After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
EDIT: Thank you to everyone who has responded! This thread has been very insightful :)
As a couple of poster here are already demonstrating, they discover that western nations have lied about communist nations, but they don’t learn the more fundamental lesson that they shouldn’t trust everything a nation says. So instead of adopting a nuanced view, they just counter believing everything a western nation says with rejecting everything a western nation says and instead believing everything a communist nation says.
Yep.
I’m perhaps older than some here, so I saw something similar after 9/11.
Western media, especially American media, were often blatantly biased in favour of the US government and the so called ‘war on terror’. Especially when stuff leaked out about torture, mass killings and abuses. People turned to alternatives and often found channels like Russia Today. And to be fair, at first glance Russia Today did (certainly at the time) appear to be far more nuanced than mainstream media. It was certainly and often justifiably critical of what the US and its allies was up to around that time. But people who spent a lot of time uncritically watching Russia Today, often ended up believing the Russian government propaganda mixed in with truths.
I think it’s also in large part due to the human tendency to simplify reality. Reality is often complex, but we prefer to thing in categories, like black and white. And so you often see people thinking in or blindly accepting false binaries. Side A bad, so side B
badgood. (e: brain fart)It’s surprisingly common. I mean, look how common it is to think of Germany as the bad guy in WWI, when the reality was far more nuanced. The British empire really wasn’t great.
And in WWII the nazis were obviously evil, but that doesn’t mean the allies were particularly good either. For example, Roosevelt didn’t do that much to stop the deportation of up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps wasn’t moral, America was still virulently racist, and contrary to what you may have been led to believe about the Soviets up to 1 in 4 rapes by allied troops were perpetrated by Americans. Churchill arguably helped kill up to 4 million Indians during the war. Etc. etc.
I think it’s also in large part due to the human tendency to simplify reality. Reality is often complex, but we prefer to thing in categories, like black and white. And so you often see people thinking in or blindly accepting false binaries. Side A bad, so side B bad.
Agreed.
Nuance is difficult, and arguably more to the point, it’s sort of vague and insubstantial, not least because an awful lot of it necessariky boils down to “I don’t know.” People generally prefer something more solid to which to cling, so tend toward absolutes and unjustified certainties. And the most attractive ones are binaristic, because then you don’t even have to provide support for your claimed position - all you have to do is find fault with the (generally falsely dichotomous) alternative.
The Post 9/11 situation with Mass Media and RT is why it’s so desperately important for a Government to not lie or cover up it’s actions. Another example of this is Al Jazeera. The US Government’s dedication to hiding its dirty deeds opened the door for AJ to establish credibility which they later used against the US and it’s Government.
Not a tankie, but this kind of framing is reductionist and condescending. It’s possible for someone to study the spectrum of political ideology and rationally decide that Communism is the best system. It’s honestly disheartening that a non-falsifiable claim presented with zero evidence would garner this many upvotes on this platform.
THANK you. I was considering saying something similar here, and did in response to another ignorant, self-assuaging user elsewhere in the thread. So I’ll just say the same thing I said to them, as a response to WatDabney above:
If you read the many comments in this thread, not to mention other threads on this topic, a significant chunk of western leftists who are ML arrive at Marxism Leninism only after going through a more anarchist phase, and only through a lot of examination of the world and themselves, coupled with a lot of study and reading, do they move from anarchism to come to recognize the undeniable accuracy of Marxism Leninism to reflect the real world and to offer an actually-working methodology for revolution.
Your fallacious description of people’s process towards becoming Marxist Leninists as being the same sort of way that poor, ignorant, emotionally needy people latch onto a cult, is ridiculous, and the kind of things liberals like to say of all of us on the anticapitalist left to comfort themselves into maintaining their simplistic “I’m right but they’re wrong” worldview and avoid having to engage with the many real reasons people become anticapitalists. But that’s what you’re doing. Don’t be like the liberals. Try to understand the real why of things, don’t make up nice little bedtime stories that ensure you don’t have to examine your own misconceptions.
