The tankies seem incapable of reckoning with the fact that an informed citizen can vote for the lesser of two evils (usually fairly easily) and also take other action like boycotts protests and community organizing etc. I also don’t believe most of the keyboard communists actually do jack shit to fight back, aside from impotent online rage.
It’s even worse than that. Most of them are incapable of understanding any kind of nuance. To them every issue is black or white. And everyone who doesn’t agree with every single point on their extremist agenda is an identical enemy.
And Lemmy (or at least certain instances on Lemmy) is infested with them. Which means they go around in clusters, swarming anyone on the other instances who doesn’t conform with their impractical ideology and blinkered views.
Edit: Ooh, looks like they found my comment! Just wanted to add a special note to them: grow the fuck up!
i’m just being observant, an overwhelming amount of people calling others ‘tankies’ are perfectly fine with team blue sending in the tanks/bombs/drones.
No not really, I am way left of Biden, universal Healthcare, free community College, strong social safety net etc. are not radical left ideas, they are centrist.
I also know enough about history to understand that power systems formed around Marxism communism or anarchism are not inherently good or just when put into practice.
I despise the wholesale slaughter of civilians by the military industrial complex, I also despise the violent crushing of dissent by ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ governments.
A good and just society will always be a mix of different ‘isms’ and marxism definitely needs to be a prominent part of the mix. I’m against total ideological purity, be it capitalist imperialism that can justify industrialized human suffering, or naive tankie bullshit that can justify being on the side of the tanks in Tiananmen square.
the “good society is a mix of isms” line is classic lib dead-enderism. it sounds reasonable but it’s a way of never committing to anything that would actually challenge capital.
i am opposed to a system that unpersons people just because they can’t pay rent, your ‘way left of biden’ horizon stops way short of that.
you seem to resort to thought-terminating cliches to shut down any serious discussion of a change to that system and without engaging with the material conditions those states that did challenge that system operated under.
You’re a dumbass. Liberals don’t even know what a tankie is, let alone call anyone that.
“Tankie” is what rational socialists call the irrational people on the extreme fringes of the left who are incapable of arguing in good faith, like you for instance.
No, that’s not even true. You’re just calling anyone a liberal who calls you a tankie, so clearly it’s only liberals using the term from your perspective. That’s called mental gymnastics.
Also,
the reality is that ‘tankie liberal’ is one of those terms that gets stretched until it’s just a pejorative for anyone to the left center of the person using it.
No, “tankie” is just a pejorative for anyone that defends and supports existing socialist states. Being good faith doesn’t matter, what matters is what people support, whether they be Marxists, anarchists, or even SocDems.
Mind telling us what “existing socialist states” you’re referring to? Do the PRC and DPRK feature in that list? Because yes, defending and obfuscating for those authoritarian and rigidly hierarchical ethno-states truly is something that tankies often do. How astute for you to point that out!
And no, if someone is capable of rational discourse and argues in good faith, then by definition they’re not a tankie and I’ve never seen anyone call someone like that a tankie. Tankies are usually all about “less chat, more splat”
At present, the PRC, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba are all socialist. In each state, public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and the working classes control the state. They each have hierarchy, sure, but hierarchy isn’t class, and calling them “ethno-states” is also bad-faith. You seem to think arguing in favor of these states makes someone inherently bad-faith, but that would mean the Cuban government and the Black Panther Party are also inherently “bad faith.” It’s a thought terminating technique to immediately assume anyone defending these is malicious or duplicitous.
As for whether or nor being a tankie is disqualified by good-faith and rational discussion, this is ironically bad-faith. You are not the arbiter of who is and is not a tankie, and I’ve seen the term hurled against many people, including but not limited to myself, based on what we support, rather than rationality of our logic or how genuine we are. This seems to be more of a way for you to front-load your own views as inherently correct and impossible to criticize, as you immediately assume anyone defending, say, the DPRK is a liar, malicious, ingenuine, etc.
Yeah, people need to stop conflating MLs with Marxists, because Leninism and Marxism are not the same thing at all.
Leninists appropriated the “Marxist” label to lend credibility to their own ideology. Hence it’s “Marxist-Leninism,” not “Leninist-Marxism.”
Nobody is out there calling actual Marxists “tankies.” We’re calling MLs tankies, and then they retreat behind a mote and bailey by saying “yOuR cAlLiNg AlL mArXiStS tAnKiEs?!1?1?!1?1??1?1!!”
Also, “tankie” is a term I exclusively hear used by the left to refer to their own fringe (who, by the way, refer to the rest of the left as “liberals” and “fascists” for not being as extreme as them…). It’s like the left-wing version of maga. They’re completely irrational, bad-faith, militant, and authoritarian.
I never hear centrists, liberals, or conservatives call anybody a “tankie.” To them, the entire left are all just “commies,” because that’s the pejorative they use. They don’t need the term “tankie,” because the entire point of that term is to differentiate between the irrational, extremist fringe of the left, and the rest of us leftists who are capable of both rational thought and empathy (crazy idea, I know…), and are typically somewhere in the democratic range of the socialist spectrum.
disclaimer:
(Although I’ll add that anarchists exist among us reasonable socialists too, but that’s a very broad term and some self-declared “anarchists” truly are actually authoritarian tankies, which becomes clear when you listen to the things they say and how they handle disagreement.
Conversely, some “anarchists” are also actually neofeudal capitalist/corporatist fascists cosplaying as freedom fighters when all they really want is deregulation of industry…).
Leninism is not a replacement of Marxism, Leninism refers to Lenin’s own advancements on Marxism. Lenin used Marxist analysis to bring Marxism to a new era, from the era of industrial capitalism to the imperialist stage of capitalism. The primary advancements of Leninism are the following:
The Leninist strategy and tactics of revolution
The Leninist critique of Imperialism
The Leninist understanding of the national question, and the right of self-determination.
Marxism-Leninism is called as such because the basis of Marxism-Leninism is Marxism. Marxism-Leninism carries over the 3 basic fundamentals of Marxism:
Dialectical and historical materialism as the guiding worldview
The Marxist critique of capitalism based on the Law of Value
The scientific approach to socialism, grounded in class struggle.
In the modern era, the number of Marxists that reject Lenin are incredibly fringe. Lenin’s work as a Marxist is incredibly obvious to anyone who has read both Marx and Lenin, and it’s very clear that Lenin was history’s greatest Marxist, after the deaths of Marx and Engels. MLs are the dominant form of Marxism in the modern era, and most relevant historically, so trying to claim Marxism-Leninism isn’t Marxist requires an enormous level of justification on your part.
The primary advancements of Leninism are the following:
You forget to add "Assassinating the soviet leadership because they defeated the bolsheviks in a fair election, and that was unacceptable to Lenin; and then replacing the dead soviets with bolshevik stooges while appropriating the term “Soviet.”
Oh and betraying the anarchists and other groups who supported them during the revolution.
Oh and highly centralized and controlling surveillance state apparatus, and making the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” a permanent fixture rather than a transitional government.
Marxism-Leninism
It’s Marxist-Leninism, not “Marxism-Leninism.” You might want to get your own label right before trying to school people on the internet about it.
In the modern era, the number of Marxists that reject Lenin are incredibly fringe.
No, you said Marxism-Leninism isn’t Marxist. Marxism-Leninism is Marxist. All of Marxism in the modern day has historically evolved from the era of Marx, be it through accepting ideas, changing them, or rejecting them. There is no such thing as a Marxist that has no opinion on Lenin one way or the other, for example. The ideology “Leninism” is used to refer specifically to Lenin’s advancements, “Marxism” to the ideology created by Marx and Engels, and “Marxism-Leninism” as the unified ideology created by Lenin and forged in practice.
You then make vague references to the Russian Civil War without actually contextualizing them. The Bolsheviks did not “lose fair elections,” and fighting amongst the Soviets did coalesce around the Bolshevik line, as the Bolsheviks were supported by both the proletariat and peasantry. The fighting between the communists and anarchists wasn’t some one-sided betrayal either, it was a civil war and some sections of the anarchists that did not join the Bolsheviks took up arms against the soviets.
Further still, the soviet state was not some “permanent fixture.” Such an idea is inherently against Marxist understanding of dialectical materialism, as nothing in the world is permanent, as well as the economic basis for the withering of the state. The USSR was a socialist state gradually building towards communism.
As for “Marxist-Leninism,” no, I mean Marxism-Leninism, as understood by Wikipedia, science direct, and Stalin when coining the term. You’re very confident about this point despite being trivially proven wrong.
