-- 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 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.
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.
V I B E S B A S E D A N A L Y S I S
They're still comrades even if they are miss guided
This is unironically the nicest and most reconciliatory anti-tank post I've ever seen. We have different assessments but neither of us are writing off the other as stupid or an LLM, which is actually a breath of fresh air. The bar for political discourse may be in hell these days, but I still appreciate your clearing it.
As for where our views diverge, I would like to understand the nature of the divergence. I guess my main question is: what decides your ideology's position on the spectrum?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Posting in a thread that will have 300 comments and 20 visible on hexbear
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.
.ml is the best instance because you get to see the comments from all other instances
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!
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."
There are people who are categorically opposed to forcefully compelling people, and many of them use the word 'authoritarian'.
It can be a useful term, not all systems are equally authoritarian. It's a spectrum.
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.
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
On authority, by Frederick Engels 1872
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
You wouldn't make it on the grad
Do MLs consider anarchists liberals now?
Generally not. Anarchists and Marxists want separate goals and have separate means, but Liberalism is a separate ideology.
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?
That would be silly but tankie is also a silly term.
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.
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
Just replace "woke" with "russian".
Its become the boomer equivalent of calling everything bad communist.
Tank you very much
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.
A tankie is anyone to the left of whoever is using the pejorative. Usually because they expressed a critique of imperialism or aren't sufficiently racist towards the Chinese.
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.
generally it vaguely means "communists" as well as "anti-imperialists", with the caveat that left communists are excluded as a separate thing
I was under the impression it was the intersection of the venn diagram of communists and imperialists, as long as imperialist means imperialist (defined as using economic, military, diplomatic and cultural power to influence countries around you in a way that is beneficial to you, and may be either beneficial, inconsequential or detrimental to them) and not just "western and capitalist"
its the one with the.. and they have ttank, with.. the one with ehe tan, you takn. rhe tanker. tabker is the with the
I always just thought it meant leftists who are actively advocating violence.
No marxist does this, and the painting of communists as inherently violent is pure capitalist projection. But we do disagree with pacifism.
https://redphoenixnews.com/2011/08/11/pacifism-how-to-do-the-enemys-job-for-them/
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.America is the most authoritarian nation in human history
They have the highest incarceration rate of all time, and have destroyed the sovereignty of billions of people
Authoritarian communist, essentially
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.
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?
If you look at the holodomor I think it's hard to continue painting the Soviet Union as having uplifted the proletariat. Soviets starved their people to achieve rapid industrialization - a tradeoff that most of those who died would probably not have agreed with. IIRC most historians say that collectivization was a horrible failure and was not good for the working class.
First hand accounts of life during stalinism make it clear that people had to develop weird mannerisms to avoid making it seem like they were disloyal/anti-party; basically everyone walking on eggshells all the time.
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 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?
I've always thought of them as the communists who think communists are somehow uniquely immune to the "power corrupts" doctrine
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.
"Liberal" is just
It’s really not though
Shut up, tankie!
Do people genuinely take badempanada seriously?
He starts a lot of shit, but dammit if he isn't right most of the time.
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.
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
