Na, this shit annoys me so much…
Tankies AREN’T communists.
The core of communism is having a stateless, classless, moneyless society.
None of them want that, nor did any of the states they support achieve it.
What they are is authoritarian bootlickers (which by definition is a concept that cannot coexist with communism) LARPING as communists to try and gain support and with it power for themselves and their authoritarian ways.
Tankies love to whine about how calling them that gives communism a bad name, but it isn’t us calling them what they are which does that, it’s their insistence of co-opting and hiding behind communism in the same way Xi does, and in the same way Hitler did with socialism (and even in the same way western nations co-opt the idea of democracy, or worse socialised democracy, to hide the fact that they are oligarchies) that is what gives communism its bad name (along with McCarthyism of course, but at least they’re not trying to claim they are the thing they behave antithetically to)
amen. Socialism by definition requires the workers to own the means of production, and yet all the states they support again and again suppress unions and democracy. Rather tired of being associated with them just because people are confused about most political terms
Yup.
I’ve had piles of tankies try to convince me that the workers in China are in fact the ones in control of the government (no mention of the means of production though 🤔), and that shit like there being over 90 million members of the party is evidence of that (rather than of oh, I donno, a dictatorship?)…
It’s the oldest trick in the fascist book, hell, the father of fascism himself made the exact same move - started on the left, then co-opted and distorted its ideas to gain power for himself and his in group, and it’s their favourite trick because it fucking works, because as a society we have been indoctrinated by those in power for a good couple of thousands of years that we NEED someone in power to survive, which again, is completely antithetical to actual leftist ideas (and human nature).
It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerously effective.
Technically, a sufficiently democratic state would make the workers indirectly in control (or directly in a direct democracy) if the businesses are state owned. Would make them socialist however and not communist, but that might be a bit pedantic.
Technically, it just leads to corporate capture of the state.
You are using the term technically incorrectly :P
I’ve had piles of tankies try to convince me that the workers in China are in fact the ones in control of the government (no mention of the means of production though 🤔),
I was referring to this. If the workers in china were actually in control of the government (which they aren’t), and the businesses were controlled by the state (which quite a few of them are, but not all), then that would be a form of socialism.
As it stands however it’s a capitalist oligarchy.
I would also like to say that I’m not arguing for this specific implementation of socialism, I’m elaborating on what is required for socialism in reference to how a tankie might deluded themselves into thinking that china is communist.
Technically, and in theory maybe, and even then only if the majority of business are actually owned by the state, but not in reality, and definitely not in China (or NK, or the USSR, or anywhere else claiming to be socialist, never mind communist) lol
They got the idea that unions don’t exist under communism, but they glossed over the fact that that is because you don’t need workers to form a block against capital when there is no capital.
The soviet union had unions or just the one involuntary one if I remember correctly, but since it was essentially controlled by the state it wasn’t all that powerful. Cuba today does the same thing.
Should be noted that the soviet union was neither fascist nor communist. Fascism is a form of capitalism, and while many “communist states” (such as china) are capitalist, the SU had a planned economy.
I had one tankie try to convince me that since there was some limited workplace democracy in the SU this meant that workplaces were democratic, but if that is all that is required then I’m happy to announce that plenty of liberal democracies today are socialist.
Edit: oh woops the fascism vs planned economy thing was intended for another comment
The Soviet Union, rather than being just a planned economy, was an empire. It was a Russian empire that used Marxism as a front for its imperialist actions.
It certainly did a bunch of imperialism, yeah
It’s more than something they did; it’s central to understanding how their economy functioned. With no imperialism, their controlled markets wouldn’t succeed. The exertion of state violence on member states for the benefit of Russians wasn’t a bug or inefficiency, but a feature.
The core of communism is having a stateless, classless, moneyless society.
None of them want that, nor did any of the states they support achieve it.
PREACH.
I’ve had to explain this one to some friends and family.
North Korea calls themselves a democracy. But we can all agree that when there’s only one motherfucker on the ballot, what you have is NOT a democracy, right? Calling yourself something doesn’t make it true.
So when a country calls themselves communist but has suicide nets on their fucking factories, the same shit applies. Communism has a definition, and a society can fail to meet that definition while still claiming to be communist.
