On lemmy.world I posted a comment on how liberals use ‘tankie’ as an invective to shut down dialogue and received tons of hateful replies. I tried to respond in a rational way to each. Someone’s said ‘get educated’ I responded ‘Im reading Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll burn that bridge when I get there’ and tried to keep it civil.
They deleted every comment I made and banned me. Proving my point, they just want to shut down dialogue. Freedom of speech doesn’t existing in those ‘totalitarian’ countries right? But in our ‘enlightened’ western countries we just delete you.
Sometimes it kind of of makes me feel really irritated in a way because like, a lot of these people who are so overly concerned over “tankies”, don’t have that energy directed at fascists or reactionaries? They seem more concerned over “tankies” than reactionaries or fascists who are in power in various places and are hurting people. Like they will make a post or whatever denouncing “tankies”, but where is that towards fascists? or reactionaries? If anything all they do is help fascists and reactionaries whether they are aware of that or not.
Go ahead liberals. Call me a tankie. See if I give one ten thousandth of a fuck. Literally such a low-tier insult. “Uhh its like… uh…you support this large cool looking machine that stopped Color Revolutions and was responsible for Liberating the Eastern Front during World War II” “Yea, I do😐” “😨”
Tankie means you approve when a communist state uses military/tanks against its own people… Not against a Nazi state. I would reconsider if you really want to wear that label with pride…
Tankie just means “any communist I don’t like” at this point. Take your McCarthyism and complete ignorance about color revolutions elsewhere.
Nice definition of tankie! Got that from wish?
At what point does being clowned on by an entire instance spur self-reflection?
Look what people wrote as replies to my comment, look how the upvote downvote numbers are, think.
My key takeaway from this post is: people on lemmygrad say they are interested in discussion and all those other instances are oh so bad, because they block them or doenvote them or call them tankies, which people on lemmygrad interpret as slur.
At the same time, you get down voted to oblivion, when you even write the definition of tankies to someone, who calls himself one. People who are pride to be a tankies onLemmygrad: cherished People who criticise this in anyway: laught at.
And simultaneously everyone who calls anyone else except him self a tankie no matter the context is automatically a liberal, when Servers defederate them, they are all facists or love fascists
People making strawman arguments when I say in a discussion that I don’t agree with Stalin (“ohhh so capitalism is sooo much better” - no, its not, and I didn’t say that, I can disagree with capitalism and stlinism at the same time, go figure)
And people defending (literal) tankies get upvoted, people who don’t get down voted.
This server has lost one of the strongest tools in material dialectic: (self-) critical thinking
I really hoped I would find interesting debates here, but this is a circlejerk
At what point will self reflection kick in? At what point t people in an echo chamber realise its one?
If you don’t send tanks into hungary, the nazis will do pogroms and construct concentration camps there. Not sending tanks is inhumanly cruel.
I 100% agree, and tho I very much like Stalin(he’s my favorite writer) it doesn’t take a “Stalinist” to understand that Color Revolutions and Nazism need to be crushed for socialism to survive
Mathematician 1: 1+1=2 Mathematician 2: 1+1=2
Debatebro: Muh echo chamber!
Yeah, cause stating “tankie” means “every communist I don’t like” is the only truth and like saying 1+1 =2
Also comparing societal questions to mathematical ones is totally unconcerning
/kappa
The nazis aren’t our people.
And everyone who don’t likes Stalin is a Nazi
/kappa
The uprising in hungary was a nazi uprising, with pogroms.
There’s a really great graphic novel called ‘Berlin’ that goes into how the Nazis came to be, how the communists were the ones that organized worker strikes to stop railroads to death camps etc. I don’t think our meme warfare on the net will change anything but if your looking for a fun read checkit. Is there anything you would recommend for me? I probably I’ll read it. I’m a reader.
Oh i totaly agree that communists were often the strongest force against fascists. Don’t have to like Stalin to be a communist nor to be antifascist though
What is your opinion on the standing rock protests and the Kentucky state massacre
Also the 1956 Hungarian coup attempt that the epithet “tankies” comes from was literally full of nazis lmao
That’s correct, specifically a state that uses tanks against its people in revolt.
However, people on Reddit (and on Lemmy now) basically use it to refer to any leftist they have a disagreement with.
