Tankiejerk

I was a social liberal and economic conservative. I read The Economist and Ayn Rand. My mother had a copy of Mao's Red Book from her grandfather, but none of it made sense and there was nothing about communism in the media. I even had to seek out anti-communist literature, I read Solzhenitsyn and Orwell.

My evolution to social democrat happened during the Obama administration. I had been railing at GW Bush, flabbergasted he would start two wars, watching the Daily Show, and eager for Obama to get in and stop the wars and close Guantanamo. When Obama did a troop surge in Afghanistan instead, kept Gitmo open, and invaded Libya and Syria, I started to realize that there is no major anti-war party. Obamacare got everyone talking about health care and I started to realize that it makes no sense to deny health care to poor people. I didn't vibe with anyone but I read in a magazine about a Vermont senator that sounded pretty based, and he went on to run for president.

So I gave over a thousand dollars to Bernie Sanders's two presidential campaigns. I was pretty crushed to learn that the DNC is a corporation that will openly work against popular will to suppress any threats to private health care. CNN was handing debate questions in advance to Hillary, the email leaks showed open conspiracy against Sanders in the DNC. The second go-around wasn't much better and ended with a whimper as COVID obscured everything. Warren acted like someone trying to pull the left wing of democratic voters back to the center.

From time to time I would see socialists on Reddit. Bernie was talking about socialism like a good thing and I liked Bernie so I would see what these people were saying. My first impression was two things, firstly that I had no idea what they were talking about and secondly that they had more in-depth discussions about international relations than anyone I've seen.

They were saying that history shows that incremental reform through elections in a country controlled by the wealthy will never bring about lasting socialism, and the elections of Bernie Sanders, Jesse Jackson, Howard Dean, Eugene Debs, Henry Wallace, Jeremy Corbyn and Salvador Allende showed that. These were not people talking about revolution because they like violence and death, they were talking about revolution because it is necessary to stop all the death that comes from capitalist exploitation at home and abroad.

I wanted to have an informed opinion about communism, so I could understand exactly what's wrong or right about it. I read Marx, Lenin, Frantz Fanon and Michael Parenti. The State and Revolution by Lenin explained with historical context why a revolution is necessary to overthrow capitalism, and why a state is needed to protect the revolution from being overthrown by capitalists.

I read The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin and The Ecology of Freedom by Bookchin to get an idea of the left-libertarian mindset. I went in wanting an answer for how an anarchist revolution would protect itself better than the Paris Commune did, and I left with no answers. It seems to me that libertarian socialism only works if there's so much popular support for anarchism that there is no state suppression necessary, and there are no sufficiently strong foreign influences that will profit from invasion and overthrow.

This whole journey basically came from two questions about my disillusion with the USA Democratic Party, what will it take to get our country to stop supporting unnecessary wars, and what will it take to keep tens of thousands of Americans from dying every year from denial of health care. Most people don't want war, do want everyone to have health care, yet something keeps us from getting it year after year.

I remember feeling smart because I read Solzhenitsyn and The Economist. I understand how pervasive anti-communist propaganda is, and it makes perfect sense that it is so when monopoly media and the CIA have no interest in portraying communism in an honest light, and I've seen how they work, reading "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky and "Inventing Reality" by Michael Parenti.

So people generally call Marxist-Leninists "tankies" and now the tankie is me.