Originally, it meant people who supported the soviet union’s use of tanks to crush uprisings.
Now its used to describe people who support Authoritatian Communist regimes, like the ussr, north korea or china.
On lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml there is a high amount of them.
I think the best evidence that “tankie” is a meaningless snarl word is the way the people who use it just make up what ever positions they like to ascribe to the mythical “tankie”. Like, none of the people you call “tankies” support modern Russia, but you’re going to insist that tankies support modern Russia anyway, because it’s not meant to an actual descriptive word, just a way to punch left.
Don’t play dumb, it’s the geopolitical version of “I’m not racist, but…”
People who know their views are reprehensible to most reasonable people, so aren’t willing to outright say what they believe, but will still argue the point.
And if you press them hard enough, you almost always find out they somehow blame Ukraine for being invaded.
People who know their views are reprehensible to most reasonable people, so aren’t willing to outright say what they believe, but will still argue the point.
Yes, like what you did, when you lied about people supporting Russia when you just meant that they aren’t as opposed to them as you think they should be.
Yes, I’ve noticed that the “criteria” are extremely malleable and impossible to pin down. That’s why I concluded that it’s just a snarl word that ultimately means “anyone to the left of me”
What ghoulish logic. 50.000 civilian casualties, 6 million refugees, a country and a future in ashes, 1.5 mothers mourning their mutilated sons. And you talk about them as pawns in your imaginary game.
You are no better than the Hawks in the Pentagon. Not one bit.
the other vein of pro-russian tankies i’ve seen is that it’s impossible for a once communist country to backslide into fascis. how they square that and russia’s claim that they must destroy Ukraine, a country that was once not just communist, but anarcho-communist, in order to stop their backslide into fascism, i have no idea. perhaps if a person is actually familiar with history and not just a single pro-hegemonic propaganda, they wouldn’t be tankies.
i’ve been developing a theory, more of a hypothesis, really, that tankies, hoteps, white feminists, etc have figured out a part of the puzzle of oppression, and in their anger at waking up to that aspect of their reality, reject all other discourse surrounding the system of oppression that doesn’t mesh with their experienced oppression. this, in many ways, is the root of leftist infighting. everyone sees everyone else’s fight for liberation as a distraction from their own fight for liberation. the trick is, none of them are. they are simply different expressions of how the ruling class controls us.
when a tankie says shit like “the trans issue is a distraction” the are sparking leftist infighting, charitably unknowingly. our trans brothers, sisters, and thembers are our allies in this, and are generally speaking (not universally of course, i don’t want to give the impression anyone is a homogenous group) left as hell. we need them to help us in our fight because they are experienced, battle hardened, and see things the rest of us don’t see because they are tuned in.
the thing is that… yes. the culture wars are distractions. but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight in them. that’s like saying the best response to being bullied in school is to take your beating and tell no one because you’re focused on a bigger issue. that’s a great way to get your legs broke. the answer is to push back against the culture wars and say why we push back, and say that our enemy combatants are distracted from the real war. that they are acting as class traitors from a deep system of manipulation.
tankies don’t realize it, or maybe they do, but they’re conservatives. they seek to maintain a hegemony that oppresses us, the working classes, that has been shown not to work. authoritarian communism is still authoritarianism, and also expresses somewhere between most and all of the features of ur-fascism. it will never save us from our oppression. they also tell on themselves when they say “read theory” and all the books they reference were published before WWII. the world has moved on. we have learned more about our oppressors. they’re leaving out a century of theory when they say to read theory. they are practitioners of the religion of Marxist-Leninism
A lot of people don’t realize they are being manipulated to fight each other instead of dealing with the people who are actually causing the problems, the ones pulling the strings and syphoning off all the wealth for themselves and their friends.
It’s way simpler than this. They simply cannot admit that Lenin, Stalin and Mao just got communism wrong. They refuse to move on from those authoritarian traditions. That’s really it.
Marxism, in general is a very modernist political theory. For most of the 20th century, we extended most modernist ideals beyond that rigid structuralism. Leftism is no exception, but MLMs in general refuse to move past that way of thinking. As you say, it is very similar to the way that modern conservatives seem to hold that early 1900s thinking up as some philosophical ideal.
This recent thread is pretty insightful on lemmygrad.ml’s position. Their own users repeatedly emphasize that they are critical of the RF, which shouldn’t be a surprise given that it’s a capitalist country with plenty of reactionary domestic policies. (OP didn’t get banned)
Literally the very first comment in that thread I see is the instance admin speaking in support of russia for no other reason than it being opposed to the US.