As for Merleau-Ponty, yes, Western Marxism is incredibly fringe in the global and historical context.
^ that, friends is what we call a “bad-faith argument” based on a distorted interpretation of what was actually said, utilizing flashy one-liners to deride a commenter without actually addressing any of the content of the comment they made.
it’s called paraphrasing, you wanted to make it very clear that you’re one of the good ones for the liberals, as opposed to tankies who are the bad ones. i don’t think i misrepresented you.
the term is literally a left facing pejorative the way it’s used, especially how you were using it.
Cowbs there is fully ideological and fails to reconcile his understanding of classroom theory with real world application. Fucker genuinely believes the cow is a perfect sphere and is a bad faith propagandist. He’ll probably report my comment too because he’s a little bitch that just gish gallops bullshit and pivots every time you pin him down. You’re wasting your time. Their whole account is dedicated to getting republicans in power.
I organize in real life, my perspective is based on what I actually do as an organizer and activist as well as someone who studies Marxist-Leninist theory and history so as to apply it better. Just because I oppose the democrats doesn’t mean I support the republicans, I oppose the entire capitalist system. My goal is socialism, and like all Marxists, I believe that this can only be established through revolution, which means I do spend a fair bit of time combatting misconceptions surrounding reformism.
I haven’t reported any of your comments yet, btw. You have this absurd caricature of me that lives on in your brain, this must be the second dozen comment you’ve made about me specifically with no actual substance. Take a break, touch grass.
well i’m an anarchist and i literally vote in every primary and every year for municipal/nonpresidential elections, so it was nice to have you identify me correctly.
what was funny to me is that this comic is so dishonestly framed, like take panel 1, my trans comrades have already been getting arrested by democrats for protesting their abandonment of trans kids healthcare in favor of institutions and placating trump. ‘i don’t want to arrest trans people’ is clearly not the same as ‘i won’t arrest trans people’.
the way the comic is structured is like actually nonsensical too, the person being anti-voting says stuff after the vote has already been cast, and then when it fails we’re supposed to blame the those two? i blame the democrats for losing more than i do voters.
Reformism is a dead-end, so demsocs may want socialism but in practice are limited to welfare capitalism. The intent may not be to preserve capitalism, but the effect ultimately reinforces it.
Yes, that’s the hyperbolic slander it tries to assert when in reality it is just a buzzword for imbeciles to use when they want to stop engaging with the argument.
Authoritarian is a useless word. The US is far more authoritarian than anybody those supposed “dictatorships”, but the serious people in suits you’ve outsourced all your thinking to would never say it out loud.
okay then please tell that to everyone calling me a tankie plsss
the reality is that ‘tankie’ is one of those terms that gets stretched until it’s just a pejorative for anyone to the left of the person using it.
started as a specific reference to people who defended the soviet invasion of hungary in 1956, then it gets applied to anyone who doesn’t denounce every socialist state on demand, now it’s anyone who doesn’t want to vote for biparitsan war consensus
Sister, you’re the one that decided that OP was lumping the anarchists and Marxists in with the tankies! You appear to be trying to claim that OP is portraying everyone who says ‘both sides are the same’ as tankies. A is a subset of B; B is not equal to A. Just because some people don’t actually understand what ‘tankie’ means doesn’t mean everyone shares that view, in the same way that ‘liberal’ doesn’t actually mean ‘everyone who votes Democrat’.
I have never encountered an ml user acting in good faith on here. They always come in packs and use alts to brigade communities and instances and hit every political thread hard trying to convince people not to vote dem. They’re almost exactly like how thedonald subreddit used to be a decade ago. Probably quite a few of those rejects ended up there the way ml works for maga.
it’s a heavily sanctioned garrison state that emerged from a brutal colonial occupation and a war that killed a third of the population.
i dont particularly care for any states, but i have special contempt for the US. that makes it hard to share in the fearmongering about the US’s designated enemies on the other side of the planet from where i live.
I probably should have asked you about authoritarianism.
yes i oppose authoritarianism, but also all states are authoritarian. liberal authoritarianism is a far greater threat to my existence right now than any threat from the state enemies of the US
“Tankies” just means people who support existing socialist states. Typically we are Marxist-Leninists, but anarchists and socdems also fit this sometimes and are targeted.
Tankies are the ideological opposite and intellectual equivalent of libertarians. Like if you’re in high school it’s ok to dabble but if you maintain those viewpoints into adulthood you probably weren’t top of your class and you definitely weren’t popular. Ideology for dumb assholes.
And let your instance admins know you’d like them to defederate! There’s a good chance they might also want to but don’t want to force the decision upon their users.
My instance defederated both Hexbear and db0 and it’s crazy how much more emotionally mature the vibe is without those users.
I think their instance admin was the guy behind the tesseract scandal a few months ago, might want to look into that if you haven’t heard of it.
Basically snuck a hidden blob into a “small” update that shadowbans a bunch of users and keywords. Doesn’t sound that bad on the surface, but the implementation was really shady, the blacklist itself was sloppily constructed, and the way he handled the fallout when people called him out on it was really immature.
If I have this confused with a different instance, then my bad. I think he’s involved with sh.itjustworks at a fairly high level too though.
There’s a couple graphics floating around somewhere mapping defederations of major instances if you want alternatives. I’ll see if I can dig them up.
Dang I knew this was a honeypot thread I didn’t realize it was for THAT.
I’m still upset that you guys managed to sucessfully bully a developer into deleting his (free) project (that had like 10 users), because now his blocklist has to be rebuilt manually, thankfully so many of you out yourselves and make it easy to report.
Oh, you’re the guy I was talking about? Hahaha, I didn’t even realize, but now you’re glowing.
You reported me for an objective delivery of the facts, as I understand them? Sure, don’t care.
Next time be more honest about the diffs in your “free” software updates, and handle things a bit more maturely when people take notice of the unethical payloads you hide behind “security patches.”
If telling you that is “bullying” you, then you need thicker skin. In fact you’re suspiciously bordering on DARVO, a common tactic among narcissists. (Not calling you a narcissist, by the way. Just pointing out how your response resembles how one would react).
Oh by the way, did I just make the tesseract ban list? If so, I’ll consider it an honor.
These kinds of sweeping generalizations that collapse the entirety of leftist thought into simple black and white binaries is the exact behavior you’re trying to criticize, no?
Unsure what you mean by “flying monkeys,” but if there’s one thing anarchists and Marxists near-universally agree on, it’s the necessity of directly struggling against the system itself, rather than treating voting as our primary means of political engagement. Collapsing leftist point of views into this unprincipled, nuance-lacking strawman doesn’t actually engage with the primary critique, which is that we need to organize outside the system and direct that organization against said system to gain change, be it revolutionary or even to gain reforms or concessions.
And no, I don’t represent the entirety of leftist thought. I was responding to a sweeping generalization of leftist thought.
I’m not, I’m responding to the comment directly. I suppose you could argue that their comment was vague enough that they could claim to be talking about a specific group in a clarification, but as it stands they seem to be lashing out against the left in general. Further, when people treat voting as their primary means of political engagement, they do check out! I’m not denying that people can organize while voting for the DNC, many people do, but the problem is that most see voting for the DNC as their primary political agency, and not a pressure valve designed to siphon away agitation against the system itself.
Their comment was very clearly talking specifically about tankies who want to “well acktyually” people on “Theory” while being the textbook definition of useful idiots helping the fascists. That behavior isn’t encouraging people to organize; it’s discouraging them from it because if organizing means dealing with that sort of condescension then they want no part of it!
Everybody but you understood that. You’re the only one who’s so fucking full of yourself you think you’re entitled to speak for the entire Left!
The point of trying to bring theory to people isn’t to get a cheap gotcha, it’s to try to bring the general level of political education of people up, from the base level of general instinct to an informed and scientific approach to social change. If someone is being condescending in their approach, then they are doing it wrong.
I’m not sure why you’re lying about me claiming to speak for the entire left, I claimed the opposite. I speak for myself, and can at minimum self-identify as a Marxist-Leninist.
Further, when people treat voting as their primary means of political engagement, they do check out!
Citation needed. If this is the basis of why you think Voting Bad then you’re going to have to back that up with some science. Not quoting Lenin, I want a solid peer reviewed study.
If you don’t have that your entire reasoning falls on a hunch and vibes.
Personally I think voting helps people become more politically engaged, not less.
Since when did I say “voting bad?” I said that electoralism cannot bring about the change that is necessary. Regardless, the issue is that focusing political engagement on voting over organizing is what deflates organizational pressures, not the act of voting itself. Are you actually reading my arguments?
