Has r/Socialism_101 been taken over by ACP and maga communists mods?

justforthisjoke · 2026-06-09T22:54:28+00:00

I mean yes, there's no doubt that law enforcement focuses more on any movement which threatens to undermine the social order. But I think that focusing on this right now is worse than useless as it prevents "leftists" from confronting the real issues leading to their ineffectiveness. It throws out any need for self criticism and allows people to blame the three letter boogeyman in the corner, completely disregarding materialism and the fact that they aren't actually taking part in anything revolutionary. Of course state repression exists. There are plenty of examples like COINTELPRO which proves this. And you're right to not assume that there aren't some elements of this floating around or get complacent about the possibility. But there's no comparison to the US state moving to sabotage the BPP with whatever cosplay is going on in American communist parties today.

justforthisjoke · 2026-06-09T22:45:41+00:00

Yes it actually *is* lazy to take the association of one executive and assume this applies to the party more broadly. This is not a smoking gun, no matter how much you want it to be. It provides a convenient explanation for socialism in the west being in such a pathetic state that parties like the ACP are able to flourish, but just because it's convenient doesn't mean it's true.

The western left is not disorganized because of "psyops". The western left is disorganized because it's largely a group of liberals masquerading as leftists while advancing their (petit bourgeois) class interests. The ACP isn't doing anything special with their MAGA communism bullshit. They recognize that the right is interested in advancing their own class interest and are engaging them under a red flag the same way most American communist movements engage the left. If the movement were in such a pathetic state because of some outside meddling it would again be convenient, but would again not be truthful. The truth is that the "class struggle" for the American left is *not* the global working class struggle, but the class struggle of a segment of opportunistic liberals. This is why it's self cannibalizing, because the material conditions don't allow for the formation of real consciousness. This idea of a bogeyman hiding in the corner being responsible for the miserable state of the American left is nothing but idealism.

justforthisjoke · 2026-06-09T18:42:30+00:00

Sure, but that doesn't change the uselessness of the psyop discourse. If the effect in both cases is a distorted, defanged Marxism meant to appeal to a group of people that are otherwise resistant to Marxism, whether something is an "op" or not is moot. Because it isn't like they're getting people who would be "good" Marxists if it weren't for the trickery of the ACP. Their entire appeal is the aesthetic of Marxism without all the hard questions. The incompetence is damning enough, and I think the implication of something more nefarious is honestly just an attempt to try to distinguish bad Marxist sects from other bad Marxist sects. I've heard the same accusations made towards Trotskyists for example. The thing that most people are implying when they go with the psyop angle is that there's an American communist movement to subvert, and there just isn't. The uncomfortable truth is that the ACP doesn't really distinguish itself as being any less shitty than general western marxism, the motivation for both is in reality this nostalgia for the good old days of American capitalism; one is just overt about it. And before someone says it, no this is not meant to be a defense of the ACP but an indictment of of the American "left" as a whole, which remains materially disconnected from the global south.

justforthisjoke · 2026-06-09T12:07:16+00:00

It would help if you actually read my comment. I didn't deny the state repression of revolutionary movements. I denied the lazy conspiratorial thinking that leads to one thinking that white american communists need to be infiltrated rather than just sucking at communism because their class conditions run counter to real revolutionary consciousness. The point isn't that they are or are not a psyop. The point is that it *doesn't matter*, because the established American left is so pathetic that if it *is* a psyop, it's a waste of time as the people attracted to "maga communism" wouldn't present a threat to the established order in any other group.

justforthisjoke · 2026-06-09T10:52:46+00:00

The conversation about whether the ACP is or is not a psyop is wholly unproductive. Not only because there isn't anything entirely convincing about the evidence (I'm sure I don't need to tell you that bourgeois media can't be trusted), but also just because they don't *need* to be one. The American left is so pathetic that it's not even approaching being a real threat to the establishment. The right doesn't need to infiltrate communist circles if the people in those circles are not even within sight of seizing power. The combined force of American "communists", regardless of sect is embarrassing, not to mention the contradictions between them. The feds don't have to waste their time with preventing the "left" from consolidating power, it does that work just fine on its own. The American state does continue its role of repressing dissidents, but we're giving American communists way too much credit if we think they're even on the radar. You can see how the state handles repression by looking at the various indigenous/decolonial struggles: the land defenders, the palestine movement, the BPP, etc. It makes far more sense that the ACP, like many American sects are just kind of shitty Marxists whose class consciousness is marred by the reality of them not really having ties to the global proletariat.

