Yeah, that's not the tankies here; these are "North Korea is a great country, actually" tankies.
Also, "anything negative about a communist country is US propaganda"
Should probably listen to Blowback Season 3.
Not to say they're a perfect country but to pretend that anyone in the West can critique them when their material conditions are dictated by the actions of the West is just comical.
If you aren't a materialist, what are you even doing? As if history happens in the realm of pure thought.....
Something something worlds largest prison population?
Again, it's not like North Korea is some shining example or anything, but to pretend that the west has the moral high ground here is laughable.
Again, listen to Blowback Season 3, recognize that their country was basically bombed to the stone age Curtis le may style and then maybe reevaluate, just a little, the chauvinist attitude.
DPRK is not a great country but it's not as if they were ever given a chance either.
When a liberal says "tankie" they mean anything remotely communist-looking. When a leftist says "tankie", they mean authoritarians who like red flags and self-proclaimed communists who nonetheless support hierarchies and have no plan or intention to bring them down. I think the vast majority of people here knows this already.
I think the vast majority of people here knows this already.
You are way optimistic.
Mostly True, while (at least in my part of the world) there are a lot of people who like red flags but fight against hierarchies.
There are plenty of Marxists and Marxist-derived socialists who aren't Tankies.
They just don't make up the majority.
Is the USA a “functioning” state with all the oppression, racism, greed, invading other countries out of monetarian interest and environment destruction?
I hope you realize that this is an incredibly privileged take. The US is rife with issues, but the hardships experienced by the average western citizen doesn't even compare to the suffering that you would find in, say, Pol Pot's Cambodia, or (to a less extreme extent) Maduro's Venezuela. To compare what a US citizen deals with on a daily basis due to capitalism to what a citizen of any of those countries had to go through is very reductive and may be perceived as disrespectful to many who had to live those experiences.
The United States, for all it's faults, is the pretty side of capitalism.you don't even need to look to the most poor countries to see a standard of living that makes even directly post ww2 soviet union look like a great place.
The US is rife with issues, but the hardships experienced by the average western citizen doesn’t even compare to the suffering that you would find in, say, Pol Pot’s Cambodia
I have some fellas from Detroit that would disagree.
Genocide and pol pot is terrible. So is the USA.
Implying the us is better than Cambodia because Cambodia committed genocide is very weird, considering that the US did so too
Im not from USA, and from my point of view its mich worse than most other countries (no healthcare, no independend courts, murder sprees in schools nearly every day, opression of half of the world (a half of them just to get more oil to destroy the planet faster), one of 3 of the biggest war-pushers in whole earth, polutes and destroys earth mode than every other country per citizens, etc. PP.)
capitalism mostly opresses and profits from people out of the country to Funktion. if its Bad in Venezuela or Cuba or Afghanistan, or even early russia, thats at least partly fault of US.
Venezuela is not communism, China isnt, russia isnt. Most of them have failed, at least partly because caputalist societys atack them and stop a as soon as they are born and they can't form a stable democracy. Before reading Marx, your bashing of communism isnt worth anything, as you clearly don't understand what you are talking about. We never had communism, and some would say not even socialism. You sound like you don't even know the difference, since you keep talking about communism, which is a utopian society after humanity has stopped a lot of bad habits and has learned to live without working against each other in competition and working together instead, which arises maybe after generations of workig socialism, which we clearly didn't have.
4.you exactly prove my point. I dont agree with tankies either, but the number of people around here blindly copying capitalist propaganda while understanding nothing they bash about is too damm high.
You have a warped view of USA that doesn't reflect reality. You're seeing it through the lens of sensationalist news media and hyperventilating social media posts.
The actual reality for Americans is that it's a vast, beautiful land with an amazing spectrum of various experience. Violent crime is rare overall, and most Americans have never seen or heard any gun violence in person. Health care is available to pretty much everyone, even if you don't have money. We have state-run healthcare facilities that the poor can make use of like county health departments.
My life in the USA is great, because I don't live in a big city. I live on my own land, in a nice house that I own, and I'm just middle class income level. It's pretty easy to accomplish if you choose a low cost of living area rather than a big metropolis or suburb thereof.
Capitalism has killed orders of magnitude more than communism.
yeah, and every time a communist country tried to pop up USAmerica sent Smedley Butler to ass blast them.
