this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Communism
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So I've heard tankies defined as "someone who specifically supports the centralized, authorization flavor of communism practiced by the USSR". They also often mention worship of Stalin and Mao, and a revisionist version of history supporting such a stance
This seems odd to me, especially since a group of tankies flocked early to a decentralized platform geared for long-form discussions
Personally, I believe capitalism is an ideological virus. You can trace a clear path from the Roman empire to the modern day, where a hyper-specialized society eradicated every other system of resource husbandry by sloppily harvesting as quick as possible and using that advantage to gangpress everyone else into service under them (and destroying anything that would even slightly slow down the process )
I don't think communism is the answer, because I don't think it's a path we can walk without first curing the disease, but the guiding concepts resonate with me.
So in that light, I'd like to ask in good faith:
Self-identified tankies - how do you define a tankie?
Someone asked a very similar question the other day. Here's a link to my reply, in case you're interested: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/559425. And related to this, I also recently wrote something about the need to defend a revolution: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/565520.
To answer your questions…
I don't self identify as a tankie and I'm not sure that anyone does. It seems to be a broad term used by anti-communists so that they don't have to do the hard work of engaging with what's being said.
If anyone does call me a tankie it's because I'm a Marxist-Leninist (ML). MLs are historical materialists. This involves a way of looking at the world that was first developed by Marx and Engels. Historical materialism (himat/histmat) applies dialectical materialism (dimat/diamat) to human society, treating reality as interrelated processes, not things.
This methodology is opposed to bourgeois ways of thinking and of other 'vulgar' strains of Marxism. As MLs interpret the world according to himat, they say things that can be incomprehensible to those who don't know understand dialectics or materialism.
Chomsky is a good example. He's a renowned prof at a top university but he admits that he doesn't understand himat and has never tried to. How can one possibly deal with one's opponents arguments in good faith without even trying to understand where they're coming from? An honest theoretician would admit that he's simply talking past his opposition, as might e.g. Ronald Dworkin or John Finnis (IIRC). Not Chomsky, who gives the perception that he's understood his opponents before dismissing them. Anyway, I digress.
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:
I won't say that you're a tankie, lol, but you're in agreement with the MLs. Following Marx and Engels, communism is the process of curing the disease.
It is often said that communism is the end goal. In a way, this is true. But we need to look a bit further and apply himat to fully understand the position. According to himat, all relations/processes are internally contradictory (himat still complies with formal logic).
Capitalism is a class society, involving a contradictory relation between bourgeois and proletariat. One cannot exist without the other but their interests are opposed. They must fight, just as slaves fought masters and serfs fought lords. Humans arrive at capitalism when they resolve the contradiction between slave/master and serf/lord. (This is very reductive example, as there are many classes in every epoch of class society.)
Humans will arrive at communism when they resolve the contradictions of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg once said, 'socialism or barbarism', roughly meaning we either head towards communism or we let the liberals/fascists continue their barbarity. (When MLs say, 'liberals', they mean all those in favour of capitalism, as liberalism is the ideology of capitalism; and they become fascists to protect capitalism against revolution.) Now we can add a third, 'or planetary collapse'. We either head towards communism or decide how quickly to destroy the climate. There's no option where it isn't destroyed unless we head towards communism.
But, according to himat, communism isn't the final stage of human development. Because contradiction is in everything. And the struggle between the opposites within those contradictory relations drive change. We're just unable to see exactly what contradictions will arise once we get past capitalism and abolish classes.
I think you might already see things in a similar way, as you identify the germ of the existing system in the Roman system.
And this takes us to e.g. the USSR. I'll try to be brief. It's not that MLs/tankies support the USSR. I'm not even sure what that means as the only kind of support that counts is material support. Although material support can be ideological, there's no USSR in existence to which to offer any support. It dissolved several decades ago. The only thing left is critical analysis of what it was, how it worked, and why it ultimately failed.
Following such an analysis, the evidence takes us to whatever conclusions it takes us. Looking at that evidence to fully understand the USSR, it's clear that it was not what the anti-communist narrative says it was. If this is a more favourable view than we've been taught we're allowed to have, then someone is lying and propagandising and we must ask, why?
