this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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No, believing capitalism must fall, even by revolutionary means, does not make you a tankie.
No, believing that the left is hamstrung and baited by the powers that be does not make you a tankie.
No, opposing US imperialism does not make you a tankie.
No, believing in a planned economy does not make you a tankie.
What makes you a tankie is supporting authoritarian regimes crushing everything a leftist is supposed to stand for, because 'West bad' or 'Critical support for Comrade Xi's concentration camps!'
Indeed. It just very strongly implies being a tankie though.
If I asked them to describe implementing such a thing, Im pretty sure they would describe just about the way every murderous communist regime began.
Every economy is planned. There is a framework in which entities function. That is called capitalism. A sandbox where rules are made to make it geared towards growth.
Even if someone went through with the grandiose plan of setting up a communist regime, they would eventually start simulating capitalism.
Whew!
The kmer Rouge thing is crazy, and I just had my first encounter with it in the wild.
Lately I've been feeling alienated from both liberals and the extreme "left".
The liberals boot lick two party politics and shill for corporations. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" while letting good enough be the enemy of better.
The tankies boot lick shitty individuals and put mere men on pedestals, murdering in the name of "progress".
Can't win I tell ya! 💁
Political ideology isn't a straight line spectrum though. At the extreme far left, you have people that oppose any form of authoritarian control, people that are in favor of absolute authoritarian control, and people that think that some authoritarian control is necessary for society to function. None of these views are inherently wrong per se, but people that are in favor of one flavor or another are going to see champions of there version as being above criticism. Tankies are generally in favor of state-control, and so they take criticisms of Lenin and Stalin as personal attacks on them.
I should have said tankies instead of extreme left tbh. I consider myself extreme left.
All of the above does make you dumb tho
"At least I'm not a tankie" is like, the lowest possible bar to clear
Fuck socialism, but fuck US imperialism too (can't keep markets free if you get invaded by the US when you refuse to eat their shit)
Tell me you don't know the definition of political terms. There's no such thing as free markets anywhere on Earth. Government regulation exists even in wartorn developing nations.
In truth, markets cannot exist at all without government intervention.
Never said otherwise. Markets do need some entity to back them, specially countries
Setting up some rules to prevent corpos from taking more power than the state is not the same as a fucking command economy where all means of production are nationalised
What've you got against socialism in general? It's a very broad term.
I definitely am not against unions and the defence of worker's rights (Specially for the USA, you fuckers have like 19th century working conditions) but there are quite some things in Marxist theory that I disagree with
Like, that part where it's the amount of work done that adds value to goods. Like, I could literally pick up a diamond meteorite that just fell on my yard and it would be extremely valuable. Scarcity is definitely a bigger factor than work put into goods. There's also this thing of having no real incentives to be more efficient, but that might be more command economy specific
We could have a long conversation about this, but I think the easiest way would simply be to say that:
Marxism is not the only form of socialism
Command economy is very, VERY specific to the style of Marxism-Leninism that was exported by the Soviet Union. You might find interest in anarcho-syndicalism, mutualism, and market socialism. Not because I think you'll necessarily agree with them, but because they posit very different ideas about how a socialist economy should work.
Don't assume I didn't know about those ideas. And don't assume either that I'd like them. I mentioned Marxism as Marx is considered to be the "father of scientific socialism"
I didn't say that you'd like them, I only brought them up because you included a specific criticism of command economies when asked for your issue with socialism.
You don't like anarcho-syndicalism?
Anarchism is a childish fantasy
Dude any "ism" that begins with "anarcho-" is just waiting for a smart person to become a dictator.
If you don't realize that, it's just proof you're not the smart person who would take over, not that it wouldn't happen
Diamonds are literally one of the most artificially inflated gemstone values in existence. They’re also the most abundant. Just pointing that out for when you try to argue your point again.
And yet it would have a high value despite it having gone through no worker's hands.
Yes, the economy is crazy in quite a lot of cases, yes, sometimes things are overvalued and that further proves Marx's stance wrong
Oh, yeah, I’m not disagreeing. I guess diamonds work for that, I’m just saying it’s not rare at all.
Well, I specified that it fell from the sky, that definitely is a plus
True. Just for clarity, I think the Marxist socio-economic platform is absolute horseshit and doesn’t survive contact at all with the Information Age, because it necessitates an industrial/agrarian society.
That diamond would be worth a lot more if you put in the labor to cut and polish it. Almost like labor adds value to resources.
Also: Who says you own what falls on the ground?
I own it because I took it while nobody else claimed it
How do you plan on enforcing that claim?
Simple: as nobody else claimed it I just take it and leave it in my home
And what happens when an angry mob or lawyers or jackbooted thugs come and take it?
That's why the state must protect private property. In the case of the lawyers, if the claims are unfounded then I would get to keep it
Oh, so you get special thugs that are allowed to use violence. That doesn't seem fair.
Also: Now you see the violence inherent in the system.
Yes, we get special thugs that protect what's of each person.
Sure, it's probably even more violent than a literal mob trying to steal my stuff just because they want to. Well, it was that way in the Neolithic (raiding settlements) and that's why its inhabitants decided to have some kind of protection by and for the settlement.
It's literally not that hard to understand: you use force to prevent people from raiding your settlement, then the settlement grows with more safety and that's literally how we stopped being either nomadic raiders or afraid and impoverished farmers.
Anarchism would be just going to that step