Just replace “woke” with “russian”.
- and they both punch left; exactly as conservatives like to do.
The liberals are still doing this in 2025. We shouldn’t really be surprised I spose.
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 actual capitalism and the role the state plays in it.
V I B E S B A S E D A N A L Y S I S
Lemmygrad admin here. I normally don’t look at reports from other instances but for this I had to make an exception. Probably the dumbest shit I have read so far lmao.
What did the report say? Lmao
Reason: “state capitalist”
Hence my reply:
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.
Cheers
Personally I’ve found that bashing myself in the head with the book is just as effective as reading it
Cheerze
What defines your position on the spectrum?
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.
Agreed. I’ll come back to this when I’m not as busy. I made a simplistic argument and I’d like to expand on it. Cheers
If you’re one of those people who just considers “tankie” to be a synonym for “Marxist-leninist” then I suppose I agree, but I think the term is used too nebulously to meaningfully place on the political spectrum.
Do you believe there has ever been a socialist state, even one?
Yes. Russia from 1917 till about 1928. A slow, but through counter revolution took place.
I don’t think I’ve run into someone that thinks the NEP was authentically Socialist, but the collectivized, publicly owned and planned economy that defined the Soviet Union for the majority of its existence as “counter-revolutionary.” The NEP had more literal bourgeoisie and was defined by controlled markets, it’s still a form of Socialism but it’s common to deny it that along that basis. Are you a Bukharinist? Do those even exist? Even then, Bukharin seemed to just want to lengthen the NEP, not perpetuate it forever.
Genuinely, this is a take I haven’t seen spelled out before. I don’t agree, of course, but I’m curious what your reasoning is.
Call it whatever the fuck you want. It’s working 100 million times better than this shit we’re doing. It’s lead to the most rapid increase of quality of life in human history for it’s people. Do you really think they care what you think about their government not being socialist enough?
Poverty is not socialism. To uphold socialism, a socialism that is to be superior to capitalism, it is imperative first and foremost to eliminate poverty.
lmao
anti-communism is always fascist. When you engage in “tankie punching” you engage in fascist anti-communism
Sure. Never analyze or critique anything. Got U
How do you get from “never critique anything” to “I can be an anti-communist ideologue”?
It’s really not though
“Liberal” is just
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 Nazi movement. 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.
I can’t understate how different history would look today had the Communists succeded in Germany.
Authoritarian communist, essentially
Wikipedia has a good article about the term
If you think Hitler is bad, wait until you hear what he has to say about the soviets!
But seriously this is an argument that has been over since before anyone alive today was ever born
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
authoritarianism = bad is literal baby brain
All it really boils down to is “supports AES,” though. The article even says as much.
I skimmed through the article and I have no clue what does being a tankie have to do with encryption algorithms
Actually Existing Socialism. Cuba, Vietnam, China, Laos, the former USSR, etc.
Tank you very much
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.
You consider tankies to be people who have actually dug into the sources and done enough research to come to their own conclusion rather than just accepting the cold war narrative without question?
I consider tankies to be people that are incapable or unwilling to admit that China or whoever else massacred their people.
You consider tankies to be people who have actually dug into the sources and done enough research to come to their own conclusion rather than just accepting the cold war narrative without question?
Posting in a thread that will have 300 comments and 20 visible on hexbear
.ml is the best instance because you get to see the comments from all other instances
That also makes it a very draining instance where there is constant skirmishing, but the plus side is that it’s a good frontier to try to push Leftist ideals for other instances to see.
It provides a good balance between seeing mainstream right wing opinions without having to deal with full on Republican fascists.
Not being in an echo chamber helps to keep us grounded to what the layman CNN watcher believes.
Sure, but discussing the same points day after day is frequently unproductive. Hexbear and Lemmygrad, as an example, can be seen as an “echo-chamber” within the context of Lemmy, but Lemmy itself exists in the context of a western-dominated internet. It’s rare that a liberal wandering into Lemmy.ml brings a new argument to the table unheard of by leftists in their daily lives going against the grain.
