195

Communist philosophy also calls for a (typically violent) revolution involving an authoritarian transition to get rid of capitalist society and usher in the future collective state

This is a reductionist explanation. The initial modern movement of socialists debated a lot on whether to support reform or revolution. Marx argued in favor of an authoritarian revolution after the failure of the Commune of Paris, but near the end of his life, he thought it was more sensible to seek out power through democratic means in societies with a liberal political framework, such as Britain. At this point, socialdemocratic parties still hadn't renounced to socialism - they just wanted to achieve it after democratically reaching power.

Through the start of the 20th century, there's a heavy rupture in the socialist movement when socialdemocratic parties begin moving away from the goal of actually achieving socialism, just at the USSR is born. This divide wider as the Cold War progresses, but we can still find a few important reformists who are aiming for a democratic form of socialism, such as Attlee in Britain and the French and Italian Communist Parties, although these two are, unfortunately, too loyal to the Soviet Union for their own good. As we enter the 21st century, socialist parties, for the most part, only want to tweak a few things about capitalism, but we can also find supporters of democratic socialism in the eurocommunist parties and the Communist Party of Japan. On the other fence, authoritarians who denominally support socialism, typically called tankies, tend to support the actions of whatever self-denominated communist regimes exist, such as China, and reject participation in liberal democracy.

Tankies aren't the only ones who call for revolution tbf. There are revolutionary anarchists as well. "Tankie" has usually been used to describe auth-lefties in particular.

Political compasses are stupid anyway.

It's a political torus. Walk of one end and you end up in the other

When your group is so left wing that all your real big arguments are against the radical side of your ideology rather than the other side! Somewhere there's a fiscal conservative arguing against a guy screaming about anarcho-capitalism on parler or something.

Does the word Tankie comes from the tanks in tinnamen square?

Except Russia and China aren’t even pretending ti be communist.

Russia is a christo fascist oligarchy.

And China is a corporatist authoritarian state.

A respectful answer that does delineate the shades of communism and shows education. Admirable.

Isn't it really more to do with pro Chinese? The name literally refers to the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The one benefit of ziq being an anarchist extremist is that his article is probably one of the least biased things you'll read against modern Tankies who try to hide behind their support of culturally progressive politics to defend their ideology and make it seem like they're good people. Because it's a critique from someone who is just as left-wing as they claim to be so they can't hide behind their usual excuse of the critic being pro-capitalism/anti-communism/culturally conservative because ziq is none of those things.

I second this article as a fantastic overview of what Tankies stand for and why they should not be tolerated. If the article is too long to sift through - one particular paragraph summarizes the main issue with Tankies:

Tankies celebrate Lenin and Trotsky's massacres of socialist revolutionaries, including the Mensheviks, the sailors of Petrograd, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anarchists, unaffiliated peasants who had their food confiscated and so on. Tankies also celebrate murdering 'kulaks', a word they use to describe any peasant that resisted Soviet imperialism, but especially the Ukrainian peasants that resisted sending all their food to Russia, which they rightly guessed would lead to mass-starvation and one of the worst atrocities in history; the catastrophic Holodomor man-made famine.

The Holodomor is largely considered to be a genocide of the Ukrainian people - by 26 countries and the European Parliament. Tankies deny it ever happened, and if it did it wasn't their fault, and if it was their fault the kulaks deserved it.

That’s not a simple explanation, that’s a Ted talk.

There's also !lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196 that seems to be doing well.

I'm new here to! I think 196 has branches all across the lemmyverse, at least that's what I think happened.

moss made this channel as an alternative to reddit in lemmy.world, but since the blahaj.zone/c/196 that other people are already pointing to already existed, they just changed this channel's name. The other channel is far more active, I recommend subscribing to it.

is that unblocked now?

Authoritarian Communists. Not all communists are tankies.

Remember kids, Authoritarianism is bad, no matter which side you wield the stick for.