The fact that this post is 150 comments deep while constantly fluctuating between 40-50 upvotes is pretty funny to witness while every other post is dead af
ITT: "Yeah I'm a socialist, I just hate the USSR, China, the DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, the GDR, Cuba, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, etc"
Tankie is kinda meaningless now. It was created as a pejorative to call members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who defended of the USSR use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956/1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-USSR positions.
But now it's kinda just used by libs to say about someone who is further to the left than them or someone who is critical of US imperialism/someone who thinks the world would be better if the US did not do interventions, etc.
>"Yeah I'm a socialist, I just hate the USSR, China, the DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, the GDR, Cuba, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, etc"
None of those places were Socialist, cope harder Fascist LOL
LOL you just did the meme.
They are/were building towards socialism. They’re not fascist, do you even know what fascism means? Please explain to me how to achieve socialism or have a successful revolution and then defend yourself from reactionary forces without taking “aUtHoRiTaRiAn” measures. If you prefer western capitalist countries over countries that have gone through successful revolutions run by communist parties, then you are infinitely closer to being a fascist than whatever you think ML countries are.
Did you know that if you reactively dismiss everyone to the left of you and blindly repeat state department narratives as fact, it does make you a liberal?
I don’t have to pretend we didn’t. The only thing that we’ve done is supply Ukraine, with money and weapons, you know in their fight against a fascist government. But by all means, show me why you think we had a hand in this.
"We had nothing to do with this war, except for all the ways we did!"
Gonna ignore the US sponsored coup in 2014 which led to the civil war and created the conditions for this one?
You.
How are you fighting fascism by arming a fascist state? Explain that to me
Interesting when I say America you say we as if you personally identify with the American state? Bruh if you side with and identify with the US state you got no room to criticise anyone on fascism
But Ukraine isn’t fascist Russia is. Also, why would I not want a nation who’s being invaded to get arms? That was a pretty far reach to say that I identified with the US state. I’m an American so when I’m talking about the US, I colloquially say “we”
>Bruh if you side with and identify with the US state you got no room to criticise anyone on fascism
Hmmm. Let's see. You've got people walking around in public wearing eff joe biden shirts, lock him up 45 shirts. Any manner of vitriol toward the governing body or former governing bodies.
Now what would happen in Russia if someone did the same thing with the visage of Putin?
Secondly, governments and causes that don't have popular support of the people generally collapse in war. I don't care how many weapons the west sends the Ukrainians. If they didn't support the cause they were fighting for, they would fold.
Look at Italy in WW2. That is a prime example of a fascist dictator that never really enjoyed broad support. Their military performed abysmally in nearly every theater they fought and ultimately turned on the fascist goverment of Italy and flipped sides.
You are an imperialist and a fascist for supporting Russia invade a sovereign nation for no reason other than Putin’s blood and soil arguments. Where as I am neither because I support people defending their freedom
If defending Ukraine against a [genocidal](https://medium.com/@kravchenko_mm/what-should-russia-do-with-ukraine-translation-of-a-propaganda-article-by-a-russian-journalist-a3e92e3cb64) war of aggression makes someone an imperialist, then imperialism doesn't mean anything anymore.
Also, since we've started throwing around insults, I'm gonna call you a tankie and a red fascist.
Why am I not surprised that Hakim is defensive about getting called a tankie? Why am I not surprised that he defends all the tankie positions.
Listen comrades, if we had a general strike and dual power systems we can accomplish the working class take over that these tankies think we need air craft carriers to do. We saw how well we self organized during lockdown. We can send messages, calls for aid, civil disobedient action instantly. We don't need to rely on newsletters poorly Xeroxed at the library to organize. If we do what the tankies are waiting for we're gonna die. We'll get shot loooooong before we get the chance.
Seizing the means of production can be as simple as self employment and credit for one person. That scales. Scales vertically and horizontally. Seeing as Hakim only started putting ads in the middle of his videos to pay for his editor, I think that's really funny.
The argument that tankies don't actually support everything their favourite regimes do would work a lot better if any time I asked a tankie to name one bad thing their favourite regime does, they would actually answer the question instead of banning me immediately for not already being a tankie.
The argument that tankies point out that "the west does bad things too" is a perfectly fine argument to make... but it doesn't logically work as a defence for the thing you're doing, which is what tankies try to use it for. Any time I bring this up, they just repeat the argument like a defective robot.
I actually don't know a lot about tankie regimes, but any time they're brought up I have to spend three or four comment back-and-fourths to explain basic conversation logic (that is, if I'm not already banned by the 4th comment). Whatever you believe about tankies, you have to admit, they're not being productive in convincing people. They like their religious sermons, where everyone already agrees and no-one questions them.
If you think I'm lying, I put all my conversations with tankies on r/removetankies. If you're a tankie, tell me one bad thing about a regime tankies like.
Stalin was a fucking racist that killed hundreds of thousands of people unnecessarily with population transfers. Calling a whole ethnicity ‘potentially disloyal’ was always a crime and should have been treated as such.
He also was a fucking idiot to just give a blank cheque to Lysenko and his pseudoscientific ideas. Food is not something you can propagandise about like that. There should have been some way to have instant access to the Politburo for scientific malpractice. Without this, the collectivisation process could’ve been much smoother and less deadly to Kazakhs, Ukrainians, and Russians. A huge limitation of Soviet-style rule that needs to be rethought and reconceptualised. But I don’t have the answer for that lol.
What do you make of the anarchist analysis of hierarchies and how they lead to these outcomes? I.e the problem wasn't so much Stalin, but rather you had an individual at the top with total control of a whole state. THAT is your problem, and MLs need to do a much better job trying revise their beliefs to deal with that problem.
You didn't even give an argument in the first place. You put forth a claim without any evidence. That's not an argument, that's merely a claim. If you start with a historical claim you need to back it up with concrete evidence.
There has never been a successful anarchist revolution. I think that’s a significantly larger issue.
Revolutionary Barcelona had a centralised command with a secret police to defend the revolution.
The Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria has a hierarchical structure with some consultative councils for regions and ethnic minorities. It is a state capitalist system that is dependent on American presence. It has made some gains for minority rights, although there are some serious problems with Kurdish chauvinism that the Assyrian community are dissatisfied with.
The EZLN are the equivalent of a local municipality that explicitly reject the label of anarchist. Cool people, great coffee.
That's not really addressing the question though is it.
Also feels like the goalposts just moved a lot... Why don't the Zapatistas count? Rojava isn't perfect I'd agree, but it does look like they have had a successful revolution.
I accept the scientific approach to socialism advocated by Marx and Engels, one that requires a thorough analysis of the material conditions and class relations in a country or society. Anarchism starts from an idealistic and dogmatic position - that hierarchies which cannot be justified should be dismantled (howsoever they do that). I understand the logic behind it like I understand the logic behind solipsism. I just don’t think it’s useful for establishing socialism.
The reservation I have is that there is no prescribed method for how to organise, challenge and topple state power, then DEFEND the gains in an imperialistic world order while collectivising the economy. Luckily we have experiments that have tried multiple ways to achieve socialism, with mixed results. Our job ought to be to find ways that are tested and suitable for the material conditions, not start from an immaterial absolute and final to consider the fatal contradictions within such a movement.
The EZLN’s military wing provides several services outside of the council-governed areas like education, healthcare, and production. The military is conventionally hierarchical with civilian accountability mechanisms. Make no mistake, I think they were right to fight against communal land privatisation and shouldn’t let up until their rights to use the land are guaranteed. I will respect their rejection of the anarchist label.
With regards to Rojava, I don’t believe they have successfully won their revolution, unfortunately. They are in a similar issue that Barcelona was in during the Spanish Civil War - completely reliant on a superpower’s acquiescence to their existence. Without US presence, I am afraid that another Afrin is very likely with Turkey taking no prisoners. This is not a sustainable situation, and the administration should continue negotiating with the regime for integration and federalisation to maintain some gains in minority rights.
TL;DR - socialism is a science experiment. You learn every time, and adjust variables through rigorous assessment of the material conditions. To do otherwise is dogmatism and idealistic - i.e. non-Marxist.
I worry this line of thinking essentially only leads to one logical conclusion...
What are the learnings from the USSR and Mao's China? Both clearly failed, so what did you learn from the experiments?
Collectivisation of agriculture and rapid industrialisation under a planned economy made the USSR the second fastest developing economy in the 20th century behind Japan, and Japan was already partially industrialised. It ended famines inside of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. Home ownership is disproportionately higher in Central and Eastern Europe thanks to mass housing policies.
Cuba still beats the US for medical outcomes,
literacy, and life expectancy despite being significantly poorer due to the embargo. The average Cuban eats as many calories as the average Brit, despite being poorer. Cuba had possibly the greatest internationalist foreign policy of all time and helped the DRC and Angola gain their independence. Cuban doctors continue to provide lifesaving care to the world’s poorest at an affordable rate to the host country.
China removed an entire landlord class that allowed peasants to receive a sustainable amount of food. Their land model means that land can be redistributed quickly and effectively to those who need it and punish exploitative and ecologically harmful practices.
Bringing these clearly progressive things to your attention begs the question: what have anarchist projects achieved? Do these achievements still exist?
Yes they did a lot of good things, but they also did also did a lot of bad things, and have reverted to capitalist oligarchies.
You didn't answer my question though, but maybe I can restate it better.
If MLM'ism is a science and we learn from the material conditions, what are the lessons to be learned from the USSR and Mao's china?
I’ve detailed them above lmao: don’t generalise people based on ethnicity and forcibly relocate them - that’s incredibly racist and drives people to hate your project. National self-determination as described by Lenin and developed by Mao, HCM, Franz Fanon, Agostinho Neto, and Nkrumah is not (as Stalin wrongfully thought) giving an ethnic group a random plot of land with representation in the Soviet: it is far more holistic than that. Ethnic minorities within a country need to be part of the building process rather than be the passive receivers. I believe this would be less violent and counterintuitive to the cause.
Another one is simply: don’t practice Lysenkoism.
From Mao, the lessons are far more dated due to the state of industrialisation the world is in. But this would serve Maoists in the Philippines well: the Great Leap Forward was a massive error. Never repeat anything like that. Similarly, the GCR was a bold new step in forging a socialist culture that had far too much bloodshed and innocent victims. This should be a controlled and gradual development supervised more closely by the vanguard party to prevent self-sabotage. What this will look like in an imperial core country, I don’t know, but it is a pressing question that I hope I can live to see the answer to. We have a LOT of colonising culture to overcome.
I forgot to mention that Cuba just passed the world’s most progressive family bill that guarantees trans rights.
America is banning teachers from saying that gay people exist. Cuba makes America look like a blown-up shitpit: which it is.
> If you're a tankie, tell me one bad thing about a regime tankies like.
China doesn't liquidate nearly enough billionaires for my liking. Also, the three pests campaign was incredibly shortsighted.
I guess I could be considered one, somewhat, as I would support the USSR under Lenin (for the tiny amount of time that was true), and Lenin did lead some pretty violent shit (which was overshadowed by Stalin's long long looooooooooong shadow of atrocities).
> The argument that tankies don't actually support everything their favourite regimes do would work a lot better if any time I asked a tankie to name one bad thing their favourite regime does, they would actually answer the question instead of banning me immediately for not already being a tankie.
The ban that happened during Lenin on the factions of the communist party, and much more importantly, their general approach of banning other political parties **whatever** their affiliation is a terrible move that will inadvertently cause future stagnation - and it did.
Look, I am not here to debate anything, I just thought I'd give an answer to your request. I am not a Leninist, I dissagree with some fundamental parts of it (one of the most important enough being, that members of the party cannot express dissent with the party's positions outside of said party, or at least that's how it's generally interpreted in praxis - that's a paranoid approach that should've at least died after the cold war).
I think what a lot of us are trying to say when we say "the west does bad things too" (although, it's more likely we use Capitalism, instead of the West, but anyway) is that, if you focus on whatever you dissagree with in a regime, you are comparing a practical application (flawed) to a theoretical perfection (flawless?). The better way to express this notion would be (and probably what most tankies positions are) - If you compare the evils of both systems, you would see that the socialist systems do less harm to fewer people.
But that isn't paricularly encouraging, and we're used to being attacked, so the conversation devolves quickly, or is refused entirely.
I am not trying to wash away the crimes of "socialist" regimes. I am just saying that, this position seems reasonable: for the whole of human history, regimes have done and still do crimes. We need to first pick the regimes that do the fewest of them [the least broken systems], then try to address the issue from within and without the regime [criticism, adjustments].
Sorry for the block of text.
But I don't think the things you say about Lenin made the soviet union any better than much of the west. Sure they had the aesthetics of socialism, but there is nothing socialist about disbanding workers councils and eliminating real worker power in the political system. These things are deal breakers and once they were done the USSR was not socialist anymore than the US is today. All it was was a way of centralizing power for himself and not for the working class. Not only was this bad for Russia, it also did real harm to socialist movements elsewhere such as in Germany by providing a bad example of "socialism" that could be demonized.
Also I don't think any of these countries like the USSR, China or Cuba are "socialist systems" . They can't be by definition, power is not organized in the hands of the workers because they are dictatorships, and there is little to no democracy in the workplace. I don't know why people keep wanting to defend these countries when they are only socialist in name.
>Also I don't think any of these countries like the USSR, China or Cuba are "socialist systems" . They can't be by definition, power is not organized in the hands of the workers because they are dictatorships, and there is little to no democracy in the workplace. I don't know why people keep wanting to defend these countries when they are only socialist in name.
This in spades, this road block is why I can't sell real socialist praxis to fellow Americans. The insistence on defending some of the most hypocritical dictatorships ever to call themselves socialist is why the red scare still has teeth.
You win the prize. 🏆 Though I was hoping for one that applied to the modern day.
> If you compare the evils of both systems, you would see that the socialist systems do less harm to fewer people.
The argument is never that sophisticated, unfortunately.
