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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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I see just as much if not more complaining about “tankies” as on subs like subredditdrama, it’s not that leftist
I literally saw a guy earlier today in that one large memes thread trying to convince people that Eastern European countries yearn for the USSR days.
Only tankies try to do that lol.
A lot of people there do yearn for the return of the USSR. You can argue about why, but the polling is quite clear that many people miss socialism
"Why don't you ask people from Socialist countries what they thought"?
"Wait, not those people".
I'm commenting in support of the person I'm replying to. I don't understand what you mean by this.
Welp, I'm a dumbass! I apologize, I thought you were doing exactly the opposite, but I see it now.
Text is hard. Sorry.
Text is hard! I should've been clearer!
Where can I see that polling?
https://lemmy.world/comment/1618443
Here’s a link to a comment with some polling
So really not a lot of people, mostly Russians and countries that have strong ties to Russia.
That's what the first source says and as someone already pointed to a more recent polling showing that it's no longer the case for eastern European countries.
Hungary source is an old article and the same recent polling shows otherwise.
Romania source link doesn't even work.
Eastern Germany is a pretty complex and nuanced topic, one that I won't get into so I'll give that one the benefit of the doubt that they actually want soviet socialism back.
Czech source link also doesn't work.
Serbia source literally has the article saying "the Serbian citizens primarily refer to better economic situation and standard of living, but the majority of them would not go back to that period."
And then there's the Russian part, which is completely understandable considering the USSR was just a form of Russian imperialism.
More recent polling shows otherwise:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Pew-Research-Center-Value-of-Europe-report-FINAL-UPDATED.pdf
Russians are dying to get the old gang back together, that's for certain.
I'm not a guy. Hi though.
You are a tankie though.
Depends on the day of the week to be honest. I'm a socdem some days, I'm a demsoc other days, and I'm a revolutionary on others. Right now I'm mainly calling myself a trade unionist, but I won't tell you which union I organise for 😘😘😘
Enjoy the strikes though.
Tankies are a tiny subset of extreme far leftists which even far leftists have a right to despise, though.
if they truly are a "tiny subset" then why even spend the time to complain about them?
Because they're very vocal online, are annoying, and also give actual leftists bad rep. If you're promoting egalitarianism and distributing social power among everyone, you wouldn't like people who support authoritarism to share a label with you.
every state in the world is authortarian
Are you saying this as a retort to me indirectly calling tankies authoritarians? If so, that's pretty rich.
The Soviet Union suppressed people who used Marxist analysis to argue that the higher echelons of the party aparatus had constituted itself as a separate, dominant class that held the ultimate political power, which resulted in a tendency to exert that power undisputed and continued accumulation of privileges. Once enough time had passed, some of the people leading that aparatus decided they wanted an even larger share of the cake, so they decided to drop the pretense, drop the nominal communism and embrace privatisation. When working people tried to oppose that process, the authoritarian state used its repressive forces to protect the ruling class. What is most interesting about this is that you can see similar processes in almost every single country that followed the leninist vanguardist model, ultimately losing any political equality that was initially sought in its revolution, and any self-respecting Marxist should have taken the hint that this makes Leninism and its godchildren a failed avenue for socialism.
To connect this with your not too hidden assertion that "since every state is authoritarian, me supporting authoritarian states is ok": any state and society is going to decide the margins outside of which behavior and politics are not acceptable, but that is absolutely no excuse to give free reign to any government to become as authoritarian as they aim to no matter the cost. When we do that, we come across disgusting situations such as the difficulties for working class Chinese people being unable to self-organize and protect their rights if the local party strongman arbitrarily decides they're too much trouble. Any kind of emancipatory project soon turns crippled under those circumstances, which you could have easily noticed if you weren't drown in liturgy.
https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/
ML states are the only successful socialist states in history to hold out for a significant amount of time against the United States empire. I'm not super attached to the vanguard model myself, but can you show me a single other successful model? I think this quote is quite relevant here:
Authoritarianism under the banner of socialism isn’t success. It’s just a different kind of failure.
Is it better to be too “authoritarian” and protect your revolution, or just let reactionary states destroy your newly formed socialist state, carve up the remains and enjoy the spoils while people suffer?
If you’re authoritarian, who are you protecting? It’s not for the people or the workers, so it’s not a revolttion worth protecting.
How do you personally determine whether a revolution is for the people?
Can you define what you mean by "authoritarian" in a way that doesn't include actions the US does ? What is authority in your mind?
Even in the United States after the revolution they implemented authoritarian measures to ensure the security of their revolution. They sized the land of Loyalists and effectively drove them out if the country. They killed Loyalists, who were their fellow colonists, for their opposition to the revolution. They attempted tirelessly for peaceful transition to independence but the Monarchy refused them and ignored them until they were left with no choice but to begin violent armed revolution. All revolutions are authoritarian in their nature. The American revolutionaries were seizing their power by force and imposing their self actualized authority over the colonies in pursuit of their own economic and social freedoms.
