Ah, the classic "only western countries can be imperialist"

the other vein of pro-russian tankies i've seen is that it's impossible for a once communist country to backslide into fascis. how they square that and russia's claim that they must destroy Ukraine, a country that was once not just communist, but anarcho-communist, in order to stop their backslide into fascism, i have no idea. perhaps if a person is actually familiar with history and not just a single pro-hegemonic propaganda, they wouldn't be tankies.

i've been developing a theory, more of a hypothesis, really, that tankies, hoteps, white feminists, etc have figured out a part of the puzzle of oppression, and in their anger at waking up to that aspect of their reality, reject all other discourse surrounding the system of oppression that doesn't mesh with their experienced oppression. this, in many ways, is the root of leftist infighting. everyone sees everyone else's fight for liberation as a distraction from their own fight for liberation. the trick is, none of them are. they are simply different expressions of how the ruling class controls us.

when a tankie says shit like "the trans issue is a distraction" the are sparking leftist infighting, charitably unknowingly. our trans brothers, sisters, and thembers are our allies in this, and are generally speaking (not universally of course, i don't want to give the impression anyone is a homogenous group) left as hell. we need them to help us in our fight because they are experienced, battle hardened, and see things the rest of us don't see because they are tuned in.

the thing is that… yes. the culture wars are distractions. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight in them. that's like saying the best response to being bullied in school is to take your beating and tell no one because you're focused on a bigger issue. that's a great way to get your legs broke. the answer is to push back against the culture wars and say why we push back, and say that our enemy combatants are distracted from the real war. that they are acting as class traitors from a deep system of manipulation.

tankies don't realize it, or maybe they do, but they're conservatives. they seek to maintain a hegemony that oppresses us, the working classes, that has been shown not to work. authoritarian communism is still authoritarianism, and also expresses somewhere between most and all of the features of ur-fascism. it will never save us from our oppression. they also tell on themselves when they say "read theory" and all the books they reference were published before WWII. the world has moved on. we have learned more about our oppressors. they're leaving out a century of theory when they say to read theory. they are practitioners of the religion of Marxist-Leninism

Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use. Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.

However, I'll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed. In fact, before the war, socialist parties across Europe came together and, seeing the possibility of the war on the horizon, agreed that in the event of such a war they would work together against their own governments. Once the war actually started, however, "socialists" in Britain, France, and Germany all fell in line behind their government in support of their own side in the imperialist war. They either succumbed to pressure or sought to advance their own positions as careerists and opportunists. Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.

Whether revolutionary defeatism is generally applicable is another question, but it is sort of our, "null hypothesis," you might say. But more important are the underlying ideas that support revolutionary defeatism. We don't just agree with it because Lenin said it, but because it tracks with our own analysis, which is based on class and realpolitik. Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, "but this time, it's different," and more often than not, they're wrong.

Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don't really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all. If you want to speak our language, then you have to frame your arguments in terms of the benefit to the common people.

Whoa, watch out, you might hit someone with that goalpost, swinging it around like that

Do you know who else was right about landlords? A shit ton of people that didn't get millions of their own citizens killed through incompetence and mismanagement.

Most Marxists do not uncritically support Russia, though opposition to the Nationalists like Azov in Ukraine is something common on the Left, and believe Russia's anti-US stance is beneficial for the Global South (see the string of African liberation movements in the past few years). Most Marxists can agree that the Uyghur people have been placed in re-education camps, but most do not believe they are being systemically murdered en masse like many people report. Most Marxists think the DPRK is doing surprisingly well for a country under extreme embargoes and was subject to more tons of bombs than the pacific front in World War II, not that it would be preferable to live there than in a highly developed country free from those problems.