Agree with you in general, but I think a lot if people here are not really informed what differences there are materialistic ideologies.
Yes, Stalin bad.
But Guevara is not Stalin.
Marx is not che
Engels is not Marx
China is not communist.
Marxism is not materialism
Socialism is not communism
Also the amount of people bringing the “the 3 times people tried socialism were bad, so the whole ideology must be bad” argument are way to high IMHO.
How many times was capitalism tried? How many times it worked out? Is the USA a “functioning” state with all the oppression, racism, greed, invading other countries out of monetarian interest and environment destruction?
While I agree with you, that oppression is bad, no matter what the oppressor calls himself, we should talk about policies without resorting to dogmas and generalising people in favor of fear the hegemonic class is propagating to stay in power.
Yeah, that’s not the tankies here; these are “North Korea is a great country, actually” tankies.
Also, “anything negative about a communist country is US propaganda”
or “russia is correctly in invading ukraine”
Should probably listen to Blowback Season 3.
Not to say they’re a perfect country but to pretend that anyone in the West can critique them when their material conditions are dictated by the actions of the West is just comical.
If you aren’t a materialist, what are you even doing? As if history happens in the realm of pure thought…
The material conditions forcing North Korea to make work camps
Bugger off, tankie
Something something worlds largest prison population?
Again, it’s not like North Korea is some shining example or anything, but to pretend that the west has the moral high ground here is laughable.
Again, listen to Blowback Season 3, recognize that their country was basically bombed to the stone age Curtis le may style and then maybe reevaluate, just a little, the chauvinist attitude.
DPRK is not a great country but it’s not as if they were ever given a chance either.
The country that holds the record for number and percentage of people in prison is the US. In the US the percentage of black people in prison was higher than the percentage of black people in prison in South Africa during apartheid.
No other western/industrialized (at some stage) nation has had so many political exilees and people whose citizenship was revoked based on “anti-american” views than the US. At some point the general secretary of RCP was in exile in France with his citizenship revoked. So, not all states are equal, and their historic development as modern capitalist states should be studied within context.
When a liberal says “tankie” they mean anything remotely communist-looking. When a leftist says “tankie”, they mean authoritarians who like red flags and self-proclaimed communists who nonetheless support hierarchies and have no plan or intention to bring them down. I think the vast majority of people here knows this already.
I think the vast majority of people here knows this already.
You are way optimistic.
Mostly True, while (at least in my part of the world) there are a lot of people who like red flags but fight against hierarchies.
There are plenty of Marxists and Marxist-derived socialists who aren’t Tankies.
They just don’t make up the majority.
Is the USA a “functioning” state with all the oppression, racism, greed, invading other countries out of monetarian interest and environment destruction?
I hope you realize that this is an incredibly privileged take. The US is rife with issues, but the hardships experienced by the average western citizen doesn’t even compare to the suffering that you would find in, say, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or (to a less extreme extent) Maduro’s Venezuela. To compare what a US citizen deals with on a daily basis due to capitalism to what a citizen of any of those countries had to go through is very reductive and may be perceived as disrespectful to many who had to live those experiences.
The United States, for all it’s faults, is the pretty side of capitalism.you don’t even need to look to the most poor countries to see a standard of living that makes even directly post ww2 soviet union look like a great place.
Well of course the standard of living in the imperial core is higher than the countries it has exploited or destabilized. A lot of American wealth is the fruit of imperialism.
The US is rife with issues, but the hardships experienced by the average western citizen doesn’t even compare to the suffering that you would find in, say, Pol Pot’s Cambodia
I have some fellas from Detroit that would disagree.
My dude you need to stop right now before you end up saying that genocide isn’t that bad. Because that’s what Pol Pot did.
Genocide and pol pot is terrible. So is the USA.
Killing millions and being dysfunctional are in a different realm of terrible. I’m sorry, but how did you come to the conclusion that they are even comparable?
For the person dying of hunger is the same. But yeah, killing millions is bad and is something America NEVER did, right?
hm i wonder if theres any capitalist countries with a history of committing genocide…
I’m all ears. Please give me a list so I can expand my understanding.
