This is my experience as well. It's also laughable that they call themselves communists and love China and Russia. Those people aren't communists, they are authoritarians.
That's why I too am not a believer in horseshoe theory and actually agree that communism hasn't been practiced properly before. A peaceful emancipation of the common person is still unpracticed. If this is all tankies said, I'd be fine with it. But they say communism has never been practiced before along side arguments that the Soviet Union and China are communist. They are parroting real modern communists without understanding them and mixing in their revisionist history to create a paradox they don't seem too concerned about.
I think it's more about rebelling against their Reagan loving, USSR hating dads than sound political theory.
Isn't that pretty much exactly what a "Tankie" is? An authoritarian communist? One that believes the revolution can only occur through state violence?
I think it should be updated, as Russia and China are not communist and those people love them.
I feel like the "communism" was used, because "authoritarianism" sounds worse.
To be fair. "that wasn't true Communism" is true. The problem is dictatorships keep getting sold with its name. Ironically proving how hard it would be to actually achieve a world or country of communes.
Except those people prefer the Chinese and USSR style of social autocracies to actual socialist projects. Some of them even trash worker coops, although that was more true to the InfraHaz style lolcows than the tankies of lemmy...
The only kind of Communism I'm willing to accept is the Star Trek Communism. Until then I'm pro Team "Social market economy"!
Fully Automated Gay Space Communism or bust!
I'm with you there. If we get poop->food magic machines then all bets are off. Until then we need a democratic state to prevent abuse.
The bolshivek revolution made it certain that any communist nation is a dictatorship. The menshiveks would have achieved better results.
Toussant would've been better for Haiti than Dessalines. But him being a tyrant doesnt make me not an abolitionist.
Right, the problem is they turn around and defend the dictatorship because obviously Marxism cannot survive less you continuously sanitize the marketplace of ideas.
Well their version can't at any rate. I'd say Marxism can't survive violence in the ideas market.
Communism is inherently authoritarian as it puts the needs of a social construct (in this case a "commune" or "society") over the needs, rights and freedoms of an individual. It is hard to achieve anything good with communism, because totalitarian dictatorship is the only possible outcome for any advanced enough authoritarian ideology.
Actual braindead take. A monkey with a typrewriter would come up with something more sensible.
Oof the individualists didn't like that. I don't think it's inevitable though. I just think it's going to take some special people and circumstances we haven't found yet. For example a George Washington like figure who refuses to become another king.
Oh good, this seems like a good place to ask something that's been bothering me for a while.
I see the posts from Hexbear and Lemmygrad. I can understand why they are in favour of theoretically communist regimes like China. What I can't for the life of me see is why they seem to unconditionally support modern Russia which is surely as far away from communism as you can get.
I must be missing something but not sure what?
Because they’re anti-west not pro-communist.
Anything critical of Russia is obvs western propaganda and as Russia is an enemy of the west, they will support them.
They see the enemy of their enemy as their friend, instead of realising it’s just another enemy.
They're not actually communists, it's just a facade for Kremlin and CCP propaganda.
But you see, Russia is just what is left of the glorious soviet union who got destroyed by the western evils. Whatever they do is totally justified in their bid to rebuild the union under a dictator, dont you know anything? And Ukraine is full with jewish nazis.
The better question is what are they missing.
in those places you will usually see the term "critical support". that means we are critical to most aspects of modern russia, but are supportive of their anti-us goals, simply because it helps us break free of their imperialism.
I don't think it's reasonable to try to break free of an imperialism enforced primarily by markets via support of an imperialism enforced primarily by mass genocidal violence and threats of disproportionate nuclear retaliation. Furthermore, Marx's writing indicates that revolution needs to start in the most powerful industrial country on earth before global revolution can take root. Fighting against people trying to reform the U.S. and trying to destroy it without a revolutionary base goes directly against the strategy Marx recommended. That is to say, if all you do is counter one imperial power with another in hopes that the first will fall, all you get is a revolving door of imperialism.
They dont unconditionally support Russia. I disagree with them but they see Ukraine and the US as even worse. Considering the prelavance of Nazi imagery in the Ukraine military, or how Ukraine banned leftist opposition parties, or how they removed minority language rights etc.
I think in their minds in a fight of two reactionary autocracies they prefer the one fighting against the west.
You can see on ProleWiki what Lemmygrad.ml's stances are, in their words, and why. Their article on the Russian Federation backs up what you've said, they believe it is extremely reactionary with horrifying treatment of LGBTQ people and is currently ruled by the Nationalist party, but critically support Russia insofar as it opposes Western hedgemony and Imperialism, and no more than that.