What people tend not to realize is they don’t support Russia because they think it’s still communist, but because of a combination of campism, accelerationism, and revolutionary defeatism. If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first, otherwise they will just see you as a reactionary and dismiss what you say. I still occasionally get my comments removed from .ml but I’ve been able to get through to people somewhat by leading with an actual understanding of where they’re coming from.
I don’t think it’s fair to categorize it as accelerationist, although definitely campism and critical support (that is, taking a side while remaining critical of it) - like you said, they know and despair that Russia is no longer socialist, they only side with the RF in this conflict as a ‘lesser evil’ than the dominant NATO camp. We saw the US prolong the proxy war (it’s not their soldiers dying) until the they openly threw Ukraine away and negotiated terms with the RF when the war seemed no longer useful (this part usually happens more diplomatically and privately in a proxy war, but it usually happens).
If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first, otherwise they will just see you as a reactionary and dismiss what you say.
Absolutely. The .ml instances are stricter than most and don’t cater to anyone they perceive as ignorant and parroting propaganda in bad faith. From their point of view, it’s just as simple as how most instances would ban conservatives coming in and starting bigoted, ignorant oft-debunked Fox News arguments about racism and transphobia. Why bother platforming it?
Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use. Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.
However, I’ll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed. In fact, before the war, socialist parties across Europe came together and, seeing the possibility of the war on the horizon, agreed that in the event of such a war they would work together against their own governments. Once the war actually started, however, “socialists” in Britain, France, and Germany all fell in line behind their government in support of their own side in the imperialist war. They either succumbed to pressure or sought to advance their own positions as careerists and opportunists. Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.
Whether revolutionary defeatism is generally applicable is another question, but it is sort of our, “null hypothesis,” you might say. But more important are the underlying ideas that support revolutionary defeatism. We don’t just agree with it because Lenin said it, but because it tracks with our own analysis, which is based on class and realpolitik. Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, “but this time, it’s different,” and more often than not, they’re wrong.
Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don’t really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all. If you want to speak our language, then you have to frame your arguments in terms of the benefit to the common people.
Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use.
That’s not a response to the criticism, just a dismissal of it based on who it originated from. I personally think it’s a valid criticism of many who consider themselves marxist-leninists, and I am not a trotskyist. People I’ve spoken with in the past have had a tendency to dogmatically subscribe to a campist mindset in total disregard for the particulars of any given situation, and for how much shit MLs give liberals for practicing lesser-evilism, many sure seem to love their own version of it.
Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.
It’s far more prevalent than you’re giving it credit for, and in my experience many MLs’ understanding of revolutionary defeatism tends to boil down to accelerationism when questioned.
However, I’ll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed.
Indisputable suggests it’s largely undisputed now, which you must know is absolutely not the case. I am currently disputing it. There is no significant historical pattern of countries that faced a military defeat becoming socialist or even having better revolutionary conditions afterwards.
Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.
Starting a civil war while the country is in the middle of an imperialist war is not an example of revolutionary defeatism working. If Russia had been defeated in their imperialist war and then had a socialist revolution that would be an example, but even then one example is not a pattern.
Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, “but this time, it’s different,” and more often than not, they’re wrong.
I agree completely, but this is just an argument for being anti-imperialist and anti-war, not an argument for revolutionary defeatism.
Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don’t really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all.
Those sorts of arguments don’t have any traction with me either, I’m an anarchist. I don’t believe I have made any such arguments, unless you conflate collective self-determination with national sovereignty.
That’s not a response to the criticism, just a dismissal of it based on who it originated from.
many MLs’ understanding of revolutionary defeatism tends to boil down to accelerationism
If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first,
It seems kind of contradictory to talk about “trying to understand our position in good faith first” before criticizing it, and then characterizing it in critical terms that we don’t use. If you want to “understand a position in good faith first” then you should describe that position in a way that the people who hold it would find fair and agreeable - and then you can tear into it all you want. It seems that you don’t actually want to understand our position or explain it, but rather just jump into criticizing it.
If you actually followed your own (good) advice, the form of your argument should look like:
Here’s a neutral description of what they say:
And here’s my critical view of what that position actually amounts to, and the reasons why I see it that way:
The issue I take with you using the terms “campism” and “accelerationism” is that they belong in the second part, but you’ve presented them as being in the first.
Indisputable suggests it’s largely undisputed now, which you must know is absolutely not the case. I am currently disputing it. There is no significant historical pattern of countries that faced a military defeat becoming socialist or even having better revolutionary conditions afterwards.
What you’re describing is not revolutionary defeatism, it is accelerationism. I have to withdraw my props for only learning the term without actually understanding what it means. You’re not really disputing it, you’re disputing a completely different concept that you’ve incorrectly labelled.