And some of them just get born into it.
No one is born into Marxism Leninism, anarchism, or any other ideology, and saying that is a grotesquely anti-anarchist thing to say.
And to add to that, when first coming to realize the lies you’ve been told by the state you live under, it is a lack of nuance to immediately jump to the false premise that just because your state is bad, that must mean all states are bad. That’s just the easy and childish answer. That doesn’t make it inherently wrong, but it does make it the one that requires further examination and sometimes a hard look at ones misconceptions. MLs are the ones who have done that hard work, not the ones who have fallen for the easy, un-nuanced end point. As someone else here went into a lot of detail describing but I can’t find at the moment, the typical and more easy trajectory for a young leftist is to go from disillusionment at their own state to anarchism. It is only after a lot more learning, examination, and recognition of nuance, that a person comes to see that the understandable kneejerk reaction that “all of them are evil!” is naive, simplistic, and totally lacking the nuance these things need.
It takes more internal work to conclude that “oh wow, all these other things I assumed were just the flat truth, common knowledge, - like how evil the communist states were and how bad they were for their people - were actually just more lies I was being told for a reason.” Which is why we have so many young anarchists who over time become ML’s but only rarely the other way around. @WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com has it exactly backwards.
You are right that we cannot know and understand the life of every individual in a group, but we may observe typical or aggregate behavior, and we may seek reasonable inferences.
Tankies express a general pattern of behavior that is bad faith.
They quote passages instead of explaining from personal comprehension. They attack individuals against an opportunity to discuss ideas. They defer to doctrine instead of reasoning independently. They anchor to absurd lies about anarchists. They lie and deny instead of admitting to problems. They rely on disingenuous rhetoric such as the motte-and-bailey fallacy.
Such observations converge on a pattern of anchoring to convictions for reasons that are unrigorous, prejudiced, and generally misguided.
The problem with your argument is that it relies entirely on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, which is heavily influenced by confirmation bias.
Politics is not an empirical science.
I see, so your personal experience – rife with confirmation and composition fallacies – is how we should debate politics. That’s clearly valuable.
Everyone’s experience is important.
Tankie is just the flavour du jour for the modern version of red scare. It’s easier to call someone a tankie when they disagree with the current narrative about the war in Ukraine or the Palestinian genocide than meet them at their argument and have an honest discussion. To this day nobody has been able to explain to me, if Putin elected Trump and the pedo is a Russian asset, why did Putler decide to invade precisely when his asset was not in power. Also, why did Macron and Scholtz beelined to Moscow to stop a war while Bojo and Biden went full hawk? An aggressor is always in the wrong, period. That said, if Mexico and Canada entered a military alliance with North Korea or China do you think the US would sit idly by? Is it so hard to believe that Biden, after the traitorous IRA (stealing industry from the EU), was all too happy to wreck the EU industry by just precipitating the war rather than collaborate on its avoidance? Nobody ever does the “qui bono” analysis before they chest thump about “DeMoCrAcY”. That’s why the name tankie exists, it’s too hard for the average hollywood consuming joe to understand the grey in international politics. They just understand absolutes, especially within the anglosphere, which if PISA is anything to go by, is fast losing reading comprehension and ability to process complex problems. If you go agaist the narrative you’re a tankie, even if you’re on the side of the victims of genocide or argue we should support Ukraine because it’s the only way to assure a positive outcome for the EU rather than “we’re the good guys”.
Kinda like how when someone finds god, they go hardcore devout-mode, only surprisingly…. More ignorant.
It happens with other things. If you hear a new Linux user, a reborn Christian, a new WH4K player, … you’ll hear them say that the “new” thing they like is the best thing in the world and has no flaws. Then you find the flaws and can happen two things: either you grow up and admit it has flaws or you stay a child and ditch that thing for another “new” thing.
