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.
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"
or "russia is correctly in invading ukraine"
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.....
The material conditions forcing North Korea to make work camps
Bugger off, tankie
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.
Yeah, the US prison system is absolutely abhorrent and counterethical to all the principles it's supposed to hold.
First, the US is basically the only western country like that:tm:, second, more than one thing can be bad. "'North Korea is a great country' is a dumb position", the only (implied) assertion I made about it in my original comment, is still true, even if they got dealt a shit hand (which, so did most of the east after WW2; South Korea was in a pretty similar state (it was actually worse than NK shortly after the Korean war), yet they're doing... much better than NK at least).
Being "basically bombed to the stone age" doesn't mean a dictatorship is inevitable, nor that their government is suddenly blameless; being victimized doesn't mean you can victimize others.
Genuinely, if you take "the west" as a whole and compare it to North Korea... yeah, I do think they have a high ground. No, I'm not saying the west is perfect, far from it. No, I'm not saying communism is automatically bad, I'm totally cool with communists.
Basically my base position is "a functional democracy is the governance system that works the best". Most western states are much closer to that than North Korea (yes, I know what the Electoral College is and why it's bad), so I do think their political system is better.
I still wonder why you're so obsessed with North Korea. It's not like the South wasn't also a dictatorship until very recently. I wonder what the difference in economic outcomes was. Surely not the political system but instead the different material conditions between south and north i.e. embargo and isolation.
Again, I don't think that NK is the best example of AES, in fact their country is probably the worst. But I don't think the people who have produced the economic emisseration of the country and have worked to undermine its regime at every term get to scold them about their political choices.
Why should democracy be privileged when the choices of that democracy, at least internationally, are immoral. Should we praise democracy when it produces an evil outcome? Why are you so wedded to a system? After all democracy produces trans and drag bans in the south. Is that good? This isn't to say dictatorship is superior, I don't think it necessarily is, but to pretend the virtue is in the system rather than the outcome is pretty lib. If democracy produces fascism is it still good? If we throw our trans friends or homeless into the wood chipper because voters say it's good with 51% of the vote, does that legitimate it?
The country that holds the record for number and percentage of people in prison is the US.
In the US the percentage of black people in prison was higher than the percentage of black people in prison in South Africa during apartheid.
No other western/industrialized (at some stage) nation has had so many political exilees and people whose citizenship was revoked based on "anti-american" views than the US. At some point the general secretary of RCP was in exile in France with his citizenship revoked. So, not all states are equal, and their historic development as modern capitalist states should be studied within context.
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.
My dude you need to stop right now before you end up saying that genocide isn't that bad. Because that's what Pol Pot did.
Genocide and pol pot is terrible. So is the USA.
Killing millions and being dysfunctional are in a different realm of terrible. I'm sorry, but how did you come to the conclusion that they are even comparable?
hm i wonder if theres any capitalist countries with a history of committing genocide..
Every genocide can be bad at all the same time. You know?
yea i know. genocide is never a good thing. no matter who does it. whats ur point?
I'm not sure about your specific views, but my point is that the genocides carried out by the USSR and by China and by other 'Communist' states are bad, and that they don't become any less bad as a consequence of Capitalism also having carried out genocides.
i fully agree and im sorry if it came across differently.
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.
Well of course the standard of living in the imperial core is higher than the countries it has exploited or destabilized. A lot of American wealth is the fruit of imperialism.
What are some good actual communist lemmy communities that aren't supporting the fucking capitalist imperialist russian invasion?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
How a lot of you sound
No one is suggesting that the states the authoritarian communists replaced were good or functional, just that they failed to actually uplift and make people's lives better. There's nothing to admire about one oppressive state being replaced by another.
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.
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.
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.
Huh, thanks for the info. I've never heard that term before nor have I ever run into any of those people on the internet though I guess platforms like this attract people like that more because of the lack of any central moderation team
196 is the server you're in right now, tankies is a slang term for the more authoritarian types of communists (like Stalinists and such)
can we please not let the discord brainrot spread here? this is a post on the lemmy.blahaj.zone server, in the 196 community.
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.
Ya the genzedong ban made lemmy be lemmygrad unless you blocked the instance for a month or two.
Honest question - what's a tankie? I feel like I've seen them mentioned a ton on Lemmy but I'd never heard the term prior to a few days ago. From the image it looks like a maga/skinhead combo?
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.
exactly
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
Originally, it was used to describe communists who followed the party line and supported suppressing Hungarian workers with tanks.