Well saying tankies support using tanks against civilians gets you down voted on lemmygrad.
No tankies here though, all just libs propaganda
/kappa
So you want the nazis to murder everyone in hungary?
Thats such an obvious strawman, i dont think i need to answer that ;)
Because if you would answer that you would have to admit that the wokes were right.
This is a rhetorical trap called “reality”.
Oh I think there are a lot of people who get called woke and are right. Your rhetorical trap is not reality, its trying to get me to say something which confirms your prejustices.
Remember, my claim, forwhich you guys are fighting me here was “tankie” has other than “someone I don’t like”
You attacked me verbally for saying that, and then realized, that you can’t win this argument, cause in reality you agree with me so you try to shift the battlefield to a discussion you can win (and kept pressing really hard with your Hungarian Nazis ^^)
That’s your rhetorical strategy, it has nothing to do with reality ;)
If someone calls me a tankie I roll my eyes, but what makes my blood boil is the term “red fascist.” What the actual F? I would have been in a fascist concentration camp for at least 3 reasons
No need to resort to suppositions; just look at Thälmann.
The term of “red fascist” is not only (purposefully) insulting to the memory of actual MLs who came under repression and execution from the hands of fascists (and ignoring that in many fascist states they were the forefront of resistance against it, see: the PCE under francoist Spain), but also dangerous as it blurs fascism as a word with a meaning, making actual fascism harder to identify and, thus, to combat.
There’s a reason why fascism has to be redefined, blurred, or otherwise trivialized. Most libs don’t do it on purpose but they serve reaction by doing so. If we actually learned the true socio-economic definition of fascism we’d very quickly realize that the golden billion live in nations which are arguably fascist.
Fascist or ‘authoritarian’ even. I asked for their definition so we couldn’t at least have some ground to debate on but yeah, naw. It’s just throwing memes. And I again reiterate the US is absolutely authoritarian. Prison population? Through the roof. Cop city? Murder protestors. War? Total media and popular support even to the tune of one trillion dollars a year.
1000000000000 dollars
As Hakim or Yugopnik (I can’t remember exactly) said, “tankie” is the new “commie”
Yugopnik I think from memory. He was saying how libs can’t say “commie” because its such a dated word and nobody takes it seriously (except some conservatives who still say it unironically which is actually hilarious😂). It’s too much associated with redscare era propaganda. Tankie doesn’t carry this baggage but has exactly the same function.
Also Hakim, in his newest video.
ah cool didn’t realise
This is liberal mental space, full of “freedom of speech”. Liberalism is a cancer which leads to right extremism. And social democracy leads to liberalism. If you exclude ML from discourse, you eliminate whole left wing point of view consequently.
Unrelated, but I like your pfp.
Thank you comrade!
omg i just had the misfortune of wandering into this thread, https://lemmygrad.ml/post/806853 i am so glad we have our own space where we can safely laugh at these fools. omg.
Holy shit what an insufferable group.
“Define Tankie”
Red fascist
Who defines a buzzword with a buzzword ffs.
Also! (Paraphrasing)
[…] people who justify genocides. […]
'scuze me what the fuck? Who here says genocides are cool and good actually? We are like the first fuckers to point them out and scream about them???
And even more!
Comrade Spood
Now that’s dose of Anarcho-Debilizm let me tell you. “Just press the communism button Xi and we’ll succeed no problem! They will just let us exist and everyone will love each other :3”
And it just still keeps going!
Educate yourself. / Please change and grow as a person. / Read a book.
Motherfuckers I read too much compared to your sorry asses.
Yeah it was torture. I tried to keep it civil and lighthearted and actually engage but they are so programmed it’s almost knee jerk comment reaction at this point.
Also fun and great that so many Lemmy instances won’t federate material that threatens their worldview. I mean, I’m 100% anti Nazi anti fascist and anti authoritarian but what does that even matter right? How dare I say there might be a different way to view say Cuba China Vietnam or North Korea…
Who here says genocides are cool and good actually
I say that Mao’s landlords genocide was pretty neat actually. Please don’t tell the libs.
Educate yourself. / […] / Read a book.