Revolutionary defeatism is not the descriptive belief that a country facing a military defeat will always or even generally become socialist, rather, it is the proscriptive tactic that, when both sides of a conflict are roughly equally enemies of the people, socialists should primarily oppose their own country’s side, with the aim of turning it into a revolution/civil war, taking advantage of the difficulties faced by the state.
Starting a civil war while the country is in the middle of an imperialist war is not an example of revolutionary defeatism working.
That is literally what revolutionary defeatism is. Again, you demonstrate that you don’t understand the concept. Turning the imperialist war into a civil war was Lenin’s very explicitly stated goal.
Your own Wikipedia link explains this:
“Workers would gain more from their own nations’ defeats, he argued, if the war could be turned into civil war and then international revolution.”
If Russia had been defeated in their imperialist war and then had a socialist revolution that would be an example, but even then one example is not a pattern.
Again, that’s accelerationism, not revolutionary defeatism.
I don’t know where you picked up this idea that revolutionary defeatism just means accelerationism, but it’s certainly not from reading theory. If you want to practice what you preach and make a good faith attempt to understand it, Lenin spells out the concept very clearly here
Do you know who else was right about landlords? A shit ton of people that didn’t get millions of their own citizens killed through incompetence and mismanagement.
It’s actually especially focused on Khrushchev, who was the one who sent tanks into Hungary which is where the term originates. It’s notable that it focuses on him rather than Stalin, because the real point of the term was to guard against people who might be more sympathetic towards the USSR after “destalinization.” The literal meaning may be, “people who support socialist countries no matter what they do,” but the actual meaning has always been more like, “people who support anything any socialist country has ever done.”
I would never call a leftist a “tankie” because they are a leftist. People who do that are idiots. The important part of the word is the support of authoritarian regimes.
Which is pretty weird nowadays because neither Russia, China nor North Korea are even communist/leftist anymore.
That isn’t true though: the Nordic countries are undeniably authoritarian from a leftist perspective, but you never see Nordic model socdems being called “tankies”. Failed leftist projects like Catalonia or the Paris Commune were also undeniably “authoritarian” by the definition applied to more successful projects, but supporters of them are never called tankies. The Black Panthers, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, all supported “authoritarian regimes”
What it really boils down to is serious opposition to Western liberalism.
China and the DPRK are still Socialist, though different forms. China has a Socialist Market Economy, the DPRK is closer to the Soviet model. Russia is no longer Socialist, that is correct, but is occasionally seen as a temporary ally as they seek to destabilize US Hegemony, a goal they seek for profit and Leftists seek so that Socialism has a better chance worldwide.
If you define leftism as a pure economy model, then you could call right-wing authoritarian countries with state-controlled economies “socialist” which makes no sense.
I don’t know what you mean by a “pure economy model” or how a fully publicly owned economy would be right wing, unless it’s a different form of ownership like Monarchism.
China is communist, and there’s a reason authoritarianism exists in those spaces. That reason is the US, which spends unlimited amounts of money to upkeep their war economy that they haven’t cooled off since ww2.
Absent constant attacks there’s a good chance authoritarianism wouldn’t have ever developed in those spaces. But since someone keeps funding scorned previously rich fucks to start counterrevolutions, it has to exist. A necessary evil until the us and west kill themselves.
China isnt communist, not with their actions, not with their economy, not with their society, not with their diplomacy and not even with their politics, communist in name and propaganda only
China is Socialist, and is still trying to build Communism. I am not sure what you are referring to by their “actions.”
Their economy has large firms firmly in the public sector, with the private sector being made up primarily of sole proprietorships and small businesses or cooperatives. This is classical Marxism, you can’t kill an economy into being developed enough for public ownership nor can you outlaw small businesses into large ones. Marx believed markets were the key to laying the foundations for public ownership, and here we are.
Not sure what you mean by “their society,” if I were being dishonest I would say that smells of Western Exceptionalist chauvanism.
Their diplomacy is pretty damn peaceful, they have only a handful of millitary bases worldwide, and instead go for multilateralism.
I don’t know what you mean by “politics,” here, this is more vagueness.
Percentage wise doesn’t determine it, correct, but China is Socialist because the vast majority of its large firms and key industries are Publicly Owned, and the private sector is mainly cooperatives, sole proprietorships, and small businesses. Marx believed markets centralize themselves, meaning over time more can be publicly planned in an efficient manner.
Communism is a classless stateless society. China has a vanguard party, and any attempts to protest. Run against it, or run outside it will result in torture, imprisonment, and death. The vanguard and their oligarch pals are a separate class from a Chinese citizen. Not classless, not communist. China is a state. Literally not stateless, literally not communist.
The reason authoritarianism exists there is because the military overthrew the emperor/tsar and put themselves in power. And militaries function via authority. It’s got nothing to do with WWII or western powers. They did it to themselves.