They call out a cluster of traits as being bad. The only sane way to parse their comment is to interpret it as only applying to people who have all those traits. You’re doing something equivalent to demanding someone clarify that they didn’t mean they hated all food when they complained about not liking things that are sweet.
They are targeting a vague group that they claim has these traits. There’s no direct attack on any ideology specifically, nor any instance specifically, so we have to fill in the gaps and see it for what it is: an attack on instances like dbzer0, Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad.ml, and Hexbear.net, as well as the ideologies of those instances, those generally being anarchism and Marxism-Leninism. Their position is that these are dominating flaws of specific instances, not merely a random type of person with an unspecified level of influence.
If you’re pro-military, pro-dictatorship, you’re not a leftist. Leftists don’t want to keep wallowing in the same monkeybrained shit we’ve been doing for the last ten thousand years, we want to grow the fuck up as a race. Violence isn’t doing the job. It doesn’t work for the enemy when they try to use it on us, and we’d be stupid to think it’d be more effective in the hands of the less violently inclined. We need better tools, better ideas. Fuck Marx, fuck Lenin, fuck Mao. Don’t even try to pretend their authoritarian thinking is compatible with anarchism.
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, but I did used to be an anarchist, and from my time as an anarchist I cannot recall any anarchists opposed to revolution as a means to establish anarchism, which is something anarchists and Marxists share in common. Further, Marxists are not “pro-dictatorship,” not in the sense of an individual with immense power, but in favor of the working class taking control, in favor of radical and genuine democracy.
Marxism-Leninism is not “pro-dictatorship.” This is a simplistic framing of unitary forms of democracy that focus on policy changes as the primary issue of political engagement, rather than party changes. States like Cuba, that are guided by Marxism-Leninism, have complex systems of delegate-based democracy.
What happens to the working class after they take control? History says they don’t stay the working class. They become the new rich or the new military leaders. They do their dance just to fall back into the same shit patterns they worked to overthrow. Their revolutions mean nothing because they just use violence as a response to violence rather than taking a holistic proactive approach to the advancement of mankind.
There is no such thing as genuine democracy; each individual must be taught how to control themselves, take responsibility for their actions, and move beyond the ways that failed us so many times. A tyranny by majority vote is still tyranny.
What happens to the working class after they take control? History says they don’t stay the working class. They become the new rich or the new military leaders.
First of all class in the Marxist sense refers to your relation to the means of production. Getting a higher paying jobs doesn’t change your class.
And sure some do become military leaders, because they literally lead a revolution. They proved they were capable military leaders, why wouldn’t they stay a military leader?
And no, they don’t become the new rich. You can look up how much people in government positions in communist governments were paid. They didn’t all become overnight billionaires. And working for the government is a job.
Their revolutions mean nothing because they just use violence as a response to violence rather than taking a holistic proactive approach to the advancement of mankind.
Communism has been successful everywhere they’ve been tried. They all improved the material conditions of their people, improved literacy, and health outcomes. There’s a reason polls show most people who experienced communism preferred it to capitalism.
What happens after the working class takes control, is that the working class begins to transform society into its own direction. Administration is a job, not a class, nor is class a level of wealth. Classes are relations to ownership of the means of production. Here’s a snapshot from the early USSR, taken from This Soviet World:
A leading Russian Communist said to me a year ago “The mind of our people is changing so fast under the conditions of socialism that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to speak to the rest of the world. We find it harder to understand them, and they us.”
We who go back and forth between the Soviet world and the world of capitalism—not only in space from New York to Moscow but also in spirit from intimate life with Soviet people to intimate life in America—feel keenly this difficulty. Important words like freedom, democracy, dictatorship have different meanings on different sides of the border. The Soviet world is sharply conscious of planning its future; the capitalist world is always arriving where it hadn’t intended. And Soviet officials are not always helpful in making their acts intelligible; they often assume that only deliberate malice can doubt them and that the only needed explanation is the appropriate citation from Marx.
To explain the swiftly growing Soviet world to that other world out of which it was born is a task that becomes steadily more complex. For if its outer achievements are every year more able to speak for themselves, its inner life more and diverges from that of capitalism in a hundred subtle ways.
In the Berlin station a giant sign greets me with three-foot letters: “Think of your hair!” My mind flashes back to the world I have left. What are Soviet people thinking of? The Stakhanov drive, the Moscow city plan, Marie and her sugar beets, the conquest of the north. And hair and perfume, O yes, of course. Everyone knows of the rising standard of living and firmly believes in a cultural life—more bath-tubs, radios, books and dramatic clubs and doubtless more hair. But their individuality is expressed not by possessions and polish but by the various ways in which men create. Dynamic is the word; their civilization is dynamic.
The regimentation of life by property is my next shock in the capitalist world. The obscene phrases “damages for alienation of affections” or “a $50,000 man” or the remark: “I do it only for the money that is in it”—what degradation they imply of human life and work! I see able engineers spending creative power on little models in a government relief job just to keep alive. I see a journal of high standard, the life-work of an able editor submerged by a new owner’s wish for quick profit. Lives are conditioned in the Soviet world also, by trends and sages of organization, but not by the profits of a boss.
The difference appears in the use of pronouns. People under capitalism are contrasting “I” and “they.” “Too bad it couldn’t have been on my land,” a man remarks of a California oil-strike. Soviet folk would be hailing “our new oil-wells”; to them the idea of a private oil-well is already as quaint as a private postal system. I note a remark about American unemployment: “If it gets any worse, they’ll have to do something.” Who is this ultimate, uncontrollable “they”? The term betrays the class society of which the speakers are unconscious; they are waiting for some boss to act. To hear a debate: “Is America going fascist?” and think how much less passively Soviet folk would word it. “Shall we go fascist? No. Then exactly how shall we prevent it?” Soviet folk say “we” of one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Uzbek cotton-pickers, toiling under the sun of Central Asia, say: “We are conquering the Arctic; we rescued the Chelyuskinites.” Ukrainian farmers who never went up in an airplane talk of “our stratosphere records” and “the loss of our Maxim Gorky airplane” as they take up collections to build ten new ones. But even Mrs. Roosevelt asks me: “Are Russian peasants getting more reconciled to accepting direction?” I feel the hopelessness of language as I answer: “No, they are learning better to organize and direct themselves.”
Americans often ask me whether Russians are not naturally more altruistic than Americans, more fit for communism, they imply. No, it is something quite different. Russians at the time of Revolution were more medieval than Americans, which means “naturally” more petty, unreliable, inefficient, given to bargaining and cheating. Traits of the Asiatic market-place were widespread and occasionally still annoy the visitor. But these traits are disappearing under the fact of joint ownership, which brings identity of individual with community good.
Joint possession of the country’s resources and productive mechanism is the economic reality which unifies Soviet life and makes it dynamic. It is this that washes out the antagonism between personal and public good, that makes men say “we.” It is this that makes men conscious planners of the future; for owners plan but non-owners can only fight or drift. The chief quality of Soviet civilization is the sense that the world is “ours,” to seize, understand and make over.
This Soviet world is my theme; I give scant space to those fast disintegrating forces that fought it. I tell not the “whole truth,” for truth is never “whole”; there are always at least two truths in conflict: the truth that is dying and the truth that is coming into existence. American Tories who intrigued for King George had their truth also, but it remains only as piquant sauce to romance; the truth of the Continental armies remained to build the modern republic. They themselves recalled the frozen feet of Valley Forge less as suffering than as heroism; their raids on hungry farms passed into memory not as banditry but as necessity and daring. History’s greatest gift to victors is that not only they, but their truth survives.
Yet I do no injustice to those many lives which in greater or less degree were wrenched or broken by the coming of the new Soviet order. Even for them the new years obliterate the past. They also change to seek their new future in the new system; Lives broken in terms of property are being remade in terms of work. Saboteurs reform and win posts of honor; kulaks come back from exile to factories and farms; children have an equal start now regardless of fathers. For this war differs from other battles in that all men, even the conquered foes, are absorbed into the ranks of the conquerors—joint heirs to all the fruits of victory.
Anna Louise Strong was a Statesian radical and journalist that traveled back and forth between the USSR and the US, and later the PRC as well.
Cowbee is incredibly patient and doing marvelous educational work in threads like this. You confuse it for a debate, but you’d need to be on even footing for that. It’s more like they are a teacher who calmly tries to make some common sense stick with western people who behave like spoiled children and are to privileged and racist to see the simple and plain truths that literally most people in the (non-western) world see clearly.