Their education:
I refuse to believe there’s actually 1.6gb of anarchist literature in existence that’s not supplemented with lots of random unpublished PDFs and saved blog posts that are rife with poor grammar and spelling errors.
It could be a bunch of breadtube videos.
“I have” doesn’t mean “I’ve read”, what a pretentious dumbass.
In the second part of this pic she tells the reader not having read any of it.
it’s real lmao
So when she said 1.6GB of litterature, it was basically two audiobooks. That’ll show them how litterate she is for sure lmao
Hilarious how she doesn’t even have a problem admitting it’s all a matter of fitting the edgy cyberpunk aesthetic of blue hair, computers, skateboards and slapping stickers around. All about individual image and no political dedication.
And I can understand listening to theory audiobooks instead of reading them, although I think it’s worse as it’s harder for you to re-read lines and take notes, but… While skateboarding? Can you imagine yourself attempting to make any sense of a Das Kapital audiobook while playing basketball? Probably just to be able to say “yeah i’ve already read it” and nothing else. Once again, all about aesthetics.
That whole thread:
“These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world”
My favorite Engels tweet.
hmm, I wonder who controls the socialist state
I am guessing that their response would be ‘the bureaucracy’ (which would be inaccurate).
It’s partly because liberal westerners can see how shit their system is, see how shit their lives are or are becoming, see how much shit they have to take from unaccountable people, and then cannot fathom how people who they’ve been taught to see as subhuman could possibly achieve anything better. So a combination of racism and self-hatred. The only way out begins with self-reflection.
We only know the fucked up, one sided abusive relationship we have with our capitalist governments, so we can’t imagine anything different.
The only way out begins with self-reflection.
🏅🏅🏅<–In lieu of hexbear medal emojis
No one should control the state because there shouldn’t be a state. If there is a state then there’s oppression.
As an ML I actually agree with you, the state is a weapon and i would like to see it one day outlive it’s usefulness and wither so that communism can be achieved. However, it’s a weapon that you absolutely cannot discard until capitalism has been destroyed, and until then, unilateral disarmament is guaranteed suicide for a revolutionary movement.
I could not have put it better myself, thank you for your illuminating comment.
guaranteed suicide
As is blind faith in a revolutionary movement’s ability to wield such a weapon in the interest of the proletariat and towards communism. Seems like a lot of people in this thread are forgetting Mao’s critique of the USSR.
"The revisionist Khrushchov clique abolish the dictatorship of the proletariat behind the camouflage of the “state of the whole people”, change the proletarian character of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union behind the camouflage of the “party of the entire people” and pave the way for the restoration of capitalism behind that of “full-scale communist construction”. - Mao - marxists.org
But is this not equally true for China today?
It is not.
Just because a state brands itself socialist doesn’t say anything about the level of democracy or workers’ control of it.
sure, but if we were talking about non-socialist states that call themselves socialist, we wouldn’t call them socialist states
Well IMHO both USSR and China shows how gaining workers control and keeping it, or moreso making significant headway towards communism, is just much more complicated. Representative worker ownership of the means of production through the state doesn’t have a compelling track record. I think it’s dishonest, reactionary and anti intellectual to laugh off arguments like that of comrade spood from the screenshot above.
Edit: checked out my claim on calorie intake and discovered it was dubious. Removed, but letting the main argument stay.
The USSR was eventually compromised, so it technically failed in that sense, but how is China an example of failing to retain worker control? If you’re claiming that capitalists control China’s government, I’d challenge you to provide some evidence
Lack of press freedom, organization freedom, social credit system, great firewall of China, over 2000 work hours pr year (France has 1500), severely low scores in democracy rankings. This doesn’t smell much like worker control, more like authoritarianism. But then again, I’m very much from the West. Happy to be educated on my shortcomings in understanding 👍
It’s as much analysis as you can expect from the userbase of Tumblr lite.
Tumblr lite, or tumblr alt right?
Let’s be fair to them, at least they aren’t reactionary. Still, unfunny “uwu” memes mixed with Lockheed Left behaviour does not paint a much more enjoyable scene.
Lockheed Left is reactionary though.
“…which is why we won’t do shit, but raise a lot of stink, until communism just kinda happens on it’s own.”
the brainworm infestation has proved devastating
And I had the misfortune of not resisting to participate in it. Do not recommend.