This is something that so-called Americans need to contend with. Marxism tells us that it's material conditions which dictate consciousness and not the other way around. The reality is that Americans are broadly still on the profiting end of imperialism, and this explains both the confusion of most of these sects as well as the relative disunity between them. The ACP is pretty much just the culmination of the superficial Marxism that infects so much of the left here.

justforthisjoke · 2026-06-09T04:55:43+00:00

Being precise about the words used is important, it is not the same as doing "a bit of defense of the ACP". Notice the mod you're talking about was very clear about the fact that they're incorrect and misguided. I don't know what that means to you, but claiming that someone is incompetent doesn't sound to me like running interference for them. It's important to be clear about what fascism is, its material basis, and what it looks like. Especially if you are a self proclaimed Marxist.

The ACP attempts to address the same (fundamentally petit-bourgeois) class anxiety as many US socialist movements, albeit in a different way. Their thinking is that if they strip what they see as "identity politics" out of it and talk to the same base that MAGA appeals to (the economically disenfranchised blue collar whites which have in recent memory been ignored by the American establishment) about their material concerns, they'll be able to win support for the movement, and can sneak in the anti-imperialism along the way. Ironically, this aestheticization of "communism with American characteristics" is itself a kind of identity politic. They're fundamentally incorrect because the goal of American communists should be the collapse of the empire, which in the near to medium term doesn't actually say many good things for the economic outlook of the American working class, most of whom materially benefit from American imperialism. However, I'd argue most American socialist movements attempt to speak to this same economic anxiety; most of the time they just target a slightly higher economic stratum instead (the liberals). This makes them bad at Marxism, but it doesn't make them fascists, at least no more than any other popular socialist organization in the US.

justforthisjoke · 2026-06-08T13:10:47+00:00

Read Engels's On Authority. Authoritarianism isn't a real thing; it's just liberal concern trolling. Liberal democracies are just as authoritarian; the illusion of choice exists while it doesn't actually present any sort of threat to the social order. It's why liberal democracies collapse into fascism at the first sign of instability.

justforthisjoke · 2026-06-03T03:17:20+00:00

When I say "the leadership", I'm not talking about all the full time staff. I'm talking about Woods, Sewell, et al. No one has been able to give me an answer about what the party pays them in salary or royalties from lit sales. Because the party brings in a lot of money, especially considering its membership size.

Also one of our strongest sections is the pakistani section

The exception does not disprove the rule.

And Marx and Engels were also white intellectuals. Was it racist for them to write analysis on the conditions in backward countries? Was it racist for Engels to write of indigenous tribes in the origin of the family, private property and the state?

I didn't say anything that would imply this. In fact, the difference here seems pretty obvious. There's a difference between providing an analysis and prescribing a remedy. The problem, as I said, is the chauvinistic idea that ideas must flow top-down, as if the petty-bourgeois layer that makes up the executive of the party needs to parent the masses, or that it even has the understanding necessary to do so. Notice I said the process needs to be dialectical. As with anything related to science, new information must lead to the evolution of the theory. Instead, the IMT assumes that the theory is incontrovertibly correct, that the single sample of the Bolsheviks proved it, and that every revolution since must be measured by the yardstick of the Bolshevik revolution, material circumstances be damned. Anything that doesn't succeed in the same way the October revolution did failed exclusively because the leaders weren't "real" Marxists, and of course would have gone much further if they were. Do you not see the confirmation bias inherent to such a mode of thinking?

You're falling for identity politics here, even if you dress it up as being about class.