The benefit of such “echo chambers” is that there’s potential for higher understanding and discussion. I’m not going to find nuanced discusdion of, say, Marx’s Law of Value or Dialectical and Historical Materialism here as applied to current events. There’s opportunity to give the briefest overview to visitors here, but such topics require being a particular nerd for Leftist politics and theory as well as reading more in-depth than Lemmy conversations can provide.
Where are you seeing these right wing opinions? I batangas haven’t seen any since wolfballs dropped
.world is full of them.
all “right wing opinions” are dogshit
The best instance is subjective to the user. That’s why the fediverse is so rad, people can join whichever digital commune that best reflects their values.
Some people like bowling with the little gutter bumpers raised up. Some like to throw bowling balls into the wall to see how many holes they can make. Something for everyone!
Probably for the best, because if you click through to the .ml version you get worlders saying things like
I dunno, I perceive it more as a letft wing term for left-extremist fascists
Words mean nothing to these people lmao
It’s a very silly place here.
Shut up, tankie!
Whoever taught liberals that word, I hope they have diarrhea forever.
That would probably be some ultras, they are very desperate to be recognized by liberals as “true communists” unlike those “fake authoritarians”. Liberals of course don’t give a shit and immediately labeled ultras as tankies as well.
The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.
I’ve never understood why there is any confusion over the word “tankie.” It applies to the pro-cop left. If a leftist believes that it’s necessary for cops to beat minorities and dissidents into submission for their society to function, they’re tankies. If they approach leftism in a way that does not involve state violence against civilians to enforce those ideas, they’re not tankies. To me there isn’t a lot of gray area.
I’ve always thought of them as the communists who think communists are somehow uniquely immune to the “power corrupts” doctrine
I don’t think your second paragraph follows from the first. The cited revolts were largely fascist in origin, for example the Hungarian revolt had the fascists lynching Soviet Officials and freeing Nazis from prison in order to assist with lynching Soviet Officials. Calling them “dissidents” or pretending they were ethnic minorities is ridiculous. Not answering fascists lynchings with violence would be incredibly terrible.
The “rebels” were trained and supplied by MI6, and had marked the doors of Jews and Communists for extermination.
Really curious what a “non-tankie” would recommend doing in such a situation. Giving the Nazis that killed hundreds of people flowers?
What you claimed is very believable to me, and I’m also prepared to believe that the reality of your claims is heavily censored in the English language. That being said I haven’t been able to find evidence to support that the primary drivers of these respective uprisings were fascist or Western. I have only found evidence of other causes. I have no doubt opportunistic fascists and Western governments took advantage of these situations for their own benefit, but the origins of these situations seem to have been genuine domestic issues which were met with state violence causing the situation to escalate. Would you link me to your sources?
This is a decent overview of the background that led up to the events of 1956, and this is a decent overview of the darker side, where the lynchings happened. Content Warning: lynched corpses. Here is a source on MI6 training and arming the counterrevolutionaries. Those 3 articles give only the briefest overview of the events, but don’t do the real buildup to them, their complexities, what the people actually supported, or the real character in any depth. If you want to actually take a deep dive, these are additional sources:
The History of the Working Class Movement in Hungary
1956 Counter-Revolution in Hungary
Others can offer more sources.
Overall, when it comes to geopolitical enemies of the United States in particular, it would not be a bad idea to treat your current understanding with extreme skepticism until you’ve investigated counter-sources as well. That doesn’t mean the US always lies, in fact it frequently tells mostly the truth, but will distory either the quality or quantity of an event.
Thank you for taking my request in good faith; this is what I was looking for. I’ll be taking some time to look through these.
No problem! I try to be good faith, haha. There’s a lot to the events in Hungary, Prague, and so forth, so there’s a lot to dig into beyond what I provided.
True but only for terminally online liberals. I still haven’t heard anyone in real life ever use that word.
It will happen in a few years from now.
Bet is going to be conservatives using it to talk about anyone left to Hitler
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.
Any moderate support for a non-US aligned capitalist country as well
What are you referring to with “AES”? (I only know it as an encryption method and Google ain’t helping)
Actually Existing Socialism. Cuba, China, Vietnam, the former USSR, etc.
Do people genuinely take badempanada seriously?
He starts a lot of shit, but dammit if he isn’t right most of the time.