It’s funny how leninist etc clutch their pearls and bemoan the wests trepidation towards them. When they’re perfectly innocent. After all, who doesn’t forcefully annex much of Eastern Europe?
Not saying the west has never overstepped it’s bounds or fucked up. Not at all. Just that leninist are the wests hypocritical equal.
Of course, China is not a “communist country” in the sense that it has achieved communism - in that sense, “communist country” is a contradiction in terms and no country could ever be communist, because communism is stateless. When people describe countries as communist, what they mean is that the leaders profess belief in communist ideology, that is, a country that is run by communists.
China has not achieved a global, publicly owned and planned economy, no, but is still working towards that, as Marxists would, through Socialism.
First of all, the state and government are not the same thing, and parties are not classes either. The State is the aspect of society that enforces class distinctions, classes themselves being relations to ownership. The way Marx believed we could get to statelessness is by nationalizing the large industries and firms that are already built up enough for central planning to work, and let the small firms compete and grow until they reach that point. This is what China’s economy looks like.
I think if you listened more to what Marxists believe, you’d be more likely to succeed in leftist organizing in real life (if you do any).
Read chinese history. Try again. When you can’t even use wikipedia to support your ridiculous misconception of history I don’t care about anything else you say.
Cool. So you’d support a popular, citizen lead uprising that had to convince illiterate farmers to take up arms against western funded and armed authoritarian monarchists and then establishing a state to deal with the now 1 billion people that statistically knew nothing but farming while introducing them to higher level concepts like the existence of police or government they can participate in or what their taxes even do, right?
Hell if you were a communist you’d have some response to how to deal with an international, infinitely funded threat actor right?
You wouldn’t be stuck at the idea that you can go from agrarian subsistence farmers to post scarcity mutual aid communes, right? You wouldn’t be dumb enough to think that you even have the capability to defend yourself and you local community, much less a revolution, without a clear state hierarchy in place for mass coordination and communication, right? You’d be smart enough to know why stateless communities cannot exist in any world where a single stated capitalist actor exists, right?
There was no strawman, by the way, cosplayer. You repeat the empires propaganda like a lib, you repeat their ideology word for word, it doesn’t matter what you call yourself.
A citizen military is still a citizen military. The military is not a democracy. They didn’t win with luck dragons and unicorns. And did not disband to Institute actual democracy. Whether or not they started out as Citizens doesn’t disprove what I said. It’s a red herring.
No one asked my response, least of all you. Again with more red herrings and straw man attacks. Anyhow I’ve got better things to do then toy further with you.
Sort of person that, in the UK, might be just to the left of the current Labor party leadership (but right of a lot of the party) or on the SocDem end of the LibDems.
Ok, what’s a tankie?
Originally, it meant people who supported the soviet union’s use of tanks to crush uprisings.
Now its used to describe people who support Authoritatian Communist regimes, like the ussr, north korea or china.
On lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml there is a high amount of them.
And with the recent JFK declassified documents:
…it turns out the soviets were right to crush the Hungarian color revolution lmao
Damn, y’all are back.
Wait…you’ve been making post about us for the last several weeks, despite not being federated? What a nerd Loloolllooll
.ml and grad are still there.
Somehow they even support modern russia which is as far from communism as it’s possible to be without being US
I think the best evidence that “tankie” is a meaningless snarl word is the way the people who use it just make up what ever positions they like to ascribe to the mythical “tankie”. Like, none of the people you call “tankies” support modern Russia, but you’re going to insist that tankies support modern Russia anyway, because it’s not meant to an actual descriptive word, just a way to punch left.
There are people in this thread that support Russia.
Or at least are busy telling people they’re not actually that bad.
No there aren’t.
Oooooooh here we go, watch that goal post sail away. How completely unsurprising that by “support Russia” you really meant “don’t hate them enough”.
Does it not bother you that you have to resort to this kind of wilful dishonesty?
Don’t play dumb, it’s the geopolitical version of “I’m not racist, but…”
People who know their views are reprehensible to most reasonable people, so aren’t willing to outright say what they believe, but will still argue the point.
And if you press them hard enough, you almost always find out they somehow blame Ukraine for being invaded.
Yes, like what you did, when you lied about people supporting Russia when you just meant that they aren’t as opposed to them as you think they should be.
They almost always support Russia, and I think you know that very well.
People who support russia and communism are tankies.
Communists aren’t necessarily tankies.
Can I reference you here when I get called a tankie despite not supporting Russia?
Thats not what I meant, there is other “criteria”.