And Capitalism also killed more people than Fascism.
That doesn't mean Fascists movements don't need fiercer opposition than Capitalist Liberals.
Again: seems weitd that you think, a New thing needs to work after 3 -5 trys.
Capitalism was tried 100erds of times and still doesnt work...
This comment section is really something uh
Tankies on their way to explain why teaming up with the Nazis to conquer Poland is actually based and totally in line with Marxist philosophy.
Can you give an actual example?
they yearn for the glorious people's boot
500 years ago these mfs were the pro monarchy serfs
Meanwhile anarchist organizing doesn't have cops, it has Agents of Community Defense who definitely aren't cops!
I have nothing against anarchists, but you need to see past slogans to be anything but a useful idiot to neoliberals.
there's literally a community called "moretankie196", they should go infest that one instead
I thought ml stands for make love
actually it was chosen because the .ml domain is ludicrously cheap to get, like to the level of basically being free
finds social media developed by tankies
looks inside
finds tankies
fr I'm down with having a good old purge eventually but noone should be surprised
Literally doing the "so much for the tolerant left" shtick.
look for anarchists if you desire a classless, stateless, moneyless society.
communism has been coopted by auth apologists infatuated with the color red.
But what if I'm not an anarchist? I like Marx but not Lenin, so I can't be an ML either.
There are an infinite variety of flavors of socialism, at some point you gotta learn to find folks you don't disagree with on anything too important. In my experience anarchists are generally chill.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/...
anarchism acknowledges Marxist theory, but rejects the need for a state/beaurocratic apparatus, as it is considered to be fundamentally oppressive.
the state is an abstraction of capital, and cannot liberate the working class, as it exists to perpetuate its own hegemonic existence, our subjugation.
governance need not be heirarchichal; I promote collective mutual determination as an egalitarian system by which society can organize.
can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools
I promote collective mutual determination as an egalitarian system by which society can organize.
In practice, direct democracy? Or, how would that work - how would we organize society? Positions would still need to be held, no? Roles appointed, decisions made, lines drawn. No one can be up-to-date on all matters in their local nor global environment. And certainly not at the same point in time. How would anything work with any cohesiveness?
Sorry to be so dismissive, I'm actually kinda curious on your thoughts. Only ways I see are AI governance or a hive mind. Not sure about either tbh.
governance need not be heirarchichal; I promote collective mutual determination as an egalitarian system by which society can organize.
I don't. I don't think all hierarchies are unjust, I evaluate them based on their effect on the world. If a hierarchy can solve a problem better, it's the preferable solution.
Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that other people are. But if you think about it, don’t those people all feel exactly the same way about you?
But what if we all have a different idea of what behaving reasonably means?
Anarchists argue that almost all the anti-social behavior which makes us think it’s necessary to have armies, police, prisons, and governments to control our lives, is actually caused by the systematic inequalities and injustice those armies, police, prisons and governments make possible.
That's silly. Systemic inequalities don't make people park their vehicles on the bike path or murder their wife because they think she cheated on them. If anarchism is all about thinking people are angels unless bad, bad oppressive systems make them do evil things they couldn't do on their own then I don't think we'll ever get along. It's alternate reality and an incredibly naive way of looking at the world and human nature.
Edit: could you kindly not respond to this? I don't have an option to silence this thread on my end, and don't want to hear about it any further.
anarchism acknowledges Marxist theory, but rejects the need for a state/beaurocratic apparatus, as it is considered to be fundamentally oppressive.
Acknowledges Marxist theory as much as acknowledging Newtonian gravitational theory may be a way to put it. Most of the ones I know either accept Marxist general theory as a whole, non-critically, and the rest are anti-communist/anti-marxist idealists, as much as any fascist would be. Because the true essence and reason for the existence of fascism is anti-communism.
There are many social relations that are oppressive, why limit it to state? Parents are oppressive, teachers, professors, bosses, cops, military higher officers, spouses, parents in law, ... prison guards ... they are all oppressive. Is it just the state? Is it a different class of people who oppress from those being oppressed?
the state is an abstraction of capital, and cannot liberate the working class, as it exists to perpetuate its own hegemonic existence, our subjugation.