People deify their favorite State and overlook the bad it does. All States commit atrocities so it is easier for everyone to look away rather than say “I like x about how y nation handles z” and be specific about it.
But that last part is included in the “maturing” part of your life. About countries and about people.
Oh man this was one month ago? It feels like years.
Too often these criticism’s of “tankies” involve calling questioning blatant cold war lies as tankie behavior and very often i get accused of being a tankie by both liberals and “anarchists” because i oppose the democrats its far past time to retire the word.
It’s a tiny fringe, just here on Lemmy they can be quite noisy 🤷
This goes for almost any obnoxious behavior on the internet. It’s about 5-10% of people who are just assholes (of whatever description), and everyone else is fine. It only seems like the whole place is jerks because of how noisy the jerks are, and how skilled they are at amping up the normal people into noisy arguments that go nowhere.
Any time you’re in one of those comments sections, take a step back and look at the number of people who are actually initiating the dickishness and you’ll see that it’s a tiny tiny minority.
not really my experience now that they have legitimate fash instances. getting Sybil downvoted is pretty hilarious though.
“Communities”
Top community: 15 subscribers, 5 users/month
I rest my case
Actually existing socialism actually exists: imperfect, flawed, with tragic excesses and rightist deviations. But it exists.
And I’m interested in the real world, not creating an ideal world in my head that can’t actually become reality.
How socialist is a system that crushes the working class beneath it’s boot heel, though? Is that really the working class seizing the means of production because that just seems like someone else beating us to the punch and becoming our new overlords.
The working class in China are not being crushed under anyone’s bootheel, though. They really do enjoy a dictatorship over the bourgeoisie, which has been used to great effect to improve working class lives. Yes, a dictatorship of the proletariat as mediated by the party, but vast swathes of the working class people are the party. And those who are not, well, there is a reason the party has an over 90% approval rating and it’s not some disgusting racist trope about Asians being sheep. It is because they’ve watched their quality of life rise by leaps and bounds, repeatedly.
Yes I’m sure the suppressed LGBT really enjoy the weight of that boot as much as you enjoy its taste
Yes, a country that 70 years ago was feudal has some backwards social policy. Is that an own?
The difference betweent China and the west in this regard, is that social justice victories in China are not constantly threatened by right wing parties and far-right Nazis.
Cope harder buddy, nobody buys that shite except you lot.
You should check out hexbear, plenty of pro China queer people there!
Which is naturally a disgusting phenomenon to see queer people support oppression of people like them. But I guess needing to fit in is indeed a strong counter to cognitive dissonance.
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I’m nowhere near well versed enough on the topic to chime in. But isn’t this the same excuse people try to throw against supporters of Palestine? “Oh yeah you support ending the genocide in Palestine? Did you know they throw LGBT people off the rooftops”.
Regardless of the truth/inaccuracy of the statement. It seems like it’s not really that relevant to the conversation and just thrown out there as a cheap gotcha. Does the suppression of LGBT individuals mean that their overall quality of life hasn’t improved? Does a country have to be perfect and not have other social changes that need to be worked towards in order to acknowledge progress? This is not an endorsement of China, again I’m not knowledgeable enough on the topic. But just a criticism of this rebuttal.
By the time it achieved industrialization, USSR had universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, had abolished unemployment and homelessness, had the lowest income inequality rates seen in the history of the region, and materially supported emancipatory anticolonial movements all over Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Was it imperfect? Yes. Was it the most emancipatory project humanity has ever seen? Absolutely.
You’re judging them while they have the boot heel of Western imperialism on their necks.
There it is! The goalposts just got kicked into another galaxy.
The goalpost is “actually existing socialism actually exists”
That’s it. The fact that it exists under siege simply means that our goal should be to lift the boot off their necks, instead of wasting time criticizing them. Are they imperfect, flawed, with tragic excesses and rightist deviations? Yes. That’s beyond the scope of anything we can possibly do. Our project, if you actually believe in anything other than capitalism, is to use our privileged position within the core to fight for the defeat of the empire: lift the blockades, end the espionage, stop regime change.