Thank you for your service comrade o9
oh dear. I told myself i wouldn’t engage. (narrator: but he engaged). Just trying to gently nudge an anarchist towards materialist analysis, i’ll try resist getting sucked into any arguments for my own sake.
Like moths flying into a bug zapper: we know it will hurt, but we just cannot help it.
I’ve talked about this before, albeit the topic was about self‐identified anticommunists, but I am sorry to say that it applies to a lot of leftoid noobs as well. Anybody who poses obviously loaded questions like ‘why is it being a “lib” to say that governments who repress the human rights and civil liberties of minorities are not practicing leftism in good faith? the same governments who have horrifically and violently crushed workers rights movements?’ does not need to be dignified with a serious response. You can’t make these bipeds educate themselves no matter how good your evidence is; it simply isn’t a matter that’s within your hands.
Do something else: unionize, agitate for better working conditions, exercise, train with a weapon, do some volunteer work, contribute to volunteers (like Food Not Bombs), or engage with communists or communist sympathizers who are very clearly asking in good faith. Personally, I spend my most productive time studying modern history, and I’ve amassed a respectable répertoire of knowledge. I can confidently say that you’ll learn more about capitalism in decay from me than you’ll ever learn from any horseshoe theorist or dullards saying ‘red fash’ unjokingly.
Damn, son, you went off and gave me a reading list… continue
Basically, get offline. Every single conversation I’ve had about communism in person, I can at least get people to view communist history from a rational perspective less clouded by propaganda. Even if they don’t “agree” they can at least respect it and can marinate on it later.
Online arguments with liberals are pointless. At least the arguments on lemmygrad are mostly good faith and even if there are disagreements there’s a lot of learning that happens. Arguing on mainstream liberal forums just opens you to being brigades by bots, reactionaries, and people who are participating in bad faith to begin with.
It’s why it’s really funny that there’s a decent amount of libs trying to pretend that Lemmy (either .ml or as a whole) is this super “tankie” thing when they’re really the opposite
Like, if the rest of the Lemmy universe was “tankie” we wouldn’t need Lemmygrad in the first place
It’s pretty funny that liberals see themselves as proponents of open debate and rational discourse, but in practice they start freaking out as soon as anybody challenges their dogmas.
Real “my girlfriend goes to another school” situation, except the girlfriend is their respect for other people
🤣
We should call liberals coupies because of all their coups.
There is already the term dronie which is a defender of neoliberalism and their imperialistic policies.
Fair, although coupie is more accurate, since it’s like their thing IMO, drone is more common nowadays and not just for Obama.
Call them boaties because NATO sent 19 warships to surround and blockade Lisbon in 1974 after Portugal overthrew fascism and started nationalizing industries and redistributing land.
Where can one read more about those events?
From Rogue State by William Blum, chapter 17
More from chapter 18:
Awesome, thanks!
fr
cool idea but i think this gives them too much credit. libs blindly support every war and blindly swallow every hot distraction, while believing they do neither. i think it is too kind to focus on just the coups.
I like David Graebers choice of calling them “extreme centrists”
I like what he proposes, I haven’t seen that video, thanks! Although that’s not much of an insult.
It gets up their noses though because they see themselves as the most moderate of people!
That’s a good one.
P.S. I want to take the opportunity to tell you that I like your username. I’m downloading my legally aquired copy of Metal Gear Solid now.
MGS saga has some good things, you need to be critical but for example Peace Walker is the gamification of guerilla warfare in a way, and Big Boss is kind of based in el Che. Kojima’s ideas are a bit flawed in terms of politics because he was born in the West but his heart is in the right place. Every one of his games is good in a very specific way.
Liberals are incapable of intelligent conversation with others, especially those of opposing viewpoints. They’ve been trained to desire and maintain the status quo (Capital), even in the face of creeping fascism, and will parrot insults at anyone who doesn’t tow the line. ‘Tankie’ is just the newest term.
It’s just western red scare paranoia with a millennial twist. I hadn’t peeked at those communities before, but I’ll make sure they’re given a wide berth now.
Wow you’re not using liberal the american way are you? What is your definition of the world liberal?