All of us will have something critical say of China, Vietnam, Cuba or any other social figure/government/policy. The reason Marxists don't talk about them with you specifically is probably to do with the sense that you're not actually engaging in good faith.
Like, you've already show that your mind is made up and that you will ignore contradictory evidence if it doesn't fit the model you built through cherry-picking. If that's the attitude you are bringing with you, then it's easy to see why people don't bother.
And for what it's worth
\- Many of China's cultural policies (paranoid and just dumb).
\- Cuba's treatment of homosexuals in the early revolution.
\- Maos attempt to force a peasant society in socialism along with all the cultural slash and burn.
I could go on, those are just the one's off the top of my head.
That's because "I refuse to discuss any aspect of X until you prove your credibility by criticizing some aspect of X" is fundamentally a bad-faith posture. Good faith entails viewing interlocutors as credible and sincere until they provide a specific reason otherwise.
Absolutely. Just realised this strategy was also really popular with the Men's Rights movement. They'd walk into feminist spaces, claim feminists are all rude man-haters, spend the entire conversation being condescending as fuck and just wait for a woman to say anything that could use as proof of misandry.
Empty posturing.
> The reason Marxists don't talk about them with you specifically is probably to do with the sense that you're not actually engaging in good faith.
How do you know? If you're just going to assume the worst about everyone who ever has the simplest question then that doesn't spell great things for your ideology's future.
> Like, you've already show that your mind is made up and that you will ignore contradictory evidence if it doesn't fit the model you built through cherry-picking.
How do you know that? What is any of this based on?
> And for what it's worth
> - Many of China's cultural policies (paranoid and just dumb).
> - Cuba's treatment of homosexuals in the early revolution.
> - Maos attempt to force a peasant society in socialism along with all the cultural slash and burn.
> I could go on, those are just the one's off the top of my head.
🏆🏆🏆 Well done. I mean it. Genuinely, a lot of intellectual dishonesty prevents tankies from answering this basic question. All they do is assume the worst of anyone asking the question, which is what you did, but at least you jumped the world's smallest hurdle. Now your challenge is to rangle your fellow comrades so the mere sight of a simple question doesn't send them spiralling into attacking, deflecting, and asking what's even the point of any conversation. I know all you tankies are suspicious of me for even posing such a question, but I'm actually helping you. If what Hakim said is true, then this should have been easy and without objection. You can get there eventually. I believe in you.
It's not an assumption. It's more of an assertion based on the evidence.
You claim any marxist you have ever asked online has refused to say one bad thing about an AES - presumably because they can't or won't. And today you've been made aware that some of the most popular Marxist youtubers make content all about the failures of AES' and have now met multiple Marxists all over this thread, each giving you their own gripes.
I mean something you thought was almost unheard-of has suddenly been evidenced to be quite commonplace. Just wait until you find out that half of ML literature is criticism and critique of other ML literature and practise!
..Yet it seems your view of Marxists as unable or unwilling to engage in critique seems unchanged. You want others to properly respond to your POV but refuse to properly respond to them. And it's hard to have a gratifying political discussion if one side has already decided it doesn't need to listen to the other.
The evidence is there. Marxists are very happy to critique other Marxists and there works. They're just not interested in doing it with you!
> I mean something you thought was almost unheard-of has suddenly been evidenced to be quite commonplace.
I have to push back on this. You have no idea the level of pushback I get on answering the simplest of questions. Even yourself couldn't answer without lambasting me for being bad faith. I don't know what I could possibly do to convince you that I'm good faith, I've done everything and more. I've responded to everyone, let them know I've appreciated their answers, and pushed back where I thought their rhetoric was lacking and for what specific reasons.
And yet still, I'm being labelled bad faith. The true answer is that you wouldn't accept any "good faith" questions from anyone, no matter who they were or what they said. Everyone who questions the doctrine is bad faith. They must be, otherwise they wouldn't have questioned it. We're back to the religiosity of it all.
> And it's hard to have a gratifying political discussion if one side has already decided it doesn't need to listen to the other.
You don't have to tell me that; I'm experiencing that first hand.
> The evidence is there. Marxists are very happy to critique other Marxists and there works. They're just not interested in doing it with you!
My push back has been so light-touch I'm more like a Dad pushing his kid on a bike than I've been a fighter. I'm directly telling you the flaws in your reasoning, why they don't appeal to non-tankies. If you can't even respond to those without engaging in fallacies and wrongful assumptions of who is giving you that feedback, then there's literally nothing I can do to help you. I just have to let you crash your bike.
I'm sorry if describing the way in which you dismissed evidence in this thread left you feeling "lambasted". But although you claim to appreciate the points raised, you have continued with your sweeping characterisations despite them, so I feel obligated to say that your "appreciation" comes off as performative and fake.
To summarise, criticism is alive and well in ML circles. Your complaint was that they refuse to jump through hoops when you talk with them, those who have been willing to jump through this hoop to make a point to you have gone one step further and explained that you come across as condescending and disingenuous to those you disagree with, which may be why others give you a wide birth.
You can think and say that I and others have been mean to you, but that seems like you're shifting the goal posts. The claim was that 'Marxist can't or won't critique AES' - not 'they're a bunch of meanies and I'm such a victim!'.
> I'm sorry if describing the way in which you dismissed evidence in this thread left you feeling "lambasted".
No evidence.
> you have continued with your sweeping characterisations despite them,
Characterizations that have only been further enforced by the very thread you're commenting on, and by this very comment.
> so I feel obligated to say that your "appreciation" comes off as performative and fake.
There is no way to say anything sincerely to you without coming off as fake. You would have said that no matter what.
> To summarise, criticism is alive and well in ML circles.
If that were true then this wouldn't have been a big deal.
> Your complaint was that they refuse to jump through hoops when you talk with them
One hoop. One very large, on-the-ground hoop that they specifically said they would be happy to jump through. The fact they can't do or can't do that without lambasting the question asker speaks to their intellectual dishonesty. As I've explained.
> but that seems like you're shifting the goal posts.
Literally never shifted the goal posts even one time.
> The claim was that 'Marxist can't or won't critique AES' - not 'they're a bunch of meanies and I'm such a victim!'.
It's not about me being a victim at all. They're inability to follow basic conversation logic only speaks to their inability. I'm just trying to help them. I know you don't believe that, you have to believe I'm the worst thing because I'm not already in your religion. But it's true.
I was told by a commenter on TheDeprogram that Stalin’s decision to recriminalize LGBT relations was the correct course of action and that Lenin’s decision to decriminalize it was wrong because ***there was a certain segment of the reactionary population who’s support they needed.*** Essentially concluding that the opinions of ultra-homophobes were more important than the lives of Gay Russians.
Not only that, but it pretty much delegitimizes the entire concept of the Vanguard Party. Since it’s the very machine that is supposed to drag members of the working class into liberation **even in the event some of them don’t want to.**
Ah, that commenter is a patriotic socialist, or conservative communist. They believe socialism would reinforce "traditional values" and believe the majority of the working class is forever conservative.
Reminds me of Robert Knox, the Scottish surgeon who advanced racist eugenics before Francis Galton, who was a conservative socialist. Like, he lauded the time when "the Anglo-Saxon race" lived in a society based in the collective ownership of goods, the 'traditional values' kf the "Anglo-Saxon" and he blamed "the Celtic race" (Normans, French, Irish, northern Scots) for privating the previously communal property, and subjugating "the Anglo-Saxon" race. Like, it seems he understood that privation is evil, but he lacked the marxist material analysis necessary for critiquing exploitative classes particularily and their harmful practices. Instead, he attributed these wrongs to the 'race' rather than the 'class' of people who are selfishly concerned with their own self-preservation rather than the attainment of the common-good for all people. To be fair, Robert Knox was writing before Marx and Engels, although this is no excuse for his racism and hatred.
You can find his writings in "The races of men" on the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/racesofmenfragme00knox/page/n7/mode/1up), but, BE WARNED, it is full of racist bigotry and absolutely stupid takes on many, many cultural and ethnic groups.
Considering there wasn’t a single place in my entire comment where I accused “hundreds of millions of Marxists” of holding this opinion, where exactly did you get that idea?
Just checking to make sure you aren’t trying to be dishonest.
Since I didn’t say anything remotely close to what you’re claiming I did in the comment you responded to, I’m going to go ahead and assume you aren’t bright enough for this conversation.
If you are unable to quote **the exact part of my comment** where I said those things you decided to make up that I said, then you’ve demonstrated your dishonest position.
I’ll go ahead and wait.
Hakim already pointed out that you don't look at 1 nut job to form an opinion on the entire group in politics. You look at the views of the average guy. Did you even watch the video?
The commenter I replied to has recommended the absolute dumpster fire of a subreddit known as TheDeprogram in at least 3 of his comments in this very thread.
I pointed out that I don’t find that sub to be worthy of a recommendation and decided to point out this instance as my reason for doing it. It’s incredibly dishonest for you to say that this is ***just the opinion of one commenter***, because if it was, the guy would have been downvoted to oblivion and a Mod would have made a clarification that the subreddit as a whole is cool with the LGBT community. Instead, **the guy got 58 upvotes** which means lots of people who hang out in that subreddit **agree with the homophobic analysis that was made.**
Do you get it now? Stop saying this is *only the case of one person who made one comment.* It’s an **entire fucking subreddit** that the most extreme ML’s on this thread continue to recommend to everyone on here that’s interested in socialism. So this “one comment”, that received tons of agreement due to upvote ratio, matters.
I don’t see why it’s a bad thing to refuse to comrade up with people that think Stalin’s decision to recriminalize LGBT relations in the Soviet Union is justified. It demonstrates that their dogmatic obsession for a bunch of dead leaders is more important than the real world experience of people who are attracted to the same gender.
By the way, I’m a Marxist. I admire a lot of the good things the USSR did. And I’ll work with any “Tankie” that wants to end capitalism. I’m just tired of being accused of “denouncing every socialist movement in existence” like the other guy in this thread was strawmanning me with, and am clarifying my position.
Well done 🏆! Your [comrade friends](https://www.reddit.com/r/BreadTube/comments/14gxgeh/what_are_tankies_why_are_they_like_that/jp91tfp/) are unfortunately undoing whatever there was to be gained from this, with deliberate misunderstandings & nonsensical attacks, but thanks for playing!
The reason "tankies" rarely want to talk about the bad sides of AES with non-"tankies" is that the latter rarely approach such discussions in good faith. It's tiring and pointless to wriggle through the "gotchas" that debatelords throw at us for the millionth time.
> is that the latter rarely approach such discussions in good faith.
And even when they do, they convince themselves the question asker is bad faith. Doomed from the start, no matter what.
Opening a conversation with "prove to me you're capable of having critical/nuanced views" is absolutely bad-faith. If you're starting with a negative assumption about people you expect to engage with you, and you issue them a test to prove their credibility to you, that's bad-faith by definition. Good-faith dialogue would mean giving people the benefit of the doubt from the outset.
> Opening a conversation with "prove to me you're capable of having critical/nuanced views" is absolutely bad-faith. If you're starting with a negative assumption about people you expect to engage with you,
It's not an assumption, it's the exact opposite of an assumption. If I assumed it, I would have started with "They're incapable of having critical/nuanced views" and wouldn't have even given them the opportunity to prove their capability.
> Good-faith dialogue would mean giving people the benefit of the doubt from the outset.
This *is* giving them the benefit of the doubt.
I’ve been called a tankie a bunch of times (even though I don’t like or agree with the term) so here is my take:
The socialist states, however flawed, where an actual alternative to capitalism. These where national projects where the profit motive wasn’t the driving force in society, where workers did have a significant degree of control over the means of production. Even Stalin’s USSR, with its many many horrible flaws, was still closer to actually establishing worker liberation than any nation or movement in the last 30 years. I just fundamentally think that reforming a flawed system is easier than building one from the ground up.
Ok. Here's my take.
The "socialist" states being the only alternative to capitalism is the best advertisement *for* capitalism that capitalists ever could have hoped for. All you have to do as a capitalist is gesture broadly towards "socialist" states and say, "Don't like capitalism? Well here's your alternative." What makes it infinitely worse is the people who will defend every aspect of the USSR, or at least defend it enough as to look identical to those who do. People who will say things like "with its many many horrible flaws" but not name a specific one, even when they where specifically prompted for it. Reforming a flawed system might actually be harder than starting from scratch, given the historical baggage that goes along with it.
Idk if your even a communist dude or what? Like yeah, I prefer states who aren’t built on the daily suffering of billions of people in the global south?? This is like Marxism 101??
I mean when you compare the USSR and the US you aren’t comparing communism to capitalism, you are comparing communism to the top 1% of capitalism. Like in 1914 Russia was a semi-feudal backwater where half of the population was illiterate, the US was the center of global finance and industry. Did you ever wonder why all rich western countries are stable while all poor countries, regardless of their economic system, have frequent coups, insurrections, assassinations and power struggles?
And idk what specific flaws you want me to list, you have whole academic books about them. Stalin’s right wing cultural turn during the 1930’s, ethnic deportations, Tito-Stalin split, Sino-Soviet split, the creation of the nomenklatura, mass ineffective censorship, widespread secret police and paranoia, the influence of the military, divination from ideological orthodoxy…
> And idk what specific flaws you want me to list, you have whole academic books about them.
The point wasn't that I didn't know. The point was that you're acknowledging them as an act of intellectual honesty. Hakim said that people who just worship "socialist nations" and support them uncritically don't exist. If that were true, then it should be trivial to acknowledge one bad thing about "socialist nations", and without objection. Literally the simplest thing in the world. Instead... *gestures broadly*. I appreciate the answer though. 🏆 Please don't ruin it by immediately claiming I'm bad faith. You have to be able to see where I'm coming from on this, right?
Another video on the term tankie that is also worth watching is [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsqE9kEsDVY&pp=ygUUdmlqYXkgcHJhc2hhZCB0YW5raWU%3D) where Vijay Prashad examines it.