Yes, I’ve noticed that the “criteria” are extremely malleable and impossible to pin down. That’s why I concluded that it’s just a snarl word that ultimately means “anyone to the left of me”
Ok, good news then: there aren’t any tankies on hexbear
I lurk on hexbear from time to time, and there is definetely people there who believe some of those.
Yeah, out of “supports Russia” and “are communist” there are indeed people who support some of those two things
If you support russia in this day and age, you are a tankie.
Their reasoning is that its anti-us imperialism, despite russia being pretty imperialistic itself.
That’s such an oversimplifcation that it can just be dismissed as wrong. Here is someone who actually asked and didn’t just assume
https://hexbear.net/post/4477584
Hey, y’all got federation working again.
yee the specter haunts again
You guys have great emojis, I’ll give you that.
What ghoulish logic. 50.000 civilian casualties, 6 million refugees, a country and a future in ashes, 1.5 mothers mourning their mutilated sons. And you talk about them as pawns in your imaginary game.
You are no better than the Hawks in the Pentagon. Not one bit.
Ah, the classic “only western countries can be imperialist”
Love making up quotes
Don’t forget that only US Capitalism is the root of moneys evils
It’s not a classic because no one says that. Japan did it for sixty years, until it was made a vassal of the US, which it still is today[1][2].
the other vein of pro-russian tankies i’ve seen is that it’s impossible for a once communist country to backslide into fascis. how they square that and russia’s claim that they must destroy Ukraine, a country that was once not just communist, but anarcho-communist, in order to stop their backslide into fascism, i have no idea. perhaps if a person is actually familiar with history and not just a single pro-hegemonic propaganda, they wouldn’t be tankies.
i’ve been developing a theory, more of a hypothesis, really, that tankies, hoteps, white feminists, etc have figured out a part of the puzzle of oppression, and in their anger at waking up to that aspect of their reality, reject all other discourse surrounding the system of oppression that doesn’t mesh with their experienced oppression. this, in many ways, is the root of leftist infighting. everyone sees everyone else’s fight for liberation as a distraction from their own fight for liberation. the trick is, none of them are. they are simply different expressions of how the ruling class controls us.
when a tankie says shit like “the trans issue is a distraction” the are sparking leftist infighting, charitably unknowingly. our trans brothers, sisters, and thembers are our allies in this, and are generally speaking (not universally of course, i don’t want to give the impression anyone is a homogenous group) left as hell. we need them to help us in our fight because they are experienced, battle hardened, and see things the rest of us don’t see because they are tuned in.
the thing is that… yes. the culture wars are distractions. but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight in them. that’s like saying the best response to being bullied in school is to take your beating and tell no one because you’re focused on a bigger issue. that’s a great way to get your legs broke. the answer is to push back against the culture wars and say why we push back, and say that our enemy combatants are distracted from the real war. that they are acting as class traitors from a deep system of manipulation.
tankies don’t realize it, or maybe they do, but they’re conservatives. they seek to maintain a hegemony that oppresses us, the working classes, that has been shown not to work. authoritarian communism is still authoritarianism, and also expresses somewhere between most and all of the features of ur-fascism. it will never save us from our oppression. they also tell on themselves when they say “read theory” and all the books they reference were published before WWII. the world has moved on. we have learned more about our oppressors. they’re leaving out a century of theory when they say to read theory. they are practitioners of the religion of Marxist-Leninism
A lot of people don’t realize they are being manipulated to fight each other instead of dealing with the people who are actually causing the problems, the ones pulling the strings and syphoning off all the wealth for themselves and their friends.
It’s way simpler than this. They simply cannot admit that Lenin, Stalin and Mao just got communism wrong. They refuse to move on from those authoritarian traditions. That’s really it.
Marxism, in general is a very modernist political theory. For most of the 20th century, we extended most modernist ideals beyond that rigid structuralism. Leftism is no exception, but MLMs in general refuse to move past that way of thinking. As you say, it is very similar to the way that modern conservatives seem to hold that early 1900s thinking up as some philosophical ideal.
You haven’t seen that because literally no one says or believes this. It’s entirely your own invention, a blatant strawman.
As I always say, “If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.”
Didn’t read anything after that because you started with such a blatant lie.
I really haven’t seen that? A while ago I looked into HexBear’s opinion on it and it wasn’t good.
Check out this thread, there really isn’t any Putin worship in these spaces.
https://hexbear.net/post/148426?scrollToComments=false
In this one some of the top comments are hoping Putin gets shot in the face. https://hexbear.net/post/3270551
shhhh! They haven’t finished building their strawman
Plenty of examples from .ml. Not sure how one 3 year old thread disproves it?
I gave you two links, one which is much newer.
I’m looking at this community you linked I’m not sure I can see how you’re proving that “tankies” admire the modern Russian government.