Critically, Lemmygrad, Hexbear, and much of Lemmy.ml see Lenin's definition of Imperialism as the number one obstacle in Socialism's advance, that is, the state in Capitalism where Imperialist countries export machinery and finances to the third world in order to super-exploit outsider populations for super-profits domestically. This is a necessity within Capitalism to combat the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall. It's the concept of unequal exchange.
Now, of course you do not have to agree with Lemmygrad or Hexbear or Lemmy.ml, but as someone who regularly sees these posts, there are no delusional posters who somehow think the Russian Federation is still Communist or that Putin is secretly rebuilding the USSR.
It is a weird world where the Tankies align with Moscow Marjorie
It's not surprising at all, they're working for the same people.
I'm my experience, they tend to be authoritarian first and Leftist second at best. Note that I'm not talking about all M-Ls, just those that support military force and violence to quell dissent.
Leftist = authoritarian.
"Russian special military operation in Ukraine is an anti-imperialist project."
"US military aid to Ukraine is an imperialist act."
Statements made by the utterly deranged.
My additions:
- “Sealioning”
- That’s all a bunch of lies, you’re just blindly linking to a mouthpiece for US imperialism like Washington Post / BBC / Wikipedia
- Links to rt.com
- The answers you seek are in this 90 minute YouTube video
- You’ve unwittingly EXACTLY PROVEN MY POINT (refuses to elaborate)
I am sure there are more
Edit: More
- (this comment has been removed by the moderator)
- If Russia isn’t fantastic how are they winning so hard in Ukraine
(Comment Removed by Mod) made me LOL
The Gish Gallop is often used, although you've kind of covered it with point 2 and 3.
Extended Version:
Needs an "EU BAD" square
Welcome to fight night
in this corner is a poster who brought a lot* of links from sites you've never heard of! He thinks browbeating liberals with theory will help them "escape the mind prison of Western propaganda", his special power: pigshit!
Heeeeereee's TANKIE BROWN!!
crowd noises
Aaaaand in this corner!
Hailing from the mean streets of forums everywhere! He doesn't like criticism of Dems, and has the links and the time to disprove you! Special power... Derision!
IiiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIT's LIB-MASTER J!!
crowd: raaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Tonight, they'll be performing, front and center, in your thread! Whether you like it or not! Taking up all the air! Watch with horror and wonder as the same arguments are trotted out and no one learns anything! Whose ego will be bruised? Who will get "owned"? Find out tonight (and every night) on lemmy.ml!
does the concession sell popcorn? cause I'm down for this.
I enjoyed this.
>thread about cakes
Tankie: This is US propaganda!
Source?
Red Devil cake
i don't think "that wasn't true communism" belongs with the rest. saying Russia good , USSR good and China good requires you to pretend they are true communism, isn't that what tankies do?
i think this is more what actual leftie/communist people say about those countries because they think the authoritarian regimes don't reflect communism, not to mention the fact that Russia and China are capitalist countries in everything but name.
saying Russia good , USSR good and China good requires you to pretend they are true communism
Russia hasn't been anything resembling Communist since perestroika and the subsequent dismantling of the USSR. Might as well call France a monarchy or complain about Japanese Imperialism.
The long struggle session over "Is China Communist?" has been tilting back in the "Enthusiastic Yes!" column for years, as Xi's abandoned the Dengist market integration strategy and increasingly put his chips on a new Third-World Export model for Chinese aid and trade (incidentally, much more in line with the USSR peace dividend strategy circa 1950s/60s). If nothing else, Xi's proposal to have a housing sector that is 30% public (up from the current 5%) would be the AES guy's wet dream.
Russia and China are capitalist countries in everything but name.
Russia after '91 spend a solid decade under the Shock Doctrine mass sell off of domestic assets. Its rapid transition to capitalism had more in common with a pillaging than any economic reform. The Russian state was never fully integrated into the European trade model. And it was always held at arms length by NATO military advisers, limiting the possibility of fully internationalized markets. After the second failed "Russian Reset" under Obama, the state has begun re-nationalized a host of traditionally private assets as multi-national industries abandoned the country.
Chinese single-party state administered economic policy - the Five Year Plan model that's been building steam since the 1950s - is about as far away from the Western Laisse-Faire model of capitalism as you can get and still plausibly cling to the name. If China is capitalist, it is doing capitalism in a way wholly alien to any Chicago School economics professor or McKinsey consultant.
You might be able to shoehorn their economies into the broad definition of profit-seeking private ownership. But in both form and function, they look radically different from a US, German, or Japanese private economy.
I think you may have missed the word "pretend" there
They'll make both arguments, but yeah you're right otherwise
You forgot “a meme response that is barely relevant to the discussion.”