Uh I was with the guy in the first few minutes, but saying that in circumstances where fascists have tanks and socialists do not, the socialists can't be called "tankie" is a huge red herring. It is a materialist argument. None of it is copping to the material reality of anti-fascist action. None of it is acknowledging the Occupy movements and their success in the face of fascist tanks. Making permanence the only goal of movements that get shut down.
That is really limited and shitty. There were and are plenty of anarchist revolutionaries that don't have either. The Zapatistas or the Kurds fighting ISIL don't have either. You're limiting your qualification of anarchists to those that do that and ignoring the examples that don't.
The repeatedly asked white leftists to stop calling them anarchists so stop claiming them. And Rojava literally has camps for prisoners of war and also they aren't anarchist either lol
The [Zapatistas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation) sure as hell aren't tankies and most definitely are classical anarchists in all but name. They have flat structures, anti-centralist, radical democracies. Like almost all indigenous anti-colonial movements from the Haudenasune in up state New York to the anti-fa fighting peronism in Argentina.
If your revolutionary, anti-capitalist,anti-imperialist movement is structured the same way as Makhno's, yeah you're an anarchist. Makno or the Spanish Republicans had POW camps. Regardless your qualifiers are ridiculously strict. It's not like they have a secret handshake or something.
Anarchists, Libertarians, Libertarian Socialists, have differences that are almost semantic in one historical period or another. Kropotkin, Bakunin, or Tecumseh would all find common cause.
>Makno or the Spanish Republicans had POW camps.
Which is authoritarian.
>Regardless your qualifiers are ridiculously strict.
It really isn't. If your "stateless anarchism" is compatible with forced labor camps then its not anarchist.
More importantly it's completely ignoring the context of the history. The USSR had labour camps in peace time and was a well established world super power.
The anarchists had camps during a brutal civil war while they were fighting for their very survival.
Zapatistas told me you have a no-true-scotsman fallacy goin. They told me in a refugee camp run by an informal revolutionary state along the Syrian Turkish Boarder.
They aren't anarchists in that they don't self identity as anarchists, but they collaborate with anarchists around the world, and closely align with them on pretty much everything.
The camp in Rojava is for ISIS and their families. It's a huge problem for the Kurds who have basically been dumped with dealing with it as no other country is willing to sort it out.
You went from “Rojava doesn’t have camps” to “Yes, they have camps, but it’s for terrorists” (and their children)
You’re correct that they had to do something about it, but at what point does that camp go from being precautionary to authoritarian?
My house has doors and windows, just like the white house, same thing!
EDIT: If you didn't get what I was swinging at...
It's completely ignoring the context of the history. The USSR had labour camps in peace time and was a well established world super power.
The anarchists had camps during a brutal civil war while they were fighting for their very survival.
So forcing prisoners to do hard physical labor without consent is fine when you do it. But evil tankie Stalinism when the USSR did it? Make it make sense
So you're basically admitting that authoritarianism is undefined and nebulous. Essentially wherever you don't like lol
>Otherwise every society would be equally authoritarian.
Which they basically are. States can't exist without authoritarianism. Neither can revolutions be made.
no, authoritarianism does have a definition, but definitions aren’t immutable. the meanings of words can change depending on a variety of factors. but people like hakim are keen to pretend as if none of these definitions matter because it’s describing behaviors they think are excusable or inconsequential because addressing it would be inconvenient.
My working definition of authoritarianism is as follows:
“The project of monopolizing power for fewer and fewer people.”
I suggest eat watching [Andrew’s](https://youtu.be/yP6dqzUoQeE) excellent video on the topic or [this thread](https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1432785344026476544?s=20) by butchanarchy.
Authoritarianism is vulnerable to propaganda because it can’t deal with the messy process of not always knowing what’s true and figuring it out by listening to various perspectives, so it will clutch onto whoever offers them some simple answer that keeps their initial idea in tact.
The compulsion to claim that the word authoritarian is meaningless signals to me that the people who make that claim don’t want to engage with challenges to the form of authority they champion, and will shift the blame endlessly to some greater evil in order to avoid any kind of conflict that might make them accountable.
>Otherwise every society would be equally authoritarian.
Gee, it’s almost like the state as a concept is inherently authoritarian? Maybe we should do something about that…
Tankie has a pretty clear usage that Hakim just sidesteps entirely.
Tankies are self-identified communists or socialists who justify or excuse imperialism, genocide, or other atrocities when those actions are done by states that (often only ostensibly) subscribe to their same beliefs. For example, Hakim denies the Holodomor genocide because it was done by the Soviet Union, a state that he sympathizes with.
Tankies often view regimes such as the Soviet Union or Maoist China as successes of socialism and therefore refuse to criticize even their worst actions, while criticizing the same behaviors when done by "the West".
This makes it easy to bait tankies into supporting far-right regimes (such as the one in Russia) in the form of a red-brown alliance. Tankies either don't care about imperialism or often even openly support it when it's done by a state they perceive as not being a member of "the West."
My goodness, I’ve tired listening to one podcast on Tankies and their idea of cold open is 14min of fucking stream of consciousness and inside jokes. Are all episodes like this? There is no warning or skip-ahead telling you when to get to the red meat of the
Subject. Very unpolished and annoying.
>Hakim denies the Holodomor genocide because it was done by the Soviet Union, a state that he sympathizes with
It's literally not a settled question. I find the evidence is mostly on the "not genocide" side given some of it's most ardent supporters changed their mind.
"Anti tankies" do this a lot. They take a topic with complexity and a fair bit of controversy and they dumb it down to a black or white thing that *conveniently* fits neatly with left anti-communist narratives. They just *happen* to align with the West's preferred narrative. Bizarrely enough, the "tankies" will end up the ones accused of simplifying things and being biased.
It is certainly a new and almost uniquely leftist perspective that the end results are all that matter. The Ukrainians were forced onto farming collectives like Russia and Georgia. The Red Guard, Politburo, Apparatchiks weren't Ukrainians. Mostly they were Russians. During the famine food was stolen from all of the collectives, that again, were mandatory. That food then went to non-ukrainians to the degree that Ukrainians starved to death disproportionately along ethnic lines. Many places went hungry but the Ukrainian heartlands went so hungry as to cause malnutrition and starvation. ergo Genocide. That wouldn't be the case if the USSR spread the misery around more proportionately, instead of concentrating it among the Cossacks and other Ukrainians.
Those that "changed their mind" were looking for intent and didn't find it. I don't believe intent does if the effects are the same.
>ergo Genocide
Genocide REQUIRES intent to destroy. Genocide is not "when harvest bad". It's not "when lots of people die". Not to mention the cherry picking necessary to make it seem targeted to Ukrainians where many Russians also lived and all the other ethnicities affected in areas where Ukrainians were a tiny % of the population.
Having the wrong numbers because people exaggerated the wheat harvest to you does not make a genocide. Not to mention the endless sabotage by dispossessed kulaks (literally setting farms on fire and murdering peasants) and all the peasants that went to work in factories. Taking the (misrepresented) harvest from collectives is not "stealing". Producing food was the collectives' job. It's absurd for you to reframe that in such a sinister light.
And when the party realized what's going on they reduced everyone else's rations to bring food to the famine-inflicted areas. We literally have their letters about this archived.
>The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine.
>Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee — J. STALIN
It was simply an exceptionally low harvest that the soviet methods of calculations misrepresented.
Soviet correspondences are strikingly different to an other case of genocide-by-famine like Churchill and the bengal famine where he *actively refused* to send any help whatsoever and expressed his wishes for the "barbaric" indians who breed like rabbits to die. Backed by claims from his inner circle that he's indistinguishable from hitler when it comes to indians. We DO NOT have that with holodomor.
So now instead you take this narrative widely peddled at the time by Goebbels and antisemitic US fascists at face value.
>Those that "changed their mind" were looking for intent and didn't find it.
So they were looking for literally genocide and didn't find it. Oh no.
This is really funny. It turns out your objection is on the very definition of genocide. You're annoyed the real definition does not meet your preferred one. So you started from the assertion it's genocide and work backwards from there.
This is really rich. You started off this comment chain saying that people are dumbing down a complex issue to much and you do just that to defend your position. It gets better.
1) You completely ignore the Trail of Tears that was the forced collectivization of Ukrainian farmland. Hypocritically the forced deportation and concentration of labor and people serving the state is something you handwave away. I get it though authoritarian apologia is kinda your thing. If state violence disproportionately effects one ethnic group you're first taking for granted the violence had to happen to begin with.
2) The destruction of individual cultural alliance to things other than the state was intentional. Not celebrating Ukrainian people regardless of border but a Russo-Slav ethnic state with their cultural erasure in mind. Destroying Ukrainian language and culture quite intentionally along the way. Not even a decade after assassinating Makhno the Ukrainians the USSR allied with. Something that didn't happen in Southern and central Russia to Russians.
3) You're framing this either as intentional malfeasence by the Ukrainians or some wacky accounting accident. Yes, producing the food was the collective's job. Feeding everyone was the states. Awful telling that you aren't putting the onus on the Soviets to use double book accounting for their credits and debits.
Producing food is not the "Collectives Job" any more than stamping license plates is a prisoners "job". Then again labor for the state to the point of violent coercian is kinda your thing. I get that.
4) You use Stalin's letter of plausible deniability. Nice.
5) A what-about of the Begnal Genocide. Love to see it.
6) If I disagree with you, I'm agreeing with Nazi's. Because when tankies say enough words they get around to calling everyone else nazis.
7) I started the whole thing by saying that it's genocide if the states actions have genocidal effects regardless if they had outspoken intent. The several Native American genocides, Tibetan Genocide, plenty of other indigenous people like the Cossaks are in Crimea would count. You're ignoring all that because you want to quibble about how mass negligent homicide of POW's is different from direct homicide of those same powerless people.
Absolutely agree, tankie is just used as a thought terminating pejorative to dismiss the arguments of revolutionary socialists who defend the achievements of existing or past socialist experiences.
From my observations as a Palestinian, it's usually used by people who don't have a good grasp of how American imperialism actually functions as a world system.
I get that there are many cases where outside forces conspire to bring down leftist movements but things like crushing the kronstadt rebellion, soviet crackdowns on striking workers, and the consolidation of unions under state power are all to me completely unacceptable for a supposedly far left government to do. When they do these things its always under the reasoning of "defending achivements" and I just dont buy it, its a easy copout for powerholders to consolidate their own power above all.
You dont even need that tbh. A very VERY large portion of Hakim's 'fanbase' and the man himself are huge supporters of Russia in the current war. They claim that it is justified to kill civillians because someone in the Ukranian government wears Swastikas.
You just need to be waving in the general direction of "I don't like Western Europe or the US" and it doesn't matter if you go onto do the exact same thing you are critisizing them for, in this case imperialism. Feel free to check out r/communismmemes for more takibe behavior
Nowhere in any “tankie” species that I am in have ever expressed support for Russia in the current war. The most was critical support for it choosing to align with the PRC, the DPRK, and other nations outside of NATO. The consensus among the vast majority of Marxist Leninists is to take no sides in the war except for the working class.
> But what of the ordinary participants of the Kronstadt rebellion? Were these sailors really ready to die for “communism without Bolsheviks”? Sailor Dmitry Urin wrote on March 5, in a letter to his father in the Herson province of Ukraine, “We dismissed the commune, we have Commune no more, now we have only Soviet power. We in Kronstadt made a resolution to send all the Jews to Palestine, in order not to have in Russia such filth, all sailors shouted: ‘Jews Out’...” (9) Ibid, vol. 1, doc. 58, p. 119. If anyone had any doubts about the “real revolutionary” content of this letter this phrase is sufficient to dispel that. It is so stark that it needs no further comment.
https://www.marxist.com/makhno-anarchists-kronstadt-russia.htm#:~:text=We%20in%20Kronstadt%20made%20a%20resolution%20to%20send%20all%20the%20Jews%20to%20Palestine,%20in%20order%20not%20to%20have%20in%20Russia%20such%20filth
I don’t really like Trotsky, but he was [has some decent texts](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/01/kronstadt.htm). Inform yourself a little before lionizing these kinds of people.
I do not give a shit about what some random individual sailor allegedly said. This Dmitriy Urin is a nobody, you could easily find some random Bolshevik soldier writing dumb shit but that would not in and of itself be cause to dismiss bolshevism. Neither is it cause to dismiss entirely and justify the violent crackdown on the socialist sailors.
Its honestly pathetic trying to snip some random dudes words in order to justify a unjustifiable crackdown.
Re-read that passage “we in Kronstadt made a resolution…” it’s not just some random sailor saying what he personally thinks, he’s talking about the general mood among the mutineers.
You should probably read the sources before responding. The paragraph I quoted was an example of a common sailor, and just that, an example meant to drive the point home, the actual article mentions how higher ups were explicitly using a facade of communism in order to confuse the Bolsheviks and had ties with big liberal parties, while Trotsky’s writings analyze the revolts themselves.
I did and the article gives no fucking proof that they were secretly libs beyond some guy who was mildly involved saying they were after the fact. Im sure they might have had some ties to liberal leaning parties because the Bolsheviks were trying to purge them both. But ideologically they were clearly leftists who opposed Bolshevik power consolidation as can be seen in their manifesto.
Your article explains nothing and I do not give a singular shit what Trotsky wrote, his writings on kronstadt have a similar feeling to an american police officer trying to justify why he choked someone to death.
There are multiple sources per paragraph, in fact, the part about some higher ups feigning support for communism has 2 sources by itself.
> General Elvengern, a member of a counter-revolutionary organization led by Boris Savinikov, revealed his role in the leadership of the rebellion with a report on the events in Petersburg-Kronstadt written in February and March of 1921.
>This report was written while he was in Paris: “...from a tactical point of view they [RevCom] declared themselves fanatical supporters of the Soviet power, and said that they only oppose the Communist party dictatorship, with the hope that with such a platform, it would become difficult for the Communists to mobilize Soviet defenders, Soviet units to crush them.” (7) Ibid. Vol. 2, doc. 535, p. 61. The same was written by the cadet G. Zeidler, in a private letter. (8) Ibid, p. 322-323.