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Im not from USA, and from my point of view its mich worse than most other countries (no healthcare, no independend courts, murder sprees in schools nearly every day, opression of half of the world (a half of them just to get more oil to destroy the planet faster), one of 3 of the biggest war-pushers in whole earth, polutes and destroys earth mode than every other country per citizens, etc. PP.)
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capitalism mostly opresses and profits from people out of the country to Funktion. if its Bad in Venezuela or Cuba or Afghanistan, or even early russia, thats at least partly fault of US.
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Venezuela is not communism, China isnt, russia isnt. Most of them have failed, at least partly because caputalist societys atack them and stop a as soon as they are born and they can’t form a stable democracy. Before reading Marx, your bashing of communism isnt worth anything, as you clearly don’t understand what you are talking about. We never had communism, and some would say not even socialism. You sound like you don’t even know the difference, since you keep talking about communism, which is a utopian society after humanity has stopped a lot of bad habits and has learned to live without working against each other in competition and working together instead, which arises maybe after generations of workig socialism, which we clearly didn’t have.
4.you exactly prove my point. I dont agree with tankies either, but the number of people around here blindly copying capitalist propaganda while understanding nothing they bash about is too damm high.
You have a warped view of USA that doesn’t reflect reality. You’re seeing it through the lens of sensationalist news media and hyperventilating social media posts.
The actual reality for Americans is that it’s a vast, beautiful land with an amazing spectrum of various experience. Violent crime is rare overall, and most Americans have never seen or heard any gun violence in person. Health care is available to pretty much everyone, even if you don’t have money. We have state-run healthcare facilities that the poor can make use of like county health departments.
My life in the USA is great, because I don’t live in a big city. I live on my own land, in a nice house that I own, and I’m just middle class income level. It’s pretty easy to accomplish if you choose a low cost of living area rather than a big metropolis or suburb thereof.
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tankies more like no thankies
Based.
They already have lemmygrad.
Honestly, I don’t think we need them here.
the have genzdong in there lol
there’s literally a community called “moretankie196”, they should go infest that one instead
“lemmygrad.ml” was the most infested for the last year, “lemmy.ml” the 2nd worst. They ban for being lucid. “.ml” stands for Marxist Leninist !
actually it was chosen because the .ml domain is ludicrously cheap to get, like to the level of basically being free
Just removed like 40 comments and banned a buncha people.
holy shit they kicked the tankies out of 196
based
Based mod team
based. also hiii moss :3
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I got banned from lemmygrad for saying acab means all cops lmao
they yearn for the glorious people’s boot
500 years ago these mfs were the pro monarchy serfs
Meanwhile anarchist organizing doesn’t have cops, it has Agents of Community Defense who definitely aren’t cops!
I have nothing against anarchists, but you need to see past slogans to be anything but a useful idiot to neoliberals.
I mean any person or entity that enforces oppressive laws is a bastard. The government of China is far from some sort of benevolent state.
This comment section is really something uh
Tankies on their way to explain why teaming up with the Nazis to conquer Poland is actually based and totally in line with Marxist philosophy.
Can you give an actual example?
Can we have something like tankiejerk here? I seriously liked browsing that sub after a bad day with the red fashs.
that sub often tended towards outright anti-leftism
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What are some good actual communist lemmy communities that aren’t supporting the fucking capitalist imperialist russian invasion?
look for anarchists if you desire a classless, stateless, moneyless society.
communism has been coopted by auth apologists infatuated with the color red.
But what if I’m not an anarchist? I like Marx but not Lenin, so I can’t be an ML either.
anarchism acknowledges Marxist theory, but rejects the need for a state/beaurocratic apparatus, as it is considered to be fundamentally oppressive.
the state is an abstraction of capital, and cannot liberate the working class, as it exists to perpetuate its own hegemonic existence, our subjugation.
governance need not be heirarchichal; I promote collective mutual determination as an egalitarian system by which society can organize.
can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools
governance need not be heirarchichal; I promote collective mutual determination as an egalitarian system by which society can organize.
I don’t. I don’t think all hierarchies are unjust, I evaluate them based on their effect on the world. If a hierarchy can solve a problem better, it’s the preferable solution.
Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that other people are. But if you think about it, don’t those people all feel exactly the same way about you?
But what if we all have a different idea of what behaving reasonably means?
Anarchists argue that almost all the anti-social behavior which makes us think it’s necessary to have armies, police, prisons, and governments to control our lives, is actually caused by the systematic inequalities and injustice those armies, police, prisons and governments make possible.
That’s silly. Systemic inequalities don’t make people park their vehicles on the bike path or murder their wife because they think she cheated on them. If anarchism is all about thinking people are angels unless bad, bad oppressive systems make them do evil things they couldn’t do on their own then I don’t think we’ll ever get along. It’s alternate reality and an incredibly naive way of looking at the world and human nature.
Edit: could you kindly not respond to this? I don’t have an option to silence this thread on my end, and don’t want to hear about it any further.
Edit: could you kindly not respond to this? I don’t have an option to silence this thread on my end, and don’t want to hear about it any further.
So I have to ask… Why would you respond and then deny someone the same respect?
anarchism acknowledges Marxist theory, but rejects the need for a state/beaurocratic apparatus, as it is considered to be fundamentally oppressive.
Acknowledges Marxist theory as much as acknowledging Newtonian gravitational theory may be a way to put it. Most of the ones I know either accept Marxist general theory as a whole, non-critically, and the rest are anti-communist/anti-marxist idealists, as much as any fascist would be. Because the true essence and reason for the existence of fascism is anti-communism.
There are many social relations that are oppressive, why limit it to state? Parents are oppressive, teachers, professors, bosses, cops, military higher officers, spouses, parents in law, … prison guards … they are all oppressive. Is it just the state? Is it a different class of people who oppress from those being oppressed?
the state is an abstraction of capital, and cannot liberate the working class, as it exists to perpetuate its own hegemonic existence, our subjugation.
Between the late 1800s and early 1900s the state became an insurer of labor law and justice, the welfare state was born, rights to pension, an 8hr day, sick leave, vacation, overtime pay, were all provided and were promised by the state. So we can say the state backed off and became hostile to capital. Between struggle (labor syndicalism) and the capitalist state there was a dialectic transformation, the social democracy was born. Today the state has absolutely surrendered to the powers of the banking financial world system, made out of a handful of banks and financial institutions mainly based in NY, London, Frankfurt, Paris, maybe even in HKong, Tokyo, to a lesser extent. All states owe to private global markets to such a degree that just one or two clicks down on their bond ratings and they are bankrupt and in the hands of IMF and other bankers to implement the most vicious neo-liberal reform anyone can imagine.
This means that when leninists propose on taking over a state that just means removing it from the markets and sentencing the population to starvation and misery. “Abolishing the state” is just as suicidal. Should there be a thing like political responsibility for genocide proposed by pseudo revolutionaries, who want to enforce their fantasy on people already suffering because of capitalism?
governance need not be heirarchichal; I promote collective mutual determination as an egalitarian system by which society can organize.
As long as you speak of “a system” you imply, like it or not, a centralized system, a system that supervises whether the system is implemented correctly or not. That constitutes an authority. Whether this authority and enforcement is conducted by “anti-authoritarians” who as a minority forced their terms and conditions on a society, we are speaking of a revolutionary vanguard, an authoritarian force over the entire society (under the state and within state borders).
By the way, the collapse of the Syrian state had a gradual effect of Turkey moving sourth, Israel and Libanon moving further east, Iran moving west, I am uncleat of Jordan is taking a piece of the pie, and some Iraqi authorities are eyeballing the Kurdish management of some areas they would like to grub as well. So by abolishing a state these days the remaining states in the globe legitimize the neighbors all grubbing a piece without anyone being a state to protest. Assad’s only friend is too busy fighting the entirety of NATO playing a game on the heads of the residents of ex-Ukraine.
can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools
As long as your focus is to destroy and dismantle instead of constructing an alternative and an escape route from capitalism you will be condemned by history as a force of nothing beneficial to humanity.
