there’s too many comments and posts for me to view all of them, so the way that we can deal with them is you, the glorious people of 196 reporting them as you see them.
People get mad at “tankies” (communists who aren’t blanketly anti-authoritarian and support AES nations who have Proletarian authoritarianism/DOTP(to a degree at least)) for one of two things, either imagined points they may have based upon either hyperbole, edge cases, or assumptions. Or the other reason is they challenge the world view of “anti-authoritarian” community members who then decry they should be removed… via authoritarianism.
Showing it’s ok when the “leftists/anarchists/liberals” do the authoritarianism for when their feelings are hurt but magically are supposedly anti-authoritarianism elsewhere. It’s all aesthetics and working off of your propagandized experiences and assumptions. You can personally block people/communities you dislike if your worldview is that fragile, or (as you’re advocating for) engage in what you decry and remove every opinion that challenges yours. This isn’t like yelling wolf for seeing nazis, nobody is actively calling for genocide or erasure around here and if they are advocating it then yes that can be problematic. It’s made all the worse by taking lies like (all tankies support putin unconditionally) and running with it till the birds come home to roost.
Interestingly the “Tankies” all haven’t defederated from LGBT or other diverse communities(despite being claimed to be just like the nazis) nor have they actively advocated to silence entire communities based upon differing worldviews. It’s good we’re growing, we can expand the scope of what we see or we can be in denial of anything that changes their worldview like a bunch of children who are being told Santa isn’t real! C’mon people, get real this is FOSS and we can do better than to do a bunch of infighting, this isn’t reddit anymore, we’re supposed to be a community(federation) here.
ban me too coward
196 my beloved
I support the anti-aurhoritarian backbone of this, but it would probably be more helpful to focus on the content we want to avoid rather than assuming people will all have the same idea of what being a “tankie” entails. Not loving having dark violent imagery on my feed either but oh well.
I mean, the definition is kinda clear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
https://www.dictionary.com/e/politics/tankie/
you should defederate lemmygrad and maybe even main lemmy instance then. Because they kinda belong to that category afaik.
OOTL what are tankies?
People that support the more authoritarian tendencies of historical Marxist-Leninist states (ie socialism). However, it’s mostly used as an insulting word for communist from uninformed liberals who then (like this idiotic post) compare them to literal nazis and the likes.
Gross misuse of IE considering socialism is literally a less extreme version of communism.
Marxist-Leninist was literally communism where in their own words it was “a dictatorship of the proletariat”. Where Marx and Engels literally dismissed socialism as “a middle class movment of quacks.” In Marx’s outline of socialism, it literally disregards it as “capitalism still exists to a lesser degree.” ML-communism is authoritarian and completely different that most forms of socialism as well as “pure” communism.
Socialism, on the other hand has either state-controlled or private-but-worker-controlled economy with a democratically elected government and not necessarily single party. It was an entirely other school of people and ideas. China is not socialism as their government is not elected, but appointed by a ruling party. It is a statist-oligarchy plain and simple.
Socialism is constantly misused. Stalin and hell, the Nazis called themselves socialist even though they weren’t at all. George Orwell actually said that Marxist-Leninist communism has circles around and is on the right again.
It’s okay for us to disagree on our assessments of AES, but these disagreements must be based on some common understandings. I don’t think we’re there at the moment. Partly this comes down to the way language has shifted in the last 200 years.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is to be contrasted with a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It means ‘dictatorship’ in the way that liberal democracies are dictatorships because they are governed by consistent (class based) institutions that hold executive, legislative, and judicial power.
The meaning of dictatorship has changed. Back then it more clearly meant something like ‘governance by’, and Marx’s contemporaries would have inferred this meaning.
A dictatorship of the proletariat means the workers, not the capitalists, control the state and the means of production. In the words of one scholar, it means something like:
… either state-controlled [where the state is controlled by the proletariat] or private-but-worker-controlled economy with a democratically elected government and not necessarily single party.
The idea being that capitalism is a class-based political economy, and communism is the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the stage of history where the workers have control of the state/means of production. Once the workers have such control, the distinction between bourgeois and proletariat falls apart. At that point we have reached communism.
You might even challenge the way that this has been tried so far. I would say to look again, if so. But either way, it doesn’t change the theory. One can detest the way that an idea has been put into practice without rejecting the theory. As Kwame Ture advises, an ideology should be judged by it’s principles, not it’s practicioners.
No state has yet reached communism. The very idea is an oxymoron as communism is stateless. What some few states have begun to achieve (but no state has quite got there yet, as the class struggle is ongoing, although China, at least, is close) is socialism.
Marx used different terms in different works to discuss all this. As primarily a critic of capitalism, he didn’t really flesh out a theory of socialism or communism in the way that you suggest. For that, we must look to Engels and to Lenin’s State and Revolution. Nonetheless, a birds eye view of Marx’s work reveals that he advocated for socialism (a dictatorship is the proletariat) as a stepping stone to communism. The logic of this progression grows directly out of an historical materialist analysis of class society.
At the same time, there is another sense of the Marxist concept of communism, but I don’t think this is the one you mean. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
Further, in the Communist Manifesto, they wrote:
Communists everywhere support any revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions.
In this sense, Marxist-Leninists are ‘literally communists’ but Marxist-Leninist states cannot be ‘literal[] communism’ but they are socialist (or trying to be).
If you want to read a short text about socialist governance, you might enjoy Roland Boer, Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance. His Socialism with Chinese Characteristics may also be of interest for giving a detailed analysis of governance in China.
You can still disagree with MLs, AES, and the above definitions and propose other definitions, but that would involve speaking at cross purposes. It might also involve idealism because throughout history the only revolutionary socialist projects to have succeeded for a significant time have been guided by Marxism-Leninism. It’s okay (albeit idealist) to have a different concept of socialism but a definition based on concrete examples must look to Marxism-Leninism.
And one cannot simply dismiss the experience of the attempt of billions of people trying to build socialism as not socialism because it doesn’t match an esoteric and contrasting definition of socialism.
Edit: fixed paragraph for quote
left wing bootlickers
Allegedly left-wing bootlickers. Historically, they are more comparable to fascists than anything leftist.