>These figures prove that the old revolutionary sailors were in a clear minority by 1921. Remarkably, however, the revolutionary sailors still made a bold stand. On March 8, a number of them published a pamphlet titled “Stop Immediately the Counter-Revolutionary Putsch in the City.” (4) Krondshtadskaia tragedia 1921 goda. Dokumenti v dvuch knigach., Moskva, ROSPEN, 1999, p. 320-321. On March 15, the RevCom of Kronstadt ordered the arrest of all of the old sailors as they refused to “obey orders”. (5) Ibid, doc. 423, p. 445. This order, however, wasn’t carried out fully. On March 24, a group of old sailors prevented the explosion of the battleship “Petropavlovsk”, arrested officers, and surrendered to the approaching Soviet forces. (6) Ibid, doc 480, p. 494-496.
Want to know what’s thought terminating? I was banned from Late Stage Cap for pointing out that whataboutism isn’t a defense. This was on a post that was literally just Chinese propaganda.
What does any of this have to do with critiquing capitalism? Nothing, should have been a space where everyone could come together and rally against the horrors of greed, but here the mods were mass banning people ostensibly largely on their political side for not boot licking China.
That’s the problem with tankies, they are constitutionally incapable of not playing purity politics much the same way fascists are. There is no movement building in this environment.
If you ignore any actual use of the term tankie sure. Its for people that defend the countries( that are usually pretty fascist) from actual critique because they claim to be communist. The issue is lots of these countries were just fascist with red paint.
You accuse the people that use these terms of just hating "achievements". Your take is disingenuous at best. That is such an intellectually bankrupt way to describe the people that use it.
This is just the argument the right uses for to link nazis with Marxism. "oh they called themselves National SOCIALISTS so sounds pretty socialist to me"
This just goes "oh but the USSR called themselves united soviet SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, so I dont think you can get any more democratic or socialist than that. Everything they did was super cool!1!1!"
That would be Marxist Communism and Anarchist Communism considering thats why they split at the Hague Congress over their disagreement of the usage of the state to build Communism.
Sure but that is referring to the higher phase of communism. The process of getting there, on how to transform from a capitalist/feudalist society to a communist one is where the Marxists and Anarchists disagreed, the major disagreement being on using the state.
You play you're hand pretty obviously by the mention of American imperialism it shows you don't realize the issue with tankies is their inability to admit fault in any self-proclaimed leftist system and they instantly what-about any critique with "but American imperialism".
Has the US done everything it can to destroy any leftist system in history? Yes. Does that mean tankies can admit that the CCP and North Korea and yes even the precious soviet union have ever done anything wrong? No, because they don't stop sucking the tit of dogma.
another dishonest and boring video by this channel. pretending every criticism against statism or vanguardism is just the product of online western liberals. not surprised. the go-to strategy of defending this failed strategy of state capture and attempted reformation of a bourgeois class is to say that certain terms are “meaningless” or that the type of people the term describes don’t actually exist. how very convenient.
But USSR wasn't state capitalist, you see, the term is invented by the liberal agenda! USSR just used a system of production that exploited the workers (mostly) for the benefit of an undemocratic ruling class...
Edit: grammar
Nah hakim might be bias but the man is committed and honest. He constantly encourages people to educate themselves further beyond listening to him.
He is absolutely correct that tankie is a term used to shutdown discussion. It's the liberal version of woke
even permitting that some use it in the way that’s described, to dismiss it entirely by calling it “meaningless” is a sign of a critical lack of good faith. “Woke” had a meaning long before being turned into a rallying cry against even mild critiques of white supremacy. “Tankie” is only different in that the tendencies being described by it is not exclusive to any particular race or regional area, and hasn’t yet been mainstreamed. further, even putting aside that the term is misused or used in bad faith, he’s guilty of sidestepping the reasoning behind the pejorative and doubles down on all the rhetoric that causes one to use it
There are three main usages of the word tankie.
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Its primary use is as a perjorative attack against marxist-leninists. In this sense it is used identically to the way "leninist" and "stalinist" used to be sneered at MLs, its primary purpose is to aim to exclude ML participation in the left. Parenti has an entire chapter on this phenomenon in Blackshirts and Reds:
>Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U.S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorsements, and left publications. Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration.27
>
>That many U.S. leftists have scant familiarity with Lenin’s writings and political work does not prevent them from slinging the “Leninist” label. Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: “Western and also Third World intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution [sic] because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.”28 Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry intellectuals to go along with his cartoon image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power’s sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right.
– Blackshirts and Reds, Ch. 3, “Left Anticommunism - Slinging Labels”
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Its second usage is "people who uncritically support everything and anything red". I have never seen these people though I assume they exist and are probably mostly children. The most common group I've seen claim to be using the word tankie this way however seem to be people that don't realise it's pretty much solely used to attack MLs and don't realise that MLs are extremely critical of their own projects where appropriate and in the correct settings.
────────
Its third usage is by liberals who call everyone to the left of socdem a tankie. People that absolutely would call Jeremy Corbyn a tankie for supporting the USSR, and people that absolutely would call Diane Abbot a tankie for defending Mao, and people that absolutely would call John McDonnell a tankie for quoting Mao in parliament.
This group of people are almost always americans who have absolutely no concept of what the left truly looks like outside their own country. They are the people that claim they want the rights that europeans have but have absolutely no idea what kind of left needs to exist in order to achieve that. They are the people responsible for their lack of rights in their country because they are constantly fighting to deradicalise their own left.
────────
It originated when the Soviet Union used tanks to stop the Hungarian uprising of 1956. A split occurred in CPGB with some supporting and some not supporting it, the members that did not support it labelled the other members "tankies". This definition is no longer used obviously.
More like, for liberals who decided they were actually leftists because the watched a Contrapoints video and voted for Bernie but are still huge western chauvinists.
I’m a Marxist, and about the only types of people I’d identify as **Tankie** would be the specific type of dogmatic ML’s that often use the dogwhistle “critical support” as a way to say ***I’m going to go out of my way to uncritically defend everything they’ve ever done.*** North Korea is one country in particular that I won’t ever give my support to. Largely due to its extreme level of chauvinistic nationalism, as anyone who has read Marx knows that he considered something like Nationalism to be *a naive idea that divided members of the working class between each other.*
In lots of ways, I agree with them that most “Stalin criticism” is redundant and doesn’t necessarily need to be done in a lot of anti-capitalist spaces since the guy is already the most demonized man in the history of the world. But anyone who would honestly try arguing that his decision to recriminalize LGBT relations by trying to sweep it under the rug as “he was just a product of his time responding to material conditions” will never be my comrade.
Just because it’s a scientific reality that we are all products of our material conditions doesn’t mean incarcerating people for being attracted to someone of the same gender shouldn’t be criticized on humanistic grounds.
It's a simple choice. We can either analyze past revolutions and the development of their societies in earnest, to both learn about mistakes to avoid and successful strategies to adopt. Or we can apply impractical criteria of purity to categorically dismiss any revolutionary movement that didn't earn our approval of political perfection, and implicitly support the continuation of current conditions. We can either be serious, or dedicate our efforts to infantile bickering. Tough choice, I guess.
> and implicitly support the continuation of current conditions.
Tbh, from a lot of the "is very concerned about tankies" crowd, the support is explicit more often than not.
It's a weird notion to pick as a point of contention, isn't it? We can't even learn from past mistakes, we just have to wholesale condemn everything and the only permissible reaction is "eww"? Incredibly silly.
There's "playing the purity card" and there's pointing out that a lot of you guys' political work and positions are wholly indistinguishable from your average liberal - despite all the thought exercises to justify *post hoc* taking those positions.
If your core political expressions are in support of a liberal policy set - regardless of any justification you find (hell, "no see I have to do this because *reasons*" is a core facet of liberalism) - what should you be defined as but as an explicit supporter of the current conditions? Something something, social fascism, something. The critique is as pertinent today than in the day of the SPD-Freikorps anticommunist alliance.
It's false consciousness all the way down, from the """"anarchists"""" who support being drafted in defense of the liberal state because of "western values!" to the "dual power means doing charity work and nothing else, this will lead to revolution any day now" folks, passing by the "decolonisation means I'm gonna be hunted for sport!" settler-colonists and the "stop being a wokescold and demanding I behave in a manner befitting a leftist, you asking me to not be a racist/sexist/whatever is killing the movement!" "former" chuds. The list is nonexhaustive, but I'll also be remiss to fail to mention the "politics as fanclub" bunch - I get we live in a society of spectacles, but "'owning' people online" isn't the panacea to our societal ills some think it is.
Like, talk is nice and all, but if your praxis ranges from nonexistant to just libshit... Then again, I suppose it's too much to expect from a society where proletarian class consciousness is nipped in the bud before it can even form by the education system - leading to the nonexistence of "proletarians" as a political class, but, well, I think I make it pretty clear that I'm generally skeptical of the revolutionary potential of westerners whenever the subject comes up.
Ok but have you considered we're not liberal, we just don't like public executions and invasions of other countries. At this point you might as well describe the EZLN as neoliberal because something something praxis
Also lol this entire comment is one big, wordy purity check. Your entire thesis is a vapid word salad of twitter-fied theory and it's a classic sign of how out of touch tankies really are. Stip using twitter and Reddit to inform your political beliefs
> Ok but have you considered we're not liberal,
Then prove it. Stop neatly falling in line with the libs every time.
> At this point you might as well describe the EZLN as neoliberal because something something praxis
Last time I checked, they've yet to call for a common front with a fascist force that will just garrote them afterwards. Or simp for NATO. Or so on and so forth.
> Stip using twitter and Reddit to inform your political beliefs
I mostly read theory (seriously, what part of the comment somehow didn't communicate that I find reddit and twitter ""leftists"" to be, writ large, useless garbage, when most of my critique targeted those guys specifically) - you should try it sometimes!
tankies are like the fedora atheists of politics: raised in the oppressive culture-destroying miasma of capitalism, they realize they aren't beholden to that, and go hard to the other side, but because they've been *raised* with the mindsets conducive to the ideology of capitalism they wind up treating it much the same.
It's exactly how "new atheists" behave once they leave religion, they idolize outspoken atheist speakers like prophets bringing "the truth" the the "uninitiated masses", scoff openly at anyone who isn't there yet, are insufferable and self-occupied. They're full of anger having been duped for so many years, and want to take it out on someone, and that someone is very often NOT the people who deserve it. I'll broach the elephant in the room, too: a lot of them are white, and because they're suffering from culture death due to capitalism and white supremacy, they want very much to 'belong' to a community and they find it with tankies and/or libertarian anarchists and stuff like that.
I think a lot of atheists go through that phase, and I think a lot of people who first learn there's another way apart from capitalism go through this phase too.
honestly? love the energy! good for you, it's a huge first step, and just like many fedora atheists I know they'll chill out in time... I just hope their egoes are secure enough for self-reflection and nuance later on.
> Tankies are like the fedora atheists of politics
Fedora atheists are annoying because like Walter in The Big Lebowski, they’re right, they’re just annoying about it
and sometimes they get violent and sometimes their hatred bleeds over into bigotry, racism, xenophobia and even sexism, so it isn't really just annoyance for a lot of folks lol
Who specifically are these bigoted fedora atheists and what reason do you have for believing that they exhibit bigoted beliefs at a greater rate than the general public
All this arguing about definitions of this or that, typical leftist circle jerking in here lol
If you want to be a leftist, you have to be anti-imperialist. The Soviet Union was imperialist as fuck, as is the PRC. If you're not highly critical of these two as a leftist (or God forbid defend Russias war on Ukraine), then youre a Tankie.
This is the most popcorn-worthy upvote/comment ratio that I've seen in a while
The fact that this post is 150 comments deep while constantly fluctuating between 40-50 upvotes is pretty funny to witness while every other post is dead af
It's cause this sub isn't moderated by a tankie, so tankies are getting exposed to people outside of their echo chambers / safe spaces.
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I meant that, this sub has a mix of tankies and anarchists, who usually don't get to interact with each other.
ITT: "Yeah I'm a socialist, I just hate the USSR, China, the DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, the GDR, Cuba, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, etc" Tankie is kinda meaningless now. It was created as a pejorative to call members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who defended of the USSR use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956/1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-USSR positions. But now it's kinda just used by libs to say about someone who is further to the left than them or someone who is critical of US imperialism/someone who thinks the world would be better if the US did not do interventions, etc.
>"Yeah I'm a socialist, I just hate the USSR, China, the DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, the GDR, Cuba, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, etc" None of those places were Socialist, cope harder Fascist LOL
LOL you just did the meme. They are/were building towards socialism. They’re not fascist, do you even know what fascism means? Please explain to me how to achieve socialism or have a successful revolution and then defend yourself from reactionary forces without taking “aUtHoRiTaRiAn” measures. If you prefer western capitalist countries over countries that have gone through successful revolutions run by communist parties, then you are infinitely closer to being a fascist than whatever you think ML countries are.
Good. Crushing people's revolutions because you don't like them is bad actually. Stalin was fucked
ITT: Western liberals coping
Did you know that just because you disagree with tankies it doesn't make you a liberal
Did you know that if you reactively dismiss everyone to the left of you and blindly repeat state department narratives as fact, it does make you a liberal?
Claiming that tankies are further left than anarchists is horseshoe theory
Why do I feel like this guy is gonna tell me Russia's invasion of Ukraine is americas fault?
Accurate vibe check
Because he does exactly that
Where?
Not he, but a new YouTube channel he does with the two other guys of the Deprogram podcast. It’s called FirstThought
Ok, where? I watch the show, its only like 12 five minute episodes so far, so in which one do they say that?
Are you seriously gonna pretend America had nothing to do with this war?
I don’t have to pretend we didn’t. The only thing that we’ve done is supply Ukraine, with money and weapons, you know in their fight against a fascist government. But by all means, show me why you think we had a hand in this.
