Tankie doesn’t really mean anything to me anymore. Even self-proclaimed tankies often have trouble defining it in a way that is consistent among leftist groups.
I’m not into that authoritarian stuff. Worshipping a fascist authoritarian state is not a leftist make.
Communism and fascism are entirely different, and conflating the two has roots in Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi Apologia. The Nazis industrialized murder and attempted to colonize the world, the Soviets uplifted the Proletariat and supported national liberation movements such as in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Palestine. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.
What in the everlasting embrace of god. Soviets, who - I’ll admit - simply chose to work people to death painted as the good guys? The same soviets that starved, beaten and let people freeze to death? The same that put people in cattle wagons and rode them out to syberia in nothing more than clothes they had on their backs?
Not my fault people are conflating them
You conflated them, though. It may not be originally your fault, though, that dishonor goes to figures like Joseph Goebbels.
– and they both punch left; exactly as conservatives like to do.
I consider tankies to be on the right end of the socialist spectrum, so when I say it I’m punching right. They’re still comrades even if they are miss guided by state-capitalist governments. Cheers
I love it when people call a transitional economy state capitalist because it betrays a lack of understanding of actually existing capitalism and the role the state plays in it.
I think if you’re comparing “degrees” of left vs right, at that point you’re missing the forest for the trees. Ultimately, Anarchists and Marxists disagree on strategy and end goal, but both oppose Capitalism and Imperialism. At that point, there really isn’t a “more” or “less” left, there’s just differences in analysis and what must be done to get from A to B, as well as what B itself is.
Because the Chinese state has fiat monetary sovereignty, it doesn’t function in the capitalist mode. It has no need to make a profit because it has infinite money[1]. It doesn’t need to extract surplus value from workers to satisfy investors, and it doesn’t even need to break even. The logic of capitalism doesn’t apply.
Truly. Any moderate support for AES? Immediately labeled a tankie, I’ve seen Anarchists and even Liberals labeled a tankie. The term only exists to punch left from the Liberal POV, just like “Woke” is used to punch anything left of fascism.
Do MLs consider anarchists liberals now?
Anarchists tend to be smart enough to not use the word tankie.
There are exceptions of course.
That’s been my only exposure to the term, is hearing/seeing anarchists say it. Do liberals really use that term?
Liberals do use it since “commie” lost its zing. Go to any reddit thread where somebody is speaking sense and there’ll be a liberal going “don’t listen to him, I saw his history and he’s a tankie”, likewise with any Facebook thread when some blue no matter who page says something profoundly silly
Generally not. Anarchists and Marxists want separate goals and have separate means, but Liberalism is a separate ideology.
I’m aware, I’ve just never heard/seen a liberal use the word “tankie”- though I don’t often expose myself to liberals… Are libs actually using that word now? I would literally laugh out loud at the hypocrisy if I witnessed that
Go to lemmy world. Any political comm. Or check in on reddit.
Don’t go to Reddit, even to prove a point. It’s a very silly place.
I block every liberal with a shit take I come across (like 200 .world users so far lol) so that could explain why I haven’t seen it much
I’ve seen many I definitely don’t think are Anarchists use it, and I’ve even seen Anarchists and Liberals get labeled “tankies.” It’s a generic term used like BadEmpanada is referring to, a largely meaningless catch-all for Leftists.
That is whack; thanks for sharing
No problem. There are many on Lemmy.world for sure who use it that way, same with Reddit.
Are a anarcho-capitalists considered anarchists here?
No, Anarcho-Capitalism is a deeply unserious ideology that doesn’t even understand Capitalism well enough to understand that it can’t exist at any significant length of time without a state enshrining Private Property Rights.
That would be silly but tankie is also a silly term.
The conversation around “tankies” reminds me heavily of “neolibs” - loosely defined in the minds of the folks discussing them. Basically a catch-all term for your own idea of what a liberal outgroup should be.
[Referring to the Tiananmen Square Massacre] We (at least many of us) have read the sources that have been linked. What is described there, particularly the accounts of people who were there, is what we assert is what happened. In the few instances where there may be contradictory first hand accounts (and mostly, the accounts are not contradictory but rather corroborate each other) there may be some ambiguity. But even taking that into account, it is ridiculous and downright ahistorical to say “Chinese authorities massacred people.”
