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Tankies pretend they're democratic
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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To be fair, the community depicted in the show is the communist Utopia that Marx envisioned. The end goal of communism has always essentially been a collection of autonomous, democratic communities.
Where "Tankies" generally go awry is the handwaving away of all the mass murder and totalitarian terror that occured when Lenin, Stalin and Mao had a crack at it.
The problem is not the communist utopia as envisioned by Marx, the problem is that the way to get to it on a large scale, which was also envisioned by Marx and implemented in every single so-called "Communist" nation is through the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat, which is definitelly not Democratic.
Unsurprisingly in practice every single so-called "Communist" nation out there got stuck at the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat stage: not a single one ever reached the communist utopia stage (even though they all call themselves "Communist"), they all remain authoritarian and all of them essentially just changed to way the local elites are chosen from one based on wealth to one based on Party Membership and connections.
Tankies aren't really communists (of the kind that supports a system were everybody has the same), rather they're Communists (tribalists in one or other of groups associated with those countries which call themselves Communists but in fact got stuck in the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat stage of the path to the communist utopia from were they just drifted backward to having elites just like the rest of the dictatorships out there).
This is why Tankies have a hard-on for any the very hierarchical structure of authoritarianism and a "might makes right" conduct in politics - the ideologies they follow with tribalist blindness are all heavilly subverted versions of the "dream" with layers upon layers of justifications and slogans built over decades (in some case more than a century) to excuse, obfuscate or justify the many and very deep ways in which the countries that promote those ideologies deviate from the utopia that they claim to represent.
Or to put things another way, they're Nazis with a different set of slogans.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as envisioned by Marx, is not a literal dictatorship; it is meant to be democratic.
I've always thought Dictatorship BY the Proletariat gave a better impression of what the statement actually tried to say. From what i understood of it, its supposed to be that the rules are made by the Proles (working population) rather than the "upper classes".
"Democracy of the Proletariat" would be the most accurate descriptor, but no one ever accused 19th century writers of not being melodramatic enough.
Well, I suppose the Confiscation Of The Means Of Production could happen by majority vote if it was possible to get most people to agree to it ...
That said, I know of not a single example out the were the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat wasn't done by force, either at first or eventually.
I mean, every revolution is done by force, including democratic ones. Most successful communist revolutions were backed by the considerable resources of the Soviet Union, which put special emphasis on destroying all democratic-left opposition.
Revolutions where power gets centralized for long enough suffer from the problem that every asshole in the land now knows were to go to for maximum personal upsides (and there are lots of them with lots of different techniques and some are even smarter than the top revolutionary idealists, so you can't stop them all) and trying to create an utopia against natural human tendency is one of those cases where power has to be centralized for an infinite amount of time, so it will most assuredly end up corrupted no matter how pure the intentions of the original revolutionaries.
In the real world with real people even the most honest of idealists will end up overrun by the assholes if they've created and put themselves on a nexus of power. This is actually IMHO why Democracies have the concept of the 3 independent pillars (Judicial, Legislative, Press) - they're meant to be separate nexus of power watching each other - and even then just look around to how deeply subverted that stuff has been all over the World in supposed democratic nations thanks to how Capitalism makes sure Money is the 4th power, strong enough to overtly buy the Press and also to "buy" members of the Legislative and Judiciary.
Seizing the means of production and the dictatorship of the proletariat are totally different concepts, though.
Flipping through the Communist Manifesto for a few choice words and then using them totally wrong isn't really bolstering your case.
An important place these countries fucked up is including nationalism in their attempt.
Everyone's the same and has equal rights but boo foreigners and anyone who's different.
I suppose if the USSR had really committed to communism they'd have been perfectly all right with capitalism, because it's just how they want to do things.