Edit: Downvoting me for asking a question is so reddit of you, feels like home <3
Liberals in America are capitalists just as much as they are in the rest of the world. The Democratic party never fails to extol the virtues of capitalism. At best they say it should be regulated.
I mean liberalism in the sense of support for things like private property, liberal ‘western’ democracy and an exploitative, laissez-faire approach to market economies. I am American; perhaps I’m just not understanding the varied meaning of the word?
Because this is a communist sub, and he is using the world liberal in the way that communists use it, in the way it was meant to be use when it was created, that actually describes what it is. You’re getting downvoted because it’s really frustrating answering the same simple concept questions over and over again to people who don’t care to actually learn, and who are already being slightly obnoxious when answering the question right from the get go.
Sorry for the long comment, hope this clarification helps. If others disagree with my explanation, feel free to clarify or call out any wrong ideas. I’m a new Liberal convert so I’m still working through these details.
In essence, the “left” are socialists, the “right” are fascists (Glossing over some details here). Fascism is authoritarian capitalism, but Liberalism is capitalism that’s not fascism. Liberalism is theoretically to the left of the political spectrum, but it’s a compromise to the capitalists.
Our problem with Liberals is they seem completely incapable of having a real conversation about how the world works, and how to make change. As well, they demonize anyone that doesn’t share their viewpoint.
For example: “Woke” is kind of a fake word now, it means whatever conservatives want it to mean, but it comes from a real place. Initially being woke meant that you see the injustices that are institutionalized in the world, and seek to better yourself after learning that information. This is a good thing and lead to more people understanding the contradictions of our wold. But Liberals kinda turned into “I’m better than you because I went ‘woke’”, “If you aren’t woke, then leave my circle of friends”, “Anything that isn’t woke isn’t worth talking about”. This perpetuates the culture war that the conservatives are winning, because in the end, who wants to side with the assholes who push their own out at any sign of disobedience? The fascists are playing open arms to everyone the left excludes, perpetuating the growing movement of right authoritarianism.
I was a liberal for a long time, but always felt out of place because although the conservatives made up a lot of bullshit about liberals, they touched on some real things that also irritated me. Instead of moving to the right, I was educated and looked at the source of some of these things. That led me to find where the real problems of the world were, opened my eyes to those that were in charge, causing these problems in the first place. That lead me to socialism, communism, etc. and now I think I’m more on the ‘left’ than I have ever been.
This turned into the longest thing I’ve written in ages.
You gave quite a good explanation, and there are just two big points I want to add to it. Sorry if I get basic with it or seem condescending, but I’m also writing with new people in mind. The first point is that liberal capitalism is capitalism that is not yet fascist, and the second point is that for anyone living in one of the many places the west exploits, it already is fascist. Because of how writing this shook out, I’ve tried to make these points in the opposite order, because it’s easier to follow that way.
Nothing is static, everything is a process. A mountain is the process of plate tectonics, an animal is the process of cellular life, and a capitalist economy is the process of accumulation. It outcompeted and replaced feudalism, a more primitive form of accumulation. Every form of social organization has inherent contradictions, inherent tension points where the interests of one group pull against the interest of another. Peasant vs landlord, yeoman farmer vs slave, industrial worker vs factory owner. These roles are defined by their relationships to the means of production and to each other, and when conditions make those relationships untenable, they break, and a new dynamic arises. For example, when the conditions of defeat in the Civil War but also a paltry reconstruction effort by the US made chattel slavery an unviable arrangement for the wealthy, they started up the sharecropping industry, a form of wage slavery the new government found acceptable. Obviously prison slavery also started ballooning afterwards, and now we have more prisoners in a larger carceral system in the US than anywhere else on Earth. The profit margins of chattel slavery were stabilized by other types of slavery. Because a capitalist economy requires infinite growth, it requires new frontiers to exploit, places where resources and labor can be had cheaply and sold for more elsewhere. In US history, these frontiers (and the wretched economic conditions necessary to extort cheap labor) have always been enforced by military and intelligence organizations. Look into the history of any country the west uses for cheap labor, cheap materials, or as a trash dumping ground, and you’ll find a history of naked imperialism that set the conditions for all these “voluntary, free market” transactions that always seem to screw over anyone who isn’t part of the so-called first world.