You forgot a square for circle-jerking over reading theory.
You have a problem with educating yourself?
I hope you find your way out of this bullshit spiral you're descending in, best of luck to you
Does enemys have to be misspelled to get bingo?
Don't worry, it will be.
Yeah i like communism and all but can't for the life of me figure out why they like russia and china . Is it because there used to be (a kind of) communism there ? I stand for the idea of communism not the people or places that are (kinda) associated with them .
Tbh I can see how communism is a pretty romantic ideal utopia but when you look at the people proposing communism it's consistently been used as a sort of scam to take power and the freedom of the people that they rule over its like the geopolitical version of saying hey I've been trying to contact you about your cars extended warranty
Even when there are serious people reforming systems to provide more rights and equality they jump in and sell a more radical version to take power. It also doesn't help that the KGB used that as a signature move to install pro soviet dictatorships. Personally I've always thought democracy would be the stable way to move to the left. But we need to have actual education and get past the neo liberals drip feeding us reforms.
Cowbee explains this.
i can understand if you hate china if all you know about it is western propaganda.
i dont think many tankies "love" modern day russia
China is basically still communist, though apparently they have mixed with capitalism as well, and so is Russia basically, with the Russian communist party still a party in Russia and is the 2nd largest party in the country.
China has a Socialist Market Economy post-Dengist reforms. Russia is a borgeois dictatorship, the Communist Party in Russia is behind the current ruling Nationalist Party, as you've said, so it is not Communist or even Socialist.
Wut?
Russia sold off all of the publicly owned industries to their now plutocracy, and China having a mixed economy is exactly not communism.
The United States has a communist party and a mixed economy, no one would ever argue the US is Communist (expect maybe Republicans when a Democrat takes office.)
I'm quick to ban communities from my feed that are political. I'm just here for the memes and tits - Not to doomscroll or argue about shit I don't understand.
That's fair and I hope those communities continue to grow and mature. I do enjoy the good faith discussions that happen here more often than other sites myself.
"enemys"
What’s a good privacy respecting instance besides lemmy.ml? I don’t wanna be blocked from seeing content for being on .ml :(
You can see more content on .ml, because .ml is federated with Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and the other instances like shit just works, lemmy.world, and so forth.
If you want to see a lot of content, it's a good instance for that.
Is ml on many defed lists? I dont think it is, lemmygrad.ml is heavily defeded. I switched to lemmy ml a while back because of world having issues and find it okay, the porn is off my feed, but basically everything else (including hex and grad, unfortunately) is in, could be that im missing something, but none of the big instances afaik.
Can an instance even collect data that isnt public excluding IP addresses?
Meh, add to your block list with hexbear, you won't miss em.
Not true a lot of great privacy/open source communities there
Anything good gets reposted elsewhere. Signal to noise at hexbear is too poor to leave it unblocked. I don't miss it.
I'd rather miss that content and spare myself reading the drivel of useful idiots
You forgot "great man theory" (i.e. any criticism of Putin or Xi) and "horseshoe theory" (i.e. any indication that left wing violence is bad).
Ahh yes, let me fix that
God, I'm just so genuinely happy to see someone use the word, "Tankie," properly. A shocking number of people on .world seem to think anyone left of Joe Biden is a Tankie.
The nickname tankies is pretty funny because tanks are becoming obsolete.
Is the name meant to be related to war machines or the things you keep fish in? 🤔
the war machines
it was something about who defended the USSR rolling tanks into a country to get it into the USSR or smth
The LW admins are violating their own ToS by allowing LML posts to get federated to LW.
I'm not sure what you mean?
A lot of the content on Lemmy.ml that is endorsed by their admins breaks rules 1, 2, 4, and 5.1 of the Lemmy.world terms of service. By staying federated with them, the admins are facilitating this content's transfer to Lemmy.world's servers, which is against their own terms of service.
It's much easier I find in .ml to just ignore the tankies tbh. Though the bingo sheet is admittedly, very funny.
"USA bad" should be the free space, because anyone with as little as half a rotten brain can identify that it's true - The US is a shithole. That does preclude conservatives, of course.
We definitely have our issues.
Mostly, they are the ones other places can ignore because they aren't the cultural battleground for the world at large. Not that I'm complaining, since we're not generally the physical battleground for the world at large.
Mostly, there's not a good culture of actually facing issues and processing them, anywhere in the world, outside of some spiritual practices. If you're someone who does do that, though, the US is the place to be.
It's always really sad to see otherwise good leftist ideals held back by ML campist brain rot tbh.
V|X|V X|V|V X|X|VWhere do I claim my prize?