Between the late 1800s and early 1900s the state became an insurer of labor law and justice, the welfare state was born, rights to pension, an 8hr day, sick leave, vacation, overtime pay, were all provided and were promised by the state. So we can say the state backed off and became hostile to capital. Between struggle (labor syndicalism) and the capitalist state there was a dialectic transformation, the social democracy was born. Today the state has absolutely surrendered to the powers of the banking financial world system, made out of a handful of banks and financial institutions mainly based in NY, London, Frankfurt, Paris, maybe even in HKong, Tokyo, to a lesser extent. All states owe to private global markets to such a degree that just one or two clicks down on their bond ratings and they are bankrupt and in the hands of IMF and other bankers to implement the most vicious neo-liberal reform anyone can imagine.
This means that when leninists propose on taking over a state that just means removing it from the markets and sentencing the population to starvation and misery. "Abolishing the state" is just as suicidal. Should there be a thing like political responsibility for genocide proposed by pseudo revolutionaries, who want to enforce their fantasy on people already suffering because of capitalism?
governance need not be heirarchichal; I promote collective mutual determination as an egalitarian system by which society can organize.
As long as you speak of "a system" you imply, like it or not, a centralized system, a system that supervises whether the system is implemented correctly or not. That constitutes an authority. Whether this authority and enforcement is conducted by "anti-authoritarians" who as a minority forced their terms and conditions on a society, we are speaking of a revolutionary vanguard, an authoritarian force over the entire society (under the state and within state borders).
By the way, the collapse of the Syrian state had a gradual effect of Turkey moving sourth, Israel and Libanon moving further east, Iran moving west, I am uncleat of Jordan is taking a piece of the pie, and some Iraqi authorities are eyeballing the Kurdish management of some areas they would like to grub as well. So by abolishing a state these days the remaining states in the globe legitimize the neighbors all grubbing a piece without anyone being a state to protest. Assad's only friend is too busy fighting the entirety of NATO playing a game on the heads of the residents of ex-Ukraine.
can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools
As long as your focus is to destroy and dismantle instead of constructing an alternative and an escape route from capitalism you will be condemned by history as a force of nothing beneficial to humanity.
As long as you preach -isms- from a high tower looking down on people without ideology, and you refuse to accept that the dialectic between leninism and libertarianism has already materialized, that more than a million people have been living OUTSIDE of capitalism, in autonomous communities, for nearly 30years (this next new year's eve), decide in their communities EVERYTHING about their own lives, mostly using consensus, and their federation (2 levels) is designed to serve the community not to dictate to the community, you are more authoritarian and stuck up than you really think. Now these people have liberated themselves from capitalism, they live outside it, they are unaffected by it, other by having to fend off some para-military attacks here and there 2-3 times a year, their values and principles are even more strict than the early 1900s CNT constitution, and they laugh really hard and stick a finger up to all revolutionary vanguards, but you keep speaking hypothetically, what if society did this and that and the other thing.
If you want to be heard, you should be looking up to indigenous peasants, farmers, not down. If you want the residents of the favela to follow bureaucrats and academics to social change, you are in worse shape and dillusion than the average tankies. If you want children industrial workers in SE Asia to look up to your ideology and rhetoric, to buy your story, I assure you they think you are dumber than they are.
Who gives a flying ** what "anarchism" acknowledges.
I don't know how any of that applies to what I said here.
Edit: I skimmed through the text on the first read because I was sleepy. After reading more carefully I guess you're agreeing with me somewhat: yes, the necessity for certain types of organization in specific situations is why I dislike anarchism.
I don't know why a certain ineffective administrative model would have to be coupled with a more equitable economic model. Although I didn't want to argue that point, rather express a preference.
communism has been coopted by auth apologists infatuated with the color red.
Which happened almost instantly. I don't have much hope that other radical leftist movements will fare much better.
I'm on the FMHY instance and the only political ideology community that's been showing up in my feed has been Anarchism, so it's probably the instance to join if you're libleft and don't want to deal with Auth shit.
that sub often tended towards outright anti-leftism
what with all the anti-communist fascists and all
What's your definition of "tankie"? If you're willing to call out Putin's homophobic journalist murdering authoritarian bullshit and the Chinese government's massacring of protesters and genociding of ethnic minorities you're not a tankie imo, you're just a communist.