Today it means ultra-authoritarian marxist-leninist.
I mean there is a word for that that's less derogatory: Stalinist
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"
From the image it looks like a maga/skinhead combo?
For context, the image originally said kick nazis out of punk.
genocide denier and hard authoritarian. fash dressed in red, basically.
I have always wondered why it always says "Kick _" when she is punching instead of kicking. Lol.
What's a tankie?
Hard-core authoritarian communist. The kinda peeps who support Stalin and shit
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.
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.
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.
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.
there's a trend towards that, which can be combatted & has been by communist parties. Stalin had a pretty incoherent plan to combat rightist tendencies within the communist party, assuming the problem stemmed from external meddling. Mao actually shared your view in that bureaucracy rots socialism, and that it needs to be decreased as the people are helped towards being self reliant, ready to self manage the economy & have suitable industry to run the country with. that's why the cultural revolution happened, to fight bureaucracy
And yet in spite of the few positive things contributions Mao made, and some of the things he got right, he still positioned himself culturally to take up the position 'benign and distant emperor. Much as the contemporary regime prefers to pin all the horrors of the Cultural Revolution on the Gang of Four, many of Mao's ideas themselves were harmful (such as wholesale and universal destruction of old culture).
Marxism-Leninism and its party structure has shown itself, in practice and historically, as being unable to resist this impulse to corruption and autocracy. It was Bolshevik counterrevolution that destroyed the power of the Worker's and Soldier's Soviets in Russia, Soviet counterrevolution that invaded Ukraine during its revolution, and then again Leninist party counterrevolution that prevented any of the (few) positive aspects of the cultural revolution from blossoming into anything useful.
Vanguard parties are counter productive, and counter revolutionary. The French revolution gives us the same lesson, as the Jacobin counter-revolutionary terror (with the oh-so-popular guillotine mostly used on the poor) created the space for reactionary backlash.
The centralization of power is, therefore, a counter-revolutionary impulse. Humans being are not suited for the rule and management of others. Only a revolution that truly returns power to the people has any chance of lasting. That's why even the flawed and imperfect Kurdish revolutionaries of Rojava are sustaining the social and cultural infrastructure for revolution, while Marxists, Maoists and other authoritarian communists world-wide consistently either degrade into bandits and terrorists, or form corrupt and reactionary power-structures.
This is such a based comment. Good analysis and very well said.
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.
just to chime in with an anarchist perspective-- majority rule, as lionized by proponents of liberal democracies, is itself a form of heirarchy in which the will of an ostensible 'majority' (though usually that of the capital- owning class actually) is inflicted upon society as a whole, alienating the minority position, enforced by the state apparatus' monopoly of violence.
if one values bodily autonomy, reconciled with the needs of the collective, a system of governance like mutual collective determination must be established which guarantees that all voices are heard and acknowledged.
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.
Not sure I disagree, necessarily, but that's the answer to your question.
it's also not an either or situation
Stalin
Certain aspects of Stalin? Or in general?
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.
It's the prog-lib equivalent of woke. It's used dismiss leftists with out engaging with our arguments. The term has lite ideological or argumentative use.
Libs use it that way, actual leftists use it to describe fascists that think they're on the left and like red flags.
I don't know what tankies are and at this point I'm too afraid to ask
Usually people who advocate military communism, such as defending tiananmen square, Stalin, and more. Basically it's usually the belief that anything a government professing to be communist does must be good.
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.
I got banned from lemmygrad for saying acab means all cops lmao
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.
I mean any person or entity that enforces oppressive laws is a bastard. The government of China is far from some sort of benevolent state.
Just removed like 40 comments and banned a buncha people.
holy shit they kicked the tankies out of 196
based
Based mod team
I do my best :)
based. also hiii moss :3
Hiiii :33 howru
im good! glad u got made a mod here as well!
I am too! I love contributing to communities that I like!!
thank u for ur service :3
lmao I moderate a website I'm not a firefighter
x3 small deeds still matter
:> thanks
Based.
They already have lemmygrad.
Honestly, I don't think we need them here.
the have genzdong in there lol
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.
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"
or "russia is correctly in invading ukraine"
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.....
The material conditions forcing North Korea to make work camps
Bugger off, tankie
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.
Yeah, the US prison system is absolutely abhorrent and counterethical to all the principles it's supposed to hold.