Right now it’s Venezuela on the chopping block. You will help them far more by fighting the US than by criticizing Maduro.
Defenses of “AES” always equivocate on whether it is actually socialism.
At best, the term is a deliberate lie, but the situation is much worse.
As soon as the characterization of socialism is challenged, it is walked backed, and the challenger is gaslighted for saying that what was said moments earlier was ever said.
“AES” is a nonsense concept defended by nonsense arguments.
It’s the only socialism that actually exists, hence, actually existing socialism.
So, choose. Do you want capitalism, or the only existing alternative? In Venezuela you can support Maduro, or you can support Trump’s regime change. Those are the only options that exist. Pick one.
You insist it is socialism.
When someone correctly objects that socialism not yet exists, you deflect and make excuses.
Socialism is worker control of production. Chinese workers being employed by companies in China is not socialism.
“AES” is obscurantist nonsense.
In what way is AES “nonsense?” Countries where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the workint class in control of the state factually exist. It isn’t a “deliberate lie” because you either disagree with that or with the understood definition of socialism.
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Thanks for the feedback.
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Simple, that shit is fictional
Nuance? In my hate thread? You get out of here with that nonsense!
It’s more or less the same position the rest of us “tankies” have. We push back on bourgeois framing of the flaws of real socialism, be it fabrications, exaggerations, or minimizations, but we acknowledge that there are real flaws.
Omg someone who is named specifically!
Can I ask you what you believe/want to happen?
Real talk homie, I’m genuinely curious!
What do you mean by “named specifically?” Either way, I want the end of the era of imperialism, and the completion of the already begun global transition to socialism, and then the global transition to communism. I want a better world, one I believe we are in the long, queer, protracted, messy process of bringing about, and as such I support the movements that further this process.
Someone said your name further up in the comments.
And that sounds dope as fuck from an objective pov.
“Queer” as in complex and not easily defined, though communists are very often queer sexually.
I think I’m going to refer to myself as queer from now on.
Edit: The amount of conjecture and thought terminating cliches in this thread is through the fucking roof lmfao. Peak reddit.
A lot of tankies are actually posting how and why they believe what they believe. If anyone’s seriously interested in an answer look at this thread from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60633370?scrollToComments=true
There are 206 comments in total at this time.
My journey started here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/3763871How they piqued my interest:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5606499The reason I switched:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5355388It was a combination of them just not being horrible “redfash” monster everyone says they are, them being able to consistently back up their seemingly “obviously wrong” takes and me and seemingly no one else being able to come up with better answers.
In discussions tankies were the only ones who had good faith discussions, obviously they didn’t always, but if it wasn’t just an internet slapfight the tankies were the ones citing sources and having incredibly nuanced understandings while me and the other libs didn’t really. All I ever saw was a “nuh-uh” backed up by “obvious” claims that “everybody” knows like your “mao zedong was the worst mass murderer”.
There is a post I could make about this “black book of communism” statistic now, having read about these sorts of claims, but not on my phone.
me and the other libs
Is this a parody?
At the time I was a lib even if I didn’t identify as such
No. The great majority of MLs on Lemmy were born, raised, and still live in the imperial core, just like most other people on Lemmy. We got the same education, indoctrination, and propaganda as everyone else, so most of us started out as liberals with largely the same beliefs as everyone else. We believed all the same Cold War propaganda as everyone else. Investigating and peeling away the layers of propaganda and lies is actually a long, slow, and not particularly pleasant, effort.
Speak for yourself, peeling off cold war propaganda is an incredibly liberating process for me. It actually gives me hope that revolution is possible and that not only things can potentially be done, but have already successfully been done.
Actual answer: It’s pretty much just teens who get radicalized by youtube channels such as wow_mao, yugopnik, hakim, badempanda and most notably thedeprogram podcast, and young students joining ML/Maoist book clubs in their unis though that’s more of a hit and miss since some book clubs actually read Marx and Lenin. They have audiences in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions so it’s not a “small, underground current”.