I'm confused on your point.
well some people who are called "tankies" do. some of them are just rabid bhreznevites
To tankies fascist means opposing whatever flavor of authoritarian "communism" they prefer regardless of the reasons or context. This conveniently allows any number of pogroms, mass slaughters or engineered famines to be reframed as anti-fascist action, rather than a brutal expression of state power at the expense of the working class.
Then what would you have me call people who make excuses for invasion, oppression, and genocide just because it was committed by the Russian or Chinese government instead of a western one?
I really hate how ya'll deliberately conflate tankies and all socialism/communism, and then conflate anyone being opposed to those concepts as inherently being a fascist.
well is there any actually existing socialist country that you would support?
i’d never have seen it coming! /s
didn't they have a problem with people doing alt-right dogwhistles about anti-white racism recently? and it got so bad that they had to make a mod announcement telling people to stop doing it and all of the users started trying to explain to the mods how it definitely wasn't a right wing dogwhistle
Thank fuck. I thought Lemmy was some ultra militant leftist hellhole before the shift.
I don't like extreme radical left any more than extreme radical right.
Fuck Che Guevara. Read a book.
Do you know its possible to read books and disagree with them?
The ML obsession with treating books as religious tomes is getting tiring.
what if the book is Che Guevaras "Guerrilla Warfare"
Is being a good tactician and being a genocidal, totalitarian extremist an oil and water situation?
He can be both.
c/EnlightedCentrism
Che Guevara did a lot of good for people, like the people of Cuba. Considering he fought, and helped Cuba free itself from being a colony to the United States and against Batista. I didn't know people fighting for the right to not be under colonial rule and have their own self determination is "extreme".
Also maybe go check out "On revolutionary medicine" by Che Guevara. I'll also leave this quote from him.
...the life of a single human being, is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth...
Vaush moment
What's a tankie?
Isn't "authoritarian communist" kind of an oxymoron? 😂 like the whole point of communism is that there isn't a ruling class. I guess Russia and China were never really communist, just statist authoritarian right? I mean, the Nazis called themselves Socialist. They were nowhere near that
Isn’t “authoritarian communist” kind of an oxymoron?
Yes. Yes, it is. I sometimes call them “pseudocommunists” for this reason.
Isn't "authoritarian communist" kind of an oxymoron?
Most real life implementations of communism used an authoritarian one party system. You can say these aren't true examples of communism, but that just ends up sounding like cope unfortunately.
None of those states ever gave economic or political power to the working classes.
Fair point. Though so far, there hasn't really been any system at all that didn't lead to genocide and/or class based opression. From monarchs to feudal Lords to capitalist oligarchies and communist dictators, terrible people always rise to the top.
As how Marx outlined Communism as the evolution of Capitalism once it reaches a scale of production that everyone can have their needs met, resulting in a classless, stateless, moneyless society, then yes authoritarian communist is an oxymoron.
well socialism has the proletariat as the ruling class, this is true in Marxism & anarchism even if anarchists word it differently
The party leaders are not proletarian, but rather become part of a class of privileged bureaucrats.
The proletariat are by definition the majority. The Soviet Union was by no means ruled by the majority. Stalin murdered millions to enforce his autocracy—the exact opposite of majority rule.
Communism must be enforced somehow, it just ends up being authoritarian because of that
The same can be said for capitalism though.
Capitalism must be enforced somehow, it ends up being an oligarchy or authoritarian because of that.
Both. Fascist apologist like to cherry pick palatable characteristics of figures like Stalin, or Hitler, or Andrew Jackson in order to destigmatize thier idolatry of these figures. These "certain aspects" are the tip of the wedge they use to destroy rationality and peace.
A reasonable person who would like to discuss the benefits of communism would point to the value of labor, advantages of unions, and the dignity of the worker, not the evil, paranoid, and violent person of Stalin.
Always, the stink of fascism follows the idolization of so called "great men." Excuses after excuses.
The fundamental problem of tankies is that they forget the whole point of socialism is making people's lives better, not getting revenge on the hated capitalists. If you create an oppressive hellscape in the process of destroying capitalism then you've failed.
"I care deeply about the color of the boot"
oh ok so bhreznevites
And Stalinist, Maoists, and other authoritarian Communists.
