True but only for terminally online liberals. I still haven’t heard anyone in real life ever use that word.
“Liberal” is just
Authoritarianism is authoritarianism. Doesnt matter how you paint it.
Not really, no. To a capitalist, all forms of leftism is ‘authoritarian,’ because they consider private property natural and oppose leftists ‘stealing’ in.
‘Authoritarianism’ just isn’t a particularly useful term because nobody who uses is is ever actually categorically opposed to forcefully compelling people to do or not do things. They will always have a build in exception for what ever they consider to be ‘legitimate authority’, and what they consider justified authority will just depend on what political philosophy they ascribe to. So really calling the word just means “someone with a different political theory to me with regards to legitimate authority.”
Just because some people might not use the term correctly doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful term
I left lemmy.ml because there were too many people defending or denying historical acts of political violence. That’s what we mean when we say tankies are authoritarian.
If you’d actually read my post, you’d know my point wasn’t about it being used “incorrectly”.
people defending or denying historical acts of political violence. That’s what we mean when we say tankies are authoritarian.
Defeating the Nazis was an act of political violence, freeing slaves was an act of political violence, over throwing the feudal system was an act of political believe, driving out colonial empires is an act of political violence, enforcing property rights is an act of political violence, ceasing the means of production is an act of political violence.
See? This is exactly, exactly what I was talking about.
I mean we both know I’m talking about specific acts of political violence, but you are right in that I should have clarified.
To be clear what makes it authoritarian is when it’s the state/government/leadership that is using acts of violence against citizens with political ideas that would threaten their power.
And tankies get the name specifically from either defending or denying that specifically the Soviet Union used violence to suppress attempts to leave their union. When I was on .ml I also frequently saw defense or denial of China using violence that way such as the infamous Tiananmen Square Massacre.
People from lemmy.ml love to shout that people who want them defederated are “anti-capitalist” and hexbear has decided accusing people of being anti-trans is their move, but those are simply strawmen, and really poorly constructed ones at that.
when it’s the state/government/leadership that is using acts of violence
So when a corporation uses or sponsors acts of violence it’s not authoritarianism? I guess Coca-Cola-funded fascist death squads are just smol bean libertarians fighting the oppressive tankie socialists!
You can’t even get your talking points in order. The main people on lemmy.ml are anti-capitalist, they would accuse those who would censor them of being anti-communist.
And tankies get the name specifically from either defending or denying that specifically the Soviet Union used violence to suppress attempts to leave their union.
I fucking knew it, Lincoln was a soviet plant all along, fucking tankies.
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 believe in reclaiming “tankie” in the same way as “queer.” Schoolyard bullies don’t really care to distinguish between the many different labels encompassed by LGBT+, and so they inadvertently invented a term that could be very inclusive and all encompassing, even if you’re still figuring out who you are, you call always fall back on “queer” to give the general idea.
In the same way, the term “tankie” gets applied to people of all sorts of different left ideologies. There are significant differences between different leftist ideologies, but our critics don’t care to understand or distinguish between them, so I consider tankie to be a similarly inclusive term. Do you support anything that any socialist government has ever done? Do you think Cuba had an effective literacy program? Congratulations, you’re a tankie, welcome to the club.
Note that my identifying with the term isn’t really an invitation for people to use it. But, you know, if people want to keep using it as this broad, meaningless term that lumps a bunch of people together, as I see it, it only works to our advantage as “tankies,” it pushes people towards us and helps us remember what we have in common instead of fighting over our differences. So I’m not exactly going to fight the label particularly hard.
Tankie always meant a fan of authoritarianism but not of the nazi variety. And hand to hand with that goes hate for America, but hate for America isn’t enough on it’s own, it should be paired with love of Strong Hand Of The East.
Tankie thinks China, Russia, North Korea are just swell, and not because of some underlying ideology, but because they have an authoritarian model of governance and generally in opposition to the west to some degree.
And that’s the reason why it’s so hard to define for some people, boiled down to it’s definition, it’s very hard to spin into something universally good, so talking to a general public they have to do what authoritarian lovers from the other side of the spectrum call “hiding the power lever”, which muddies the water.its the one with the… and they have ttank, with… the one with ehe tan, you takn. rhe tanker. tabker is the with the
Do people genuinely take badempanada seriously?
He starts a lot of shit, but dammit if he isn’t right most of the time.
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?
The USSR was perhaps the single most progressive movement in the entire 20th century. It was not free from flaw, of course not, but in total it was a massive leap forward for the Working Class not only within the Soviet Union, but its very existence forced western countries to adopt expanded social safety nets (along with the efforts of leftist organizers within these countries).
From a brutal, impoverished backwater country barely industrialized, to beating the United States into space, in 50 years. Mid 30s life expectancies due to constant starvation, homelessness, and outright murder from the Tsarist Regime, doubled to the 70s very quickly. Literacy rates from the 20s and 30s to 99.9%, more than Western Nations. All of this in a single generation.
Wealth disparity shrank, while productivity growth was one of the highest in the 20th century:
Supported liberation movements in Cuba, Palestine, Algeria, Korea, China, Palestine, and more. Ensured free, and high quality healthcare and education for all. Lower retirement ages than the US, 55 for women and 60 for men. Legalized, free abortion. Full employment, and no recessions outside of World War 2. Defeated the Nazis with 80% of the combat in the entire European theater. Supported armistice treaties that the US continuously denied.
The bad guys won the Cold War, and they did so by forcing the USSR to spend a huge amount of their resources on keeping up millitarily, as the United States had much more resources and could deal with it that way.
Did they support liberation movements in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland etc etc?
Bit of a cheap pivot, isn’t that? Not all nationalist movements are good, many are highly reactionary, even fascist in nature. On the whole, Soviet foreign policy was cleary in the interests of the working class, from helping Cuban workers liberate themselves from the fascist Batista regime, to helping Algeria throw off the colonizing French, to helping Palestinians resisting genocide, to assisting China with throwing off the Nationalists and Imperialist Japan.
I don’t think it’s a cheap pivot at all. If you want to say “look at all these places where the people there wanted freedom!” While completely ignoring that they were violently surpressing those same scenarios within their own annexed territories? That’s just willful blindness.
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
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.
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.
Do MLs consider anarchists liberals now?
No, but a lot of liberals consider themselves anarchists.
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.
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.
Shut up, tankie!
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?
I dunno, I perceive it more as a letft wing term for left-extremist fascists
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.
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
