this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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I have only seen it used in reference to people who support dictatorial regimes with socialist aesthetics, mostly MLs. I have yet to see an anarchist be called a tankie. Also you can hear it IRL, not commonly though since most MLs are on twitter and the like and not IRL.
Based on your answer, I've discovered what tankie means: Tankie = Marxist.
Successful Marxist movement results in a dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictator = tankie.
Hence tankie is a term used to describe any Marxist.
Thanks for contributing to this scientific breakthrough!
Nah, first premise is false in more than one way. You are conflating the ideology Stalin made with Marxism.
The second error is that there has never been a dictatorship of the proletariat, every time it has been a political party that seizes power for themselves and not the workers. In doing so they become the ruling class with differing class interests than the workers.
Marx must be rotating in his grave with the speed to power the whole globe at this point.
I would say Lenin was more instrumental in the creation of Marxism-Leninism, Stalin was just the guy who happened to be in charge when they named it. It's also a tendency that has evolved a lot from what it was in the 40s.
You mean the guy in charge after the death of Lenin? Who Lenin warned against?
I mean the guy who had the support of 99% of the communists, yes.
Yeah, clearly the Soviet, Chinese and Cuban workers had completely different interests than being raised out of poverty and squalor. Damn those dastardly political parties and their... diligent work towards eradictaing poverty while promoting actual, decentralized democracy.
Well, Cubans still live in pretty close proximity to squalor. They can't even afford to maintain their own buildings, don't have a functional transportation system, and people live on what, $20 a month? The one saving grace is out there health care system is decent. And by that, I mean much more equitable than in the United States.
Theyre also a small island nation which has survived 60 years of brutal siege and sabotage by the imperial core 70 miles away.
Do you think that US actions against Cuba such as sanctions and blockades is part of the reason Cuba is a poor country?
And if yes, to what extent?
You didn't do the reading :(. Dictatorship of the proletariat is a concept Marx and Engles adopted. Stalin didn't create it.
I don't know what you think the proletariat taking control of the state is suppose to look like, but there will always be a communist party involved. The mechanisms of power exist to be ruled by a party.
Communist parties should be judged by what they do for their poorest citizens. With that in mind, AES countries are doing a decent job. Things get better when they are in power, and get way worse if they are overthrown
You're wrong, what Marx talked about was the whole class of workers being in power. Stalin perverted that idea to a vanguard party. Stalin's system has always resulted in a ruling class composed of a class that was no longer the proletariat (if they even were to begin with). That system is not socialist, it is in fact no better than a capitalist system, as the hierarchies at work are equally unjust.
State capitalism with an authoritarian regime, if you will.
What my society looks like when a party seizes power for themselves and not the workers
(Source: Thomas Piketty's World Inequality Report 2022, for fun maybe try poking around and finding a non socialist state with any comparable inversion of wealth inequality.)
Do you believe capitalism is good because it helped some people? The whole point of socialism is to put the means of production into the hands of the workers and not a vanguard party. Yea, the USSR did quite a lot of imperialism which it used to reduce income inequality of the Russian people but it was never socialist.
Do you know what imperialism means
Yes, the USSR annexing it's neighbours and then exporting their resources and people was very much imperialism.
Read this book to stop seeming so silly.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
Also the non Russian SSRs voted to keep the soviet union around at higher rates than the Russians.
Russia and China were never Marxist.
Have you read any marx?
https://hexbear.net/post/214901
https://hexbear.net/post/374789
https://hexbear.net/post/126901
There's more in the_dunk_tank if you're willing to dig
https://hexbear.net/c/the_dunk_tank
Pro Tip: Sort by Top All. Anarchists getting called tankie tends to get a lot of upbears because we have anarchist comrades on our instance. We're a left unity instance
https://hexbear.net/search?q=tankie&type=All&listingType=All&communityId=31&page=1&sort=TopAll
No idea what the first link is even about, seems incomprehensible. The second link seems true but I have no idea what was said prior. The third link is about programming. Seems there is one potential example of an anarchist being called a tankie. Seems like the vast majority of times it's being used in reference to MLs still.
In all seriousness there are plenty of people who misuse words but tankie seems to have a very clear and easily defined definition, it has even remained the same historically. Comparing it to the crazies using 'woke' is dishonest at best.
lmao no it hasn't. It originally referred specifically to people that supported the USSR putting down the Hungarian anti-communist protests. By the time "tankie" became a word (that only really ever had relevance in the UK) Stalin was long dead.
Yea, people that supported a dictatorial regime with socialist aesthetics as in the USSR. What part of that has changed?
The USSR was literally more democratic than bourgeois democracy.
It really depends on which bourgeois democracy. I may agree if compared to the US (I'm not too educated on the US so I could be wrong) but few others.
Though I fail to understand how that has anything to do with the topic of tankie having a consistent definition.
You claim that the USSR was a dictatorship with socialist aesthetics.
Also, no, no bourgeois democracy is or was as democratic as the USSR. Look up dictatorship of the bourgeoisie vs dictatorship of the proletariat.
Dictatorship of the proletariat as Marx wrote has never been achieved and arguably(Depending on how naive you believe Lenin was) has never even been worked towards. MLs bastardization of that in the form of a vanguard party is just a different dictatorship of the bourgeoisie as it creates a ruling class.
Have you read marxist theory? What have you read? This comes off as grossly misinformed.
And I assume by "dictatorial regimes" you mean any actually existing socialist country, right?
No, I do not. I made it clear multiple times that dictatorships with socialist aesthetics aren't socialist in any other way.
Sure, but the evil potato chips are still Cuba, China, Vietnam etc, right?
Literally every one of our anarchist users have been called tankies, lmao