The need for profits drove colonialism, it drives neocolonialism today, and when one frontier closes, another must open. If no external frontier can be opened, it will be an internal one. Fascism, economically, is is the attempt to open up an internal frontier against a segment of ones own society. It’s capitalism in crisis mode, a rampant imperial economy that has begun chewing at it’s own flesh to make up for the caloric deficit. This is the stage at which decline will be felt by the people living inside the empire, with things like infrastructure failures, mass poverty, mass incarceration, crimes of desperation, an explosion in new cults, and outbreaks of disease becoming commonplace. These conditions are symptoms of the contradictions between the classes becoming irreconcilable: decades of austerity, of public funds and programs being looted by the wealthy, of endless imperial wars, of the privatization of every industry and resource, even vital resources like food and water that people need to live. This is where we’re at now-and I havent even mentioned the concentration camps.
Looking at it from a class perspective, these are conditions that the American and westen bourgeoisie have inflicted both on the proletariat of their own countries, and to a much greater extent on the rest of the world. The people of all these countries we ruin don’t choose fascism, our ruling class chooses it for them. The people of America don’t choose to go to war, or for healthcare to cost a million dollars, or to give the police tanks and combat robots. Our ruling class chooses it for us. We don’t actually live in a democracy, we live in a dictatorship of the rich.
When we consider that a capitalist economy has only one goal -to accumulate capital, to make fewer and fewer individuals richer and richer- and that it will fufill this goal at any cost and when we consider that extreme fascist policies are very good for private accumulation, it leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: that any liberal capitalist economy, after exhausting or losing access to it’s external frontiers, will inevitably become fascist, must inevitably become fascist, or be outcompeted and absorbed by a more ruthless competitor.
As long as capitalism is the dominant mode of production on this planet, fascism is it’s only logical endpoint.
TLDR what we think of as liberalism is actually just when the fascism is contained in the countries we inflict it on.
Fantastic diatribe. Instructive and not condescending at all. If those people who insist on calling us ‘tankies’ for understanding this and calling for actual global socialist revolution would take the time to understand why we are where we are politically maybe they would join us.
but Liberalism is capitalism that’s not fascism
Got it, didn’t know that yet. Usually in english-speaking political debate, liberals just means “not racist gun-nuts” lol
That’s not really true. Self identified liberals in America don’t really put much thought into it beyond what you stated. Everyone starts somewhere and that’s fine.
Once you start understanding political ideology, liberalism becomes less of a catch all than just “not-conservative”.
Check out a great example of Phil Ochs lampooning the liberals of his time. This isn’t a new definition.
interesting that the “T word” is used by them to “trigger” you, but they were [triggered] in the end
Liberals once again refusing to acknowledge their hippocracy. They must be fuming after Comrade Hakim’s latest video
Hakim is so on point. Brilliant video.
It’s also happens when liberals talk about foreign policy. The reduce critics of US foreign policy and NATO “America bad.” Which is exactly as reductive as the hyperbolic critique they’re trying to make.
A lot of this comes from the community from the streamer whose name starts with the v and who used to go by Irish Lassie. His community is especially toxic when it comes to using the term tankie as a pejorative.
And they don’t even keep the smear to people that support the Bolsheviks. They’ve been saying that about Noam Chomsky and Jeremy corbyn and basically anyone that has been critical of NATO in the last few years.
A lot of this comes from the community from the streamer whose name starts with the v and who used to go by Irish Lassie. His community is especially toxic when it comes to using the term tankie as a pejorative.
And they don’t even keep the smear to people that support the Bolsheviks. They’ve been saying that about Noam Chomsky and Jeremy corbyn and basically anyone that has been critical of NATO in the last few years.
Imagine calling fucking Chomsky a tankie XD
XD
The polish virus spreads! Yes! Hahaha! Yes!
It might be interesting to start a conversation on the appropriate comm there about whichever rule is being enforced (check the modlog) and challenge the rule.
If you mean the blahaj 196, i doubt it will do anything, because it’s apparently this rule by their mod:
“I am very anti-commie so, YEs. FUCK THEM COMMIES!!!” The shitstains who use “tankie” unironically are just trite old anti-communists but with the flag of some dead ideology like “libertarian socialism”.