The part where they ban people for being critical of it?
Just because we don’t suck off Azov toes doesn’t mean we do suck the FSB’s. Go back to reddit, liberal.
Ah, and the other hexbear users had been doing such a good job convincing me you aren’t tankies. Way to shit all over their diligent work.
This recent thread is pretty insightful on lemmygrad.ml’s position. Their own users repeatedly emphasize that they are critical of the RF, which shouldn’t be a surprise given that it’s a capitalist country with plenty of reactionary domestic policies. (OP didn’t get banned)
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7374513?sort=Top
Literally the very first comment in that thread I see is the instance admin speaking in support of russia for no other reason than it being opposed to the US.
What people tend not to realize is they don’t support Russia because they think it’s still communist, but because of a combination of campism, accelerationism, and revolutionary defeatism. If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first, otherwise they will just see you as a reactionary and dismiss what you say. I still occasionally get my comments removed from .ml but I’ve been able to get through to people somewhat by leading with an actual understanding of where they’re coming from.
I don’t think it’s fair to categorize it as accelerationist, although definitely campism and critical support (that is, taking a side while remaining critical of it) - like you said, they know and despair that Russia is no longer socialist, they only side with the RF in this conflict as a ‘lesser evil’ than the dominant NATO camp. We saw the US prolong the proxy war (it’s not their soldiers dying) until the they openly threw Ukraine away and negotiated terms with the RF when the war seemed no longer useful (this part usually happens more diplomatically and privately in a proxy war, but it usually happens).
Absolutely. The .ml instances are stricter than most and don’t cater to anyone they perceive as ignorant and parroting propaganda in bad faith. From their point of view, it’s just as simple as how most instances would ban conservatives coming in and starting bigoted, ignorant oft-debunked Fox News arguments about racism and transphobia. Why bother platforming it?
Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use. Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.
However, I’ll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed. In fact, before the war, socialist parties across Europe came together and, seeing the possibility of the war on the horizon, agreed that in the event of such a war they would work together against their own governments. Once the war actually started, however, “socialists” in Britain, France, and Germany all fell in line behind their government in support of their own side in the imperialist war. They either succumbed to pressure or sought to advance their own positions as careerists and opportunists. Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.
Whether revolutionary defeatism is generally applicable is another question, but it is sort of our, “null hypothesis,” you might say. But more important are the underlying ideas that support revolutionary defeatism. We don’t just agree with it because Lenin said it, but because it tracks with our own analysis, which is based on class and realpolitik. Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, “but this time, it’s different,” and more often than not, they’re wrong.
Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don’t really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all. If you want to speak our language, then you have to frame your arguments in terms of the benefit to the common people.
That’s not a response to the criticism, just a dismissal of it based on who it originated from. I personally think it’s a valid criticism of many who consider themselves marxist-leninists, and I am not a trotskyist. People I’ve spoken with in the past have had a tendency to dogmatically subscribe to a campist mindset in total disregard for the particulars of any given situation, and for how much shit MLs give liberals for practicing lesser-evilism, many sure seem to love their own version of it.
It’s far more prevalent than you’re giving it credit for, and in my experience many MLs’ understanding of revolutionary defeatism tends to boil down to accelerationism when questioned.
Indisputable suggests it’s largely undisputed now, which you must know is absolutely not the case. I am currently disputing it. There is no significant historical pattern of countries that faced a military defeat becoming socialist or even having better revolutionary conditions afterwards.
Starting a civil war while the country is in the middle of an imperialist war is not an example of revolutionary defeatism working. If Russia had been defeated in their imperialist war and then had a socialist revolution that would be an example, but even then one example is not a pattern.
I agree completely, but this is just an argument for being anti-imperialist and anti-war, not an argument for revolutionary defeatism.
Those sorts of arguments don’t have any traction with me either, I’m an anarchist. I don’t believe I have made any such arguments, unless you conflate collective self-determination with national sovereignty.
It seems kind of contradictory to talk about “trying to understand our position in good faith first” before criticizing it, and then characterizing it in critical terms that we don’t use. If you want to “understand a position in good faith first” then you should describe that position in a way that the people who hold it would find fair and agreeable - and then you can tear into it all you want. It seems that you don’t actually want to understand our position or explain it, but rather just jump into criticizing it.
If you actually followed your own (good) advice, the form of your argument should look like:
Here’s a neutral description of what they say:
And here’s my critical view of what that position actually amounts to, and the reasons why I see it that way:
The issue I take with you using the terms “campism” and “accelerationism” is that they belong in the second part, but you’ve presented them as being in the first.
What you’re describing is not revolutionary defeatism, it is accelerationism. I have to withdraw my props for only learning the term without actually understanding what it means. You’re not really disputing it, you’re disputing a completely different concept that you’ve incorrectly labelled.