First, the US is basically the only western country like that:tm:, second, more than one thing can be bad. "'North Korea is a great country' is a dumb position", the only (implied) assertion I made about it in my original comment, is still true, even if they got dealt a shit hand (which, so did most of the east after WW2; South Korea was in a pretty similar state (it was actually worse than NK shortly after the Korean war), yet they're doing... much better than NK at least).
Being "basically bombed to the stone age" doesn't mean a dictatorship is inevitable, nor that their government is suddenly blameless; being victimized doesn't mean you can victimize others.
Genuinely, if you take "the west" as a whole and compare it to North Korea... yeah, I do think they have a high ground. No, I'm not saying the west is perfect, far from it. No, I'm not saying communism is automatically bad, I'm totally cool with communists.
Basically my base position is "a functional democracy is the governance system that works the best". Most western states are much closer to that than North Korea (yes, I know what the Electoral College is and why it's bad), so I do think their political system is better.
I still wonder why you're so obsessed with North Korea. It's not like the South wasn't also a dictatorship until very recently. I wonder what the difference in economic outcomes was. Surely not the political system but instead the different material conditions between south and north i.e. embargo and isolation.
Again, I don't think that NK is the best example of AES, in fact their country is probably the worst. But I don't think the people who have produced the economic emisseration of the country and have worked to undermine its regime at every term get to scold them about their political choices.
Why should democracy be privileged when the choices of that democracy, at least internationally, are immoral. Should we praise democracy when it produces an evil outcome? Why are you so wedded to a system? After all democracy produces trans and drag bans in the south. Is that good? This isn't to say dictatorship is superior, I don't think it necessarily is, but to pretend the virtue is in the system rather than the outcome is pretty lib. If democracy produces fascism is it still good? If we throw our trans friends or homeless into the wood chipper because voters say it's good with 51% of the vote, does that legitimate it?
The country that holds the record for number and percentage of people in prison is the US. In the US the percentage of black people in prison was higher than the percentage of black people in prison in South Africa during apartheid.
No other western/industrialized (at some stage) nation has had so many political exilees and people whose citizenship was revoked based on "anti-american" views than the US. At some point the general secretary of RCP was in exile in France with his citizenship revoked. So, not all states are equal, and their historic development as modern capitalist states should be studied within context.
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.
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.
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.
I have some fellas from Detroit that would disagree.
My dude you need to stop right now before you end up saying that genocide isn't that bad. Because that's what Pol Pot did.
Genocide and pol pot is terrible. So is the USA.
Killing millions and being dysfunctional are in a different realm of terrible. I'm sorry, but how did you come to the conclusion that they are even comparable?
hm i wonder if theres any capitalist countries with a history of committing genocide..
Every genocide can be bad at all the same time. You know?
yea i know. genocide is never a good thing. no matter who does it. whats ur point?
I'm not sure about your specific views, but my point is that the genocides carried out by the USSR and by China and by other 'Communist' states are bad, and that they don't become any less bad as a consequence of Capitalism also having carried out genocides.
i fully agree and im sorry if it came across differently.
No you're good, just trying to answer
For the person dying of hunger is the same. But yeah, killing millions is bad and is something America NEVER did, right?
Implying the us is better than Cambodia because Cambodia committed genocide is very weird, considering that the US did so too
You can't be serious...
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.
Well of course the standard of living in the imperial core is higher than the countries it has exploited or destabilized. A lot of American wealth is the fruit of imperialism.
What are some good actual communist lemmy communities that aren't supporting the fucking capitalist imperialist russian invasion?
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/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you
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 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.
But what if we all have a different idea of what behaving reasonably means?
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.
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.
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.
tankies more like no thankies
300 Comments already. Oh my god! Lol.
Gotta love it
Can we have something like tankiejerk here? I seriously liked browsing that sub after a bad day with the red fashs.
that sub often tended towards outright anti-leftism
Nah, I joined their Discord for a bit and everyone there was a leftist.
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
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?
How a lot of you sound
No one is suggesting that the states the authoritarian communists replaced were good or functional, just that they failed to actually uplift and make people's lives better. There's nothing to admire about one oppressive state being replaced by another.
there's literally a community called "moretankie196", they should go infest that one instead
"lemmygrad.ml" was the most infested for the last year, "lemmy.ml" the 2nd worst. They ban for being lucid. ".ml" stands for Marxist Leninist !
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
This post has literally 6 times the comments of the next most-comments post, jesus. Wonder what could have triggered this!
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.
tankies arent radical left. they are authoritarians ffs
c/EnlightedCentrism
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.
How about Saw Gerrera?