“FUCK THEM WOKES!!!”
So I’ve heard tankies defined as “someone who specifically supports the centralized, authorization flavor of communism practiced by the USSR”. They also often mention worship of Stalin and Mao, and a revisionist version of history supporting such a stance
This seems odd to me, especially since a group of tankies flocked early to a decentralized platform geared for long-form discussions
Personally, I believe capitalism is an ideological virus. You can trace a clear path from the Roman empire to the modern day, where a hyper-specialized society eradicated every other system of resource husbandry by sloppily harvesting as quick as possible and using that advantage to gangpress everyone else into service under them (and destroying anything that would even slightly slow down the process )
I don’t think communism is the answer, because I don’t think it’s a path we can walk without first curing the disease, but the guiding concepts resonate with me.
So in that light, I’d like to ask in good faith:
Self-identified tankies - how do you define a tankie?
Someone asked a very similar question the other day. Here’s a link to my reply, in case you’re interested: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/559425. And related to this, I also recently wrote something about the need to defend a revolution: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/565520.
To answer your questions…
I don’t self identify as a tankie and I’m not sure that anyone does. It seems to be a broad term used by anti-communists so that they don’t have to do the hard work of engaging with what’s being said.
If anyone does call me a tankie it’s because I’m a Marxist-Leninist (ML). MLs are historical materialists. This involves a way of looking at the world that was first developed by Marx and Engels. Historical materialism (himat/histmat) applies dialectical materialism (dimat/diamat) to human society, treating reality as interrelated processes, not things.
This methodology is opposed to bourgeois ways of thinking and of other ‘vulgar’ strains of Marxism. As MLs interpret the world according to himat, they say things that can be incomprehensible to those who don’t know understand dialectics or materialism.
Chomsky is a good example. He’s a renowned prof at a top university but he admits that he doesn’t understand himat and has never tried to. How can one possibly deal with one’s opponents arguments in good faith without even trying to understand where they’re coming from? An honest theoretician would admit that he’s simply talking past his opposition, as might e.g. Ronald Dworkin or John Finnis (IIRC). Not Chomsky, who gives the perception that he’s understood his opponents before dismissing them. Anyway, I digress.
I don’t think communism is the answer, because I don’t think it’s a path we can walk without first curing the disease, but the guiding concepts resonate with me.
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
I won’t say that you’re a tankie, lol, but you’re in agreement with the MLs. Following Marx and Engels, communism is the process of curing the disease.
It is often said that communism is the end goal. In a way, this is true. But we need to look a bit further and apply himat to fully understand the position. According to himat, all relations/processes are internally contradictory (himat still complies with formal logic).
Capitalism is a class society, involving a contradictory relation between bourgeois and proletariat. One cannot exist without the other but their interests are opposed. They must fight, just as slaves fought masters and serfs fought lords. Humans arrive at capitalism when they resolve the contradiction between slave/master and serf/lord. (This is very reductive example, as there are many classes in every epoch of class society.)
Humans will arrive at communism when they resolve the contradictions of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg once said, ‘socialism or barbarism’, roughly meaning we either head towards communism or we let the liberals/fascists continue their barbarity. (When MLs say, ‘liberals’, they mean all those in favour of capitalism, as liberalism is the ideology of capitalism; and they become fascists to protect capitalism against revolution.) Now we can add a third, ‘or planetary collapse’. We either head towards communism or decide how quickly to destroy the climate. There’s no option where it isn’t destroyed unless we head towards communism.
But, according to himat, communism isn’t the final stage of human development. Because contradiction is in everything. And the struggle between the opposites within those contradictory relations drive change. We’re just unable to see exactly what contradictions will arise once we get past capitalism and abolish classes.
I think you might already see things in a similar way, as you identify the germ of the existing system in the Roman system.
And this takes us to e.g. the USSR. I’ll try to be brief. It’s not that MLs/tankies support the USSR. I’m not even sure what that means as the only kind of support that counts is material support. Although material support can be ideological, there’s no USSR in existence to which to offer any support. It dissolved several decades ago. The only thing left is critical analysis of what it was, how it worked, and why it ultimately failed.