Revolutionary defeatism is not the descriptive belief that a country facing a military defeat will always or even generally become socialist, rather, it is the proscriptive tactic that, when both sides of a conflict are roughly equally enemies of the people, socialists should primarily oppose their own country’s side, with the aim of turning it into a revolution/civil war, taking advantage of the difficulties faced by the state.
That is literally what revolutionary defeatism is. Again, you demonstrate that you don’t understand the concept. Turning the imperialist war into a civil war was Lenin’s very explicitly stated goal.
Your own Wikipedia link explains this:
“Workers would gain more from their own nations’ defeats, he argued, if the war could be turned into civil war and then international revolution.”
Again, that’s accelerationism, not revolutionary defeatism.
I don’t know where you picked up this idea that revolutionary defeatism just means accelerationism, but it’s certainly not from reading theory. If you want to practice what you preach and make a good faith attempt to understand it, Lenin spells out the concept very clearly here
A non .ml user arguing in good faith? That’s as rare as it is welcome!
Also, I think you forgot anti-Americanism and anti imperialism in your list.
deleted by creator
The authoritarian part waxes and wanes, there’s a few anarchists in their ranks who have no real solution after “tear it all apart”.
What then, boys?
“Tear it all apart” is only aimed at Western democracies. The then is that the authoritarian “communist” countries invade and subjugate you.
I’m sure there’s a couple of genuine ones but tbh any anarchist who mostly hangs out with tankies is pretty sus imo
Thanks for taking the time to explain. Much appreciated.
deleted by creator
It’s an updated version of “commie”, means the same thing, but for people who don’t want to sound like cold war boomers.
Hey now commies are proudly to the left of them
“commie” and “tankie” mean the exact same thing
Anyone to the left of morning Joe?
Half a century ago it meant people who supported the soviet union using tanks to put down a cia backed coup in Hungary.
Modern times in the west it means anyone left of AOC.
More like anyone left of Regan or when something I disagree with
Or, hear me out, it actually means people who support authoritarian communism. Especially focussed on Stalin and Mao.
Mao was right about landlords. If nothing else. He was right about landlords.
Whoa, watch out, you might hit someone with that goalpost, swinging it around like that
Do you know who else was right about landlords? A shit ton of people that didn’t get millions of their own citizens killed through incompetence and mismanagement.
Everyone who ever killed one.
Rare Pol Pot W
It’s actually especially focused on Khrushchev, who was the one who sent tanks into Hungary which is where the term originates. It’s notable that it focuses on him rather than Stalin, because the real point of the term was to guard against people who might be more sympathetic towards the USSR after “destalinization.” The literal meaning may be, “people who support socialist countries no matter what they do,” but the actual meaning has always been more like, “people who support anything any socialist country has ever done.”
I would never call a leftist a “tankie” because they are a leftist. People who do that are idiots. The important part of the word is the support of authoritarian regimes.
Which is pretty weird nowadays because neither Russia, China nor North Korea are even communist/leftist anymore.
That isn’t true though: the Nordic countries are undeniably authoritarian from a leftist perspective, but you never see Nordic model socdems being called “tankies”. Failed leftist projects like Catalonia or the Paris Commune were also undeniably “authoritarian” by the definition applied to more successful projects, but supporters of them are never called tankies. The Black Panthers, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, all supported “authoritarian regimes”
What it really boils down to is serious opposition to Western liberalism.
China and the DPRK are still Socialist, though different forms. China has a Socialist Market Economy, the DPRK is closer to the Soviet model. Russia is no longer Socialist, that is correct, but is occasionally seen as a temporary ally as they seek to destabilize US Hegemony, a goal they seek for profit and Leftists seek so that Socialism has a better chance worldwide.
If you define leftism as a pure economy model, then you could call right-wing authoritarian countries with state-controlled economies “socialist” which makes no sense.
I don’t know what you mean by a “pure economy model” or how a fully publicly owned economy would be right wing, unless it’s a different form of ownership like Monarchism.
China is communist, and there’s a reason authoritarianism exists in those spaces. That reason is the US, which spends unlimited amounts of money to upkeep their war economy that they haven’t cooled off since ww2.
Absent constant attacks there’s a good chance authoritarianism wouldn’t have ever developed in those spaces. But since someone keeps funding scorned previously rich fucks to start counterrevolutions, it has to exist. A necessary evil until the us and west kill themselves.
China isnt communist, not with their actions, not with their economy, not with their society, not with their diplomacy and not even with their politics, communist in name and propaganda only
China is Socialist, and is still trying to build Communism. I am not sure what you are referring to by their “actions.”