Cowbee has some good points and his heart is in the right place, but always seems to show up to imply people shouldn’t vote, which I think is foolish and dangerous.
Nah, I directly state that organizing is more important than voting, and treating them like it’s the opposite is dangerous. I don’t argue against voting, I argue for organizing, and stress it as more important than voting.
Cowbee is a bad faith propagandist that can’t reconcile their understanding of theory with literally all of recorded history. Cowbee is full of shit and as bad faith as it comes here on Lemmy.
No? I study theory and history, it’s pointless to only study one aspect. I’m 100% genuine, and making a dozen comments complaining about me in a row without actually adding anything is a bit ridiculous.
That’s odd, you kept making a strawman of my argument and kept berating me for not sourcing the strawman. After I sourced the actual point I made, I only got crickets.
“Not a debate” is 100% accurate. They just copy paste some tangential and paper thin propaganda and tweak the verbiage. Basically LLM slop with some extra steps. If you punch a hole in that topic (after a bunch of equivocation and nit picking) they retreat to some other copy-paste talking point.
It’s easy to look “smart” at a glance when your conversation technique is the exact same playbook as Charlie Kirk:
Pick someone random with minimal preparation (college student :: commenter)
in a poor environment for a debate (a desk under a tent :: deep thread in a random comment section)
and throw a nonstop stream of garbage at them (unexamined statistics on black crime :: unexamined stats on USSR beef production)
when cornered, appeal to a genetic fallacy and change the topic (“that’s a fake woke study” :: “that’s CIA propaganda”)
There’s no way to have a conversation unless you already start in agreement with their priors. I’ve watched them get backed into a corner on basic stuff that contradicts their own talking points in the same thread. Paraphrasing it went something like “Communism is a perfect rational science” => Why don’t we discard the pseudo-religious trappings and make decisions that optimize for quantifiable quality of life indicators à la the HDi? => “Well actually communism is required for the vibes”
Look ladies and gentlemen, no straw man needed! Already here in the flesh! Like a terminally online Candyman, say the name you’ll summon the keyboard praxis warrior.
Too hard to search your own comment history? I don’t blame you, 21.4k comments at an average of 668 per month is too much for me too. And of course that’s just your .ml account, lord knows what you’d have to sift through on your alts.
Having actual real life responsibilities prevents me from keeping up with your Kirk-esque pace of a reply every 43 waking minutes, so how about we compromise. You can just copy-paste the existing comments calling out your bullshit right underneath the drivel you regurgitate. It’s all the same conversation anyway, it will save us both time.
Oh hey, it’s you, the person who said voting for Democrats was accelerationist. How ya been?
Actually collapsing ‘all of leftist thought’ as Tankie-owned is the mistake here. Leftist thought is broader and more flexible than you’d like to think because you’ve painted youself into the most austere, ineffective corner that consistently results in the worst possible outcomes. Leftist thought is a biiiig panoply of ideas and strategies of every color, and you guys are the button that says ‘clear all’, indicated by little grey and white squares.
Accelerationism means supporting the most competent capitalists and imperialists, to speed up concentration of capital and speed up collapse as a consequence. The Democrats are the more competent party when it comes to ensuring capitalism remains more stable. This would make them the accelerationist option. Accelerationism isn’t “burn down the system now,” it’s a specific (and wrong) strategy.
As for claiming “all leftist thought is tankie-owned,” I did no such thing. I generally categorize the left as being predominantly Marxists and anarchists, those who oppose capitalism. I myself am a Marxist-Leninist, which is an ideology that has consistently managed to both take power for the working class, and wield it to do tremendous things like double life expectancies, eradicate homelessness, and more. Not sure what you mean by your assertion that I am painting myself into an ineffective corner, nor the bit on saying “clear all.”
Marxist-Leninist strategy is time-tested and clear-cut. Capitalism runs into crisis from its own contradictions, so to make revolution we need to develop a working class party that builds up disciplined, educated cadre that struggle along with the rest of the working class directly against the system. With this party, we can make effective organizers, educate the working class, agitate among them against the capitalist system itself, and create unity among the working class that can become an unbreakable hammer, an unblockable spear. The party just becomes the spearhead, the actual working class is the one making the real moves and changes. You know, the old adage,
I think I’m decently effective. I’ve managed to convince people both in real conversations and online. I’d like to see what you mean by me being condescending, because if that’s true I would like to correct that.
You said he thinks that voting for democrats is accelerationist, and he explained why he believes that.
You claimed that he thinks all of leftist thought is whatever tankies think (a pretty vague claim, tankie is not exactly a well established term), and then you use some flowery sequence of platitudes without real refutable specifics to propose a broader definition of leftism. Cowbee responds by clarifying what he believes leftism is, which is broader than his own ideology.
What words are you saying he ignored? Are you upset he didn’t answer “how ya been?” Are you confused as to which comment he’s responding to?
Man you’re late I ain’t going over all this shit again. There’s a whole conversation you can go look over and be weird about if you want to try and draw any more context from my interactions here. It’s all in the open in the replies. I don’t even understand if you’re trying to make a point or. White kniting at this point and I don’t care. Come at me with your own shit or stay out of it.
You’re clearly trying to identify a pattern, though, and simply implying there are exceptions to this pattern doesn’t mean your assertion that the pattern itself exists is justified in reality. I think it would be better to directly attack the ideology/ies you are taking aim at, than to concoct a strawman.
To be honest, I think they only get Kremlin money indirectly in a form of propaganda, having everyone on a paycheck is way too expensive when you can make them work for free
And Lemmy (or at least certain instances on Lemmy) is infested with them. Which means they go around in clusters, swarming anyone on the other instances who doesn’t conform with their impractical ideology and blinkered views.
That’s why i switched to piefed. Out of sight, out of mind.
And a big problem with a lot of them is they antagonize you into saying shit they report you for. It’s not just about spreading propaganda, it’s about removing anyone that disagrees with it.
Their civility rules are fake. They will say the most vile, violent shit to you, and never have a comment removed. But suggest that their political strategies are stupid, and you get banned.
I actually made sausage for a couple months every year as a kid for the church sausage and pancake breakfasts when I went to catholic school. It was during winter so it was cold and didn’t smell that bad but watching cleaned carcasses get turned into sausage links really wasn’t that bad. I got to put the casing on the grinder and feed the pork bits in to make the actual sausage, twisting the links and everything. We literally did this shit in the school cafeteria. That was still the best fuckin sausage I’ve ever had. Anyway now I’m an atheist and I still eat sausage occasionally but really it’s the killing and butchering that’s the rough part. I did not participate in that as a kid. Or adult.
I’ve said it in another comment but I’m pretty sure most lemmings genuinely believe that the cow is a perfect sphere. Lemmy US political discourse is fuckin garbage.
Let’s be straight here: the likliest scenario is that Lemmy was explicitly created for the purpose of giving tankies a platform to spread misinformation and hate. It is the Nazi bar.
Lemmy was indeed made for the purpose of spreading communism, as a reaction to Reddit’s censorship. Communism isn’t “misinformation and hate” though, that’s your ideological spin on it.
I dislike the term Communism, as it’s associations with Stalinist thought muddies the waters between it and Fascism. I identify as socialist, myself.
What I take issue with is the fact that you support fascism and call it by a different name. I quite enjoyed “misinformation and hate” as a more direct statement. As an aside, go fuck yourself, fascist.
Communism is a post-socialist society where class has been eradicated and all production and distribution has been collectivized. Socialism is the transitional system between capitalism and communism. All socialism either moves towards communism, or falls backwards.
As for “Stalinism,” that doesn’t exist. Marxism-Leninism is an ideology, the one guiding Cuba, the PRC, former USSR, Vietnam, Laos, etc. Stalin’s contributions to it are extremely minor, the vast majority of Marxism-Leninism comes from Marx and Lenin.
Socialism, as it has historically existed, is by no means “fascism.” Equating the Soviets with the Nazis is a form of Holocaust trivialization. The communists represent the working classes, and always fight in their favor. The Nazis created an ideology based on racial supremacy, and cemented bourgeois rule with an iron fist. They are not at all equivalent, and to do so is immensely anti-socialist.
Stalin’s contributions to it are extremely minor, the vast majority of Marxism-Leninism comes from Marx and Lenin.
LOOOOLLLLLLLLL, Mao literally took direct inspiration from Stalin’s innovations over Leninism. Mao, whose version of “communism” was then propogated to most of those other countries you mentioned.
If “Stalinism” doesn’t exist, then neither does “Maoism.”