Through these communities and channels they learn what I’d describe as “falsified pop theory” that usually manifests as exclusively Stalin/Mao and out of context quotes from actual Marxists like Lenin. This results in uncritical support of China and other ML countries like Vietnam and Cuba (all of whom are bourgeois states and literally nothing about them resembles DOTP), embrace of nationalism, maoist third-worldism which is where the “unlimited genocide on the first world” comes from and just endless moralism that you’ve heard time and time again which is explicitly anti-marxist. At times, they might also show support to Islam for some reason.
If my tone sounds a bit harsh, that’s because they’ve completely bastardized marxism and just continue being more and more annoying with their “agitprop” (making communist memes and throwing them into social media void to spread “marxism” or something, revolution through reddit and lemmy), quote farming, absolute glazing of certain historical figures and just dogshit takes in general.
The majority of the theory I read is Marx, Engels, Lenin, and modern theorists. I do read Mao and Stalin too, of course, but the groundwork for Marxism-Leninism is in Marx, Engels, and Lenin, of course. The fact that I have read Marx, Engels, and Lenin is why I support socialist states, rather than do everything in my power to cherry pick quotes to avoid supporting existing socialism and make a mockery of Marxism. I recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the Theory and History of Socialist Governance.
If my tone sounds a bit harsh, it’s because the goal is to understand the world so as to change it, not just doompost.
Saying that Hakim is almost exclusively Stalin/Mao is actually an impressively uneducated take. I’d say half of Hakim’s videos are atrocity propaganda of western imperialism, which is absolutely necessary, and I’ve learnt more about the horrors of capitalism through him than through anyone else.
Most people come to Marxism through being disaffected by the liberal systems we grow up in, work in, etc, and look to Marxist theory for answers. I actually came to anarchism first, found myself dissatisfied with it theoretically, then came to Marx. This leads us to organizing in real life, reading more theory, and gradually beginning to read western framing of socialist states and other designated “baddies” more critically, seeking a multi-sided and comprehensive view. There’s a lot to unpack in your comment regarding preconceptions you have about China, largely being western, Red Scare style framing, but what I answered is why I’m a Marxist-Leninist and uphold socialist states as legitimate.
For a look at theory, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list you can take a peak at.
How do you reconcile all the queer people and dissidents your dream states murder with the theory you read?
I don’t have “dream states.” No socialist country has ever or will ever be perfect. If we look at Cuba, they originally criminalized homosexuality. However, because Marxism-Leninism is an emancipatory ideology, socialist states generally were more progressive than the regimes they replaced, and continued to improve. Cuba now has one of the world’s most progressive and queer friendly family codes, and has apologized vehemontly for how they treated queer people in the mid-20th century. By placing the working class in control, social progress is expedited.
As for “dissidents,” the large majority were landlords, slavers, fascists, capitalists, murderers, terrorists, etc. I won’t cape for them, and instead state that it’s sheer brutal necessity that building up state power in socialist society is a necessary evil to protect the gains of socialism.
So state sanctioned murder is fine as long as you agree with who’s getting murdered? That tells me all I need to know about your values, thanks.
Killing fascists, landlords, slavers, etc. is a good thing, yes.
not a tankie, but how would you deal with fascists, parasites, slavers, murderers, terrorists, etc.?
I just don’t think giving the state license to mass murder its political enemies is a smart idea. I think steps need to be taken to prevent bad actors like that from harming people, but I’d favor an approach based more on education and rehabilitation than outright murder. Every innocent you wrongly deem an enemy of the state should be an unforgivable occurence, not the cost of doing business.
Ultimately I’d prefer no state apparatus exists that could wield that sort of power to mass murder members of the population. Even if constructed with the best of intentions it’s corruptible and fallible.
