this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Tankiejerk
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Dunking on Tankies from a leftist perspective.
A tankie is someone who defends/supports authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes who call themselves "socialist". The term originated from people supporting the 1956 invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union. Nowadays they are just terminally online, denying genocides, and falling for totalitarian propaganda and calling such regimes "true democracies". remember to censor usernames when necessary.
Please be sure to obscure usernames on posts to prevent doxxing.
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It's clear you feel very passionately about this, I'm certainly willing to concede that it's theoretically possible for an entirely democratic country to choose a genuinely communist model in an entirely democratic way.
I do see a path to it, one that Marx thought he saw, but it was far too early for.
It relies on automation. Marx saw this starting in factories, there were more goods produced in one day than any single village could need in a year. But the problem was, those goods still took human labor to make, and toiling away in a factory leaves little time for revolution.
The modern world is rapidly changing, jobs are vanishing now in ways that have never happened before. In the past, it was some rich asshole getting richer off of my labor. Now it's some rich asshole getting richer off of an AI trained on my data.
We're not quite there yet, but soon the predictions of the video "Humans need not apply" will come true.
When no one has a job anymore, when no one can have a job, well, then you'll see a democratic push for then next step towards communism, UBI.
Countries that resist UBI will see revolution, and will then likely fall to dictatorship.
All of this will be on a backdrop of climate crisis, where governments are forced to take desperate measures to try to save what they can. Which will be another vector for possible dictatorships, because it's easy for people to fall prey to a single voice yelling that they alone can fix all the problems of the world if you just trust them. This yelling is usually quietly followed with them telling you who their enemies are, and that they believe that hurting said enemies will fix things.