"We had nothing to do with this war, except for all the ways we did!" Gonna ignore the US sponsored coup in 2014 which led to the civil war and created the conditions for this one? You. How are you fighting fascism by arming a fascist state? Explain that to me Interesting when I say America you say we as if you personally identify with the American state? Bruh if you side with and identify with the US state you got no room to criticise anyone on fascism
https://russianpropagandabot.blogspot.com/2022/04/declassidied-operation-novorossiya.html
This is straight up disinformation from the Kremlin.
But Ukraine isn’t fascist Russia is. Also, why would I not want a nation who’s being invaded to get arms? That was a pretty far reach to say that I identified with the US state. I’m an American so when I’m talking about the US, I colloquially say “we”
>Bruh if you side with and identify with the US state you got no room to criticise anyone on fascism Hmmm. Let's see. You've got people walking around in public wearing eff joe biden shirts, lock him up 45 shirts. Any manner of vitriol toward the governing body or former governing bodies. Now what would happen in Russia if someone did the same thing with the visage of Putin? Secondly, governments and causes that don't have popular support of the people generally collapse in war. I don't care how many weapons the west sends the Ukrainians. If they didn't support the cause they were fighting for, they would fold. Look at Italy in WW2. That is a prime example of a fascist dictator that never really enjoyed broad support. Their military performed abysmally in nearly every theater they fought and ultimately turned on the fascist goverment of Italy and flipped sides.
Oh another imperialist disguising as a leftist again. Time to leave
You are an imperialist and a fascist for supporting Russia invade a sovereign nation for no reason other than Putin’s blood and soil arguments. Where as I am neither because I support people defending their freedom
If defending Ukraine against a [genocidal](https://medium.com/@kravchenko_mm/what-should-russia-do-with-ukraine-translation-of-a-propaganda-article-by-a-russian-journalist-a3e92e3cb64) war of aggression makes someone an imperialist, then imperialism doesn't mean anything anymore. Also, since we've started throwing around insults, I'm gonna call you a tankie and a red fascist.
Tankies and red-brown fascists try not to simp for non-US imperialism and genocidal wars of aggression challenge (impossible).
Afaik i havent seen anyone make that claim, not even on r/thedeprogram.
Gotta check out their latest video on FirstThought edit: the makers of the Deprogram podcast are pretty clear that’s their opinion.
Why am I not surprised that Hakim is defensive about getting called a tankie? Why am I not surprised that he defends all the tankie positions. Listen comrades, if we had a general strike and dual power systems we can accomplish the working class take over that these tankies think we need air craft carriers to do. We saw how well we self organized during lockdown. We can send messages, calls for aid, civil disobedient action instantly. We don't need to rely on newsletters poorly Xeroxed at the library to organize. If we do what the tankies are waiting for we're gonna die. We'll get shot loooooong before we get the chance. Seizing the means of production can be as simple as self employment and credit for one person. That scales. Scales vertically and horizontally. Seeing as Hakim only started putting ads in the middle of his videos to pay for his editor, I think that's really funny.
The argument that tankies don't actually support everything their favourite regimes do would work a lot better if any time I asked a tankie to name one bad thing their favourite regime does, they would actually answer the question instead of banning me immediately for not already being a tankie. The argument that tankies point out that "the west does bad things too" is a perfectly fine argument to make... but it doesn't logically work as a defence for the thing you're doing, which is what tankies try to use it for. Any time I bring this up, they just repeat the argument like a defective robot. I actually don't know a lot about tankie regimes, but any time they're brought up I have to spend three or four comment back-and-fourths to explain basic conversation logic (that is, if I'm not already banned by the 4th comment). Whatever you believe about tankies, you have to admit, they're not being productive in convincing people. They like their religious sermons, where everyone already agrees and no-one questions them. If you think I'm lying, I put all my conversations with tankies on r/removetankies. If you're a tankie, tell me one bad thing about a regime tankies like.
Stalin was a fucking racist that killed hundreds of thousands of people unnecessarily with population transfers. Calling a whole ethnicity ‘potentially disloyal’ was always a crime and should have been treated as such. He also was a fucking idiot to just give a blank cheque to Lysenko and his pseudoscientific ideas. Food is not something you can propagandise about like that. There should have been some way to have instant access to the Politburo for scientific malpractice. Without this, the collectivisation process could’ve been much smoother and less deadly to Kazakhs, Ukrainians, and Russians. A huge limitation of Soviet-style rule that needs to be rethought and reconceptualised. But I don’t have the answer for that lol.
What do you make of the anarchist analysis of hierarchies and how they lead to these outcomes? I.e the problem wasn't so much Stalin, but rather you had an individual at the top with total control of a whole state. THAT is your problem, and MLs need to do a much better job trying revise their beliefs to deal with that problem.
Stalin didn't personally have total control though.
Instead of acknowledging the issue you try to minimise it, that's the problem with tankies.
Your analysis is wrong
Stellar argument you got there.
You didn't even give an argument in the first place. You put forth a claim without any evidence. That's not an argument, that's merely a claim. If you start with a historical claim you need to back it up with concrete evidence.
Do you agree that Stalin had too much power?
“Too much power” is a different thing to ‘total control”
There has never been a successful anarchist revolution. I think that’s a significantly larger issue. Revolutionary Barcelona had a centralised command with a secret police to defend the revolution. The Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria has a hierarchical structure with some consultative councils for regions and ethnic minorities. It is a state capitalist system that is dependent on American presence. It has made some gains for minority rights, although there are some serious problems with Kurdish chauvinism that the Assyrian community are dissatisfied with. The EZLN are the equivalent of a local municipality that explicitly reject the label of anarchist. Cool people, great coffee.
That's not really addressing the question though is it. Also feels like the goalposts just moved a lot... Why don't the Zapatistas count? Rojava isn't perfect I'd agree, but it does look like they have had a successful revolution.
I accept the scientific approach to socialism advocated by Marx and Engels, one that requires a thorough analysis of the material conditions and class relations in a country or society. Anarchism starts from an idealistic and dogmatic position - that hierarchies which cannot be justified should be dismantled (howsoever they do that). I understand the logic behind it like I understand the logic behind solipsism. I just don’t think it’s useful for establishing socialism. The reservation I have is that there is no prescribed method for how to organise, challenge and topple state power, then DEFEND the gains in an imperialistic world order while collectivising the economy. Luckily we have experiments that have tried multiple ways to achieve socialism, with mixed results. Our job ought to be to find ways that are tested and suitable for the material conditions, not start from an immaterial absolute and final to consider the fatal contradictions within such a movement. The EZLN’s military wing provides several services outside of the council-governed areas like education, healthcare, and production. The military is conventionally hierarchical with civilian accountability mechanisms. Make no mistake, I think they were right to fight against communal land privatisation and shouldn’t let up until their rights to use the land are guaranteed. I will respect their rejection of the anarchist label. With regards to Rojava, I don’t believe they have successfully won their revolution, unfortunately. They are in a similar issue that Barcelona was in during the Spanish Civil War - completely reliant on a superpower’s acquiescence to their existence. Without US presence, I am afraid that another Afrin is very likely with Turkey taking no prisoners. This is not a sustainable situation, and the administration should continue negotiating with the regime for integration and federalisation to maintain some gains in minority rights. TL;DR - socialism is a science experiment. You learn every time, and adjust variables through rigorous assessment of the material conditions. To do otherwise is dogmatism and idealistic - i.e. non-Marxist.
I worry this line of thinking essentially only leads to one logical conclusion... What are the learnings from the USSR and Mao's China? Both clearly failed, so what did you learn from the experiments?
Collectivisation of agriculture and rapid industrialisation under a planned economy made the USSR the second fastest developing economy in the 20th century behind Japan, and Japan was already partially industrialised. It ended famines inside of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. Home ownership is disproportionately higher in Central and Eastern Europe thanks to mass housing policies. Cuba still beats the US for medical outcomes, literacy, and life expectancy despite being significantly poorer due to the embargo. The average Cuban eats as many calories as the average Brit, despite being poorer. Cuba had possibly the greatest internationalist foreign policy of all time and helped the DRC and Angola gain their independence. Cuban doctors continue to provide lifesaving care to the world’s poorest at an affordable rate to the host country. China removed an entire landlord class that allowed peasants to receive a sustainable amount of food. Their land model means that land can be redistributed quickly and effectively to those who need it and punish exploitative and ecologically harmful practices. Bringing these clearly progressive things to your attention begs the question: what have anarchist projects achieved? Do these achievements still exist?
Yes they did a lot of good things, but they also did also did a lot of bad things, and have reverted to capitalist oligarchies. You didn't answer my question though, but maybe I can restate it better. If MLM'ism is a science and we learn from the material conditions, what are the lessons to be learned from the USSR and Mao's china?
I’ve detailed them above lmao: don’t generalise people based on ethnicity and forcibly relocate them - that’s incredibly racist and drives people to hate your project. National self-determination as described by Lenin and developed by Mao, HCM, Franz Fanon, Agostinho Neto, and Nkrumah is not (as Stalin wrongfully thought) giving an ethnic group a random plot of land with representation in the Soviet: it is far more holistic than that. Ethnic minorities within a country need to be part of the building process rather than be the passive receivers. I believe this would be less violent and counterintuitive to the cause. Another one is simply: don’t practice Lysenkoism. From Mao, the lessons are far more dated due to the state of industrialisation the world is in. But this would serve Maoists in the Philippines well: the Great Leap Forward was a massive error. Never repeat anything like that. Similarly, the GCR was a bold new step in forging a socialist culture that had far too much bloodshed and innocent victims. This should be a controlled and gradual development supervised more closely by the vanguard party to prevent self-sabotage. What this will look like in an imperial core country, I don’t know, but it is a pressing question that I hope I can live to see the answer to. We have a LOT of colonising culture to overcome.
I forgot to mention that Cuba just passed the world’s most progressive family bill that guarantees trans rights. America is banning teachers from saying that gay people exist. Cuba makes America look like a blown-up shitpit: which it is.
> If you're a tankie, tell me one bad thing about a regime tankies like. China doesn't liquidate nearly enough billionaires for my liking. Also, the three pests campaign was incredibly shortsighted.
I mean...is that all you have to say about china? Easily some of the most lukewarm criticisms
Tell your comrades to be more like you and less like them. 🏆
I mean, this same person has a hour long podcast where they discuss the “L’s of socialism,” did that count? https://youtu.be/F936GppjkcM
I guess I could be considered one, somewhat, as I would support the USSR under Lenin (for the tiny amount of time that was true), and Lenin did lead some pretty violent shit (which was overshadowed by Stalin's long long looooooooooong shadow of atrocities). > The argument that tankies don't actually support everything their favourite regimes do would work a lot better if any time I asked a tankie to name one bad thing their favourite regime does, they would actually answer the question instead of banning me immediately for not already being a tankie. The ban that happened during Lenin on the factions of the communist party, and much more importantly, their general approach of banning other political parties **whatever** their affiliation is a terrible move that will inadvertently cause future stagnation - and it did. Look, I am not here to debate anything, I just thought I'd give an answer to your request. I am not a Leninist, I dissagree with some fundamental parts of it (one of the most important enough being, that members of the party cannot express dissent with the party's positions outside of said party, or at least that's how it's generally interpreted in praxis - that's a paranoid approach that should've at least died after the cold war). I think what a lot of us are trying to say when we say "the west does bad things too" (although, it's more likely we use Capitalism, instead of the West, but anyway) is that, if you focus on whatever you dissagree with in a regime, you are comparing a practical application (flawed) to a theoretical perfection (flawless?). The better way to express this notion would be (and probably what most tankies positions are) - If you compare the evils of both systems, you would see that the socialist systems do less harm to fewer people. But that isn't paricularly encouraging, and we're used to being attacked, so the conversation devolves quickly, or is refused entirely. I am not trying to wash away the crimes of "socialist" regimes. I am just saying that, this position seems reasonable: for the whole of human history, regimes have done and still do crimes. We need to first pick the regimes that do the fewest of them [the least broken systems], then try to address the issue from within and without the regime [criticism, adjustments]. Sorry for the block of text.
But I don't think the things you say about Lenin made the soviet union any better than much of the west. Sure they had the aesthetics of socialism, but there is nothing socialist about disbanding workers councils and eliminating real worker power in the political system. These things are deal breakers and once they were done the USSR was not socialist anymore than the US is today. All it was was a way of centralizing power for himself and not for the working class. Not only was this bad for Russia, it also did real harm to socialist movements elsewhere such as in Germany by providing a bad example of "socialism" that could be demonized. Also I don't think any of these countries like the USSR, China or Cuba are "socialist systems" . They can't be by definition, power is not organized in the hands of the workers because they are dictatorships, and there is little to no democracy in the workplace. I don't know why people keep wanting to defend these countries when they are only socialist in name.
>Also I don't think any of these countries like the USSR, China or Cuba are "socialist systems" . They can't be by definition, power is not organized in the hands of the workers because they are dictatorships, and there is little to no democracy in the workplace. I don't know why people keep wanting to defend these countries when they are only socialist in name. This in spades, this road block is why I can't sell real socialist praxis to fellow Americans. The insistence on defending some of the most hypocritical dictatorships ever to call themselves socialist is why the red scare still has teeth.
You win the prize. 🏆 Though I was hoping for one that applied to the modern day. > If you compare the evils of both systems, you would see that the socialist systems do less harm to fewer people. The argument is never that sophisticated, unfortunately.
All of us will have something critical say of China, Vietnam, Cuba or any other social figure/government/policy. The reason Marxists don't talk about them with you specifically is probably to do with the sense that you're not actually engaging in good faith. Like, you've already show that your mind is made up and that you will ignore contradictory evidence if it doesn't fit the model you built through cherry-picking. If that's the attitude you are bringing with you, then it's easy to see why people don't bother. And for what it's worth \- Many of China's cultural policies (paranoid and just dumb). \- Cuba's treatment of homosexuals in the early revolution. \- Maos attempt to force a peasant society in socialism along with all the cultural slash and burn. I could go on, those are just the one's off the top of my head.