Saw Gerrera is an extremist and must be brought to justice for the good of the Empire.
This, but unironically. That man lost it and became a monster.
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.
To quote wikipedia
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.
Huh, thanks for the info. I've never heard that term before nor have I ever run into any of those people on the internet though I guess platforms like this attract people like that more because of the lack of any central moderation team
196 is the server you're in right now, tankies is a slang term for the more authoritarian types of communists (like Stalinists and such)
can we please not let the discord brainrot spread here? this is a post on the
lemmy.blahaj.zoneserver, in the 196 community.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.
Ya the genzedong ban made lemmy be lemmygrad unless you blocked the instance for a month or two.
Honest question - what's a tankie? I feel like I've seen them mentioned a ton on Lemmy but I'd never heard the term prior to a few days ago. From the image it looks like a maga/skinhead combo?
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.
exactly
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
Originally, it was used to describe communists who followed the party line and supported suppressing Hungarian workers with tanks.
Today it means ultra-authoritarian marxist-leninist.
I mean there is a word for that that's less derogatory: Stalinist
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"
For context, the image originally said kick nazis out of punk.
genocide denier and hard authoritarian. fash dressed in red, basically.
based
fr I'm down with having a good old purge eventually but noone should be surprised
removed by mod
b b b b b based
Vaush moment
Baaaased
I have always wondered why it always says "Kick _" when she is punching instead of kicking. Lol.
What's a tankie?
Hard-core authoritarian communist. The kinda peeps who support Stalin and shit
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
Yes. Yes, it is. I sometimes call them “pseudocommunists” for this reason.
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.
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.
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.
there's a trend towards that, which can be combatted & has been by communist parties. Stalin had a pretty incoherent plan to combat rightist tendencies within the communist party, assuming the problem stemmed from external meddling. Mao actually shared your view in that bureaucracy rots socialism, and that it needs to be decreased as the people are helped towards being self reliant, ready to self manage the economy & have suitable industry to run the country with. that's why the cultural revolution happened, to fight bureaucracy
And yet in spite of the few positive things contributions Mao made, and some of the things he got right, he still positioned himself culturally to take up the position 'benign and distant emperor. Much as the contemporary regime prefers to pin all the horrors of the Cultural Revolution on the Gang of Four, many of Mao's ideas themselves were harmful (such as wholesale and universal destruction of old culture).
Marxism-Leninism and its party structure has shown itself, in practice and historically, as being unable to resist this impulse to corruption and autocracy. It was Bolshevik counterrevolution that destroyed the power of the Worker's and Soldier's Soviets in Russia, Soviet counterrevolution that invaded Ukraine during its revolution, and then again Leninist party counterrevolution that prevented any of the (few) positive aspects of the cultural revolution from blossoming into anything useful.
Vanguard parties are counter productive, and counter revolutionary. The French revolution gives us the same lesson, as the Jacobin counter-revolutionary terror (with the oh-so-popular guillotine mostly used on the poor) created the space for reactionary backlash.
The centralization of power is, therefore, a counter-revolutionary impulse. Humans being are not suited for the rule and management of others. Only a revolution that truly returns power to the people has any chance of lasting. That's why even the flawed and imperfect Kurdish revolutionaries of Rojava are sustaining the social and cultural infrastructure for revolution, while Marxists, Maoists and other authoritarian communists world-wide consistently either degrade into bandits and terrorists, or form corrupt and reactionary power-structures.
This is such a based comment. Good analysis and very well said.
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.
just to chime in with an anarchist perspective-- majority rule, as lionized by proponents of liberal democracies, is itself a form of heirarchy in which the will of an ostensible 'majority' (though usually that of the capital- owning class actually) is inflicted upon society as a whole, alienating the minority position, enforced by the state apparatus' monopoly of violence.
if one values bodily autonomy, reconciled with the needs of the collective, a system of governance like mutual collective determination must be established which guarantees that all voices are heard and acknowledged.
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.
Not sure I disagree, necessarily, but that's the answer to your question.
it's also not an either or situation
Certain aspects of Stalin? Or in general?
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.
It's the prog-lib equivalent of woke. It's used dismiss leftists with out engaging with our arguments. The term has lite ideological or argumentative use.
Libs use it that way, actual leftists use it to describe fascists that think they're on the left and like red flags.
I don't know what tankies are and at this point I'm too afraid to ask
Usually people who advocate military communism, such as defending tiananmen square, Stalin, and more. Basically it's usually the belief that anything a government professing to be communist does must be good.
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
why?
Fair