I concur with you completely, but again, how do you prevent fascist genocides, landlord hostile evictions, slavers, state murderers (cops), terrorists, etc.? Education and Rehabilitation hasn’t worked on them for 143 years, and science keeps proving why. RN, fascist are genociding in China, Gaza, US, Cambodia, etc… And educated folks are letting it happen.
I disagree with your premise that it doesn’t work, I don’t believe many people have ever put serious effort towards that.
Killing evil people is good, fucking duh
As for “dissidents,” the large majority were landlords, slavers, fascists, capitalists, murderers, terrorists, etc.
“Terrorists” seems general enough to include anarchists.
Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Anarchists largely joined the red army and the bolsheviks, with a minority joining the whites or forming their own cells. There wasn’t a blanket “kill anarchists for thought crime” order, nor did the soviets sit back when groups like Makhnovschina started their banditry against soviet villages and camps.
I admire the inclusivity.
By not being fucking gullible lol
How do people actually fall into the “Tankie” mindset?
The MLs answering in good faith despite the question being framed in bad faith have exceptional grace.
a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […]”
Oh hey I know that guy. If anyone who wants to know more about propaganda & media literacy, please see also: previously.
it’s the same mindset that has “good cops” backing “bad cops” no matter what. the idea that someone like them can be wrong is an affront to lots of people, because it makes them face the reality that they could be wrong some day as well. and nobody enjoys admitting they’re wrong. so instead of thinking critically, they circle the wagons and reject anything that criticizes anyone like them.
A lot of people get fed up with slow or no progress, so they fall for supporting approaches that “get things done.” Even though they go very wrong, and by that point, some are too lost in the sauce to admit it’s wrong or severely off-base.
Being involved in anarchist and decentralized leftist orgs, it’s very discouraging how few people care and how little power we have.
Often times it takes weeks of planning and everybody’s collective effort and spare resources to provide meals to a few dozen people, or to host a single information booth or class at a larger leftist meet up.
After years of that, the temptations of centralized power to just dictate to the masses what will happen is very strong. The justification goes something like, “yeah there are a ton of problems with XYZ, but at least they are accomplishing ABC!”
I feel it too when I look around my country of the USA. Sure China is State-capitalist, authoritarian, pseudo-dystopian police state, and super politically repressive. But god damn it, they have some of the best public transport in the world, a kickass tech and manufacturing sector, solid public healthcare, and the actually imprison and even execute billionaire scumbags…
When I have to encounter the level of American idiocy on a weekly basis, listen to the most asinine politicians and talking heads, and endure capitalist bootlicking propaganda everywhere, I start to get really tempted to advocate for the China way…
So it boils down to “at least the trains run on time”?
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Tankie brigade incoming in 3… 2… 1…
I am all for letting people believe what they want
Until those beliefs attempt to control others who don’t share the same beliefs. That’s the limit. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for certain groups to leave people alone.
Ha ha “tankies” aka people who break through the empire wall of propaganda programming. So choosing to stop believing western propaganda rags and CIA psyops to answer your question
“Authoritarianism” isnt even real, its jus another CIA op from the 60s so they could label any bad scary commie country as it
“Authoritarianism” isnt even real
It is difficult for me to imagine how someone could possibly convince themselves of this. What do you call it when a leader consolidates power around themselves, removing checks on their position and making unilateral mandates that are enforced through state violence against all who dare oppose?
We call it a dictatorship. The term “authoritarian” was developed by the west to antagonize its enemies. It means nothing except “this country is bad” in the exact same way that “terrorist” means nothing except “this person is bad”.
Look, western nations do often hypocritically point out authoritarianism in their geopolitical rivals for cynical reasons, but to pretend that the word was invented for this purpose and is meaningless just makes you look like an autocrat worshipping moron. It’s the same as how Trump supporters after being accused of being fascist insist that the word is a meaningless insult. The word authoritarianism exists because there’s a spectrum between a democratically elected benevolent leader and a ruthless dictator. You don’t want to confront the fact that they may have a point.
