this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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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.
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Oh good, this seems like a good place to ask something that's been bothering me for a while.
I see the posts from Hexbear and Lemmygrad. I can understand why they are in favour of theoretically communist regimes like China. What I can't for the life of me see is why they seem to unconditionally support modern Russia which is surely as far away from communism as you can get.
I must be missing something but not sure what?
"I hate the US"
"Oh Russia and Iran hate the US. I love Russia and Iran!"
Unfortunately sometimes people are actually as stupid as they make themselves out to be.
What is there to love about the U.S.?
European here. The US are far from being the great country that they are presented as in a lot of US media, but it's also far from the terrible place that some people will claim it to be. Sure, it has some massive flaws, but it's still "better" than a lot of other places. You can love plenty of things about it. It's not just black or white.
American here. It’s not that the U.S. is a terrible place to live, it’s that a lot of America’s wealth comes from the extraction of wealth and resources from other countries:
Mensch Hubi, dich hab ich hier aber nicht erwartet
Ich bin überall 👀
There's lots of states where weed is legal.
The government doesn't have a secret police force to blackbag me for what I say.
I live in a beautiful place near the mountains.
The elections aren't rigged.
The people I know are here.
It's impossible to stage an effective invasion.
There's lots of things to love about the place I live. That doesn't mean I think it's perfect, and I still think about how to make life better. Throwing in with Russia is not an effective strategy to affect positive change, and so I think those who do so are foolish.
Now, imagine not being born in America. But in the Philippines or Iraq or Afghanistan. Would you still love the U.S. after seeing what it did to your people?
I don't see how that's relevant to the previous topic. You asked a question, and I answered. Before that, the discussion was about how naive lionizing Russia is when the motivation is counteracting U.S. imperialism. Frankly, it was the wrong question to ask.
Judging from your response, it was exactly the right question to ask. I was trying to give incite into how people might side with international interests against American imperialism.
Because they’re anti-west not pro-communist.
Anything critical of Russia is obvs western propaganda and as Russia is an enemy of the west, they will support them.
They see the enemy of their enemy as their friend, instead of realising it’s just another enemy.
They're not actually communists, it's just a facade for Kremlin and CCP propaganda.
Noo you don't ._. Their train of thought is more often than not "USSR=Good. USSR hates USA. USA=Bad. Modern Russia hates USA. So Russia = Good."
I bet they have never been to Russia
Its not even that, its more the USSR apologism that is horrifying to me, it is clear they have never interacted with someone who has lived through the USSR, especially non-russians. They keep parroting how bad most post-soviet economies are, conveniently leaving out what the USSR did to those same economies on its way out.
you havent been listening. thats not our opinion about it at all.
Care to elaborate?
But you see, Russia is just what is left of the glorious soviet union who got destroyed by the western evils. Whatever they do is totally justified in their bid to rebuild the union under a dictator, dont you know anything? And Ukraine is full with jewish nazis.
The better question is what are they missing.
in those places you will usually see the term "critical support". that means we are critical to most aspects of modern russia, but are supportive of their anti-us goals, simply because it helps us break free of their imperialism.
I don't think it's reasonable to try to break free of an imperialism enforced primarily by markets via support of an imperialism enforced primarily by mass genocidal violence and threats of disproportionate nuclear retaliation. Furthermore, Marx's writing indicates that revolution needs to start in the most powerful industrial country on earth before global revolution can take root. Fighting against people trying to reform the U.S. and trying to destroy it without a revolutionary base goes directly against the strategy Marx recommended. That is to say, if all you do is counter one imperial power with another in hopes that the first will fall, all you get is a revolving door of imperialism.
marx' (more like lenin's in this case) writings say the opposite, revolution more easily happens in the more oppressed places, because people are actually seeing the problems of the system firsthand much more intensely. china was a prime example in the 50s. also according to lenin, anti-imperialism is the #1 priority when trying for global socialism, because it will alleviate suffering the most, and weaken the empire's grip on the world.
nobody is expecting the revolution to simply just happen from russia resisting the us, by far, but burgeoise infighting will make the us hegemony weaker. the us is not even close to a reform where we can just wait for them to stop. maybe i'm wrong on this one but i dont think any empire was ever reformed in this sense.
africa is seeing some liberation movements right now that would probably be impossible if the us wasnt invested in spreading themselves thin with a few wars elsewhere. the BRICS are another example of something that would never happen with a strong us influence.