Your only hope in this conversation is that no one here knows enough about it to dispute your attempts at obfuscation.
What were Stalin’s innovations over Leninism? Be specific. Mao was a Marxist-Leninist, same as Stalin, carrying over Lenin’s ideology the way Lenin carried over Marx’s ideology. “Maoism” isn’t the ideology of Mao, but a deviation made by Gonzalo.
“Maoism” isn’t the ideology of Mao, but a deviation made by Gonzalo.
You mean, like, in the same way that “Marxist-Leninism” isn’t the ideology of Marx, but a deviation made by Lenin? (i.e., not Marxism).
What were Stalin’s innovations over Leninism?
Well for one thing, you say he coined the term that people today use to refer to Lenin’s ideology (not Marx’s, which is just “Marxism”).
For another thing, there’s literally everything that people like you ever say was “Stalin’s fault, not Lenin’s” when attempting to derail conversations away from “bad shit that happened under the USSR.”
Beyond that, I’m getting bored with you and I don’t feel the need to go dig up information that literally anyone can find easily, just to prove a point to someone who will ever accept facts and logic.
Nah, more like they found a small enough community that they could abuse with their relatively weak numbers. Also the fact that there’s no corporate backing to ban them and that’s by design. This is free speech in a nutshell. There’s a lot of people with really stupid political views.
When voting is treated like the absolutely most important means of political struggle, people do tune out and neglect to organize. The electoral system is a pressure valve, and political theater is a funnel to direct people’s rage away from the system itself and towards said pressure valve. Organizing is far more important than voting, yet societal pressures make it seem like the opposite is the case. That is the point Marxists are making, and this is why organizing in a working class party isn’t just optional, but necessary for progressive change.
Every major reform and concession has been won through struggle. Not because the ruling class was bested in the marketplace of ideas or anything. The Stonewall Riots were the catalyst for progressive change, not a change in heart in the ruling class. Same as the Civil Rights Movement, where Dr. King was assassinated as he began pivoting not just from anti-racist agitation, but towards the Poor People’s Campaign, a growing socialist movement. It’s why the Black Panther Party was infiltrated, and its top leaders killed or imprisoned. That’s why we need to actually focus our political energies on organized struggle.
When voting is treated like the absolutely most important means of political struggle, people do tune out and neglect to organize.
Prove it. Where’s the peer reviewed study? If you can’t back that up with some science this entire argument is based off of an assumption. What if voting gets people more politically active? If this is the whole reason why you think people shouldn’t vote and take direct action, it’s a flimsy one.
And, even if it was true, there’s nothing that is stopping you from reminding people to be active and not just vote. You could go into comment sections and say people should go participate in building a revolution after they vote.
But I digress, you made a claim that’s the basis of your whole argument, do you have any proof that voting leads to less organizing?
Stop putting words in my mouth. I never said the act of voting makes people tune out, or that people should not vote. I said treating voting like the primary means of gaining effective change deflates organizational pressures. If you cannot respond to the actual arguments at hand, then do not invent new ones.
No, you quoted me saying that treating voting like the absolute most important means of political struggle causes people to tune out. Not the act of voting, the treatment of the concept at a societal level. Stop making up strawmen.
The closest direct source I found suggests that there is a negative correlation between system-justifying beliefs and collective anti-system action. If people believe voting legitimately is a means by which they can enact social change, they are less likely to organize against the system itself. This does not mean voting itself is against organizing, in fact organizers vote at higher rates than non-organizers. The importance here is that collective action is diminished when that is directed towards engaging with the system itself.
I feel like it would be more effective to highlight political movements that required changing the status quo of the political landscape all involved more than just voting. Like lgbt rights starting by throwing a brick at a cop or women’s suffrage obvious not coming from women all showing up to the polls to vote for their right to vote.
Basically take a look at any history book and the case is clearly made that effective political change never came from voting alone.
Even reading through the abstract, this study is irrelevant to what we’re talking about here. They did a study that showed how people who are against the system and protest the system will inevitably butt heads with people who want to keep the system, the status quo.
Nowhere is it talking about voting, and that voting causes people to stop organizing.
The fact you said you “found” it instead of having that information on hand, and that you had to stretch to say this proves your theory means what I thought from the start.
The whole “people who vote will organize less” theory you state as absolute, the whole basis of your criticism, is made up. You assumed that this was true instead of checking. Shameful.
Primaries are for getting the candidates you want. General elections are for picking the candidate who is closest to your values. If you really want change, get involved for your primary candidate. Just bitching on here and sitting out on civic action is selfish catharsis.
Exactly. You shouldn’t treat voting for a politician as a marriage, you should treat politicians as a vehicle to get you to the place you want to be.
There almost never is an ideal candidate because everyone has different opinion what ideal candidate is. Even in countries where there are multiple parties most people don’t get exactly who they want.
If you want better choices you need to get more involved on politics, vote in primaries, vote in local elections, find and help candidates that are not popular but are closer to what you want or even run yourself.
If you don’t get involved at lower levels don’t be surprised the candidates in general aren’t what you want. Of you don’t vote, don’t be surprised that candidates ignore needs of your group.
I see a few potential ways someone might disagree:
Any kind of political revolutionary who doesn’t consider reformism a viable strategy and doesn’t believe their goals are possible to achieve through voting. e.g. even if every US politician were to be replaced with Mamdanis overnight, the US would never progress beyond “capitalism with New Deal-style concessions” without tearing down and rebuilding the entire state from the ground up.
See also: how aggressively the political machinery across most of the west mobilizes to discredit and/or oust any prospective politicians with remotely socialist or anarchist views which could threaten capitalists’ position.
More relevant to the original meme, trans people (or perhaps other minority groups) who have been thrown under the bus in the past by politicians who claimed to support them, only to pivot after being elected, as a number of Democrats have done recently.
Another train of reasoning I’ve seen: trans people who fear the potential consequences of electing a Democrat with a neutral or anti-trans position. Paraphrasing an explanation I’ve seen, the premise is that while a Republican president (or whatever other position) will almost certainly enact immediate negative changes for trans people, there is still the possibility that a pro-trans Democrat could be elected in the future. However, if an apathetic or actively hostile Democrat were to be elected (e.g. Newsom), it would set trans people back for decades, as the Democrats (always looking for ways to pivot right to appease some hypothetical median voter) would see this and conclude that trans rights are an effective compromise in exchange for winning votes. They would therefore continue to push candidates who act actively against the interests of trans people, making forward progress for trans rights an impossibility for many election cycles.
I should note that I’m neither an American nor would I consider myself a subscriber of any particular political ideology beyond an assortment of vaguely leftist beliefs. This is mainly just me paraphrasing some sentiments I’ve seen/heard which would probably disagree with the comment in question.
Thats right. But I do understand where it comes from. Theo lesser Evil evolved to a downward spiral.
The less evil is bare minimum. And it sometimes feels like that politicians are more busy With being a bit better than the actual Evil, to still satisfy their own voters and trying to win the others. Better Take would be to actually improve stuff.
But yes. No vote will Just hand over the vote for the stronger party. So the less evil kinda ist the only option… and I rather Take that, than nothing
The tankies seem incapable of reckoning with the fact that an informed citizen can vote for the lesser of two evils (usually fairly easily) and also take other action like boycotts protests and community organizing etc. I also don’t believe most of the keyboard communists actually do jack shit to fight back, aside from impotent online rage.
It’s even worse than that. Most of them are incapable of understanding any kind of nuance. To them every issue is black or white. And everyone who doesn’t agree with every single point on their extremist agenda is an identical enemy.
And Lemmy (or at least certain instances on Lemmy) is infested with them. Which means they go around in clusters, swarming anyone on the other instances who doesn’t conform with their impractical ideology and blinkered views.
Edit: Ooh, looks like they found my comment! Just wanted to add a special note to them: grow the fuck up!
posted on a thread making a black and white caricature about all marxists and anarchists as ‘tankies’
You’re telling on yourself. I just said tankies, if you choose to identify with that, and make it about all marxists and anarchists, that’s on you.
Removed by mod
Who’s generalizing now?
i’m just being observant, an overwhelming amount of people calling others ‘tankies’ are perfectly fine with team blue sending in the tanks/bombs/drones.
No not really, I am way left of Biden, universal Healthcare, free community College, strong social safety net etc. are not radical left ideas, they are centrist.
I also know enough about history to understand that power systems formed around Marxism communism or anarchism are not inherently good or just when put into practice.
I despise the wholesale slaughter of civilians by the military industrial complex, I also despise the violent crushing of dissent by ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ governments.