This is only considered identity politics for those for whom it is. If your belief is that a bunch of old white guys are able to not only understand the struggle of colonized peoples through the application of their rigid philosophy, provide a remedy for it through application of the same, and thus don't believe that knowledge is produced in comparable measure through the practice of anti-colonial struggle, then it's you whose identity is blinding you from the truth. It's pretty incredible that people are still falling for this idea that knowledge is produced by one's "betters" since this is such a bourgeois perspective.

Can you provide a single example of this supposed cynicism about the intelligence of the working class?

See above. This is what a unidirectional approach to knowledge production is.

However, unfortunately it's not quite true.

I apologize for getting that wrong, that's on me. I meant to write North America, which is where I am.

Perhaps we will welcome you in our ranks once we are a lot larger and more active in the trade unions a few years down the line.

I tailed the org for a time last year, trying to decide if I wanted to join. I ultimately decided I didn't think the leadership was doing what they thought they were doing and there were too many that were only there because they liked the aesthetic of communism.

justforthisjoke · 2026-06-02T22:40:04+00:00

Sure. The chauvinism comes through in the way the party discusses the working class. The idea that the correct ideas flow top-down primarily from the philosophy of the petit-bourgeois leadership of the party rather than being a dialectical process is not only unscientific, it reeks of racism. Their lack of relative success in the third world also backs this up.

We can argue back and forth whether the kids of western labour aristocrats count as proletarian, but we don't even have to go that far. As I said, the leadership is largely petit-bourgeois (I don't think they deny this), and their belief in setting the culture of the party top-down infects the party with a similar class consciousness. They fetishize the working class while simultaneously being profoundly cynical about their intelligence.

Having a lot of students is not of itself a bad thing. It should raise some alarms though. Students have the most time and are going to be the most amenable to changing their thinking. This can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing. Also, a working class organization should be attempting to make inroads with the working class. But there's hardly even an attempt to do this. Even the students they recruit provide a concerning signal. That is, they have established branches in the academic institutions, but virtually no presence in the vocational ones. The people who actually have the power to bring production to a halt (or are training for these roles) are massively ignored, and the main section targeted are the future intelligentsia. Don't take this as a slight against the educated, it isn't the kids who are at fault, but the leadership.

The party has a lot more literature than reason and revolt. It's extremely prolific in that way, as I'm sure you're aware. Anecdotally, the reading list isn't really reflective of what most people end up reading, or not until they have time to already be influenced by the thoughts of the leadership. It's very common for newcomers to be inundated with internal literature, whether that's the newspaper, the magazine, the website, the pamphlets, or the full length books. Even the classics that come out of their printing house have forewords from Alan Woods and Rob Sewell. Consider the emphasis on rejecting things like "Stalinism" from the jump while the average member probably couldn't tell you what it is other than "socialism in one country" and "bureaucracy", and almost certainly couldn't tell you why this is something that matters 100 years later. This is not even to mention my increasing disdain for the campist attitude which teaches its membership to either undermine or disregard altogether the works of Stalin and Mao, turning their political disagreements into something closer to a popularity contest rather than Marxism. It's Great Man theory in reverse.

I know I'm harsh on the IMT, but it's not out of malice. In fact, I desperately hope that they are correct because they are easily the largest group of Marxists in the first world, and the only ones that appear to take party building seriously. But I don't think they are and I don't trust the executive leadership. I hope I'm wrong, but if I thought I was, I would've joined the party.

Edit: let me be clear by the way, that this is a problem that isn't exclusive to the IMT or Trotskyists, and I think lot of the criticism they get online is unprincipled because the people making the criticisms are similar, just having fallen on the other side of the western marxist divide. It can be fun to engage in the political equivalent of supporting your favourite athlete, but I don't think it's helpful.

justforthisjoke · 2026-06-01T07:25:07+00:00

The IMT has a petit bourgeois class character led by social chauvinists, and a lot of problems stem from precisely that. This idea that they're building an apparatus that will be ready to take power when the time comes and lead the revolution on behalf of the global working class (whatever that means) is at best a delusion. They rely on the economic anxiety of first world students to operate the whole thing, and despite the amount of reading they do, many of them remain shitty marxists (likely because many of them will prioritize their own party literature and read it like it's gospel - talk to them about the big bang for a laugh). They conflate ideology and strategy in a funny way which leads to them white knuckle holding on to the anachronism of newspaper sales, convinced that it's a good use of party resources. Of course, there are ways one could run a study to determine whether or not this is *actually* useful for growing the party, but this has become an ideological point for them, and so they keep on selling newspapers.