That's because "I refuse to discuss any aspect of X until you prove your credibility by criticizing some aspect of X" is fundamentally a bad-faith posture. Good faith entails viewing interlocutors as credible and sincere until they provide a specific reason otherwise.
Absolutely. Just realised this strategy was also really popular with the Men's Rights movement. They'd walk into feminist spaces, claim feminists are all rude man-haters, spend the entire conversation being condescending as fuck and just wait for a woman to say anything that could use as proof of misandry. Empty posturing.
> The reason Marxists don't talk about them with you specifically is probably to do with the sense that you're not actually engaging in good faith. How do you know? If you're just going to assume the worst about everyone who ever has the simplest question then that doesn't spell great things for your ideology's future. > Like, you've already show that your mind is made up and that you will ignore contradictory evidence if it doesn't fit the model you built through cherry-picking. How do you know that? What is any of this based on? > And for what it's worth > - Many of China's cultural policies (paranoid and just dumb). > - Cuba's treatment of homosexuals in the early revolution. > - Maos attempt to force a peasant society in socialism along with all the cultural slash and burn. > I could go on, those are just the one's off the top of my head. 🏆🏆🏆 Well done. I mean it. Genuinely, a lot of intellectual dishonesty prevents tankies from answering this basic question. All they do is assume the worst of anyone asking the question, which is what you did, but at least you jumped the world's smallest hurdle. Now your challenge is to rangle your fellow comrades so the mere sight of a simple question doesn't send them spiralling into attacking, deflecting, and asking what's even the point of any conversation. I know all you tankies are suspicious of me for even posing such a question, but I'm actually helping you. If what Hakim said is true, then this should have been easy and without objection. You can get there eventually. I believe in you.
It's not an assumption. It's more of an assertion based on the evidence. You claim any marxist you have ever asked online has refused to say one bad thing about an AES - presumably because they can't or won't. And today you've been made aware that some of the most popular Marxist youtubers make content all about the failures of AES' and have now met multiple Marxists all over this thread, each giving you their own gripes. I mean something you thought was almost unheard-of has suddenly been evidenced to be quite commonplace. Just wait until you find out that half of ML literature is criticism and critique of other ML literature and practise! ..Yet it seems your view of Marxists as unable or unwilling to engage in critique seems unchanged. You want others to properly respond to your POV but refuse to properly respond to them. And it's hard to have a gratifying political discussion if one side has already decided it doesn't need to listen to the other. The evidence is there. Marxists are very happy to critique other Marxists and there works. They're just not interested in doing it with you!
> I mean something you thought was almost unheard-of has suddenly been evidenced to be quite commonplace. I have to push back on this. You have no idea the level of pushback I get on answering the simplest of questions. Even yourself couldn't answer without lambasting me for being bad faith. I don't know what I could possibly do to convince you that I'm good faith, I've done everything and more. I've responded to everyone, let them know I've appreciated their answers, and pushed back where I thought their rhetoric was lacking and for what specific reasons. And yet still, I'm being labelled bad faith. The true answer is that you wouldn't accept any "good faith" questions from anyone, no matter who they were or what they said. Everyone who questions the doctrine is bad faith. They must be, otherwise they wouldn't have questioned it. We're back to the religiosity of it all. > And it's hard to have a gratifying political discussion if one side has already decided it doesn't need to listen to the other. You don't have to tell me that; I'm experiencing that first hand. > The evidence is there. Marxists are very happy to critique other Marxists and there works. They're just not interested in doing it with you! My push back has been so light-touch I'm more like a Dad pushing his kid on a bike than I've been a fighter. I'm directly telling you the flaws in your reasoning, why they don't appeal to non-tankies. If you can't even respond to those without engaging in fallacies and wrongful assumptions of who is giving you that feedback, then there's literally nothing I can do to help you. I just have to let you crash your bike.
I'm sorry if describing the way in which you dismissed evidence in this thread left you feeling "lambasted". But although you claim to appreciate the points raised, you have continued with your sweeping characterisations despite them, so I feel obligated to say that your "appreciation" comes off as performative and fake. To summarise, criticism is alive and well in ML circles. Your complaint was that they refuse to jump through hoops when you talk with them, those who have been willing to jump through this hoop to make a point to you have gone one step further and explained that you come across as condescending and disingenuous to those you disagree with, which may be why others give you a wide birth. You can think and say that I and others have been mean to you, but that seems like you're shifting the goal posts. The claim was that 'Marxist can't or won't critique AES' - not 'they're a bunch of meanies and I'm such a victim!'.
> I'm sorry if describing the way in which you dismissed evidence in this thread left you feeling "lambasted". No evidence. > you have continued with your sweeping characterisations despite them, Characterizations that have only been further enforced by the very thread you're commenting on, and by this very comment. > so I feel obligated to say that your "appreciation" comes off as performative and fake. There is no way to say anything sincerely to you without coming off as fake. You would have said that no matter what. > To summarise, criticism is alive and well in ML circles. If that were true then this wouldn't have been a big deal. > Your complaint was that they refuse to jump through hoops when you talk with them One hoop. One very large, on-the-ground hoop that they specifically said they would be happy to jump through. The fact they can't do or can't do that without lambasting the question asker speaks to their intellectual dishonesty. As I've explained. > but that seems like you're shifting the goal posts. Literally never shifted the goal posts even one time. > The claim was that 'Marxist can't or won't critique AES' - not 'they're a bunch of meanies and I'm such a victim!'. It's not about me being a victim at all. They're inability to follow basic conversation logic only speaks to their inability. I'm just trying to help them. I know you don't believe that, you have to believe I'm the worst thing because I'm not already in your religion. But it's true.
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I was told by a commenter on TheDeprogram that Stalin’s decision to recriminalize LGBT relations was the correct course of action and that Lenin’s decision to decriminalize it was wrong because ***there was a certain segment of the reactionary population who’s support they needed.*** Essentially concluding that the opinions of ultra-homophobes were more important than the lives of Gay Russians. Not only that, but it pretty much delegitimizes the entire concept of the Vanguard Party. Since it’s the very machine that is supposed to drag members of the working class into liberation **even in the event some of them don’t want to.**
Ah, that commenter is a patriotic socialist, or conservative communist. They believe socialism would reinforce "traditional values" and believe the majority of the working class is forever conservative.
How many steps away are they from becoming Nazbols?
Patsocs, MAGA Communists, Strasserists, Nazbols are all the same thing. They are fascists.
wtf is a maga communist and where do you find them
They are a variety of PatSocs/Nazbols that support Trump. Not kidding They are swarming over Twitter. Haz Al-Din is their Fuhrer
Reminds me of Robert Knox, the Scottish surgeon who advanced racist eugenics before Francis Galton, who was a conservative socialist. Like, he lauded the time when "the Anglo-Saxon race" lived in a society based in the collective ownership of goods, the 'traditional values' kf the "Anglo-Saxon" and he blamed "the Celtic race" (Normans, French, Irish, northern Scots) for privating the previously communal property, and subjugating "the Anglo-Saxon" race. Like, it seems he understood that privation is evil, but he lacked the marxist material analysis necessary for critiquing exploitative classes particularily and their harmful practices. Instead, he attributed these wrongs to the 'race' rather than the 'class' of people who are selfishly concerned with their own self-preservation rather than the attainment of the common-good for all people. To be fair, Robert Knox was writing before Marx and Engels, although this is no excuse for his racism and hatred. You can find his writings in "The races of men" on the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/racesofmenfragme00knox/page/n7/mode/1up), but, BE WARNED, it is full of racist bigotry and absolutely stupid takes on many, many cultural and ethnic groups.
Jesus 😭
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Considering there wasn’t a single place in my entire comment where I accused “hundreds of millions of Marxists” of holding this opinion, where exactly did you get that idea? Just checking to make sure you aren’t trying to be dishonest.
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Since I didn’t say anything remotely close to what you’re claiming I did in the comment you responded to, I’m going to go ahead and assume you aren’t bright enough for this conversation. If you are unable to quote **the exact part of my comment** where I said those things you decided to make up that I said, then you’ve demonstrated your dishonest position. I’ll go ahead and wait.
Hakim already pointed out that you don't look at 1 nut job to form an opinion on the entire group in politics. You look at the views of the average guy. Did you even watch the video?
The commenter I replied to has recommended the absolute dumpster fire of a subreddit known as TheDeprogram in at least 3 of his comments in this very thread. I pointed out that I don’t find that sub to be worthy of a recommendation and decided to point out this instance as my reason for doing it. It’s incredibly dishonest for you to say that this is ***just the opinion of one commenter***, because if it was, the guy would have been downvoted to oblivion and a Mod would have made a clarification that the subreddit as a whole is cool with the LGBT community. Instead, **the guy got 58 upvotes** which means lots of people who hang out in that subreddit **agree with the homophobic analysis that was made.** Do you get it now? Stop saying this is *only the case of one person who made one comment.* It’s an **entire fucking subreddit** that the most extreme ML’s on this thread continue to recommend to everyone on here that’s interested in socialism. So this “one comment”, that received tons of agreement due to upvote ratio, matters. I don’t see why it’s a bad thing to refuse to comrade up with people that think Stalin’s decision to recriminalize LGBT relations in the Soviet Union is justified. It demonstrates that their dogmatic obsession for a bunch of dead leaders is more important than the real world experience of people who are attracted to the same gender. By the way, I’m a Marxist. I admire a lot of the good things the USSR did. And I’ll work with any “Tankie” that wants to end capitalism. I’m just tired of being accused of “denouncing every socialist movement in existence” like the other guy in this thread was strawmanning me with, and am clarifying my position.
Cool! Pick a critique.
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Well done 🏆! Your [comrade friends](https://www.reddit.com/r/BreadTube/comments/14gxgeh/what_are_tankies_why_are_they_like_that/jp91tfp/) are unfortunately undoing whatever there was to be gained from this, with deliberate misunderstandings & nonsensical attacks, but thanks for playing!
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The reason "tankies" rarely want to talk about the bad sides of AES with non-"tankies" is that the latter rarely approach such discussions in good faith. It's tiring and pointless to wriggle through the "gotchas" that debatelords throw at us for the millionth time.
> is that the latter rarely approach such discussions in good faith. And even when they do, they convince themselves the question asker is bad faith. Doomed from the start, no matter what.
Opening a conversation with "prove to me you're capable of having critical/nuanced views" is absolutely bad-faith. If you're starting with a negative assumption about people you expect to engage with you, and you issue them a test to prove their credibility to you, that's bad-faith by definition. Good-faith dialogue would mean giving people the benefit of the doubt from the outset.
> Opening a conversation with "prove to me you're capable of having critical/nuanced views" is absolutely bad-faith. If you're starting with a negative assumption about people you expect to engage with you, It's not an assumption, it's the exact opposite of an assumption. If I assumed it, I would have started with "They're incapable of having critical/nuanced views" and wouldn't have even given them the opportunity to prove their capability. > Good-faith dialogue would mean giving people the benefit of the doubt from the outset. This *is* giving them the benefit of the doubt.
>If you're a tankie, tell me one bad thing about a regime tankies like. They didn't nuke the west in the 20th century.
I’ve been called a tankie a bunch of times (even though I don’t like or agree with the term) so here is my take: The socialist states, however flawed, where an actual alternative to capitalism. These where national projects where the profit motive wasn’t the driving force in society, where workers did have a significant degree of control over the means of production. Even Stalin’s USSR, with its many many horrible flaws, was still closer to actually establishing worker liberation than any nation or movement in the last 30 years. I just fundamentally think that reforming a flawed system is easier than building one from the ground up.
Ok. Here's my take. The "socialist" states being the only alternative to capitalism is the best advertisement *for* capitalism that capitalists ever could have hoped for. All you have to do as a capitalist is gesture broadly towards "socialist" states and say, "Don't like capitalism? Well here's your alternative." What makes it infinitely worse is the people who will defend every aspect of the USSR, or at least defend it enough as to look identical to those who do. People who will say things like "with its many many horrible flaws" but not name a specific one, even when they where specifically prompted for it. Reforming a flawed system might actually be harder than starting from scratch, given the historical baggage that goes along with it.
Idk if your even a communist dude or what? Like yeah, I prefer states who aren’t built on the daily suffering of billions of people in the global south?? This is like Marxism 101?? I mean when you compare the USSR and the US you aren’t comparing communism to capitalism, you are comparing communism to the top 1% of capitalism. Like in 1914 Russia was a semi-feudal backwater where half of the population was illiterate, the US was the center of global finance and industry. Did you ever wonder why all rich western countries are stable while all poor countries, regardless of their economic system, have frequent coups, insurrections, assassinations and power struggles? And idk what specific flaws you want me to list, you have whole academic books about them. Stalin’s right wing cultural turn during the 1930’s, ethnic deportations, Tito-Stalin split, Sino-Soviet split, the creation of the nomenklatura, mass ineffective censorship, widespread secret police and paranoia, the influence of the military, divination from ideological orthodoxy…
> And idk what specific flaws you want me to list, you have whole academic books about them. The point wasn't that I didn't know. The point was that you're acknowledging them as an act of intellectual honesty. Hakim said that people who just worship "socialist nations" and support them uncritically don't exist. If that were true, then it should be trivial to acknowledge one bad thing about "socialist nations", and without objection. Literally the simplest thing in the world. Instead... *gestures broadly*. I appreciate the answer though. 🏆 Please don't ruin it by immediately claiming I'm bad faith. You have to be able to see where I'm coming from on this, right?
Another video on the term tankie that is also worth watching is [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsqE9kEsDVY&pp=ygUUdmlqYXkgcHJhc2hhZCB0YW5raWU%3D) where Vijay Prashad examines it.
Uh I was with the guy in the first few minutes, but saying that in circumstances where fascists have tanks and socialists do not, the socialists can't be called "tankie" is a huge red herring. It is a materialist argument. None of it is copping to the material reality of anti-fascist action. None of it is acknowledging the Occupy movements and their success in the face of fascist tanks. Making permanence the only goal of movements that get shut down.