We call it a dictatorship. The term “authoritarian” was developed by the west to antagonize its enemies. It means nothing except “this country is bad” in the exact same way that “terrorist” means nothing except “this person is bad”.
Read it again and again until you learn.
People who try to convince you that words are meaningless are never up to any good. I’m sure it makes you feel real good about yourself to pretend I’m too stupid to understand instead of smart enough to see that words that are often misused still have meaning.
No pretending required, you are too stupid to get it.
I remember seeing this argument before. It’s something like all states are authoritarian, so you can’t call out any single state for being authoritarian. Like the label only exists for some states to de-legitimize others even though the ones doing the labeling are also authoritarian. It appears to me to be an intentional attempt to strip the word of meaning so that authoritarians can no longer be criticized as such.
All states are authoritarian, some moreso than others. It’s true that some states do cynically accuse others of doing what they do themselves to delegitimize them, but it is completely valid still to single out certain states that are particularly authoritarian, and to compare them to others.
This is why it’s necessary to investigate the nature of authority and the state. The state is simply the tool by which one class establishes supremacy, and the degree to which said authority is used depends on the conditions the state finds itself in, and not on any individual’s decision. Socialist states where the working class is in control have to develop instruments of state power to protect the gains of socialism, even anarchists do this as well in practice. Capitalist states where capitalists are in control oppress the working class to protect the free flow of capital and continuous circulation.
Trying to treat the level of authority employed as a policy choice, rather than a response to existing conditions, delegitimizes the use of necessary tools to defend the gains of socialism.
Trying to treat the level of authority employed as a policy choice, rather than a response to existing conditions, delegitimizes the use of necessary tools to defend the gains of socialism.
How you respond to existing conditions is a policy choice, and authoritarian methods are not necessary for defending the gains of socialism.
For example, one existing condition in the US is the fentanyl crisis. The US government has chosen to respond to this existing condition by continuing the criminalization of drug abuse and using the crisis as justification for imperialism in Venezuela. The US could have chosen to respond by funding addiction treatment centers and decriminalizing drug abuse.
Another example, an existing condition in China was population growing faster than their economy could keep up (ostensibly). China chose to respond with a one-child policy, restricting reproductive freedom. China could have chosen to respond by encouraging contraception and creating financial incentives and disincentives.
What you suggest is political determinism, implying that there is only one way that a state can respond to existing conditions, when in fact there is a vast range of possibility.
For example, one existing condition in the US is the fentanyl crisis. The US government has chosen to respond to this existing condition by continuing the criminalization of drug abuse and using the crisis as justification for imperialism in Venezuela. The US could have chosen to respond by funding addiction treatment centers and decriminalizing drug abuse.
Flip it around. The US Empire didn’t randomly choose to attack Venezuela, the imperialist system itself found justification for doing so. The mode of production takes priority over the what actions a system takes, its internal contradictions are what drives its change. The US Empire is in a state of decline, and thus needs to re-exert itself millitarily. The conditions are that imperialism is weakening, the outcome is the violent re-assertion of control. Had imperialism been working fine and Venezuela colonized by the US, it would not be attacking Venezuela right now, but the capacity for doing so already exists.
Another example, an existing condition in China was population growing faster than their economy could keep up (ostensibly). China chose to respond with a one-child policy, restricting reproductive freedom. China could have chosen to respond by encouraging contraception and creating financial incentives and disincentives.
In 1954, condoms and cervical caps were already promoted over abortions for family planning. They continued to promote birth control, in the early 1970s they sent “barefoot doctors” to the rural areas where birth rates were higher to teach about contraceptives and provide abortions if needed. It wasn’t until 1979, 25 years after they started promoting modern methods of birth control and incentives for lowering birth rates that they implemented the One Child Policy, exempting ethnic minorities. It wasn’t the first, second, third, fourth, or fifth tactic, but one finally employed after 25 years, over a decade and a half from the baby boom in the 60s. The state responded to crisis in increasing measure because simply promoting awareness of birth control and providing it for free did not work at the rates needed.