This is from a conversation with the kind of people I would consider “tankies”. It’s from a community I think has since been deleted, but the general vibe of the comments in the post was that the Tiananmen Square massacre isn’t a real thing and any civilian deaths were actually justified.
I dunno, I perceive it more as a letft wing term for left-extremist fascists
Hey, just so you know for when you make decisions in the future, calling socialist states fascists is rooted in double genocide theory.
This Wikipedia article has a good list of sources about double genocide theory and how it serves to trivialize and obscure the holocaust: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory
Communism and Fascism are entirely different, and purely antagonistic. I suggest reading Blackshirts and Reds.
I think they’re reffering to the extremely authoritarian elements
First, “authoritarianism” is a nebulous term itself, the Communists had developed models of Democracy you can read about in Soviet Democracy, by Pat Sloan. The Communists were “authoritarian” towards the Bourgeoisie, and had democratized and uplifted the Proletariat and Peasantry.
Second, fascism isn’t just a synonym for “authoritarianism,” that takes an already nebulous term and further mystifies it. Fascism has always served the interests of the Bourgeoisie, which is why until the Nazis started attempting to colonize Western Europe (and even after in some cases like Ford), Western Countries were quite friendly towards Hitler (despite Leftists protesting).
When directly equating fascism and Communism, you drastically misrepresent the purpose of each and who they serve, and make it difficult to figure out how to stop fascism itself. It is, in fact, the Communists who have been history’s most effective anti-fascists, and the fascists who have been history’s most brutal anti-communists.
Fascism is also antagonistic to other fascism once it served it’s purpose. See a good chunk of the night of long knives.
That doesn’t mean the target of fascism is fascism, though, so I’m not sure what that adds. In the Night of Long Knives, the Nazis purged the millitant labor organizers that they had used to purge the Communists beforehand, as these right-wing labor organizers were beginning to take on a leftward character and served to risk the overall purposes of the Nazi movement, violent suppression of leftward movement in a country at risk of Communist revolution. They were used like tools and discarded as such.
I mean the target of one’s fascism is not the same fascism. It’s one that is arbitrarily less “correct”. For example the Slovenian fascists turned on the Germans, and the Germans turned on Vichy as soon as it suited them. My point was being “antagonistic” to fascist groups doesn’t mean you “cannot” be one. It is correct they did turn on their leftmost group after they’d served there purpose. They still (wrongly) called themselves socialist afterwards though. I wonder if anyone else could have done that.
Hitler proudly claimed to have “stolen Socialism from the Marxists,” meanwhile the Soviets and Nazis hated each other. The Soviets held to Marxism and worked to uplift the Proletariat, while the Nazis held to an incoherent ideology only explainable by what it served, wealthy Capitalists.
Again, calling things “fascism” that don’t meet the definition just obfuscates what you’re trying to talk about.
I completely agree with what you said about Hitler. In fact, even worse. His stealing of the word socialism for his own purposes did major damage to the concept people had of socialism. Calling a system that exploits workers and laborers socialism, when the whole idea was to put the workers in charge, damages the idea in people’s minds.
The biggest damage Hitler and the Nazis did was stop a genuine Communist revolution within Germany. Had Germany genuinely gone Socialist, it’s very likely other highly developed Capitalist countries would have had revolutions as well, and not just the underdeveloped countries like Cuba, China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, etc. Had Western Europe gone largely Communist, only the US would really stand as a bulwark of Capitalism, separated by the Ocean, at which point it would have been only a matter of time.
That’s not even to mention that the Holocaust would have been stopped before it happened, and the USSR wouldn’t have had half of its dwellings destroyed by the Nazi invasion. The Soviets would not have had to focus so much on rebuilding, and likely would not have had to spend so much of their overall GDP on Millitary R&D to keep the United States at bay during the Cold War, crippling their economic growth and eventually leading to dissolution.
Israel as a genocidal project would likely not exist either. Palestine would be free.
I can’t understate how different history would look today had the Communists succeded in Germany.
