’s good he’s trying something new. I just wish he was better at it.
It’s in situations like these I wish Lemmy would allow admins not to display their badge in comments, so that this could come from a simple user without the appearance of it being a cabal of admins conspiring together.
Patriotic Socialism in the US has been around for a while now and is clearly not going anywhere as long as their representatives have a say in it, and so I think me finally synthesising my position has been a long time coming.
First of all I don’t wish to tell USians how to best conduct the revolution. And if the CPI wins, then clearly they are the vanguard and are doing something right. I wish for a socialist United States for many reasons, one being that the people deserve socialism and the second being that it would mean much, much less imperialism in the world.
And certainly there is a place for nationalism on the left, and there is a place for patriotism.
Yet I have to ask; why is it that many of the followers of Haz or Maupin I talked to exhibit reactionary beliefs? Why is it that they always use bad faith arguments and are seemingly incapable of simply stating their positions and why they believe they are where the future of socialism lies for the US?
We see eye to eye with patsocs on many things. For example we (ML and patsocs) both very much like China. We like Lenin and Stalin as theorists and important figures to learn from. But you guys have to understand that to communists outside of the US, you are scary as fuck.
The United States is the bastion of imperialism and meddles where they please. You must understand the role you play in the bigger picture, in the international movement. When we see your flag we see the US soldiers destroying and plundering. When we see your giant stone portrait of Lincoln at the CPI in Austin, we see the all-American Nazis idolising Washington. To ignore the role the US plays on the global stage and how a communist movement must reckon with that reality shows amateurism, shows the rest of the world that you are not interested in communism but something else, something shrouded in shadows that we don’t really understand, and thus we fear it.
This international component extends further than just being accepted. I feel at times that patsocs expect me to naturally agree with them, as if what they believe in was common sense and I was just an agent provocateur who did not want to understand them. I am not American. Many people on the Internet (the only place I can get interaction with patsocs) are not either. Yet we are expected to like Maupin, and we are expected to already know why Lincoln is so dang important to US history and why waving the stars and stripes is so evident, it does not need to be explained – so again we see this contradiction with the international movement as well as American exceptionality, that everything American-made is adopted in the world and we share a common culture. We, as “foreign” communists, feel like you are giving us orders much like the current imperialist government is.
Say what you will about the CPUSA, and say that they are irrelevant and that is why they never displayed that behaviour if you want, but at least I never felt like they were telling me to get with the programme. I have never felt that from any other communist party, actually. None of them think I’m a weirdo for not knowing their local figures. Though there’s an interesting observation here, I talk of parties abroad but I am not aware of a single patsoc party (whether self-proclaimed or not) in the US. To my knowledge this movement is only random people on the Internet gravitating around public figures.
And when we ask what patsocs believe in, we do not get a straight answer. “Have you ever listened to what the CPI actually says? Your accusations are so unfounded that I will not even answer them. The CPI is perfect, it has done no wrong, those are just baseless accusations that I will not even dignify with a response.” I don’t get that treatment from any actual party (I say actual party because the CPI is a think tank, they are not registered as a party). Any time I ask the communist perspective on a country, from that country, they explain the situation as best they can and acknowledge their shortcomings.
So my question for patsocs I think would be: what is the situation of the working class in the United States in the present day, and where do intervene on that?
The problem I have with patriotic socialism is that on one hand, they want to do everything their own way, driving a wedge with other communists (local and international) – by appealing to symbols that other communists do not associate with, on the basis that it will bring them closer to the non-class conscious workers, a tactic we don’t necessarily agree with. But on the other hand, patsocs expect us to get with the programme and accept them unequivocally, without disagreement or suspicion. As if what they are doing, their new movement is self-evidently right and correct.
Thanks for that, comrade. I basically agree, and just want to add a few things about the left situation within the US, which might contextualize (a little) the behavior of odd groups like the CPI.
Essentially, politics in the US has been completely captured by the two-party system. (Somebody – Sankara, I think – said words to the effect that “America is a one-party state, ruled by two parties in order to suit the American taste for extravagance.”) Thus, you find in the US a certain real and unfortunate tendency: communists who say all the right things, but who also end up supporting Democrats when push comes to shove. The CPUSA is of course infamous in this regard. But the tendency is shared by much more radical groups. For instance, the Revolutionary Communist Party – which is a weird, culty US group mostly famous for having elevated its founder, Bob Avakian, to the status of Marx and Lenin – came out in support of Biden during the 2020 presidential election.
As a result, the perception which the US public, and many younger American leftists, have of most “mainstream” American communist parties is that they spend inter-election years denouncing the government and scuffling with the police, but campaign furiously for the Democrats as soon as an election cycle begins. Officially, we are supposed to vote in Democrats in the name of “harm reduction.” But the past twenty years have made it abundantly clear that Democratic policy, domestic and foreign, is just as bad as Republican policy. Indeed, Democratic policy is often worse, simply because the party can hide behind its pseudo-populist image – the latter inherited from Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the “US victory over fascism” in World War II.
All this has led many within the current generation of US communists – people Maupin’s age and younger – to denounce legacy communist parties as corrupt and out of touch. At the same time, the US far right is well-organized and decently funded. It has been able to capture popular anger against the system in a way that US communists have not. This situation has many US communists panicking, and rightly so. There is a real feeling that something must be done to attract workers who are being radicalized to fascism, even if that means waving the American flag and praising American “heroes” like Lincoln. There is a certain precedent for this, in that the CPUSA, when it was a revolutionary party, actually used similar tactics. But as other people have pointed out, Maupin is not a convincing patriot. He hedges his praise for America so much, and says patriotic things with so obviously bad a conscience, that one really wonders how many nationalists he will be able to wean from fascism. Haz is a different matter, but only because he is crazy, and that brings its own set of problems. Maupin is the brains and the public image of the CPI, and without him the whole thing falls apart.
The dismissiveness – I’ve encountered it too – that you get from CPI members stems from anger at the current left establishment, and panic at the emergent right. Most USians, unfortunately, have been propagandized to believe that America is the entire world; and thus even leftists, who should know better, assume that anyone speaking English online is from the United States. So among those associated with Maupin, there seems to be a basic gut reaction that anybody questioning CPI tactics is part of the American pseudo-left, which (and Maupin is actually right about this one) has been heavily groomed and infiltrated by the US government. According to this mindset, all criticisms of the CPI must be in bad faith – instigated by paid agents of imperialism, or by useful idiots doing the imperialists’ work for free. And so you get the duality of the CPI: hostility towards other leftists, coupled with a willingness to accommodate reactionary views as long as they come from American workers. It isn’t, I think, an attempt to sneak in fascism under the rubric of Marxism-Leninism. (EDIT: there are easier ways to sneak in fascism in America.) Rather, it stems from a conviction that the current American left is unsalvageable, and in fact serves imperialism.
Your comment makes sense, I think I noticed the same malaise the “new” (younger) USian communists have with the established parties.