What you suggest is political determinism, implying that there is only one way that a state can respond to existing conditions, when in fact there is a vast range of possibility.
Not quite. My point isn’t that choice doesn’t exist, but that the extent to which measures are employed and the types of measures employed depends on the class character of the state and the existing material conditions the state finds itself in. Modern Germany doesn’t have a lesser potential for authority than Nazi Germany, it just hasn’t had the need to thanks to benefiting from decades of imperialism. Now that imperialism is crumbling, it’s trending to the far-right again. This isn’t because of any choice for authority, but the state responding to real conditions.
What do you call it when a leader consolidates power around themselves, removing checks on their position and making unilateral mandates
I call it “class society”
Which is authoritarian in nature.
That’s circular
Explain.
I don’t really believe that authoritarianism is materially possible in classless society
I believe that authoritarianism is the origin of class. All that it takes is for one person to draw a boundary, state “this is mine,” and then enforce that with violence. There is no end of history. Even if we do manage to create a classless society, there’s no guarantee that it will remain that way. To maintain such a society will require maintenance, and that means identifying and resisting authoritarianism when and where it inevitably emerges. It is therefore essential to have a word to describe the types of behaviour that can result in the reemergence of class society.
I like how you didn’t even remotely attempt to answer the question
So choosing to stop believing western propaganda rags and CIA psyops to answer your question
Comon, at least put some effort into your liberal trolling, I even put in “to answer your question” right there ha ha!
How do people actually fall into the “Tankie” mindset?
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community?
How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
How exactly does “So choosing to stop believing western propaganda rags and CIA psyops to answer your question” answer any of these three questions? Like it’s ridiculous to think that {rejecting CIA propaganda} => {immortal science of Marxism-Leninism}, i.e. people can and do reasonably disagree with Marxist-Leninists and other state socialists out of an organic theoretical and practical desire to do things differently.
Also, western leftists have a problem swallowing CIA and pro-Western propaganda (myself included, something I’m trying to unlearn) — including western “tankies”.
liberal trolling
Go through my comment history. 95% of my comment history is screaming at liberals for being fucking liberals 😮💨
Sorry if I’m being curt but you came into our space and started being a jerk to people, and now you’re all surprised Pikachu face that we’re being less than polite back. If you want to actually have a productive discussion then great, but you’re just not doing that right now.
They corrected you and you didn’t even address it, you’re losing
Worshipping states is cringe
And what state was I worshiping??
Any that calls themselves socialist by the looks of it
Actually I think this comment unintentionally answers OP’s question.
I think a common tankie story is:
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Realization that much of western media is propaganda or influenced by propaganda.
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Finding that enemies of the American empire (and Europe) with some semblance of power agree that western media is propaganda, and these people are MLM communists.
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After they’ve established credibility with their accurate criticisms of western capitalist society, tell you that, oh, by the way, those propaganda outlets in the west also lie about us, actually almost all of what we do is awesome and people who claim otherwise are automatically suspect.
Number 3 is a mistake, I think, but it’s an understandable one. This isn’t super fair to tankies but the analogy I’d give is to people who fall under the spell of someone like Jordan Peterson: he sounds smart, and he lulls you into a sense of security with good advice about taking care of yourself, keeping your house clean, etc., and then once he’s gotten your trust he gently introduces stuff like “oh by the way evolution proves that men and women shouldn’t work together” or whatever, and because he’s made sensible points up until then, your guard is down and you don’t critique it in your head before accepting it.
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So China and Russia aren’t authoritarianisms?
“Authoritarianism” isnt even real, its jus another CIA op from the 60s so they could label any bad scary commie country as it
“OUR glorious Ministry of Truth has determined that their hated Ministry of Truth is full of lies. Our glorious ministry of truth also assures us that they never lie.”
Sure, bud.