A good and just society will always be a mix of different ‘isms’ and marxism definitely needs to be a prominent part of the mix. I’m against total ideological purity, be it capitalist imperialism that can justify industrialized human suffering, or naive tankie bullshit that can justify being on the side of the tanks in Tiananmen square.
the “good society is a mix of isms” line is classic lib dead-enderism. it sounds reasonable but it’s a way of never committing to anything that would actually challenge capital.
i am opposed to a system that unpersons people just because they can’t pay rent, your ‘way left of biden’ horizon stops way short of that.
you seem to resort to thought-terminating cliches to shut down any serious discussion of a change to that system and without engaging with the material conditions those states that did challenge that system operated under.
You’re a dumbass. Liberals don’t even know what a tankie is, let alone call anyone that.
“Tankie” is what rational socialists call the irrational people on the extreme fringes of the left who are incapable of arguing in good faith, like you for instance.
lmao have you been on the internet in the last few years? it’s their latest word that they learned.
the reality is that ‘tankie’ is one of those terms that gets stretched until it’s just a pejorative for anyone to the left of the person using it.
No, that’s not even true. You’re just calling anyone a liberal who calls you a tankie, so clearly it’s only liberals using the term from your perspective. That’s called mental gymnastics.
Also,
FTFY
No, “tankie” is just a pejorative for anyone that defends and supports existing socialist states. Being good faith doesn’t matter, what matters is what people support, whether they be Marxists, anarchists, or even SocDems.
That’s rich, coming from you.
Mind telling us what “existing socialist states” you’re referring to? Do the PRC and DPRK feature in that list? Because yes, defending and obfuscating for those authoritarian and rigidly hierarchical ethno-states truly is something that tankies often do. How astute for you to point that out!
And no, if someone is capable of rational discourse and argues in good faith, then by definition they’re not a tankie and I’ve never seen anyone call someone like that a tankie. Tankies are usually all about “less chat, more splat”
At present, the PRC, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba are all socialist. In each state, public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and the working classes control the state. They each have hierarchy, sure, but hierarchy isn’t class, and calling them “ethno-states” is also bad-faith. You seem to think arguing in favor of these states makes someone inherently bad-faith, but that would mean the Cuban government and the Black Panther Party are also inherently “bad faith.” It’s a thought terminating technique to immediately assume anyone defending these is malicious or duplicitous.
As for whether or nor being a tankie is disqualified by good-faith and rational discussion, this is ironically bad-faith. You are not the arbiter of who is and is not a tankie, and I’ve seen the term hurled against many people, including but not limited to myself, based on what we support, rather than rationality of our logic or how genuine we are. This seems to be more of a way for you to front-load your own views as inherently correct and impossible to criticize, as you immediately assume anyone defending, say, the DPRK is a liar, malicious, ingenuine, etc.
Yeah, people need to stop conflating MLs with Marxists, because Leninism and Marxism are not the same thing at all.
Leninists appropriated the “Marxist” label to lend credibility to their own ideology. Hence it’s “Marxist-Leninism,” not “Leninist-Marxism.”
Nobody is out there calling actual Marxists “tankies.” We’re calling MLs tankies, and then they retreat behind a mote and bailey by saying “yOuR cAlLiNg AlL mArXiStS tAnKiEs?!1?1?!1?1??1?1!!”
Also, “tankie” is a term I exclusively hear used by the left to refer to their own fringe (who, by the way, refer to the rest of the left as “liberals” and “fascists” for not being as extreme as them…). It’s like the left-wing version of maga. They’re completely irrational, bad-faith, militant, and authoritarian.
I never hear centrists, liberals, or conservatives call anybody a “tankie.” To them, the entire left are all just “commies,” because that’s the pejorative they use. They don’t need the term “tankie,” because the entire point of that term is to differentiate between the irrational, extremist fringe of the left, and the rest of us leftists who are capable of both rational thought and empathy (crazy idea, I know…), and are typically somewhere in the democratic range of the socialist spectrum.
disclaimer:
(Although I’ll add that anarchists exist among us reasonable socialists too, but that’s a very broad term and some self-declared “anarchists” truly are actually authoritarian tankies, which becomes clear when you listen to the things they say and how they handle disagreement.
Conversely, some “anarchists” are also actually neofeudal capitalist/corporatist fascists cosplaying as freedom fighters when all they really want is deregulation of industry…).
Leninism is not a replacement of Marxism, Leninism refers to Lenin’s own advancements on Marxism. Lenin used Marxist analysis to bring Marxism to a new era, from the era of industrial capitalism to the imperialist stage of capitalism. The primary advancements of Leninism are the following:
Marxism-Leninism is called as such because the basis of Marxism-Leninism is Marxism. Marxism-Leninism carries over the 3 basic fundamentals of Marxism:
In the modern era, the number of Marxists that reject Lenin are incredibly fringe. Lenin’s work as a Marxist is incredibly obvious to anyone who has read both Marx and Lenin, and it’s very clear that Lenin was history’s greatest Marxist, after the deaths of Marx and Engels. MLs are the dominant form of Marxism in the modern era, and most relevant historically, so trying to claim Marxism-Leninism isn’t Marxist requires an enormous level of justification on your part.
That’s literally what I just said.
You forget to add "Assassinating the soviet leadership because they defeated the bolsheviks in a fair election, and that was unacceptable to Lenin; and then replacing the dead soviets with bolshevik stooges while appropriating the term “Soviet.”
Oh and betraying the anarchists and other groups who supported them during the revolution.
Oh and highly centralized and controlling surveillance state apparatus, and making the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” a permanent fixture rather than a transitional government.
It’s Marxist-Leninism, not “Marxism-Leninism.” You might want to get your own label right before trying to school people on the internet about it.
Someone’s never read Merleau-Ponty, and it shows…
No, you said Marxism-Leninism isn’t Marxist. Marxism-Leninism is Marxist. All of Marxism in the modern day has historically evolved from the era of Marx, be it through accepting ideas, changing them, or rejecting them. There is no such thing as a Marxist that has no opinion on Lenin one way or the other, for example. The ideology “Leninism” is used to refer specifically to Lenin’s advancements, “Marxism” to the ideology created by Marx and Engels, and “Marxism-Leninism” as the unified ideology created by Lenin and forged in practice.
You then make vague references to the Russian Civil War without actually contextualizing them. The Bolsheviks did not “lose fair elections,” and fighting amongst the Soviets did coalesce around the Bolshevik line, as the Bolsheviks were supported by both the proletariat and peasantry. The fighting between the communists and anarchists wasn’t some one-sided betrayal either, it was a civil war and some sections of the anarchists that did not join the Bolsheviks took up arms against the soviets.
Further still, the soviet state was not some “permanent fixture.” Such an idea is inherently against Marxist understanding of dialectical materialism, as nothing in the world is permanent, as well as the economic basis for the withering of the state. The USSR was a socialist state gradually building towards communism.
As for “Marxist-Leninism,” no, I mean Marxism-Leninism, as understood by Wikipedia, science direct, and Stalin when coining the term. You’re very confident about this point despite being trivially proven wrong.
As for Merleau-Ponty, yes, Western Marxism is incredibly fringe in the global and historical context.
I quite clearly said it isn’t the same thing as “Marxism,” as anyone who scrolls up will plainly see.
I’m done wasting my time on you.
post summary:
‘tankies bad, i’m not a tankie, anyone who disagrees with me is a tankie’
hate to break it to you but liberals learned a new word and it’s just a left-facing pejorative now.
^ that, friends is what we call a “bad-faith argument” based on a distorted interpretation of what was actually said, utilizing flashy one-liners to deride a commenter without actually addressing any of the content of the comment they made.
it’s called paraphrasing, you wanted to make it very clear that you’re one of the good ones for the liberals, as opposed to tankies who are the bad ones. i don’t think i misrepresented you.
the term is literally a left facing pejorative the way it’s used, especially how you were using it.
‘youre a librul lobrul bad, you jerk off the markets don’t you.anyone who disagrees with me is a librul.’
if they’re pro capitalist it’s just describing their position, sorry that the term offends you
Cowbs there is fully ideological and fails to reconcile his understanding of classroom theory with real world application. Fucker genuinely believes the cow is a perfect sphere and is a bad faith propagandist. He’ll probably report my comment too because he’s a little bitch that just gish gallops bullshit and pivots every time you pin him down. You’re wasting your time. Their whole account is dedicated to getting republicans in power.