Following such an analysis, the evidence takes us to whatever conclusions it takes us. Looking at that evidence to fully understand the USSR, it’s clear that it was not what the anti-communist narrative says it was. If this is a more favourable view than we’ve been taught we’re allowed to have, then someone is lying and propagandising and we must ask, why?
We can get into more details about these subjects if you wish, although I may ask others to chip in depending on what you ask. But if you are here in good faith, which seems to be the case, please keep asking questions.
Do you know of any resources where I can hear the options of average Soviet citizens during the time of the USSR, I would like to learn?
There are some links on Dessalines’ GitHub page: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#did-the-citizens-of-the-soviet-union-dislike-their-government.
I don’t think it is quite what you’re after, but you might enjoy Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds (there are PDFs online if you look around).
I’ve made a post on !communism101@lemmygrad.ml to see if anyone else has some good suggestions: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/911871. Keep an eye out there.
Is this helpful at all?
Yes thanks, I’ve watched Parenti’s yellow lecture. Sadly, I could not get my son to watch; he said it looked “old.” But he knows more about Marx than me, so there is hope. GenZ may surprise us all.
Parenti’s lectures are great! I have faith in GenZ, too. They might need some encouragement, which it sounds like your son is getting already.
Maybe just the audio from Parenti’s lectures will do the trick? https://lemmygrad.ml/post/899886
He listens to Deprogram, on YouTube. YouTube is everything to GenZ, and TikTok. Thanks for the links, there’s so much to learn.
you’re not going to get an answer because people don’t self identify as a tankie - it’s a pejorative term. you should ask for the opinion of modern marxist-lenninists and you’ll get plenty of explanation. like most political persuasions it’s not the ideology that is flawed it’s the execution.
Fair enough, a pejorative term for what exactly though? The most nuanced answer I’ve gotten is from a proponent of communism who pointed at the authoritarian bent to it… Which seems super weird to me.
The way I see it, a bureaucracy has more leeway in allocating goods the higher up you go, which is very literal administrative capitol - it’s totally in conflict with the core concept of Marx, which is a person getting the fruits of their own labor, and no one getting to milk others (which is really the only way to get much inequality)
I’m a lot more critical of lennonists. While on the surface it imitates capitalism’s ability to optimize production (and with a more aligned goal, minimizing scarcity instead of maximizing the supply-demand equation), it also reintroduces the alignment problem. As you scale up, individual action and ideological beliefs become blips in the data, and the super organism created through humans arranged in the structure.
Individuals have a perverse incentive to maximize their own authority, the number of people under them, and the scale of their operations - by doing that they appear more meritocratous and are more likely to move up the hierarchy. Eventually someone gets the idea to fudge the numbers, and since the metrics are too complex to spot this in a spreadsheet, the most widely selected for skill to move up the ladder is to distort (or spin) the numbers so an individual appears to be serving a greater need than what actually exists.
Lennon’s theory is great, the more centralized the distribution, the greater the potential for optimization - but it ignores the emergent properties that appear when humans form an entity too complex for individual humans to grasp the full picture. You can reign in the worst excesses through watchdogs and harsh punishments, but ultimately that just becomes another layer for power to concentrate. You can keep layering and slow down the rot, but it’s a fundamental alignment problem - either you purposely concentrate the power in a person or group and regress to autocracy, or you constantly keep adding layers of checks and balances (which eats away at the efficiency gains)
So I see a fundamental contradiction here, which is why I can get behind techno-communism with intelligent agents running the show, or I can get behind decentralizing the system and creating something more anarchistic (or ideally, both), but Lennon always seemed to me to be a smart architect given a problem with a scale and an urgency beyond his abilities
Or am I missing something fundamental?
I’m a lot more critical of lennonists.
Lennon’s theory is great…
…but Lennon always seemed to me to be a smart architect given a problem with a scale and an urgency beyond his abilities
Redtea already gave you a far better response than I can, but this is an amusing typo.
communism with Ringo charecteristics?
Can you give me more information to research about the humanity/ alignment problem? I’ve recent been interested in council communism or decentralized government
I can’t edit in the app I’m testing out, but I’ll add a qualifier after hearing the pejorative connotations (I literally first heard the word last week and am looking for context)
I’d love to hear the take on the definition of the term tankies by someone who believes others would push the term on them
