• chilemango [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    On one hand the red scare stuff is kind of scary, but on the other hand the fact that they came out with this “new cold war” line just as major orgs were exposed to a wider audience to taking millions of one billionaire’s money is a very convient spin, when your group is the one that got millions from this guy and never publicly acknowledged it until the NYT called you out. And now it’s public that your group magically has way more money than the DSA despire having orders of magnitude less members and then do almost nothing with the money except put out some newsletters and youtube videos.

    I have seen zero accountability taken for not being transparent about having a billionaire patron (I know he thinks of himself as a socialist) or sitting on these giant piles of cash they got and doing almost nothing with it. And I have to assume that is because it’s very embaressing and inconvenient to them to have the funding exposed like this.

    Obviously AIPAC etc. will never get the same scruitiny, but I’m not overly concerned with the hypocrisy angle, like what doesn’t amerikkka do that’s not a hypocracy, there’s no way this wouldn’t have made it main stream eventually and I don’t get why these orgs weren’t more transparent to their members, I would imagine the DSA has never gotten a donation of a million or over before, you would think that would be significant enough to warrant being open about it

    • immuredanchorite [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Rediculous. The PSL (which was never named in the nytimes article and afaik has never directly received funds from singham) and adjacent media have been agitating against the New Cold War for years, but you have only started paying attention because of an outrageous hit-piece written by the “paper of record” (the US state dept. mouthpiece). The “expose” of a Black communist who came into hundreds of millions selling a tech company he started in his 30s. I won’t pretend that he isn’t bourgeois, but that doesn’t mean an individual in the ruling class cannot be radicalized and become an ally to the workers movement. There are a lot of examples of individuals working against their class interest in the communist movement, Engels was thoroughly bourgeois, Zhou Enlai was born to a scholar-official family, Souphanouvong was a prince that joined the Pathet Lao and became the first president of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, to name a few. Acting as though a cash infusion to large number of communist and communist-adjacent organizations is in itself bad and shady seems to conveniently line up with a narrative that would deprive socialist organizations the means to organize in general. Was there anything to suggest they are misappropriating the funds? I haven’t ever come across information that has ever indicated that. You are also missing the point of the article, which wasn’t to malign the groups for having more money than the DSA, the point was to discredit the growing communist movement and paint it as an arm of the CPC. Which side are you on?

      Anyway, just because you are unaware of the work that these groups are doing, doesn’t mean they aren’t doing good work, or agitating against the new cold war. Here is an org that has been working with since 2020 on the very issue, looking at old newsletters from 2020 you can also see People’s Forum speakers and other adjacent groups presenting at events for the org. Here is another group organizing against the new cold war since 2020. It is disingenuous to say that these organizations are only putting out newsletters and youtube videos.

      The DSA has millions of dollars and as of 2022 had 32 full time organizers. Yet, my towns local DSA chapter lost nearly 50% of its paper members. I don’t want to get into a thing about the DSA, but they operate in a fundamentally different way than communist organizations, and are not going to be subject to the same level of repression or want to completely expose their inner workings to the state. The DSA are essentially a mass org and so it would make sense for them to publicly air out their inner workings and finances. Are you a member of these other groups that have gotten money? Why would they be accountable to you?

      An aside, if you read the nytimes article, what initiated the reporter’s “investigation” was what the reporter described as “Twitter anti-fascists” … I seem to remember this coming up originally, and it just seems like the wining of a bunch of idealists who expect everyone to obey some sort of unrealistic purity-tests. I would love to see what those individuals have done to build working class power, but so far they have just given ammunition to the ruling class to paint US communists as Chinese agents and expose them to repression. I am sure the DSA will be totally insulated from that sort of repression, especially when their members who get elected to congress feed into the cold war narrative itself, or give funding the the IDF, or Ukraine (disregarding the DSA’s own positions and their international committee’s own statements)

      • chilemango [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        On one hand yeah, but on the other hand, little was done besides making a nyc bookstore and some propaganda, and if you think these orgs are completely seperate from the PSL and don’t share members/staff you are just misinformed.

        I still can’t comprehend why not just do press releases for the donations as if a big paper wouldn’t eventually find out socialist groups are getting millions from some 100 millionaire guy (regardless of his background) who is also funding dongsheng news sitting in an office in Shanghai with communist office decorations, it just adds to the narrative that something suspicious was going on because they didn’t come out ahead of it

        And ultimately making a hexbear comment is just my opinion, I’m not hurting any of these groups in any way by posting my takes on the hexagonal bear lemmy, like “which side are you on” give me a break lmao