I organize in real life, my perspective is based on what I actually do as an organizer and activist as well as someone who studies Marxist-Leninist theory and history so as to apply it better. Just because I oppose the democrats doesn’t mean I support the republicans, I oppose the entire capitalist system. My goal is socialism, and like all Marxists, I believe that this can only be established through revolution, which means I do spend a fair bit of time combatting misconceptions surrounding reformism.
I haven’t reported any of your comments yet, btw. You have this absurd caricature of me that lives on in your brain, this must be the second dozen comment you’ve made about me specifically with no actual substance. Take a break, touch grass.
I don’t see any anarchists in this comic what are you talking about? Maybe the person voting…
If you don’t think anarchists vote then you do not know what anarchism is.
well i’m an anarchist and i literally vote in every primary and every year for municipal/nonpresidential elections, so it was nice to have you identify me correctly.
what was funny to me is that this comic is so dishonestly framed, like take panel 1, my trans comrades have already been getting arrested by democrats for protesting their abandonment of trans kids healthcare in favor of institutions and placating trump. ‘i don’t want to arrest trans people’ is clearly not the same as ‘i won’t arrest trans people’.
the way the comic is structured is like actually nonsensical too, the person being anti-voting says stuff after the vote has already been cast, and then when it fails we’re supposed to blame the those two? i blame the democrats for losing more than i do voters.
k
Literally no one above you conflated anarchists and marxists with tankies.
Imagine playing victim about something no one said. The very definition of “strawman.”
‘tankies’ is such a broadly defined pejorative at this point and it absolutely does cover anarchists the way liberals use it.
“liberals” is such a broadly defined pejorative at this point and it absolutely does cover democratic socialists the way tankies use it.
if they are pro capitalism, yes it does; i know many communists/marxists who are also in DSA that the label does not apply to.
If the… democratic socialists… are… pro-capitalism…?
Let’s examine that statement. Does it make any sense?
Are you perhaps confusing democratic socialists with social democrats? Because those are different things, if you didn’t know…
believe it or not there are people in the reformist org who are not interested in seeing capitalism go; the org is not a monolith.
have you even been to a DSA meeting? i feel like i have probably been to more DSA meetings than you.
Reformism is a dead-end, so demsocs may want socialism but in practice are limited to welfare capitalism. The intent may not be to preserve capitalism, but the effect ultimately reinforces it.
I appreciate your attempt to educate these ponderous oafs but they’re only interested in keeping republicans in power.
Are these Liberals in the room with us right now?
You can make any argument you want when you imagine words to mean whatever you need them to mean.
yeah, this whole fucking thread
Can’t argue with reactionaries mate. They don’t engage in good faith.
for real; sometimes it is good to get this energy out of my system though
That’s cute considering you and who you’re replying to.
Tankies aren’t Marxist or anarchists. Tankies are eastern imperialists and statists that like to call themselves Marxist.
“Tankie”, as used in online discourse, just means “person to my political left making an argument I can’t refute”.
That is completely false and you know it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
It is about shilling for authoritarian dictatorships like Russia and China.
Sure, if your definition of “shilling for” is “rejecting US State Department narratives about”.
Otherwise, it’s like I said, it means “person to my political left making a point I can’t refute”.
https://welshundergroundnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf
No, it means someone who would really love living in a dictatorship as long as the dictator was Xi Jinping, Stalin, or Kim Jong Un.
Yes, that’s the hyperbolic slander it tries to assert when in reality it is just a buzzword for imbeciles to use when they want to stop engaging with the argument.
Authoritarians are authoritarians, they just like different flavors of boot.
Authoritarian is a useless word. The US is far more authoritarian than anybody those supposed “dictatorships”, but the serious people in suits you’ve outsourced all your thinking to would never say it out loud.
https://welshundergroundnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf
Parenti wrote about you thirty years ago. Chapter 3 of that book is all about you.
okay then please tell that to everyone calling me a tankie plsss
the reality is that ‘tankie’ is one of those terms that gets stretched until it’s just a pejorative for anyone to the left of the person using it.
started as a specific reference to people who defended the soviet invasion of hungary in 1956, then it gets applied to anyone who doesn’t denounce every socialist state on demand, now it’s anyone who doesn’t want to vote for biparitsan war consensus
Sister, you’re the one that decided that OP was lumping the anarchists and Marxists in with the tankies! You appear to be trying to claim that OP is portraying everyone who says ‘both sides are the same’ as tankies. A is a subset of B; B is not equal to A. Just because some people don’t actually understand what ‘tankie’ means doesn’t mean everyone shares that view, in the same way that ‘liberal’ doesn’t actually mean ‘everyone who votes Democrat’.
he is tho
yeah plenty of liberals are also republicans
Okay, now I know you’re just trolling.
i regret to inform you that pretty much everything i post is serious
Liberals when someone has any understanding of politics that’s deeper than what gets tought in high school civics or cable news:
I have never encountered an ml user acting in good faith on here. They always come in packs and use alts to brigade communities and instances and hit every political thread hard trying to convince people not to vote dem. They’re almost exactly like how thedonald subreddit used to be a decade ago. Probably quite a few of those rejects ended up there the way ml works for maga.
Well, you come from an instance where the rules are literally pro-authoritarian, so yeah people are gonna assume you’re a tankie as well.
What are your thoughts on North Korea?
it’s a heavily sanctioned garrison state that emerged from a brutal colonial occupation and a war that killed a third of the population.
i dont particularly care for any states, but i have special contempt for the US. that makes it hard to share in the fearmongering about the US’s designated enemies on the other side of the planet from where i live.
Well, you didn’t describe them as brave freedom fighters trying to maintain true democracy in spite of western fascism, so that’s a good sign.
In retrospect, I probably should have asked you about authoritarianism.
yes i oppose authoritarianism, but also all states are authoritarian. liberal authoritarianism is a far greater threat to my existence right now than any threat from the state enemies of the US
“Tankies” just means people who support existing socialist states. Typically we are Marxist-Leninists, but anarchists and socdems also fit this sometimes and are targeted.
Dang what socdems do you know. I’d love to meet them.
Hasan counts, IMO. He supports China, Cuba, etc. but focuses more on welfare capitalism. He gets called a tankie semi-frequently.
Tankies are the ideological opposite and intellectual equivalent of libertarians. Like if you’re in high school it’s ok to dabble but if you maintain those viewpoints into adulthood you probably weren’t top of your class and you definitely weren’t popular. Ideology for dumb assholes.
And let your instance admins know you’d like them to defederate! There’s a good chance they might also want to but don’t want to force the decision upon their users.
My instance defederated both Hexbear and db0 and it’s crazy how much more emotionally mature the vibe is without those users.
Putting your instance on highest ranking if I plan to migrate.
I think their instance admin was the guy behind the tesseract scandal a few months ago, might want to look into that if you haven’t heard of it.
Basically snuck a hidden blob into a “small” update that shadowbans a bunch of users and keywords. Doesn’t sound that bad on the surface, but the implementation was really shady, the blacklist itself was sloppily constructed, and the way he handled the fallout when people called him out on it was really immature.
If I have this confused with a different instance, then my bad. I think he’s involved with sh.itjustworks at a fairly high level too though.
There’s a couple graphics floating around somewhere mapping defederations of major instances if you want alternatives. I’ll see if I can dig them up.
actually i have that account tagged as the admins sock puppet
I was on that list of banned users!
Dang I knew this was a honeypot thread I didn’t realize it was for THAT.
I’m still upset that you guys managed to sucessfully bully a developer into deleting his (free) project (that had like 10 users), because now his blocklist has to be rebuilt manually, thankfully so many of you out yourselves and make it easy to report.
Oh, you’re the guy I was talking about? Hahaha, I didn’t even realize, but now you’re glowing.
You reported me for an objective delivery of the facts, as I understand them? Sure, don’t care.
Next time be more honest about the diffs in your “free” software updates, and handle things a bit more maturely when people take notice of the unethical payloads you hide behind “security patches.”
If telling you that is “bullying” you, then you need thicker skin. In fact you’re suspiciously bordering on DARVO, a common tactic among narcissists. (Not calling you a narcissist, by the way. Just pointing out how your response resembles how one would react).
Oh by the way, did I just make the tesseract ban list? If so, I’ll consider it an honor.
If I was the guy do you think I would let you Kiwi Farms jerks know my new account?
What the hell is kiwi farms?
And yes, probably, because as the instance admin you can make as many sockpuppet accounts as you want.
Not that you’re outting yourself on purpose or anything…
I’ll look into, thanks
Not a priority but have thought about migrating.