Usually they also "love" countries like North Korea, China, and for whatever reason (aNtI iMpErIaLiSm), Syria, Russia, and so on.
Red Fascists. They use the same tactics of gas lighting and goal post shifting.
And engaging in bad faith but accusing everyone else of engaging in bad faith.
maoists??? I think you should read anything by mao. he was anything but "authoritarian", he spend most of his time after 1949 taking a sledgehammer to bureaucracy & encouraging communities to be self reliant
Oh that's a can of worms.
Also, I created a community for leftist infighting here:
https://lemmy.ml/c/leftistinfighting
It's a free and open forum for respectful and good-natured name-calling, debating, and infighting. But dickheads aren't allowed.
So, people who love North Korea, or defend russia invading Ukraine, people, who stand by even the most autoritarian, anti-democratic, militaristic, imperialistic regimes - just because they call themselves “socialist” or “communist” - are “Tankies”.
Would be good to point out these people you are mentioning are not all the same.
There are people that Are critical of Russia, but don't buy from western propaganda and are being called tankies too.
It is more like, if one dare to question the western narrative = tankie.
but don't buy from western propaganda
i.e. are critical of russia, but stand by even the most autoritarian, anti-democratic, militaristic, imperialistic regimes - just because they call themselves “socialist” or “communist”, except for russias invasion of ukraine
lol.
most autoritarian, anti-democratic, militaristic, imperialistic regimes
you meant UK, USA or both?
btw seens a paradox that you guys so "pro freedom" are asking for bans of people that you disagree.
A nazi with red aesthetic
Spez and Unidan made reddit and no-one likes them either
Unidan didn't make reddit wtf u talking about
I mean Aaron Swartz
fair
radical solidarity, mutual aid, armed community defense. none of these require the state apparatus.
If you're in a position where you can freely oppress the capitalist class then you've already supplanted them and become the capitalist class.
There won't be a capitalist class when their assets are seized.
I have always wondered why it always says "Kick _" when she is punching instead of kicking. Lol.
300 Comments already. Oh my god! Lol.
They're communists, but not your every day "people should hold the power" communists. More like "tianenmen never happened, and if it did it wasn't that bad" type
Which makes them no different from the western imperialists they hate so much.
Tankie was first used for that kind of communist supporter who kept singing Russia's praises/defending Russia even when Russia was sent 5000 tanks to crush a popular uprising in Czechoslovakia (the "Prague Spring") on August 20, 1968. Some people just couldn't accept that a communist country could do something bad, so defended the action.
Nowadays, it's used to refer to those that are strongly supportive of Russia, completely ignoring the awful things they do. Often these days there's a lot of anti American bent to it. Like, anything anti America and American "imperialism" must be good - even blatant and awful Russian Imperialism.
These days they calmly explain how Ukraine just needs to come to the table and discuss peace (ignoring that Ukraine wouldn't exist if they did so) and blame America for the war in Ukraine for... well... they're America. The people who want war, or are causing the war, are those giving Ukraine weapons - not the country that is literally invading it.
Thanks for the explanation. I believe they are also called Rashists, at least Ukrainians call them that.
I think a better term is "Campist" which is the trend within revisionist marxists to side with one imperialist camp to oppose another. it's the same shit the SPD did during WW1
what is "authoritarianism" to you?
heirarchy in any form
well that's just childish isn't it
There's a lot of abstractions in that link but I think the following action is a meaningful distinction to call out:
The term is also used to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin,[7][8] Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim il-Sung.
No way they support pol pot. I refuse to believe that
From the image it looks like a maga/skinhead combo?
For context, the image originally said kick nazis out of punk.
It's not entirely the same though. Some of the "tankies" in the West seem to be Maoists more than Stalinists, as far as I can tell. Besides, some (many?) Stalinists also consider the term "Stalinist" derogatory, and prefer to call themselves "Marxist-Leninists".
Ok but let's not pretend that either Marx or Lenin envisaged their form of communism as what Stalin was doing
It's no different to "free speech" suddenly meaning "free hate speech, but restricted speech on anything else"
Concrete views like the idea that the government being able to jail dissenters at will is bad? That unlimited state power inevitably leads to authoritarianism? That labeling yourself socialist doesn't necessarily mean you're actually a socialist state?