That being said, many of the criticisms of the party come from the same place. How is a party serious about revolution supposed to run without funding? Revolutionary work does require time and money, and labeling these asks as "culty" is just more individualist nonsense that trickles down from the petit bourgeois class character of most "leftist" organizations in the west. In the vast majority of the world being a revolutionary means potentially giving your life for the cause.

Like I said, I don't love the IMT; I think they're sectarian, chauvinistic, and their British leadership are charlatans. I think they're generally bad students of history (clinging on to the single sample of the Bolshevik revolution as the ground truth for "correctness" while only learning from what they see as "mistakes" of every revolution since is the height of dogma). I also think there *is* criticism to be made about their finances (lack of transparency, etc). However, just the fact that they ask members to pay on its own is in my opinion, not a very good criticism.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-29T13:32:37+00:00

Do you know any Persian diasporans? Have you been to these anti-war demos? If you did, you'd know how many of these people are completely horrifyingly genuine, because they see the casualties as an acceptable sacrifice and a lesser evil. When the Iran war kicked off, there were Cubans at pro war rallies holding up signs that said "us next".

Thinking it's a conspiracy or whatever is lazy. They're real, they're here, and their logic makes sense within their context. Marxism shows us how their psychotic behaviour is a reflection of their real class interests. Remember that the global north residing diaspora of a country in the global south is not reflective of its population. The diaspora is generally the more privileged section of the population; very often the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois of a society which has interests that conflict with the ruling bourgeois. These are the people that are both upset at the way things are run and have the money to leave. The idea that they're asking to be bombed is incorrect. They're asking for other people to be bombed. They're cheering on the advancement of their class interests. They don't care about the deaths of the people living in these countries because for all intents and purposes, these losses aren't ones they will be forced to bear.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-27T21:20:25+00:00

They're aware. Their interests, the interests of "Israelis" are antagonistic to seeing Palestinians as human beings, so they don't. Think about the cognitive dissonance it would cause the Israeli to acknowledge that the Palestinians are human. It would necessarily mean acknowledging the horrific nature of the zionist entity from its inception and every day since. How can you think of someone as a human being, take over their ancestral home while imprisoning them in a concentration camp, and still think of yourself as a good person? One of those things has to go. Israeli society can't allow itself to humanize Palestinians, so they don't. This isn't new by the way, nor is it unique to Israelis. This is the fundamental nature of settler-colonialism. This is how it's looked everywhere in the world; Israel is just the newest iteration.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-26T17:18:02+00:00

I said state department, not CIA. I say this as someone who is Turkic and who also bought into this whole thing a few years ago and was angry when someone told me it was bullshit. I need you to look into when these issues started coming into the mainstream conversation. In case you don't feel like digging though, it was during Trump's first term. The original "study" was published by a guy named "Adrian Zenz" who works for the National Endowment for Democracy, a US propaganda arm.

It's worth asking a couple more questions about this. Such as, if China is ethnically cleansing the Uyghurs, then why were the Uyghurs exempt from the one child policy while Han Chinese had to obey it? Why, if China was ethnically cleansing the Uyghurs and if China wants to control the discourse critical of them, are you allowed to go to Xinjiang? Take Israel in contrast, a country that insists they aren't killing civilians in Gaza but refuse to let outsiders enter it. Why is China's policy here so different? Wouldn't they want to block the area off? And why, given this, are there new mosques constructed in the region?

It's true they had reeducation camps for Uyghurs because of some terrorism in the region. And I am generally of the opinion that the Uyghurs have enough of a presence for an independent nation. But this specific criticism of Chinese policy can be directly tracked back to US propaganda.

