a drawing of a person wearing a balaclava and holding a gun with the text "all my homies hate tankies" :3
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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I don’t agree with the vision of an authoritarian state, even as a step towards something else, but my tankie friends, for example those in PSL, are doing a ton of good on the ground by organizing and funding busses to prison for the families of prisoners, helping support tenant unions, providing support for immigrants in the form of legal representation, continuously organizing against police injustices (especially in cases involving disabled, black, or queer people), and other issues that might arise in their locale. I respect the people continuously putting themselves and their resources on the line for others. I would be much quicker to lend disrespect to those that only talk and do nothing.
PSL has defended abusers and harassed victims for speaking up, have policed and harassed the members for liking and sharing things that don't follow the party's strict platform, and have ruined actions that could have made real change all because they care more about public image than actual effective action. PSL is a cult, your friends are in a cult, and you are advocating for a cult.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/14wF1Ti5GT2w5GZmwqvhvk6uH4zUss_a-B2GZ9NZEx74/mobilebasic
https://fashbusters.wordpress.com/2020/12/30/psl-stalked-doxxed-harassed-steven-powers-accuser/
Are they doing this to support the organization of a politburo and a direct line of authority from a single charismatic leader at the top? Do they make apoligistic statements for human injustices and advocate for the expansion of borders through war?
Otherwise they're just communists doing rad communist shit and you should labor to help them organize and shoulder their burdens.
I think there is a general misconception of communists especially here in the US and it's been a problem in leftist circles for a while.
Those people dont sound like tankies.
Tankies are authoritarian, and unions are the opposite of that.
PSL is marxist-leninist in ideology and doing all the activities I described. Perhaps way in the future I will have to fight with them, but for now we align on many issues and work side by side. Don’t allow propaganda to paint too broad of strokes.
The moment your interests stop aligning, your friends kill you in your sleep. They want you dead because you don't 100% agree with their totalitarianism, and if you help their revolution, they'll betray you for it like every other ML has post-revolution. Run while you still can (not that they'll ever actually be part of a revolution, but you know what I mean cx)
I know my ML friends quite well. Some of the most loyal people I know. Quite a presumption you make.
Personal loyalty aside from what I’ve seen most people who organize together frequently put a lot of trust in each other creating a bit of a mutually assured destruction scenario that disincentives throwing each other under the bus.
No amount of disincentives is gonna change the fact that the end game of tankies includes killing all counter-revolutionaries (everyone who helped them win the revolution but thinks authoritarianism is bad). No amount of good deeds will make them a leftist. We're not out here praising catholics just bc they do some charity stuff, why do your murderous "friends" get a pass? Again, history has shown over and over and over again that tankies betray their fellow revolutionaries. Your "friends" are no exception. They're loyal to eachother and to authoritarianism. To them, you and I are tools to be used and discarded
You’re attaching a lot to labels to be an anarchist (I am too btw). I place my trust in individual humans not projects, and some of those individuals happen to be MLs. They’re not organizing against any cultural or ethnic groups, they do work that impacts their local communities and no global organizing, so I don’t find much issue with them also having some fantasies about what North Korea is up to.
Right now they're not doing any harm, and I think an armed revolution is unlikely enough they never will, but that's still their goal. It's cool they're doing good things now, but we can't mistake that for them being good people any more than we would call a nazi a good person for working at a homeless shelter. I'll take them doing good things, but they're my enemy, and I'll treat them as such if they ever gain enough power to actually go after their enemies (comrades with slightly different ideas on how things should be run)
Exactly, right now we organize together because we share the same intuitions about what the right thing to do is in the context of the issues that impact ourselves and our neighbors. Our long term visions currently differ but, as I’m sure you’re familiar with if you’re an anarchist, there’s no blueprint of what needs to be done in the future we will all need to flex with reality and make the best decisions we can (without sacrificing our core values). Sometimes that means losing a friend but as long as we put people over projects I’m confident we won’t turn into tyrants. I’m quite certain my ML friends would abandon the party before turning on me unless I gave up our shared core values which are based on human decency. Most people I know who are anarchists became MLs first just because it’s a more visible ideology. At least in the US, these groups are not that divided.
That's a good way to look at it :3 I haven't read a ton of theory or anything and I struggle to think of how those ideological differences won't lead to bad things or failure, and a lot of tankies want me dead, but so do fascists and liberalism seems really bad at avoiding that so Idk. The thought just scares me considering how much they seem to love Stalin and how many comrades he locked up or killed after the revolution (Lenin might've started that Idk, I just know a lot of revolutionaries got punished for not agreeing on how things should be done).
I know not every revolution is so bloody, and for all I know there are MLs who never turned on their comrades, so I'm sorry if I've mischaracterized your friends based on the views of their specific group. I get not all MLs are "tankies", I just struggle to differentiate them sometimes and not feel hate and fear towards them after seeing a lot of tankies cheer on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and deny + justify multiple genocides and brag about how they'll kill anarchists after the revolution. I literally had an ML "friend" tell me once that if Stalin killing jews was the price of revolution, then that's what it takes and it's justified. I know it's not reasonable of me, but that's the first kind of thing that pops into my mind whenever someone says they're an ML
I’m sorry you’ve run into those people, the world needs people who will think for themselves and remain steadfast in their commitment to human decency and equality regardless of the propaganda that will undoubtedly swirl around us. There could very reasonably be another ‘red scare’ soon and we all know it won’t discriminate between communists and anarchists and will very likely sweep up a number of people who would self-describe as liberals/democratic socialists too. We need to focus on protecting the most vulnerable (where I am—immigrants and people who lack basic food/shelter) and organizing to meet our community’s needs outside the existing government structures where we can. And, perhaps sooner than we’d like or are ready for, networking to get people safely out of hostile states.
And chances are they very much would be organizing against Uyghurs and Ukrainians if they made a decent percentage of immigrants to whatever country you're in. It's a lot easier to act cool and tolerant when you don't often see people you think are terrorists and nazis
What lmao? The people who you call tankies are aggressively pro union. Find me a "tankie" site that thinks otherwise.
And you would call the PSL tankies. Here's a Wikipedia excerpt from their page:
Oh no, someone fell for tankie memes rather than talking to a tankie and learning what their deal is.
If someone calls themselves a tankie and they dont understand where the term tankie comes from, theyre either not telling the truth or are not worth talking to hecause they dont understand their own ideology.
Your friends are assholes, and not leftist. Your friends want me dead for being an anarchist. Your friends love Russia stealing land and children from Ukraine. Your friends deny any genocide not committed by a western country. Fuck all tankies, especially your friends :3
"provides support for immigrants" as long as they're not Uyghur, those guys are all terrorists and need to be reprogrammed am I right?
"organize against police injustices" as long as it's not The People's Police, they serve the people and can do no wrong
Your tankie "friends" are shit people and shit friends, you shouldn't associate with them. Again, they want you and everyone else who doesn't lick their boots dead
Already replied to you in the other comment. I think you have some issues to work out with your own comrades if you are politically involved at all irl, which I suspect you aren’t just based on these two responses.
I'd love to be if I didn't live in the middle of nowhere, I used to go to rallies but I don't have a car to get to them. You seem like a good and smart person, and I hope it hasn't seemed like I'm mad at you or anything. I just have no patience for people whose idols betrayed their comrades and ruled with an iron fist. No matter how nice your friends seem, if they achieve their endgame, they will murder me, and likely you too unless you can kiss their ass hard enough. Either tankies need to be ignored, or if we're gonna use them for our own ends, we need to be ready to ditch them and defend ourselves the moment they turn on us