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this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Anyone that uses the term "Tankie" unironically to refer to people to the left of them and the Democratic party are not a part of the left.
It's always helpful to identify the liberals that are getting "scratched" though.
It's the good old Red Scare but using the word "tankie" instead of "commie" and the people doing it now are just as devoid of ethics and hard right as the Macarthists were.
No, it's not. Tankies are their own thing, they're authoritarian communists. The fact you think they're regular communists has you spreading misinformation sympathetic to their cause.
I'm as socialist as they come and I will forever say fuck tankies.
"I'm as socialist as they come, that's why I reject all previous forms of socialism: because I believe myself to be more intelligent, literate in politics and economics, compassionate, and superior to those pesky socialists that dedicated their entire lives to socialism in the previous century".
That's why it should mean, but is frequently applied to anyone unapologetically anti-capitalist.
Let me explain the metaphor I used since, surprisingly, you seem to have missed it by a mile:
Who are you talking about? Libs mostly don't even know what tankies are, they aren't generally going around using the term as an epithet. I think there's more LaRouchites than tankies in the US, it's an obscure and politically irrelevant tiny little slice of the population that 99% of people have no idea about. The only reason anyone talks about them on Lemmy is because there's a disproportionate amount here and a number of them like to make a nuisance of themselves. The people who dislike tankies are almost exclusively actual communists and Marxists and socialists and anarchists, and generally people of the left who are in any way knowledgeable about history or politics. No else even gives a shit about them.
Liberals are the only ones doing that.
The ones here do. I'm not writting for people not here.
And they're "libs" because you say so, because they don't pass your purity test.
Fallacious as fuck.
You just failed their bullshit purity test. In their mind, this means you're just a "dirty lib"
Tankie is when they correlate the industrial growth of USSR as success when every other nation transitioning into a bourgeoise republic had similar growth
Tankie is when they pick and choose traits of Stalin and refuse the facts of his authoritarianism
Tankie is when they ignore the lack of progress in communism in USSR after Lenin died
Tankie is when they make excuses for the failures of USSR by pining them all in the west
Sorry to hear you got scratched
What a clever, pithy response. Not like you could address the actual content of the comment because... Well you know.
There was no content to the comment, just a selection of meaningless assertions.
How, exactly, were any of them meaningless? They're statements describing the views of actual people (and a lot of them are here).
Because they're completely baseless assertions.
How are they baseless? I think of the tankies I've known over the years and these assertions fit them perfectly. They do exactly all of these things, its like they have a script. I spent a good amount of time around tankies in college and they would regularly get into dumb arguments with the communists and anarchists about literally each one of the things listed.
That nerve is still itching I see.
The differences being that the USSR uplifted everyone equally and not just a capitalist few; and that it developed without abusing imperialism and unequal exchange against the global south (and actually contributed the most to emancipatory movements and was key in the decolonisation of the 20th century and as a reference for worker movements in the west to push for further rights).
Tankie is when they reject the big-man understanding of history and instead analyze the material and historical conditions of a particular era.
Tankie is when they point to the doubling of life expectancy in the Soviet Union and the only case of industrialisation of a country in history together with China that happened since the 20th century, excluding subsidised US colonies such as South Korea or Japan.
Tankie is when you understand that an imperfect but emancipatory movement which surmounted extreme odds, is desirable over the continuation of imperialism
USSR rather than conducting imperialism instead used gulags as methods to develop the east, and it had used the development of previous white russian factories to continue industrialisation, this only sped up with factors present in Stalinist Russia which many others in the communist party opposed due to the damage it had caused
The nature of authoritarian rule essentially purged any opposing socialist whether in majority or minority, which makes him and the regime authoritarian. You just refused it without analysis, instead labelling it big man theory
This is not the only case, and would be the only case if you do not include ww1 and post-ww2, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Egypt, Siam all had similar improvements, not just South Korea or Japan, and South Korea didn't even have improvements until far later, seriously? You used these nations to argue?
Tankie is when they say 'good enough' as essentially ruin their own revolution over the fear that the west will ruin them first, how is communism in one country working out for you?
Sorry, but that's already been disproven. The gulag system at its peak had fewer people imprisoned than the US currently does. And at its peak, it represented less than 5% of the total production of the country. This lasted for a total of less than 5 years between late 30s and early 40s. The Soviet Union simply factually did NOT develop with forced labor, and saying otherwise is just proof of ignorance (or willful deception). For further details on this, feel free to check up the data on the book "Farm to Factory" by Robert C. Allen. Really not escaping the "swallowing the State Department propaganda" accusations.