Yeah, that's part of the problem. This is why I don't think MLs can form effective long-term coalitions with Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists. Lenin's writings are (with the benefit of hindsight) transparently nothing more than an effort to garner support so that he could seize power. His words and actions contradict leftist writings, ideals, and practice. I don't think anyone who looks at his actions though the clarity of hindsight and sees someone who we should study for what to do correctly should be taken seriously. I'm certain there's a few diamonds in the rough we can find, but he shouldn't ever be used as an authority.
We're talking about innocent people (e.g. Ukrainians) being killed, taken, raped, or some combination thereof. It's not "burgeoise infighting" it's war. You can talk about the practical implications and how we can take advantage of tragedies without pretending that Russia is a force for good. And I say that because there is a contingent of self-proclaimed "leftists" who routinely act in such a fashion. Furthermore, Russian propaganda is pushing the United States towards fascism, which endangers the slowly building leftist movement that we need to let the world as a whole move past capitalism.
I don't think the numbers here are clear enough to claim positive Utility from this trade-off. Yes there's the potential for the revolution to lead to better conditions (maybe even a truly left-wing society), but it's extremely uncertain if that will be the case. Furthermore, if the dominant power in the world isn't left-wing that makes that potential left-wing society's chances of surviving absolutely bleak.
Okay. You've used a mechanism of countering U.S. hegemony as an example of a benefit of when the thesis is that countering U.S. hegemony is a good thing. Do I need to explain why this is a really bad facet of your argument or is that enough for you to figure it out?
Material reality shows the exact opposite. Leninist-adjacent socialist experiments are the only ones to survive decades on a big scale, even if they still have (or had) faults, or needed adjustment over the years. You can't have perfect from the get go, and these move slowly at a generational pace.
You said it all but we don't need hindsight to see its transparent, its exactly the stated intention behind a vanguard party. Without it you can't really seize power in large country-wide scale, simply because success is very rare without it. Even the current liberation movements in Africa are seemingly led by vanguard groups, even if they turn out not to be marxist.
Thats exactly what I did. We cannot stop this war, period. But we can understand how it can help us. By burgeoise infighting I mean two capitalist states commanded by two different sets of competing oligarchs, of course. This was predicted by Marx, and happened many times before.
Key word here is probably. Also this is not a trade-off, kicking out imperialism is always good. Every single anti imperialist movement paves the way for them to start actually fixing things unimpeded. That of course depends on what they will do next, liberation from imperial powers is just the first (albeit not any less important) step. There is a reason anti-imperialism takes the forefront in the third world when it comes to this. But you can't just say being under the boot of a brutal foreign power is any better.
Read above about imperialism because it applies here. BRICS would not be allowed to advance as much as its doing now if the US still had a tight grip on us. You can take quite a lot of their military and political interventions around the world as an example. Every country in the past (that i know of, at least) had their shit beaten out of them for even trying to have wiggle room outside of the absurd demands of the imperial burgeoise and the IMF.
My own country was trying something similar before it was couped by the US and my own country was almost couped recently with their help, again, because we are slipping from their control just slightly. BRICS is one such motivator, if not one of the main ones.
You seem to have a very imperial core-centric view of the world, like most non-leninist leftists tend to do nowadays, moreso the ones from the imperial core. Things are not black and white, and every little victory helps when we barely have any space to move.
They dont unconditionally support Russia. I disagree with them but they see Ukraine and the US as even worse. Considering the prelavance of Nazi imagery in the Ukraine military, or how Ukraine banned leftist opposition parties, or how they removed minority language rights etc.
I think in their minds in a fight of two reactionary autocracies they prefer the one fighting against the west.
You can see on ProleWiki what Lemmygrad.ml's stances are, in their words, and why. Their article on the Russian Federation backs up what you've said, they believe it is extremely reactionary with horrifying treatment of LGBTQ people and is currently ruled by the Nationalist party, but critically support Russia insofar as it opposes Western hedgemony and Imperialism, and no more than that.
Critically, Lemmygrad, Hexbear, and much of Lemmy.ml see Lenin's definition of Imperialism as the number one obstacle in Socialism's advance, that is, the state in Capitalism where Imperialist countries export machinery and finances to the third world in order to super-exploit outsider populations for super-profits domestically. This is a necessity within Capitalism to combat the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall. It's the concept of unequal exchange.
Now, of course you do not have to agree with Lemmygrad or Hexbear or Lemmy.ml, but as someone who regularly sees these posts, there are no delusional posters who somehow think the Russian Federation is still Communist or that Putin is secretly rebuilding the USSR.
The delusional part comes from supporting countries that have a tendency to kill gay people and saying that they are against lgbtq oppression