You're so insufferably cocksure in your positions everywhere else, but when someone honestly asks what a tankie is, you just get defensive and can't master up the courage to just say what it is that you stand for? I really get the impression that you're just here to stir up shit.
Instead of fascists and capitalists
MLs not realizing that they are pretty much both.
ITT: a bunch of lying ideologues that deny basic historical realities like the deliberate engineering of the holodomor or the brutal repression of dissent in soviet states
A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is
What dialectics does to a mfer
Your comment has the "Karen is a racial slur" kind of energy.
And "liberal" is the Tankie go-to for "those we dislike."
Just like it is for the ring-wing fascists.
anti authoritarian*
you're telling on yourself
left unity is tankie gaslighting.
auth socs put anarchists against the wall before the dust of revolution settles
no state has achieved the liberation of the working class, because the function of the state is to expand and perpetuate its hegemonic power and influence. state authority is fundamentally oppressive.
What if class was to be determined by both economics (exploitation) and power (oppression), therefore in the USSR all the leninist reformists did was to exchange the wealthy upper class for the all powerful upper class. So at best Leninism is a bad reform of capitalism.
No state can ever achieve anything more than the liberation of the capitalist class. The only liberation for the masses is to seek alternative ways to self govern and abolish any centralized power structures from reforming again.
This is another reason why the rest of the left calls Tankies Red Fascists. So much behavior is shared.
Like the arrogant mislabeling of everything they dislike as "liberals".
uh oh you said the forbidden word, here come several of the world's most unfuckable people to tell you about how anti authoritarians are the real fascists and if you'd just spend half a year fully immersing yourself in russian state propaganda, you'd get it too.
magats, but make it left
don't care + didn't read + stay mad + L + ratio
Literally just made an account and am just a Reddit pleb. What exactly are tankies and what is 196? Guessing it's a Lemmy server but otherwise unsure
196 is a shitpost sub where you must post something when you vist
a tankie is a authoritarian that believes they're a communist. they support the imperialist invasion of Ukraine, and they deny the tianaman square massacre, where the CCP ran tanks over college students protesting the authoritarian government. they deny a bunch of other atrocities as well, these are the only two i can think of right now.
a lot of tankies are going to be posting an essay by Engles that defends authoritarianism, asserting that authoritarianism is compatible with communism. which, while sure, isn't ideal because one person having power always ends in genocide. well, it doesn't end in genocide, genocide just... happens under authoritarianism.
i made it up
Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember)
Fair enough. Though I do disagree that they don't usually deny their shortcomings but both sides of that claim are pretty hard to prove so I concede.
We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians.
Ok you can make that argument
People call this “whataboutism”
"Tankies" do often use whataboutism, that's irrefutable. Is this specific claim whataboutism? I'd say borderline, but I can see why it's still a point worth bringing up.
but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim
No, it's not - or at least not in the way he's implying. The claim is overly vague (how do we define a monster?) but it's not comparative. Whether Churchill committed atrocities (he did) and whether Stalin committed atrocities (he did) have no bearing on one another. All we have to do is define a monster - then we can measure whether a given leader was a monster. The only comparison needed is between the leader and the definition.
If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
Sure, that's true. Except like I said that "Stalin was a monster" is not comparative. If someone says "Stalin was worse than Churchill" than Churchill is relevant. But if someone says "Stalin committed atrocities" then it is whataboutism to answer "So did Churchill." Churchill's atrocities bear no relevance to Stalin's.
A tankie is a leftist who doesn’t agree with mainstream geopolitical opinions
This is a stretch. Leftism, by and large, doesn't agree with "mainstream geopolitical opinions" so this doesn't properly distinguish them from other Leftists.
A tankie is a leftist who... shows any interest in nuance
Laughable. Tankies originate from Leftists walking the party line so claiming that all non-tankies lack "nuance" is a very... interesting accusation.
"Really existing socialism" of course meaning "a system wherein workers have zero effective political power."
Just because it's true that the ML movement was an essential part of decolonialization, and because it isn't true that the USSR was some evil empire, doesn't mean that the ideologies that underpin(ned) those societies aren't deeply flawed.
