there’s a guy that i’m mutuals with on other social media who’s on the young side, like just out of college, and he’s figuring out what he thinks about politics. he’s pretty smart and hangs around cool marxist(-leninist) people, but he’s definitely trying to figure out stuff on his own, which is really cool and he’s critically engaging with stuff well.
however, it seems like he’s seen a lot of patsocs and ACP members bring up weird corners of Marx’s writing to try to justify their positions. the particular case he brought up recently was about an ACP guy on twitter using the productive vs unproductive labor distinction to call baristas (you know, people who make coffee for usually really low wages) enemies of the working class because they are unproductive labor. my friend was worried that this kind of weird nonsense argument was necessary for marxists in general. me and some other people explained that no, the ACP guys are picking weird bits of Marx to try to justify their reactionary bullshit and we actually mostly focus on class and not this other stuff. so like no harm done here, but it makes me wonder how often those kind of things go unchallenged in other people’s experience.
This is good to keep in mind, but I think you can still say Patsoc types hurt the cause. The problem is most people who are exposed to their stuff don’t engage with anyone about it, so there’s no opportunity to have the sort of discussion you describe (where you can reach the reachable, and the unreachable respond predictably).
A bunch of reachable people get turned off by this/get misinformed about socialism by it, and then we never hear from them (and get to explain what this shit is and why it’s bad) because they don’t talk to anyone about it the way most people don’t talk to anyone about stuff they read online.