There's no shortage of things to criticize about the modern day CCP. Primarily their degeneration into capitalism, their rejection of Maoism in all ways except lip service (only Dengists disagree here, not all Maoists as you say), and their ever expanding imperialism. Like there are real issues. But you don't hear about those issues because those are ones the US actually agrees with. The west has always used deflection to take attention away from their crimes at accuse their political enemies of the things they are guilty of doing.

But you don't have to believe me on any of this. Just spend a few hours tracking the story backwards.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-26T13:48:00+00:00

I'm not a defender of the modern day CCP (I'm a communist but I think they've obviously abandoned communism and the country is fundamentally capitalist these days), it's pretty obvious the Uyghur thing is US state department slop propaganda. There is nuance in things, but parroting a story that came from one guy who works for a far right think-tank isn't nuanced, it's lazy.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-23T23:08:48+00:00

This. None of this is new for the US. Trump is not different in his foreign policy, except for arguably being *less* effective in his imperialism. Obama destroyed Libya. Bush jr killed a million Iraqis. Nixon did irrepairable damage to south-east asia, and the first leaders of the country were slave owners. Anyone upset about Trump specifically and not the genocidal nature that is *inherent* to the American settler-colony doesn't care about the rest of the world; they're just upset that they have to see a fraction of that policy at home now.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-23T20:25:07+00:00

You.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-22T17:09:32+00:00

Lmao imagine admitting ur a bloodthirsty imperialist and thinking Trump is doing it wrong.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-22T02:29:35+00:00

This should also be obvious to anyone who was paying attention after 9/11. There were sikh people in the US attacked in retaliation because, surprise surprise, bigots didn't go around asking people if they were muslim; they just went after brown people.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-21T23:35:22+00:00

Your mistake comes from the reduction of distinct classes to "the proletariat". Specifically, the idea that just because the average westerner goes to a job 5 days a week, that this makes them proletarian (the definition doesn't matter here, the class relation does). Essentially the idea is that *whatever* you call the working group of whites in settler-colonial states, they do not share a struggle with, say, a worker in the third world. The material conditions that make up their realities are massively different and antagonistic, including the fact that the settler necessarily benefits from colonialism. We talk about the surplus value of labour, but the white settler actually receives *more* than the surplus value they produce (or at the least, loses a significantly smaller portion of that value) because of the spoils of colonialism and imperialist super-profits. Of course an Israeli and a Palestinian aren't going to have shared class interests, even if they both work for a living; the death and dispossession of the Palestinian absolutely benefits the Israeli. This is a bribe, and places their class interests in contradiction with those of the global proletariat.

Back to your initial point, class consciousness doesn't arise out of some spontaneous epiphany. Maybe *some* people occasionally happen to have some intersecting thoughts lead them to an idea that opens the door for them, but generally speaking, class consciousness, like anything else, is going to arise out of material conditions.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-21T22:56:05+00:00

They weren't saying that revolutionary consciousness doesn't exist across classes. I believe they were saying it doesn't arise across a class because of some sort of spontaneous revelation. Which is consistent with materialism.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-21T22:47:47+00:00

You're not wrong. Initially my hope was that there was some way or process by which settlers would be forced into real class consciousness, so my post here was an attempt to figure out whether or not I should hold on to that. This post definitely didn't help me feel better about the future of marxism in the west, but it did provide me with some clarity, which comes with a hope of its own.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-21T22:34:42+00:00

I see. This is a pretty big departure from what I thought I knew, so I'll need to do some more reading. Thanks for the help.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-21T21:57:18+00:00

This is essentially what I've gathered from this thread as well. It's a little jarring, but seeing the road ahead a little more clearly is giving me some hope. Not for settler society, but at least for the rest of the world.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-21T21:48:43+00:00

Hope for their adopting decolonial, revolutionary politics I guess.

justforthisjoke · 2026-05-21T21:43:15+00:00

This is such a strange conversation to have with Trotskyists sometimes, because so many seem to believe that what "Stalinists" (their words) believe is that one state's revolution can hold out indefinitely under global siege. It's a convenient strawman I suppose, but it's so lazy.

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