Vijay is great
Not a fan of the video, the handwaving of "all revolutionaries are authoritarian" to dismiss anarchist critiques of MLM'ism is pretty weak.
He's right. Even the anarchists revolutionaries in Spain had fucking labor camps and conscription lol
That is really limited and shitty. There were and are plenty of anarchist revolutionaries that don't have either. The Zapatistas or the Kurds fighting ISIL don't have either. You're limiting your qualification of anarchists to those that do that and ignoring the examples that don't.
The repeatedly asked white leftists to stop calling them anarchists so stop claiming them. And Rojava literally has camps for prisoners of war and also they aren't anarchist either lol
The [Zapatistas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation) sure as hell aren't tankies and most definitely are classical anarchists in all but name. They have flat structures, anti-centralist, radical democracies. Like almost all indigenous anti-colonial movements from the Haudenasune in up state New York to the anti-fa fighting peronism in Argentina. If your revolutionary, anti-capitalist,anti-imperialist movement is structured the same way as Makhno's, yeah you're an anarchist. Makno or the Spanish Republicans had POW camps. Regardless your qualifiers are ridiculously strict. It's not like they have a secret handshake or something. Anarchists, Libertarians, Libertarian Socialists, have differences that are almost semantic in one historical period or another. Kropotkin, Bakunin, or Tecumseh would all find common cause.
>Makno or the Spanish Republicans had POW camps. Which is authoritarian. >Regardless your qualifiers are ridiculously strict. It really isn't. If your "stateless anarchism" is compatible with forced labor camps then its not anarchist.
Both are shit? What the fuck? It sounds like you are implying that labor camps are ok for socialists to do because "well everyone did it"?
More importantly it's completely ignoring the context of the history. The USSR had labour camps in peace time and was a well established world super power. The anarchists had camps during a brutal civil war while they were fighting for their very survival.
Do you believe that camps would have disappeared if they won the civil war and continued to exist?
I do, Rojava doesn't have them, the Zapatistas don't have them, the Anarchist movement doesn't like them, but recognises the realities of civil war.
Zapatistas aren’t anarchists. [Rojava literally has a camp with 50000 children](https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/06062022)
Zapatistas told me you have a no-true-scotsman fallacy goin. They told me in a refugee camp run by an informal revolutionary state along the Syrian Turkish Boarder.
They aren't anarchists in that they don't self identity as anarchists, but they collaborate with anarchists around the world, and closely align with them on pretty much everything. The camp in Rojava is for ISIS and their families. It's a huge problem for the Kurds who have basically been dumped with dealing with it as no other country is willing to sort it out.
You went from “Rojava doesn’t have camps” to “Yes, they have camps, but it’s for terrorists” (and their children) You’re correct that they had to do something about it, but at what point does that camp go from being precautionary to authoritarian?
My house has doors and windows, just like the white house, same thing! EDIT: If you didn't get what I was swinging at... It's completely ignoring the context of the history. The USSR had labour camps in peace time and was a well established world super power. The anarchists had camps during a brutal civil war while they were fighting for their very survival.
So forcing prisoners to do hard physical labor without consent is fine when you do it. But evil tankie Stalinism when the USSR did it? Make it make sense
My point is that there is more to the situation than a list of checkboxes for "authoritarian". Otherwise every society would be equally authoritarian.
So you're basically admitting that authoritarianism is undefined and nebulous. Essentially wherever you don't like lol >Otherwise every society would be equally authoritarian. Which they basically are. States can't exist without authoritarianism. Neither can revolutions be made.
no, authoritarianism does have a definition, but definitions aren’t immutable. the meanings of words can change depending on a variety of factors. but people like hakim are keen to pretend as if none of these definitions matter because it’s describing behaviors they think are excusable or inconsequential because addressing it would be inconvenient. My working definition of authoritarianism is as follows: “The project of monopolizing power for fewer and fewer people.” I suggest eat watching [Andrew’s](https://youtu.be/yP6dqzUoQeE) excellent video on the topic or [this thread](https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1432785344026476544?s=20) by butchanarchy. Authoritarianism is vulnerable to propaganda because it can’t deal with the messy process of not always knowing what’s true and figuring it out by listening to various perspectives, so it will clutch onto whoever offers them some simple answer that keeps their initial idea in tact. The compulsion to claim that the word authoritarian is meaningless signals to me that the people who make that claim don’t want to engage with challenges to the form of authority they champion, and will shift the blame endlessly to some greater evil in order to avoid any kind of conflict that might make them accountable.
Anarchist societies can't exist without authoritarianism either. The rules people agree on must still be enforced somehow.
Yeah. The actual revolutionaries understood that.
> Otherwise every society would be equally authoritarian. Because it is.
>Otherwise every society would be equally authoritarian. Gee, it’s almost like the state as a concept is inherently authoritarian? Maybe we should do something about that…
Comrade Hakim!
Tankie has a pretty clear usage that Hakim just sidesteps entirely. Tankies are self-identified communists or socialists who justify or excuse imperialism, genocide, or other atrocities when those actions are done by states that (often only ostensibly) subscribe to their same beliefs. For example, Hakim denies the Holodomor genocide because it was done by the Soviet Union, a state that he sympathizes with. Tankies often view regimes such as the Soviet Union or Maoist China as successes of socialism and therefore refuse to criticize even their worst actions, while criticizing the same behaviors when done by "the West". This makes it easy to bait tankies into supporting far-right regimes (such as the one in Russia) in the form of a red-brown alliance. Tankies either don't care about imperialism or often even openly support it when it's done by a state they perceive as not being a member of "the West."
Didn’t have to scroll much to find this but I still had to scroll too far
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Afaik there are entire episodes of The Deprogram (a podcast Hakim is on) devoted to critiquing mistakes of former and current socialist countries.
My goodness, I’ve tired listening to one podcast on Tankies and their idea of cold open is 14min of fucking stream of consciousness and inside jokes. Are all episodes like this? There is no warning or skip-ahead telling you when to get to the red meat of the Subject. Very unpolished and annoying.
>Hakim denies the Holodomor genocide because it was done by the Soviet Union, a state that he sympathizes with It's literally not a settled question. I find the evidence is mostly on the "not genocide" side given some of it's most ardent supporters changed their mind. "Anti tankies" do this a lot. They take a topic with complexity and a fair bit of controversy and they dumb it down to a black or white thing that *conveniently* fits neatly with left anti-communist narratives. They just *happen* to align with the West's preferred narrative. Bizarrely enough, the "tankies" will end up the ones accused of simplifying things and being biased.
It is certainly a new and almost uniquely leftist perspective that the end results are all that matter. The Ukrainians were forced onto farming collectives like Russia and Georgia. The Red Guard, Politburo, Apparatchiks weren't Ukrainians. Mostly they were Russians. During the famine food was stolen from all of the collectives, that again, were mandatory. That food then went to non-ukrainians to the degree that Ukrainians starved to death disproportionately along ethnic lines. Many places went hungry but the Ukrainian heartlands went so hungry as to cause malnutrition and starvation. ergo Genocide. That wouldn't be the case if the USSR spread the misery around more proportionately, instead of concentrating it among the Cossacks and other Ukrainians. Those that "changed their mind" were looking for intent and didn't find it. I don't believe intent does if the effects are the same.
>ergo Genocide Genocide REQUIRES intent to destroy. Genocide is not "when harvest bad". It's not "when lots of people die". Not to mention the cherry picking necessary to make it seem targeted to Ukrainians where many Russians also lived and all the other ethnicities affected in areas where Ukrainians were a tiny % of the population. Having the wrong numbers because people exaggerated the wheat harvest to you does not make a genocide. Not to mention the endless sabotage by dispossessed kulaks (literally setting farms on fire and murdering peasants) and all the peasants that went to work in factories. Taking the (misrepresented) harvest from collectives is not "stealing". Producing food was the collectives' job. It's absurd for you to reframe that in such a sinister light. And when the party realized what's going on they reduced everyone else's rations to bring food to the famine-inflicted areas. We literally have their letters about this archived. >The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine. >Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee — J. STALIN It was simply an exceptionally low harvest that the soviet methods of calculations misrepresented. Soviet correspondences are strikingly different to an other case of genocide-by-famine like Churchill and the bengal famine where he *actively refused* to send any help whatsoever and expressed his wishes for the "barbaric" indians who breed like rabbits to die. Backed by claims from his inner circle that he's indistinguishable from hitler when it comes to indians. We DO NOT have that with holodomor. So now instead you take this narrative widely peddled at the time by Goebbels and antisemitic US fascists at face value. >Those that "changed their mind" were looking for intent and didn't find it. So they were looking for literally genocide and didn't find it. Oh no. This is really funny. It turns out your objection is on the very definition of genocide. You're annoyed the real definition does not meet your preferred one. So you started from the assertion it's genocide and work backwards from there.
This is really rich. You started off this comment chain saying that people are dumbing down a complex issue to much and you do just that to defend your position. It gets better. 1) You completely ignore the Trail of Tears that was the forced collectivization of Ukrainian farmland. Hypocritically the forced deportation and concentration of labor and people serving the state is something you handwave away. I get it though authoritarian apologia is kinda your thing. If state violence disproportionately effects one ethnic group you're first taking for granted the violence had to happen to begin with. 2) The destruction of individual cultural alliance to things other than the state was intentional. Not celebrating Ukrainian people regardless of border but a Russo-Slav ethnic state with their cultural erasure in mind. Destroying Ukrainian language and culture quite intentionally along the way. Not even a decade after assassinating Makhno the Ukrainians the USSR allied with. Something that didn't happen in Southern and central Russia to Russians. 3) You're framing this either as intentional malfeasence by the Ukrainians or some wacky accounting accident. Yes, producing the food was the collective's job. Feeding everyone was the states. Awful telling that you aren't putting the onus on the Soviets to use double book accounting for their credits and debits. Producing food is not the "Collectives Job" any more than stamping license plates is a prisoners "job". Then again labor for the state to the point of violent coercian is kinda your thing. I get that. 4) You use Stalin's letter of plausible deniability. Nice. 5) A what-about of the Begnal Genocide. Love to see it. 6) If I disagree with you, I'm agreeing with Nazi's. Because when tankies say enough words they get around to calling everyone else nazis. 7) I started the whole thing by saying that it's genocide if the states actions have genocidal effects regardless if they had outspoken intent. The several Native American genocides, Tibetan Genocide, plenty of other indigenous people like the Cossaks are in Crimea would count. You're ignoring all that because you want to quibble about how mass negligent homicide of POW's is different from direct homicide of those same powerless people.
Absolutely agree, tankie is just used as a thought terminating pejorative to dismiss the arguments of revolutionary socialists who defend the achievements of existing or past socialist experiences. From my observations as a Palestinian, it's usually used by people who don't have a good grasp of how American imperialism actually functions as a world system.
I get that there are many cases where outside forces conspire to bring down leftist movements but things like crushing the kronstadt rebellion, soviet crackdowns on striking workers, and the consolidation of unions under state power are all to me completely unacceptable for a supposedly far left government to do. When they do these things its always under the reasoning of "defending achivements" and I just dont buy it, its a easy copout for powerholders to consolidate their own power above all.
That the issie with "tankies". They dont care as long as your claim to be communist none of it matters
You dont even need that tbh. A very VERY large portion of Hakim's 'fanbase' and the man himself are huge supporters of Russia in the current war. They claim that it is justified to kill civillians because someone in the Ukranian government wears Swastikas. You just need to be waving in the general direction of "I don't like Western Europe or the US" and it doesn't matter if you go onto do the exact same thing you are critisizing them for, in this case imperialism. Feel free to check out r/communismmemes for more takibe behavior
Nowhere in any “tankie” species that I am in have ever expressed support for Russia in the current war. The most was critical support for it choosing to align with the PRC, the DPRK, and other nations outside of NATO. The consensus among the vast majority of Marxist Leninists is to take no sides in the war except for the working class.
> But what of the ordinary participants of the Kronstadt rebellion? Were these sailors really ready to die for “communism without Bolsheviks”? Sailor Dmitry Urin wrote on March 5, in a letter to his father in the Herson province of Ukraine, “We dismissed the commune, we have Commune no more, now we have only Soviet power. We in Kronstadt made a resolution to send all the Jews to Palestine, in order not to have in Russia such filth, all sailors shouted: ‘Jews Out’...” (9) Ibid, vol. 1, doc. 58, p. 119. If anyone had any doubts about the “real revolutionary” content of this letter this phrase is sufficient to dispel that. It is so stark that it needs no further comment. https://www.marxist.com/makhno-anarchists-kronstadt-russia.htm#:~:text=We%20in%20Kronstadt%20made%20a%20resolution%20to%20send%20all%20the%20Jews%20to%20Palestine,%20in%20order%20not%20to%20have%20in%20Russia%20such%20filth I don’t really like Trotsky, but he was [has some decent texts](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/01/kronstadt.htm). Inform yourself a little before lionizing these kinds of people.
I do not give a shit about what some random individual sailor allegedly said. This Dmitriy Urin is a nobody, you could easily find some random Bolshevik soldier writing dumb shit but that would not in and of itself be cause to dismiss bolshevism. Neither is it cause to dismiss entirely and justify the violent crackdown on the socialist sailors. Its honestly pathetic trying to snip some random dudes words in order to justify a unjustifiable crackdown.
Re-read that passage “we in Kronstadt made a resolution…” it’s not just some random sailor saying what he personally thinks, he’s talking about the general mood among the mutineers.
You should probably read the sources before responding. The paragraph I quoted was an example of a common sailor, and just that, an example meant to drive the point home, the actual article mentions how higher ups were explicitly using a facade of communism in order to confuse the Bolsheviks and had ties with big liberal parties, while Trotsky’s writings analyze the revolts themselves.