We can get into more details about these subjects if you wish, although I may ask others to chip in depending on what you ask. But if you are here in good faith, which seems to be the case, please keep asking questions.
Do you know of any resources where I can hear the options of average Soviet citizens during the time of the USSR, I would like to learn?
There are some links on Dessalines' GitHub page: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#did-the-citizens-of-the-soviet-union-dislike-their-government.
I don't think it is quite what you're after, but you might enjoy Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds (there are PDFs online if you look around).
I've made a post on [email protected] to see if anyone else has some good suggestions: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/911871. Keep an eye out there.
Is this helpful at all?
Yes thanks, I’ve watched Parenti’s yellow lecture. Sadly, I could not get my son to watch; he said it looked “old.” But he knows more about Marx than me, so there is hope. GenZ may surprise us all.
Parenti's lectures are great! I have faith in GenZ, too. They might need some encouragement, which it sounds like your son is getting already.
Maybe just the audio from Parenti's lectures will do the trick? https://lemmygrad.ml/post/899886
He listens to Deprogram, on YouTube. YouTube is everything to GenZ, and TikTok. Thanks for the links, there’s so much to learn.
you're not going to get an answer because people don't self identify as a tankie - it's a pejorative term. you should ask for the opinion of modern marxist-lenninists and you'll get plenty of explanation. like most political persuasions it's not the ideology that is flawed it's the execution.
Fair enough, a pejorative term for what exactly though? The most nuanced answer I've gotten is from a proponent of communism who pointed at the authoritarian bent to it... Which seems super weird to me.
The way I see it, a bureaucracy has more leeway in allocating goods the higher up you go, which is very literal administrative capitol - it's totally in conflict with the core concept of Marx, which is a person getting the fruits of their own labor, and no one getting to milk others (which is really the only way to get much inequality)
I'm a lot more critical of lennonists. While on the surface it imitates capitalism's ability to optimize production (and with a more aligned goal, minimizing scarcity instead of maximizing the supply-demand equation), it also reintroduces the alignment problem. As you scale up, individual action and ideological beliefs become blips in the data, and the super organism created through humans arranged in the structure.
Individuals have a perverse incentive to maximize their own authority, the number of people under them, and the scale of their operations - by doing that they appear more meritocratous and are more likely to move up the hierarchy. Eventually someone gets the idea to fudge the numbers, and since the metrics are too complex to spot this in a spreadsheet, the most widely selected for skill to move up the ladder is to distort (or spin) the numbers so an individual appears to be serving a greater need than what actually exists.
Lennon's theory is great, the more centralized the distribution, the greater the potential for optimization - but it ignores the emergent properties that appear when humans form an entity too complex for individual humans to grasp the full picture. You can reign in the worst excesses through watchdogs and harsh punishments, but ultimately that just becomes another layer for power to concentrate. You can keep layering and slow down the rot, but it's a fundamental alignment problem - either you purposely concentrate the power in a person or group and regress to autocracy, or you constantly keep adding layers of checks and balances (which eats away at the efficiency gains)
So I see a fundamental contradiction here, which is why I can get behind techno-communism with intelligent agents running the show, or I can get behind decentralizing the system and creating something more anarchistic (or ideally, both), but Lennon always seemed to me to be a smart architect given a problem with a scale and an urgency beyond his abilities
Or am I missing something fundamental?
Redtea already gave you a far better response than I can, but this is an amusing typo.
communism with Ringo charecteristics?
Can you give me more information to research about the humanity/ alignment problem? I’ve recent been interested in council communism or decentralized government
I can't edit in the app I'm testing out, but I'll add a qualifier after hearing the pejorative connotations (I literally first heard the word last week and am looking for context)
I'd love to hear the take on the definition of the term tankies by someone who believes others would push the term on them
I'd say the most complete answer you can have from one of the biggest names in the people who are being called "tankie" is this video by well-respected youtuber Hakim :
https://youtu.be/LcJ5NrJtQ8g