As long as you preach -isms- from a high tower looking down on people without ideology, and you refuse to accept that the dialectic between leninism and libertarianism has already materialized, that more than a million people have been living OUTSIDE of capitalism, in autonomous communities, for nearly 30years (this next new year’s eve), decide in their communities EVERYTHING about their own lives, mostly using consensus, and their federation (2 levels) is designed to serve the community not to dictate to the community, you are more authoritarian and stuck up than you really think. Now these people have liberated themselves from capitalism, they live outside it, they are unaffected by it, other by having to fend off some para-military attacks here and there 2-3 times a year, their values and principles are even more strict than the early 1900s CNT constitution, and they laugh really hard and stick a finger up to all revolutionary vanguards, but you keep speaking hypothetically, what if society did this and that and the other thing.
If you want to be heard, you should be looking up to indigenous peasants, farmers, not down. If you want the residents of the favela to follow bureaucrats and academics to social change, you are in worse shape and dillusion than the average tankies. If you want children industrial workers in SE Asia to look up to your ideology and rhetoric, to buy your story, I assure you they think you are dumber than they are.
Who gives a flying ** what “anarchism” acknowledges.
There are an infinite variety of flavors of socialism, at some point you gotta learn to find folks you don’t disagree with on anything too important. In my experience anarchists are generally chill.
finds social media developed by tankies
looks inside
finds tankies
fr I’m down with having a good old purge eventually but noone should be surprised
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When a leftist, or progressive says “tankie” it is different from what the mainstream media perceives. It (tankie) indicates someone who is overzealously supportive of non-Western imperialist countries such as Russia and China and denies their atrocities.
Also, the term developed from the tanks deplored by the user to invade Hungary and denote people who supported such action.
How a lot of you sound
No one is suggesting that the states the authoritarian communists replaced were good or functional, just that they failed to actually uplift and make people’s lives better. There’s nothing to admire about one oppressive state being replaced by another.
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Oh so ‘line go up’ is suddenly a valid way of determining a country’s quality of life now? Guess America must be a paradise then.
Honest question - what’s a tankie? I feel like I’ve seen them mentioned a ton on Lemmy but I’d never heard the term prior to a few days ago. From the image it looks like a maga/skinhead combo?
Tankie was first used for that kind of communist supporter who kept singing Russia’s praises/defending Russia even when Russia was sent 5000 tanks to crush a popular uprising in Czechoslovakia (the “Prague Spring”) on August 20, 1968. Some people just couldn’t accept that a communist country could do something bad, so defended the action.
Nowadays, it’s used to refer to those that are strongly supportive of Russia, completely ignoring the awful things they do. Often these days there’s a lot of anti American bent to it. Like, anything anti America and American “imperialism” must be good - even blatant and awful Russian Imperialism.
These days they calmly explain how Ukraine just needs to come to the table and discuss peace (ignoring that Ukraine wouldn’t exist if they did so) and blame America for the war in Ukraine for… well… they’re America. The people who want war, or are causing the war, are those giving Ukraine weapons - not the country that is literally invading it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Basically, it’s Communists who support authoritarianism.
what is “authoritarianism” to you?
heirarchy in any form
well that’s just childish isn’t it
do you consider that a rebuttal?
yes because it’s not anything intelligent enough to be thoughtfully argued against. a 7 year old could see the holes in such an idea
I oppose one more system of authority than you do, in the interest of ideological consistency, intellectual honesty.
are you taking the position of a literal child?
Originally, it was used to describe communists who followed the party line and supported suppressing Hungarian workers with tanks.
Today it means ultra-authoritarian marxist-leninist.
I mean there is a word for that that’s less derogatory: Stalinist
It’s not entirely the same though. Some of the “tankies” in the West seem to be Maoists more than Stalinists, as far as I can tell. Besides, some (many?) Stalinists also consider the term “Stalinist” derogatory, and prefer to call themselves “Marxist-Leninists”.
genocide denier and hard authoritarian. fash dressed in red, basically.
They’re communists, but not your every day “people should hold the power” communists. More like “tianenmen never happened, and if it did it wasn’t that bad” type
Which makes them no different from the western imperialists they hate so much.
exactly
This post has literally 6 times the comments of the next most-comments post, jesus. Wonder what could have triggered this!
I have always wondered why it always says “Kick _” when she is punching instead of kicking. Lol.