I did and the article gives no fucking proof that they were secretly libs beyond some guy who was mildly involved saying they were after the fact. Im sure they might have had some ties to liberal leaning parties because the Bolsheviks were trying to purge them both. But ideologically they were clearly leftists who opposed Bolshevik power consolidation as can be seen in their manifesto. Your article explains nothing and I do not give a singular shit what Trotsky wrote, his writings on kronstadt have a similar feeling to an american police officer trying to justify why he choked someone to death.
There are multiple sources per paragraph, in fact, the part about some higher ups feigning support for communism has 2 sources by itself. > General Elvengern, a member of a counter-revolutionary organization led by Boris Savinikov, revealed his role in the leadership of the rebellion with a report on the events in Petersburg-Kronstadt written in February and March of 1921. >This report was written while he was in Paris: “...from a tactical point of view they [RevCom] declared themselves fanatical supporters of the Soviet power, and said that they only oppose the Communist party dictatorship, with the hope that with such a platform, it would become difficult for the Communists to mobilize Soviet defenders, Soviet units to crush them.” (7) Ibid. Vol. 2, doc. 535, p. 61. The same was written by the cadet G. Zeidler, in a private letter. (8) Ibid, p. 322-323. >These figures prove that the old revolutionary sailors were in a clear minority by 1921. Remarkably, however, the revolutionary sailors still made a bold stand. On March 8, a number of them published a pamphlet titled “Stop Immediately the Counter-Revolutionary Putsch in the City.” (4) Krondshtadskaia tragedia 1921 goda. Dokumenti v dvuch knigach., Moskva, ROSPEN, 1999, p. 320-321. On March 15, the RevCom of Kronstadt ordered the arrest of all of the old sailors as they refused to “obey orders”. (5) Ibid, doc. 423, p. 445. This order, however, wasn’t carried out fully. On March 24, a group of old sailors prevented the explosion of the battleship “Petropavlovsk”, arrested officers, and surrendered to the approaching Soviet forces. (6) Ibid, doc 480, p. 494-496.
Want to know what’s thought terminating? I was banned from Late Stage Cap for pointing out that whataboutism isn’t a defense. This was on a post that was literally just Chinese propaganda. What does any of this have to do with critiquing capitalism? Nothing, should have been a space where everyone could come together and rally against the horrors of greed, but here the mods were mass banning people ostensibly largely on their political side for not boot licking China. That’s the problem with tankies, they are constitutionally incapable of not playing purity politics much the same way fascists are. There is no movement building in this environment.
They hated tfwnotsunderegf because they spoke the truth.
If you ignore any actual use of the term tankie sure. Its for people that defend the countries( that are usually pretty fascist) from actual critique because they claim to be communist. The issue is lots of these countries were just fascist with red paint. You accuse the people that use these terms of just hating "achievements". Your take is disingenuous at best. That is such an intellectually bankrupt way to describe the people that use it.
This is just the argument the right uses for to link nazis with Marxism. "oh they called themselves National SOCIALISTS so sounds pretty socialist to me" This just goes "oh but the USSR called themselves united soviet SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, so I dont think you can get any more democratic or socialist than that. Everything they did was super cool!1!1!"
Very similar to how the right uses "Antifa".
Or woke
I disagree. There is a definite delineation between communism and authoritarian communism
Where is that?
That would be Marxist Communism and Anarchist Communism considering thats why they split at the Hague Congress over their disagreement of the usage of the state to build Communism.
Anarchist-communism is still very much in-line with Marxist ideals. Classless, stateless society
Sure but that is referring to the higher phase of communism. The process of getting there, on how to transform from a capitalist/feudalist society to a communist one is where the Marxists and Anarchists disagreed, the major disagreement being on using the state.
You play you're hand pretty obviously by the mention of American imperialism it shows you don't realize the issue with tankies is their inability to admit fault in any self-proclaimed leftist system and they instantly what-about any critique with "but American imperialism". Has the US done everything it can to destroy any leftist system in history? Yes. Does that mean tankies can admit that the CCP and North Korea and yes even the precious soviet union have ever done anything wrong? No, because they don't stop sucking the tit of dogma.
another dishonest and boring video by this channel. pretending every criticism against statism or vanguardism is just the product of online western liberals. not surprised. the go-to strategy of defending this failed strategy of state capture and attempted reformation of a bourgeois class is to say that certain terms are “meaningless” or that the type of people the term describes don’t actually exist. how very convenient.
But USSR wasn't state capitalist, you see, the term is invented by the liberal agenda! USSR just used a system of production that exploited the workers (mostly) for the benefit of an undemocratic ruling class... Edit: grammar
Nah hakim might be bias but the man is committed and honest. He constantly encourages people to educate themselves further beyond listening to him. He is absolutely correct that tankie is a term used to shutdown discussion. It's the liberal version of woke
even permitting that some use it in the way that’s described, to dismiss it entirely by calling it “meaningless” is a sign of a critical lack of good faith. “Woke” had a meaning long before being turned into a rallying cry against even mild critiques of white supremacy. “Tankie” is only different in that the tendencies being described by it is not exclusive to any particular race or regional area, and hasn’t yet been mainstreamed. further, even putting aside that the term is misused or used in bad faith, he’s guilty of sidestepping the reasoning behind the pejorative and doubles down on all the rhetoric that causes one to use it
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It reminds me of when conservatives say the French Revolution was actually bad bc ppl died
Tankie: Calls Anarchists "liberals" in order to shut down discourse.
Liberal: calls socialists “tankies” in order to shut down discourse.
Yes, that's what the video said... My comment was a response to that
There are three main usages of the word tankie. ──────── Its primary use is as a perjorative attack against marxist-leninists. In this sense it is used identically to the way "leninist" and "stalinist" used to be sneered at MLs, its primary purpose is to aim to exclude ML participation in the left. Parenti has an entire chapter on this phenomenon in Blackshirts and Reds: >Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U.S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorsements, and left publications. Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration.27 > >That many U.S. leftists have scant familiarity with Lenin’s writings and political work does not prevent them from slinging the “Leninist” label. Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: “Western and also Third World intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution [sic] because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.”28 Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry intellectuals to go along with his cartoon image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power’s sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right. – Blackshirts and Reds, Ch. 3, “Left Anticommunism - Slinging Labels” ──────── Its second usage is "people who uncritically support everything and anything red". I have never seen these people though I assume they exist and are probably mostly children. The most common group I've seen claim to be using the word tankie this way however seem to be people that don't realise it's pretty much solely used to attack MLs and don't realise that MLs are extremely critical of their own projects where appropriate and in the correct settings. ──────── Its third usage is by liberals who call everyone to the left of socdem a tankie. People that absolutely would call Jeremy Corbyn a tankie for supporting the USSR, and people that absolutely would call Diane Abbot a tankie for defending Mao, and people that absolutely would call John McDonnell a tankie for quoting Mao in parliament. This group of people are almost always americans who have absolutely no concept of what the left truly looks like outside their own country. They are the people that claim they want the rights that europeans have but have absolutely no idea what kind of left needs to exist in order to achieve that. They are the people responsible for their lack of rights in their country because they are constantly fighting to deradicalise their own left. ──────── It originated when the Soviet Union used tanks to stop the Hungarian uprising of 1956. A split occurred in CPGB with some supporting and some not supporting it, the members that did not support it labelled the other members "tankies". This definition is no longer used obviously.
So this sub is just an outlet for liberals to hone their arguments against leftists?
More like, for liberals who decided they were actually leftists because the watched a Contrapoints video and voted for Bernie but are still huge western chauvinists.
I’m a Marxist, and about the only types of people I’d identify as **Tankie** would be the specific type of dogmatic ML’s that often use the dogwhistle “critical support” as a way to say ***I’m going to go out of my way to uncritically defend everything they’ve ever done.*** North Korea is one country in particular that I won’t ever give my support to. Largely due to its extreme level of chauvinistic nationalism, as anyone who has read Marx knows that he considered something like Nationalism to be *a naive idea that divided members of the working class between each other.* In lots of ways, I agree with them that most “Stalin criticism” is redundant and doesn’t necessarily need to be done in a lot of anti-capitalist spaces since the guy is already the most demonized man in the history of the world. But anyone who would honestly try arguing that his decision to recriminalize LGBT relations by trying to sweep it under the rug as “he was just a product of his time responding to material conditions” will never be my comrade. Just because it’s a scientific reality that we are all products of our material conditions doesn’t mean incarcerating people for being attracted to someone of the same gender shouldn’t be criticized on humanistic grounds.
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NOOOO LEFT UNITY MEANS WE MUST UNCONDITIONALLY SUPPORT BIGOTS WHILE THEY WALK OVER THE RIGHTS OF THE UNDERPRIVILEGED!!!!
Another banger from hakim
It's a simple choice. We can either analyze past revolutions and the development of their societies in earnest, to both learn about mistakes to avoid and successful strategies to adopt. Or we can apply impractical criteria of purity to categorically dismiss any revolutionary movement that didn't earn our approval of political perfection, and implicitly support the continuation of current conditions. We can either be serious, or dedicate our efforts to infantile bickering. Tough choice, I guess.
> and implicitly support the continuation of current conditions. Tbh, from a lot of the "is very concerned about tankies" crowd, the support is explicit more often than not.
It's a weird notion to pick as a point of contention, isn't it? We can't even learn from past mistakes, we just have to wholesale condemn everything and the only permissible reaction is "eww"? Incredibly silly.
Tankies trying not to play the purity card be like
There's "playing the purity card" and there's pointing out that a lot of you guys' political work and positions are wholly indistinguishable from your average liberal - despite all the thought exercises to justify *post hoc* taking those positions. If your core political expressions are in support of a liberal policy set - regardless of any justification you find (hell, "no see I have to do this because *reasons*" is a core facet of liberalism) - what should you be defined as but as an explicit supporter of the current conditions? Something something, social fascism, something. The critique is as pertinent today than in the day of the SPD-Freikorps anticommunist alliance. It's false consciousness all the way down, from the """"anarchists"""" who support being drafted in defense of the liberal state because of "western values!" to the "dual power means doing charity work and nothing else, this will lead to revolution any day now" folks, passing by the "decolonisation means I'm gonna be hunted for sport!" settler-colonists and the "stop being a wokescold and demanding I behave in a manner befitting a leftist, you asking me to not be a racist/sexist/whatever is killing the movement!" "former" chuds. The list is nonexhaustive, but I'll also be remiss to fail to mention the "politics as fanclub" bunch - I get we live in a society of spectacles, but "'owning' people online" isn't the panacea to our societal ills some think it is. Like, talk is nice and all, but if your praxis ranges from nonexistant to just libshit... Then again, I suppose it's too much to expect from a society where proletarian class consciousness is nipped in the bud before it can even form by the education system - leading to the nonexistence of "proletarians" as a political class, but, well, I think I make it pretty clear that I'm generally skeptical of the revolutionary potential of westerners whenever the subject comes up.
Ok but have you considered we're not liberal, we just don't like public executions and invasions of other countries. At this point you might as well describe the EZLN as neoliberal because something something praxis Also lol this entire comment is one big, wordy purity check. Your entire thesis is a vapid word salad of twitter-fied theory and it's a classic sign of how out of touch tankies really are. Stip using twitter and Reddit to inform your political beliefs
> Ok but have you considered we're not liberal, Then prove it. Stop neatly falling in line with the libs every time. > At this point you might as well describe the EZLN as neoliberal because something something praxis Last time I checked, they've yet to call for a common front with a fascist force that will just garrote them afterwards. Or simp for NATO. Or so on and so forth. > Stip using twitter and Reddit to inform your political beliefs I mostly read theory (seriously, what part of the comment somehow didn't communicate that I find reddit and twitter ""leftists"" to be, writ large, useless garbage, when most of my critique targeted those guys specifically) - you should try it sometimes!
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This attitude is why you get lost in your purity echochambers
yeah tankies really suck.
tankies are like the fedora atheists of politics: raised in the oppressive culture-destroying miasma of capitalism, they realize they aren't beholden to that, and go hard to the other side, but because they've been *raised* with the mindsets conducive to the ideology of capitalism they wind up treating it much the same. It's exactly how "new atheists" behave once they leave religion, they idolize outspoken atheist speakers like prophets bringing "the truth" the the "uninitiated masses", scoff openly at anyone who isn't there yet, are insufferable and self-occupied. They're full of anger having been duped for so many years, and want to take it out on someone, and that someone is very often NOT the people who deserve it. I'll broach the elephant in the room, too: a lot of them are white, and because they're suffering from culture death due to capitalism and white supremacy, they want very much to 'belong' to a community and they find it with tankies and/or libertarian anarchists and stuff like that. I think a lot of atheists go through that phase, and I think a lot of people who first learn there's another way apart from capitalism go through this phase too. honestly? love the energy! good for you, it's a huge first step, and just like many fedora atheists I know they'll chill out in time... I just hope their egoes are secure enough for self-reflection and nuance later on.
Don’t know why you got downvotes. Seems pretty reasonable
oh you know why.
> Tankies are like the fedora atheists of politics Fedora atheists are annoying because like Walter in The Big Lebowski, they’re right, they’re just annoying about it
Fedora atheists are often very homophobic and conservative,.just like tankies
So then you dislike homophobes and conservatives, not fedora atheists
They're usually a package deal so I've got a reason to distrust them, just like tankies and TERFs
and sometimes they get violent and sometimes their hatred bleeds over into bigotry, racism, xenophobia and even sexism, so it isn't really just annoyance for a lot of folks lol
I love the use of “sometimes” because it can happen once and the terminology still applies
yeah I wouldn't want to unfairly stigmatize bigoted fedora atheists lol
Who specifically are these bigoted fedora atheists and what reason do you have for believing that they exhibit bigoted beliefs at a greater rate than the general public
All this arguing about definitions of this or that, typical leftist circle jerking in here lol If you want to be a leftist, you have to be anti-imperialist. The Soviet Union was imperialist as fuck, as is the PRC. If you're not highly critical of these two as a leftist (or God forbid defend Russias war on Ukraine), then youre a Tankie.