Their economy has large firms firmly in the public sector, with the private sector being made up primarily of sole proprietorships and small businesses or cooperatives. This is classical Marxism, you can’t kill an economy into being developed enough for public ownership nor can you outlaw small businesses into large ones. Marx believed markets were the key to laying the foundations for public ownership, and here we are.
Not sure what you mean by “their society,” if I were being dishonest I would say that smells of Western Exceptionalist chauvanism.
Their diplomacy is pretty damn peaceful, they have only a handful of millitary bases worldwide, and instead go for multilateralism.
I don’t know what you mean by “politics,” here, this is more vagueness.
60% of the economy being owned by the people exclusively for the benefit of the people isn’t communist?
Please point out where in the manifesto you dozed off.
No
Percentage wise doesn’t determine it, correct, but China is Socialist because the vast majority of its large firms and key industries are Publicly Owned, and the private sector is mainly cooperatives, sole proprietorships, and small businesses. Marx believed markets centralize themselves, meaning over time more can be publicly planned in an efficient manner.
Marx believed that Socialism means that the workers own the means of production.
In China the communist party owns 60% of the economy, and the rest of the economy is hosting 406 billionaires.
ask me for citations if you want to see why I think this
Communism is a classless stateless society. China has a vanguard party, and any attempts to protest. Run against it, or run outside it will result in torture, imprisonment, and death. The vanguard and their oligarch pals are a separate class from a Chinese citizen. Not classless, not communist. China is a state. Literally not stateless, literally not communist.
The reason authoritarianism exists there is because the military overthrew the emperor/tsar and put themselves in power. And militaries function via authority. It’s got nothing to do with WWII or western powers. They did it to themselves.
It’s funny how leninist etc clutch their pearls and bemoan the wests trepidation towards them. When they’re perfectly innocent. After all, who doesn’t forcefully annex much of Eastern Europe?
Not saying the west has never overstepped it’s bounds or fucked up. Not at all. Just that leninist are the wests hypocritical equal.
Of course, China is not a “communist country” in the sense that it has achieved communism - in that sense, “communist country” is a contradiction in terms and no country could ever be communist, because communism is stateless. When people describe countries as communist, what they mean is that the leaders profess belief in communist ideology, that is, a country that is run by communists.
China has not achieved a global, publicly owned and planned economy, no, but is still working towards that, as Marxists would, through Socialism.
First of all, the state and government are not the same thing, and parties are not classes either. The State is the aspect of society that enforces class distinctions, classes themselves being relations to ownership. The way Marx believed we could get to statelessness is by nationalizing the large industries and firms that are already built up enough for central planning to work, and let the small firms compete and grow until they reach that point. This is what China’s economy looks like.
I think if you listened more to what Marxists believe, you’d be more likely to succeed in leftist organizing in real life (if you do any).
Stop. Bad radlib.
Read chinese history. Try again. When you can’t even use wikipedia to support your ridiculous misconception of history I don’t care about anything else you say.
I’m a communist / anarchist. Try again? Or are strawman all you have?
Cool. So you’d support a popular, citizen lead uprising that had to convince illiterate farmers to take up arms against western funded and armed authoritarian monarchists and then establishing a state to deal with the now 1 billion people that statistically knew nothing but farming while introducing them to higher level concepts like the existence of police or government they can participate in or what their taxes even do, right?
Hell if you were a communist you’d have some response to how to deal with an international, infinitely funded threat actor right?
You wouldn’t be stuck at the idea that you can go from agrarian subsistence farmers to post scarcity mutual aid communes, right? You wouldn’t be dumb enough to think that you even have the capability to defend yourself and you local community, much less a revolution, without a clear state hierarchy in place for mass coordination and communication, right? You’d be smart enough to know why stateless communities cannot exist in any world where a single stated capitalist actor exists, right?
There was no strawman, by the way, cosplayer. You repeat the empires propaganda like a lib, you repeat their ideology word for word, it doesn’t matter what you call yourself.
A citizen military is still a citizen military. The military is not a democracy. They didn’t win with luck dragons and unicorns. And did not disband to Institute actual democracy. Whether or not they started out as Citizens doesn’t disprove what I said. It’s a red herring.
No one asked my response, least of all you. Again with more red herrings and straw man attacks. Anyhow I’ve got better things to do then toy further with you.
That would be a large swathe of Europe, so… no.
Oh I meant the US framing.
Here. Bernie Sanders is literally Stalin. In Europe he’s what? Left leaning moderate?
Fairly normal social democrat.
Sort of person that, in the UK, might be just to the left of the current Labor party leadership (but right of a lot of the party) or on the SocDem end of the LibDems.
Naaah. It still means the same thing.