I feel like no matter what instance I go to I'm probably just going to end up disliking a large chunk of the posters, because I think after 20 years of being raised online, I just fucking hate memes straight up.
I just wish more people would identify that too much centralization is the root problem versus pointing the finger at the opposing yet equally centralized political systems. There needs to be a balance between centralization and decentralization yet few understand this. So frustrating.
I was banned from communities there for "facism" and "nationalism".......
I'm center-left BTW.... Not "left" enough for them, it seems.......
It makes sense; the leaders they admire ban people from real life for questioning the narrative. They're just doing in kind with the limited little bit of power they have right now.
Why they think they'd be in the "good" grouping if this stuff comes to power in the West, I have no idea. You'll notice that precisely 0 of the people posting are (openly) coming from mainland China, and precisely 0 of them have any plans to move there at any point now or in the future.
X|1|X X|X|2 X|3|X1Critical support doesn't imply Russia is good
2It didn't fall out of a coconut tree; all socialist projects exist in their historical context
3Fucking Kruschev
What is this linked to? Not opening for me.
Edit: nevermind. I opened it in my browser. I wonder if I have this community or person blocked in Boost for Lemmy.
Copied with some formatting:
You can see on ProleWiki what Lemmygrad.ml’s stances are, in their words, and why. Their article on the Russian Federation backs up what you’ve said, they believe it is extremely reactionary with horrifying treatment of LGBTQ people and is currently ruled by the Nationalist party, but critically support Russia insofar as it opposes Western hedgemony and Imperialism, and no more than that.
Critically, Lemmygrad, Hexbear, and much of Lemmy.ml see Lenin’s definition of Imperialism as the number one obstacle in Socialism’s advance, that is, the state in Capitalism where Imperialist countries export machinery and finances to the third world in order to super-exploit outsider populations for super-profits domestically. This is a necessity within Capitalism to combat the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall. It’s the concept of unequal exchange.
Now, of course you do not have to agree with Lemmygrad or Hexbear or Lemmy.ml, but as someone who regularly sees these posts, there are no delusional posters who somehow think the Russian Federation is still Communist or that Putin is secretly rebuilding the USSR.
ProleWiki: Political line
We are guided by Marxism-Leninism, mainly the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. Based on that, ProleWiki upholds the currently developing dictatorships of the proletariat in:
Republic of Cuba People's Republic of China Democratic People's Republic of Korea Socialist Republic of Vietnam Lao People's Democratic RepublicReally‽ They hold North Korea in high regard? I can see liking some of what Cuba, China, and Vietnam have done, but NK? I don't know enough about Laos to comment.
Edit: nevermind. I opened it in my browser. I wonder if I have this community or person blocked in Boost for Lemmy.
you probably did what I did after my first week on Lemee, and just block the .ml instance completely from my feed. it's absolutely insane and is the prime example of why Federation doesn't really work great if not all federated servers are subject to the same rules.
.ml will outright let hate, violence and threats stand. But will instance ban anyone who questions their tankies.
These words also instantly make me lose respect for anyone who repeats them:
- Western imperialism
- Colonialism
- Neo-liberal
There has to be some memo that gets passed around and every ml comment is contractually obbligated to include these phrases.
Even in a historical context? Colonialism was absolutely real, 1930s neoliberalism was a real political movement, and the British Empire was absolutely a western imperialist system.
I never said they weren't real, did I? I just said I don't have to hear about it in every goddamn comment. Someone shits in the woods and an ml account will login to mention colonialism of neo-liberal policies influenced the color of my shit in the woods. It doesn't have to be repeated. every. goddamn. time.
those are three things that actually materially destroyed my country.
Someone says: USA Bad (with proof)
USApes: It must mean they think China and Russia are good.
¿Por Qué No Los Tres?
It's usually * Russia/China does something horrific *
Normal People: Hey, this is pretty terrible.
Tankies: IT'S NOT TERRIBLE BECAUSE WHAT USA DID IS MUCH WORSE.
In 98% of my Encounter with Tankies, they are the one who try to steer the topic away from the horrible thing China/Russia has done and towards: LOOK USA BAD! Even if the USA has NOTHING to do with the topic at all. It's like that's their go-to argument. And of course: " Yeah, it's not bad because the puppet States of China and/or Russia said it's not bad. "
They usually skip the morality and jump straight to the whataboutism. They know that the thing is bad and won’t argue that, but they will try to sweep it under the rug and change the narrative to US doing something bad too.
At the end of the day they’re like kids in a playground justifying that they can do something bad because someone else did it too.
Oh and I can tell that someone will misinterpret my comment and think I’m downplaying the sh*t that the US did
You’re being obtuse, they actively defend Russia/China.
Is not propaganda if it affects you /s
