I had a post removed for “Patsoc bullshit,” and I freely admit I didnt fully understand the body of the work I was reposting (I posted it here in hopes that more savvy people could provide me some context). What is PatSoc, how do I recognize it, and why is it bad? Also, who is Haz and why is he bad?
ProleWiki has a pretty detailed explainer: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Patriotic_socialism
In short, it is a strain of opportunistic self-promoting hacks who argue the socialist movement needs to embrace the iconography and national mythology of the United States. They generally are very poorly educated about both history and theory. This doesn’t stop them from mining for quotes to torture though. Haz, Caleb Maupin, and Jackson Hinkel are examples.
Their ideology changes like the weather, and they alternate between calling themselves “Patriotic Socialists,” “MAGA Communists,” and other nakedly ridiculous things.
it’s like, what if you had socialism, but it was national? like a kind of “national socialism” maybe people would be into that?
american-flavored nazbol
Most succint answer
The term is an abbreviation of “patriotic socialist”. In general, there’s nothing wrong with a passion for you region overlapping with a passion for the struggle of working people – however, the term is usually used to describe a nationalist perspective that uses socialist analysis for the benefit of furthering nationalist goals. In the US specifically, it’s a pejorative for people who are fine with the invasions, embargoes, drone-strikes, and military interventions abroad, but would please like some social healthcare at home.
It doesn’t matter who Haz is and whatever it is he does.
In the US specifically, it’s a pejorative for people who are fine with the invasions, embargoes, drone-strikes, and military interventions abroad, but would please like some social healthcare at home.
To add to this they also generally don’t care much for the rights of POC, women, and queer people. They’ll often discredit any attack on the inherent partiarcal and white supremacist nature [and history] of the US as simply identity politics being advanced by woke liberals who want to weakened US.
Yep! Really, they’re still playing the same culture-war game and from the same position they always were, just with some copy-pasted leftist vocabulary as a shoddy mask.
Patsocs are essentially Nazis, they believe in national supremacy and are reactionary on social matters. For example this line from the article you posted:
To defend the integrity of the entire historical past, means ultimately to defend ones unique existence, to defend the existence of your people, their unique culture and way of life, as irreducible to the whims of institutions.
This is pretty clearly trying to draw an equivalence between Historical Materialism and Blood and Soil nationalism.
In this line:
Two worlds began to take shape after the Second World War: One which is cosmopolitan and historically nihilistic, and one which was deeply national, civilizational, and whose primary basis of legitimation was safeguarding the integrity of history.
The Cold War necessity of isolationism is contrasted favourably against the “cosmopolitan” west. Literally a statement against the mixing of races, or at least the mixing of cultures.
Even more pathetic is the view that Putin should have satiated the instant-gratification of Western conservatives, by talking about LGBT and culture war issues.
This is phrased carefully, but I believe it intends to handwave Putin’s atrocious record on LGBT and women’s rights. That these issues are merely a tool of western imperialism and chauvinism and that anti-imperialist countries have far more important concerns are common talking points for Patsocs.
The point of this article is to take people who see the propaganda and historical illiteracy of the US empire but who hold reactionary social opinions, and to redirect their energy back into fascist political projects. Social conservativism, the oppression of minorities and the attempted domination of them culturally is positioned as being inseparable from Marxism. The west is considered weak and removed - primarily because of a perceived capitulation to minorities and a lack of will to protect the national culture. This part is pure Nazi ideology. There seems to be a fair bit of cherry picking and historical illiteracy in the rest of the article, but I’m honestly not interested in picking through a fascist’s ramblings to factually disprove them, I hope you can at least see why this article is not welcome on Hexbear, outside of maybe the dunk tank.
Thanks, I completely missed these subtexts
Yeah, the article is vague enough that even those quotes, which I think are the most damning, could be read charitably. With context about Putin’s domestic policy and the beliefs of US Patsocs though, it becomes pretty clear the lines of thinking they’re trying to establish.
A fascist
A LaRoushite
Edit: wanted to expand on this. I think PatSocs are in many ways a reflection of the NATO-anarchist phenomenon. Both are attempts to get factions of the US political spectrum into more economically left politics via embracing western chauvinism. NATO-Anarchists try to push the liberals left on economics by embracing bourgeois democracy and upholding it’s progressiveness on certain social issues while also supporting hawkish foreign policy against “authoritarians” in this hope this will open up liberals to more progressive domestic economic policy. PatSocs think emphasizing and/or exaggerating the nationalistic elements of past socialist movements and social conservatism will open up American Republicans to more populist economic policy. It’s the same strat for different demographics.
