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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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
For the person dying of hunger is the same. But yeah, killing millions is bad and is something America NEVER did, right?
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”
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.
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.
You are way optimistic.
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.
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.
Baaaased
Based.
They already have lennygrad.
Honestly, I don’t think we need them here.
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.
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”.
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
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?
genocide denier and hard authoritarian. fash dressed in red, basically.
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
fr I’m down with having a good old purge eventually but noone should be surprised
tankies more like no thankies
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.
removed by mod
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.
dumb
? The developers of Lemmy are tankies, it’s important to make sure that tankies know they aren’t welcome here.
Gotta ask for both a source and your definition of a “tankie”.
You keep using that word, I don’t think it means what you think it means.
A tankie is someone who supports authoritarian communism (I believe the term originated from using tanks to suppress protests)
Here’s a post showing that the main instance of Lemmy (hosted by the main 2 Lemmy devs) removes any negative posts about the Chinese or Russian governments for “orientalism”: https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/5784
In the comments of that post, you can find one of the devs borderline defending what China is doing to the Uyghurs: https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/comment/5950
That same dev has a github repo called “essays on communism”: https://github.com/dessalines/essays
I’m pretty sure both of the devs’ profile pictures are Fidel Castro too
Aight fair enough, that’s pretty concerning.
Nothing wrong per se with communism itself, it just tends to be extremely unstable and quickly turns to authoritarianism, I don’t think it’s ever worked for any nation in history so far.
The defending of Uyghur genocides, and the defending of the CCP and Russian government is really concerning though. Good thing this platform is federated.
libretro has a similar problem, it’s developed by a team of transphobic, homophobic, racist Russian apologists who border on Nazism. I don’t know what attracts these people to FOSS development.
the implication that communists are transphobic or homophobic or nazis is nonsense. i am trans and live in a place not good to trans people (like most places) the communists are my only allies.
the modern russian state is not the soviet union, it is who america put in charge after creating a situation that led to millions of deaths.
I don’t know what tankies are and at this point I’m too afraid to ask
Usually people who advocate military communism, such as defending tiananmen square, Stalin, and more. Basically it’s usually the belief that anything a government professing to be communist does must be good.
I should emphasize that a lot of pro-Western outlets and commentators have recently weaponised the term to discredit any diverging points of view re-the Ukraine War. So someone like Cornel West would be a “tankie” by this point of view, which is actually kind of disgusting in how dishonest it is.
Diverging points of view? Like what, that Ukraine should just surrender and let itself be conquered?
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.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you
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
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.
But what if we all have a different idea of what behaving reasonably means?
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.
So I have to ask… Why would you respond and then deny someone the same respect?
Thank fuck. I thought Lemmy was some ultra militant leftist hellhole before the shift.
I don’t like extreme radical left any more than extreme radical right.
Fuck Che Guevara. Read a book.
tankies arent radical left. they are authoritarians ffs
What’s a tankie?
the people who made lemmy lol
Spez and Unidan made reddit and no-one likes them either
Unidan didn’t make reddit wtf u talking about
I mean Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz? The dead (by suicide) activist and philanthropist software developer and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz?
Yes that’s right, you see, Aaron Swartz was a “free speech absolutist” who allowed for things like /r/creepshots and allowed for cp on early reddit. https://archive.is/d4NPt
It’s the prog-lib equivalent of woke. It’s used dismiss leftists with out engaging with our arguments. The term has lite ideological or argumentative use.
Libs use it that way, actual leftists use it to describe fascists that think they’re on the left and like red flags.
When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, there were some british leftists who cheered for those tanks driving into Prague. They proved by this that they didn’t care about leftism, socialism, democracy or anti-imperialism at all - they approved the imperialism and militarism of the Soviet regime.
Their praise for the rolling tanks is what gave them their name: Tankies.
So, people who love North Korea, or defend russia invading Ukraine, people, who stand by even the most autoritarian, anti-democratic, militaristic, imperialistic regimes - just because they call themselves “socialist” or “communist” - are “Tankies”.
oh ok so bhreznevites
And Stalinist, Maoists, and other authoritarian Communists.
Usually they also “love” countries like North Korea, China, and for whatever reason (aNtI iMpErIaLiSm), Syria, Russia, and so on.
Red Fascists. They use the same tactics of gas lighting and goal post shifting.