"The CPSU purged every opposition. That's why immediately after his death, the opposite faction which was within the party proceeded to do de-Stalinization instead of continuing with the prior tendency that was solidified in the party". New documents released these past few years regarding the Moscow trials prove that there WAS a trotskyist/anarchist/SR/fascist/kulak plot to murder Stalin and to eliminate socialism, there's extensive, sourced discussion in the ongoing series of podcast episodes "the Stalin eras" in the podcast "Proles Pod".
If you use US State Department as your source of information for the living conditions of the country, then yes.
If you use actual metrics such as union membership rates, life expectancy, literacy rates, rates of high education, women in the workplace, crime statistics, poverty rates, inequality rates, industrialisation rates, lack of imperialism and unequal exchange, consumption of art and literature, collective sport activities, access to housing, access to healthcare, retirement age, working conditions, and a myriad more; and actually compare with historically similar countries in the region (Kazakhstan + Uzbekistan vs Afghanistan + Pakistan; Cuba vs Haiti; China vs Indonesia; Russia vs Argentina in the sense that they had very similar levels of development pre-revolution), you may find out that actually-existing socialism is extremely beneficial both for its inhabitants and for the global south.
Thanks. It's exhausting having to debunk all of the lies from the red scare over and over and over again.
Prison Labor camps in 2025 with the largest prison population on the planet: "normal"
Gulags over half a century ago that ended long before Jim Craw laws did: "Ah, that's a scary sounding name!"
It's a self report on the level of people who use dog whistles so loud they are foghorns. Just a word or two in the right context and you know you can ignore everything else you've read by them in the last 30 seconds.
Tankies aren't to the left of anyone. They're a parody of the left that ultimately believe in right-wing authoritarianism in a slightly different hat. Leftist authoritarian is an oxymoron.
It is an oxymoron because tankies aren't authoritarian. Tankies believe in collectivisation of the means of production, democracy in the government and in the workplace, maximal freedom speech and of arts, and welfare for everyone.
What tankies don't believe in, is in wannabe-good leftism that lets itself be trampled by fascism, e.g. Allende in Chile or the Spanish Second Republic. Tankies believe in actually-existing socialism, which manages to fight imperialism, e.g. defeat of Tsarism in the Russian Empire and the liberation of Europe from Nazism, or the liberation of Cuban slaves from western oligarchs, despite some caveats and shortcomings that are overstated and heavily propagandized by State Department propaganda that libs swallow whole.
Then we need a new word for the pseudoleftists who support authoritarian regimes in Russia and China who are infesting Lemmy.
No lefties in Lemmy support the modern Russian Federation in Lemmy. I beg you to go on .ML or Lemmygrad if you think so, and ask honestly for a full perspective on Russia, its form of government, who it serves, and its role in geopolitics.
I'm a Hexbear user, and users will simultaneously recognise that the Russian Federation is a force for evil towards its citizens (oppression of women and minorities, degrading of the welfare state, imposition of militarism) while simultaneously being anti-imperialist in other regions of the world (look up the news of Niger plans for abandoning its former colonial currency through Russia-supported AES), even if only by opposing the western-imperialist structures. The Ukraine topic is complicated and if you're willing to discuss it in honesty, I'm open to doing so, but spoiler: Russia fucking sucks and so does the EU/US, Ukraine is fucked either way by sheer misfortune of being in a buffer zone between imperialist powers.
As for China, I'm sorry but it's not more authoritarian than the EU or the USA. In the US, 1 in 4 black men above the age of 30 have been through the prison system, which if happened in any other nation, we'd call genocide. In the EU, democracy consists for the past 20 years in getting to choose which is the colour and acronym of the party that will impose neoliberal welfare degradation, budget cuts, and diminishing of labour rights. In China, the past year GDP grew 5% and real purchase power grew by above 5% (unthinkable in the west), with the biggest growth being in rural areas. A new integral law of protection of private citizen data against facial recognition was just passed. And if you ask in China vs EU/USA on the level of satisfaction with government and policy (I've had several Chinese coworkers who can corroborate this), the satisfaction is immensely greater in China. It's just that repression through the workplace and by private companies isn't regarded as authoritarian in the west, when in reality it's much more pervasive than any other form of authoritarianism.
Yeah no, this isn't a "everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi" situation. I know what you're trying to do here.
What if I use the term 'tankie' unironically to refer to people to the right of me?
Probably some light mockery.