These are cults of personality which revolve around dead men and their supposed successors, ripe for manipulation.
I think it was Frank Herbert who stated that he wrote the Dune series as a cautionary tale against charismatic leaders.
I agree with you about the cult of personality, but they definitely don’t just stick to dead men (I’ve seen not only defence of Xi, but of the Kims, too, it’s obscene).
I’m not actually in to Dune, never watched any of it, but good to know it has that message, and also explains why it gets a lot of love on lemmy lol
Fuck yes. All of this.
Yeah I have a feeling not being on twitter made me miss a transformation in the definition used in popular discourse. This one aligns with the more traditional definition and I’m not sure it’s useful to have it being used in a totally different way without any signal to differentiate the two.
I have almost never seen anyone use it in a nontraditional sense. What I have seen are people on hexbear and other ML instances try to muddy the water and imply that people will call anyone tankies.
This behavior is very similar to when neonazis accuse others of misusing the terms fascist or Nazi when they are rightly called such.
If you have examples of people using tankie incorrectly, please link. If you don’t have examples, please document the next time you see it happen and correct the person’s misuse.
EDIT: I’ve gone ahead and done some cursory searching in this comment. Please share that comment if this claim is brought up again by someone else. This claim needs to be proven or falsified, as it keeps being brought up over and over without any receipts being shown.
I unblocked.world temporarily for you, searched “tankie,” and sorted by all time.
Second post is someone equivocating not supporting biden with being a tankie.
So is all time top post number 10 and 12
16 is a a highly selective (lots of … to piece it together) mlk quote with a title that seems to imply tankies don’t want a change in the system???
So 4/20 (20% also hehe blaze it) of the all time top posts mentioning “tankie” in the title seem to misuse it. I do think it was more common during election season but that may be because I filtered out .world posts awhile back. Come to think of it my post search count above may be off because I have some words and users blocked, but that would likely make it an underestimate not an over-estimate.
I did my own search to confirm, with no limitation to a single instance, since I don’t exclusively digest lemmy.world. I sorted by hot on the voyager app. I’ve included links for posterity and to avoid this being a they-said-they-said situation.
The majority of comments about tankies appear to come from lemmy.blahaj.zone and sh.itjust.works. all of these are used in a traditional sense. In fact, a good portion of the comments are actually different summarizations of the traditional definition.
The first post I see from lemmy.world mentioning `tankie’ is from @OmegaLemmy 7hours ago on lemmyshitpost, who is calling out another user who chose to partake in whataboutism rather than acknowledge the USSR’s homophobia. This accused user then doubles down and shoots back with “I don’t really care. I think the USSR had a lot of unique positive things”.
The post you mention equivocating being left of Biden as being a tankie; I think I found, pleas confirm for me. That one is from @Octagon9561 11 hours ago on a post in [email protected]. Octagon9561 seems to be claiming to be a victim of anticommunism, or a “red scare” in the comments. a different user essentially says “no, you are just disgusting”. Then we see Octogan9561 state the comment, pairing it with an /s. This reads like a standard tankie again muddying the waters and claiming that people are just throwing the term around willy nilly, which, again, the majority of comments that search has brought up are traditional use.
I also opened search on firefox lemmy.world. here is the first posts shown, yours and mine minimized, sorted by new:
screenshot of lemmy.world when searching for comments with 'tankie' in them
I’ll post this comment now but I’m gonna continue scrolling through search looking for any cases of misuse. I am still seeing that if misuse is happening, it’s rare enough to not hit my feed, and much more rare than individuals claiming people are misusing the term.
EDIT: Alright, now I’ve switched to sort by local new only an lemmy.world, and here are the first 10 links in order:
- @OmegaLemmy calling out USSR apologist
- a comment that got crossfired for containing “tankier” when describing an enemy
- a comment communicating that tankies today run interference on the USSR’s history (this appears to be traditional useage).
- a comment communicating that someone is banned not because they are leftist but because they are a tankie (currently not loading when clicked, might be a removed post so I can’t provide context but I can provide the quote.
They’re blocked because they’re tankies, not because they’re left (I’m not even sure tankies can be considered left wing, as much as they claim to be).
(And others because of trolling; and others yet haven’t been blocked, they defederated themselves.)