The United States is authoritarian and many of the same ways that socialist states are authoritarian. If you don't believe me, look at the history of the socialist movement in America. Look at what the state was and still is willing to do to its own citizens for criticizing and organizing against the capitalist and imperialist system that the state runs on.
Are you here to tell me that McCarthyism and the red scare were democratic in their execution? That they were in line with the Free Speech and Free Expression ethos the United States projects? They were not times of political democratic freedom. Even in recent times you have leaders of movements critical of the state being killed for their political positions. Students killed during the anti-war movement in the 60s and 70s. Anti-War activists driven out of their employment and careers over their opposition to the state and it's actions in Vietnam.
So what do you call authoritarianism under capitalism then? Democracy??
When did I say the US wasn’t authoritarian? It’s possible for every side to be dickheads.
The compulsion that you feel to distance yourself from past proletarian movements so that your attackers won't associate you with the supposed atrocities of those movements only functions to move you further and further right. It doesn't work because the attackers will do it regardless of how much you moderate yourself. This instinct leads you to not only distance yourself from their own goals, and to condemn your own movement, but to uphold reactionary lies about our movements, sometimes even outdoing those lies by exaggerating them, in order to further emphasize the attempt to distance. It doesn't matter how much we try to twist and turn and distance ourselves from atrocity propaganda, rubbish will be heaped upon the graves of working class leaders.
Functionally all this compulsion does is move you rightwards. You are attempting to make yourself more appealing to the right because you think that doing so will magically make people on the right suddenly like socialist politics. In the meantime they will attack you with every single piece of propaganda regardless, and you will moderate yourself even more. This deradicalises the movement and blunts the radical edge it requires to get things done.
It's exactly the same compulsion that liberals have that has caused them to move further and further right over the decades. Every time they get called a communist by the republicans they desperately try to move rightwards in order to get it to stop happening, it will never stop happening though because it is not said in good faith, and the tactic of accusing them of it works well in moving them right.
Things that are mainstream in British politics would get you called a tankie by american liberals though, because they have no left and have no idea what level of radicalism is required to get welfare and healthcare in europe and then maintain it.
Jeremy Corbyn defends the USSR.
Diane Abbot defended Mao on national tv.
John McDonnell's job is "to overthrow capitalism". Or the time John threw Mao's little red book at Osborne. Etc etc.
Mainstream elected British MPs in Britain's soft left, saying and doing things that have absolutely zero negative effect on anyone's opinion of them in Britain. But anything they believe or say would get them called a tankie by americans. Corbyn's christmas message a couple years ago extolling the virtues of the Black Panthers (an ML party) would send some people here into a fit, especially if they noticed the CCCP figure in the bottom right of the video at 2:10.
We have people like Frankie Boyle on national television funded by the taxpayer saying we should kill all the rich. and making pretty clear tweets about his own political position(before he quit managing the account himself). It's just a completely different environment.
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https://piped.video/kmFGS7TyBPk
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Defending the USSR is indeed tankie shit. If the UK has a problem with communists being represented and taken seriously, they should do something about that
This is why I love the internet, for such takes as "Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the labour party that 40% of people (12.87million) voted for is a tankie".
There certainly are tankies in the labour party and the british hard left. But all of the people above are the soft left, not remotely tankies. The issue is that american libs are so far right that you can't differentiate between the demsocs and those of us that want and support revolution.
With that said if you want to see more communist representation in mainstream britain you'll enjoy learning about the Durham Miner's Gala which I made a short post on after attending the 137th year of it just a couple weeks ago.
You're not getting communists out of mainstream european politics mate, communists built the entire labour movement, trade unionism wouldn't exist without it. Ironically it's also communists building your current american unions such as Amazon's union, you just aren't aware that people like Chris Smalls read Lenin because you're not tuned into the underground american left.
I don't think any of the examples you linked are things which could credibly be called Tankieism in my eyes. Corbin saying that those regimes on balance did more good than harm is not the same as directly defending genocide as some of the programmers of this site do.
I'm a Bernie Sanders democrat and disagree with both the Tankie positions of the programmers and those you link to, but I don't consider both to be examples of Tankieism.
This is literally what all MLs believe. All MLs acknowledge the mistakes of past socialist experiments the people that don't are a literally tiny insignificant number of people inflated into a meme that is used to attack socialism in general. There are only too positions that have been used to create this myth and that is the idea that holodomor was intentional (it absolutely was not) which is used by nitwits to claim a genocide was performed by way of famine, and the xinjiang issues that were inflated into nonsense and then backtracked on by the US state department.
The point generally is that tankie is a nonsense word used to attack the entire left and eliminate nuance. It prevents conversation. It is a thought-terminating word dumped into conversation by everyone that opposes socialism as a means of preventing any and all discussion that might make people think critically or understand any nuance that people in the left actually have.