The USSR was not an evil empire, no, but the political structure of a hierarchical, command-based politic lead exactly where critics said it would lead. The "ultraleft", as you call them, including Luxemburg and Anarchist communists warned Lenin exactly what would go wrong in the USSR, and Lenin did not listen.
That's why Lenin is a counter-revolutionary by deed if not by intent. By his actions, the power of the people's and worker's soviets were shattered and replaced with corrupt bureaucracy.
Also, hey, go tell a Tartar, Kalmykk or other displaced ethnic group who were victim of Stalin's genocide that he wasn't a deranged butcher. Maybe if you survive you can tell me what you learned.
Tankies are far left Marxists/Communists that are so anti- USA/West that they gladly defend almost anything that opposes the USA. Even authoritarian states like Russia and China. To be clear not every Communist is a Tankie through. And if you critizises on of this countries for horrible stuff, the Tankies will see you automatically as a USA chill. Because, from my online interactions with them, they see the world in black and white.
To quote wikipedia
Tankie is a pejorative label for communists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history. The term was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.
Why are Blanquists even in the Fediverse? The Fediverse is about decentralization while Blanquists are for the extreme opposite.
One factor is that the main devs of lemmy are marxist-lennists, so they are more lax in regards to tankie content. Another factor is that people fled to lemmygrad once genzedong was banned from reddit.
? The developers of Lemmy are tankies, it’s important to make sure that tankies know they aren’t welcome here.
Gotta ask for both a source and your definition of a "tankie".
You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
A tankie is someone who supports authoritarian communism (I believe the term originated from using tanks to suppress protests)
Here's a post showing that the main instance of Lemmy (hosted by the main 2 Lemmy devs) removes any negative posts about the Chinese or Russian governments for "orientalism": https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/5784
In the comments of that post, you can find one of the devs borderline defending what China is doing to the Uyghurs: https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/comment/5950
That same dev has a github repo called "essays on communism": https://github.com/dessalines/essays
I'm pretty sure both of the devs' profile pictures are Fidel Castro too
Aight fair enough, that's pretty concerning.
Nothing wrong per se with communism itself, it just tends to be extremely unstable and quickly turns to authoritarianism, I don't think it's ever worked for any nation in history so far.
The defending of Uyghur genocides, and the defending of the CCP and Russian government is really concerning though. Good thing this platform is federated.
libretro has a similar problem, it's developed by a team of transphobic, homophobic, racist Russian apologists who border on Nazism. I don't know what attracts these people to FOSS development.
“You criticize society, yet you participate in it? Curious…”
Judging by your username, I’m going to guess you’re a communist. Will you continue to participate in this forum using a computing device that was produced by a capitalist economic system? If you demand this level of ideological purity, it seems rather hypocritical.
ur mom
No. Rejection of extremism does not imply acceptance of some other form of extremism.
That's because non-extremists usually aren't particularly anti-communist. And why would they be? On paper, communism is a splendid idea. Doesn't seem to work very well in practice, but that doesn't make the idea bad…unlike fascism, which is bad even on paper.
non-extremists usually aren’t particularly anti-communist
just be open about it and say you want more anti-communist fascists if you're going to go about defending how riddled with fascism these anti-communist spaces are
I don't know what tankies are and at this point I'm too afraid to ask
When a leftist, or progressive says “tankie” it is different from what the mainstream media perceives. It (tankie) indicates someone who is overzealously supportive of non-Western imperialist countries such as Russia and China and denies their atrocities.
Also, the term developed from the tanks deplored by the user to invade Hungary and denote people who supported such action.
No
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Behavior rules:
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Agree with you in general, but I think a lot if people here are not really informed what differences there are materialistic ideologies.
Yes, Stalin bad.
But Guevara is not Stalin.
Marx is not che
Engels is not Marx
China is not communist.
Marxism is not materialism
Socialism is not communism
Also the amount of people bringing the "the 3 times people tried socialism were bad, so the whole ideology must be bad" argument are way to high IMHO.
How many times was capitalism tried? How many times it worked out? Is the USA a "functioning" state with all the oppression, racism, greed, invading other countries out of monetarian interest and environment destruction?
While I agree with you, that oppression is bad, no matter what the oppressor calls himself, we should talk about policies without resorting to dogmas and generalising people in favor of fear the hegemonic class is propagating to stay in power.
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