- a comment stating that lemmy is two far left and citing that three main instances are all tankies (hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml most likely). This reads as hyperbole to me, though still seems like traditional use of the term still.
- a comment asking why tankies love Musk and others similar to him so much. maybe he knows something about tankies I don’t know, but if he is misusing it, he is misusing it in such an off-base fashion that he’s not even hitting leftists at all. I would say this is the first misuse I’ve seen so far. a comment speculating that tankies go face off in political memes, and citing stethoscope theory (stating tankies have more in common with facists than they do with leftists). Again, traditional meaning is here.
- a comment claiming that lemmy users will just call anyone a tankie willy-nilly.
- a comment stating the ‘genocide joe’ crowd was made up of useful idiots and tankies trying to further destabilize the US government. This again seems to be traditional definition, where tankies are authoritarian apologists, working in against the US in the favor of authoritarian countries.
- a comment calling another user too conservative to fit in “this 'verse”. THey state that lemmy is mostly leftists, socialists, anarchists, and communists, while adding an addendum of “fuck tankies”
- a longer comment about tribalism in politics (I won’t be trying to summarize this one) that asserts in passing that tankies show that parts of the left are just as tribalistic as the right. this again reads as another traditional use of the term tankie.
I am really not seeing your claim holding water currently.
EDIT 2: I searched top of all time for all instances, via lemmy.world again, here’s the screenshot:
screenshot of all time top n lemmy.world
again, this claim is not showing up on lemmy.world. The most recent comment is 2 months ago, and the oldest is from 2 years ago, and having scrolled through all of it, none of these use the term ‘tankie’ nontraditionally. Only a couple could prove otherwise in context, which I am still determining whether they do or do not.
EDIT 3: both comments which were ambiguous about whether they were using tankie traditionally showed that they were in fact using tankie traditionally. not a single comment in the first page all time top on lemmy.world currently has a case of tankie being misused.
EDIT 4: I just did that same search directly on slrpnk.net to see whether the difference in instances was causing a difference in comments - the first page of results are nearly identical:
slrpnk.net search results
You are going to need to actually bring receipts at this point if you want me to believe that there was a widespread issue with people misusing the term ‘tankie’ at some point. EDIT 5: I’ve gone over to posts now and searched all time to find the second, 10th, 12th, and 16th post you mentioned. Here is a screenshot of those results
slrpnk.net post search results
Your reading of the second post seems disingenuous to me. No one actually wanted Biden, but it was an obvious fact that every front of leftist activism would be cracked down on by Trump, so having Biden in office would have at least meant little to no increased difficulty. That is why many leftists still insisted on voting for Biden. It was also a common conspiracy that tankies were pedalling the ‘genocide joe’ narrative explicitly to try and get Trump into office in order to weaken the US, hence the title.
This exact same sentiment is again presented in the 10th post.
The 12th post is not necessarily about the election at all, but instead is strictly an attack on LGBT+ tankies, since tankies were very active during the election cycle. The post is most likely referencing the fact that Stalin walked back rights for homosexuals in 1933. Tankies still often espouse Stalinist apologia, and seemingly want a revolution which would create a Stalinist/ML regime in the US. The post is pointing out the irony of LGBT+ tankies advocating for an authoritarian state that they would very likely be persecuted in.
the 16th post is a truncated quote of MLK, though not that truncated. here is the unabridged quote with context. Overall I agree here: the use of tankie is likely misused here, though again it’s not really attacking leftists, since the message is leftist itself. The only way I can see it making sense with traditional meaning is if the implication is that the authoritarianism in the USSR, Russia, China, and NK created an elite which immense wealth while the rest of the population lived in squalor - I think that is a stretch overall.
You deserve a medal for time and effort invested in debunking tankie claims lol
Hmm I was sorting by top>all time (on voyager as well) and I don’t think the post you mentioned is the same one. Hopefully that means the mis-use is decreasing since the election/pre-election days but it was quite prevalent at one point.
let’s invent a signal
tankies (traditional sense) versus tankies (“i just want to use insults against people to the left of me” sense)
196 and i have literally always used the traditional sense.
For some reason I don’t think that will be catchy enough to spur adoption
doesn’t need adoption just needs to exist for use when needed
I have some thoughts on “private languages” that are probably not appropriate for this context