I found this one. I thought I had the other one too but I must have forgotten to save it. But anyway here you go:
The pissbabies took offense to your comment.
These kinds of sweeping generalizations that collapse the entirety of leftist thought into simple black and white binaries is the exact behavior you’re trying to criticize, no?
You and your flying monkeys don’t even come close to representing “the entirety of leftist thought”. Get the fuck over yourself.
Unsure what you mean by “flying monkeys,” but if there’s one thing anarchists and Marxists near-universally agree on, it’s the necessity of directly struggling against the system itself, rather than treating voting as our primary means of political engagement. Collapsing leftist point of views into this unprincipled, nuance-lacking strawman doesn’t actually engage with the primary critique, which is that we need to organize outside the system and direct that organization against said system to gain change, be it revolutionary or even to gain reforms or concessions.
And no, I don’t represent the entirety of leftist thought. I was responding to a sweeping generalization of leftist thought.
Why are you lying about what the upstream commenter was doing?
Also, fuck all the way off with the fallacious bullshit notion that you can’t organize outside the system and also still vote anyway!
I’m not, I’m responding to the comment directly. I suppose you could argue that their comment was vague enough that they could claim to be talking about a specific group in a clarification, but as it stands they seem to be lashing out against the left in general. Further, when people treat voting as their primary means of political engagement, they do check out! I’m not denying that people can organize while voting for the DNC, many people do, but the problem is that most see voting for the DNC as their primary political agency, and not a pressure valve designed to siphon away agitation against the system itself.
Their comment was very clearly talking specifically about tankies who want to “well acktyually” people on “Theory” while being the textbook definition of useful idiots helping the fascists. That behavior isn’t encouraging people to organize; it’s discouraging them from it because if organizing means dealing with that sort of condescension then they want no part of it!
Everybody but you understood that. You’re the only one who’s so fucking full of yourself you think you’re entitled to speak for the entire Left!
The point of trying to bring theory to people isn’t to get a cheap gotcha, it’s to try to bring the general level of political education of people up, from the base level of general instinct to an informed and scientific approach to social change. If someone is being condescending in their approach, then they are doing it wrong.
I’m not sure why you’re lying about me claiming to speak for the entire left, I claimed the opposite. I speak for myself, and can at minimum self-identify as a Marxist-Leninist.
Citation needed. If this is the basis of why you think Voting Bad then you’re going to have to back that up with some science. Not quoting Lenin, I want a solid peer reviewed study.
If you don’t have that your entire reasoning falls on a hunch and vibes.
Personally I think voting helps people become more politically engaged, not less.
Since when did I say “voting bad?” I said that electoralism cannot bring about the change that is necessary. Regardless, the issue is that focusing political engagement on voting over organizing is what deflates organizational pressures, not the act of voting itself. Are you actually reading my arguments?
They call out a cluster of traits as being bad. The only sane way to parse their comment is to interpret it as only applying to people who have all those traits. You’re doing something equivalent to demanding someone clarify that they didn’t mean they hated all food when they complained about not liking things that are sweet.
They are targeting a vague group that they claim has these traits. There’s no direct attack on any ideology specifically, nor any instance specifically, so we have to fill in the gaps and see it for what it is: an attack on instances like dbzer0, Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad.ml, and Hexbear.net, as well as the ideologies of those instances, those generally being anarchism and Marxism-Leninism. Their position is that these are dominating flaws of specific instances, not merely a random type of person with an unspecified level of influence.
Those people are not the average Lemmy user.
Depends on the instance.
Removed by mod
I don’t bring anyone to brigade threads, lmao. Believe it or not, I have nowhere near the influence you claim I do.
If you’re pro-military, pro-dictatorship, you’re not a leftist. Leftists don’t want to keep wallowing in the same monkeybrained shit we’ve been doing for the last ten thousand years, we want to grow the fuck up as a race. Violence isn’t doing the job. It doesn’t work for the enemy when they try to use it on us, and we’d be stupid to think it’d be more effective in the hands of the less violently inclined. We need better tools, better ideas. Fuck Marx, fuck Lenin, fuck Mao. Don’t even try to pretend their authoritarian thinking is compatible with anarchism.
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, but I did used to be an anarchist, and from my time as an anarchist I cannot recall any anarchists opposed to revolution as a means to establish anarchism, which is something anarchists and Marxists share in common. Further, Marxists are not “pro-dictatorship,” not in the sense of an individual with immense power, but in favor of the working class taking control, in favor of radical and genuine democracy.
Marx-Leninism is literally just another word for Stalinism (as in, the term was first used by Joseph Stalin to refer to his own ideology).
So, while you’re correct that Marxism is not pro-dictatorship, Marx-Leninism definitely is.
Marxism-Leninism was synthesized by Stalin, but Stalin himself did not add much of anything to Marx, Engels, or Lenin, aside form sharpening Lenin’s analysis of the national question, which is particularly important for indigenous struggles (and also partially why a group of indigenous American tribes named Stalin an honorary chief in 1942, presenting him with a headdress).
Marxism-Leninism is not “pro-dictatorship.” This is a simplistic framing of unitary forms of democracy that focus on policy changes as the primary issue of political engagement, rather than party changes. States like Cuba, that are guided by Marxism-Leninism, have complex systems of delegate-based democracy.
What happens to the working class after they take control? History says they don’t stay the working class. They become the new rich or the new military leaders. They do their dance just to fall back into the same shit patterns they worked to overthrow. Their revolutions mean nothing because they just use violence as a response to violence rather than taking a holistic proactive approach to the advancement of mankind.
There is no such thing as genuine democracy; each individual must be taught how to control themselves, take responsibility for their actions, and move beyond the ways that failed us so many times. A tyranny by majority vote is still tyranny.
First of all class in the Marxist sense refers to your relation to the means of production. Getting a higher paying jobs doesn’t change your class.
And sure some do become military leaders, because they literally lead a revolution. They proved they were capable military leaders, why wouldn’t they stay a military leader?
And no, they don’t become the new rich. You can look up how much people in government positions in communist governments were paid. They didn’t all become overnight billionaires. And working for the government is a job.
Communism has been successful everywhere they’ve been tried. They all improved the material conditions of their people, improved literacy, and health outcomes. There’s a reason polls show most people who experienced communism preferred it to capitalism.
What happens after the working class takes control, is that the working class begins to transform society into its own direction. Administration is a job, not a class, nor is class a level of wealth. Classes are relations to ownership of the means of production. Here’s a snapshot from the early USSR, taken from This Soviet World:
Anna Louise Strong was a Statesian radical and journalist that traveled back and forth between the USSR and the US, and later the PRC as well.
Cowbee never shuts up and doesn’t actually debate, just keeps repeating the same talking points and puts words into your mouth.
Cowbee is incredibly patient and doing marvelous educational work in threads like this. You confuse it for a debate, but you’d need to be on even footing for that. It’s more like they are a teacher who calmly tries to make some common sense stick with western people who behave like spoiled children and are to privileged and racist to see the simple and plain truths that literally most people in the (non-western) world see clearly.
I have never read a comment with such a superiority complex
Cowbee has some good points and his heart is in the right place, but always seems to show up to imply people shouldn’t vote, which I think is foolish and dangerous.
Nah, I directly state that organizing is more important than voting, and treating them like it’s the opposite is dangerous. I don’t argue against voting, I argue for organizing, and stress it as more important than voting.
I’ve quoted you enough where you’ve implied otherwise I’m not going to do another thread where we day the same thing.
Cowbee is a bad faith propagandist that can’t reconcile their understanding of theory with literally all of recorded history. Cowbee is full of shit and as bad faith as it comes here on Lemmy.
No? I study theory and history, it’s pointless to only study one aspect. I’m 100% genuine, and making a dozen comments complaining about me in a row without actually adding anything is a bit ridiculous.
🤮
That’s odd, you kept making a strawman of my argument and kept berating me for not sourcing the strawman. After I sourced the actual point I made, I only got crickets.
Bruv I’ve been doing stuff throughout my day other than telling at people online, give me a minute
Maybe don’t spend time implying I should be assassinated then?
Oh fuck off you sanctimonious prick, clutch your fuckin pearls elsewhere.
When did I say that? Way to put words in my mouth, again.
“Not a debate” is 100% accurate. They just copy paste some tangential and paper thin propaganda and tweak the verbiage. Basically LLM slop with some extra steps. If you punch a hole in that topic (after a bunch of equivocation and nit picking) they retreat to some other copy-paste talking point.
It’s easy to look “smart” at a glance when your conversation technique is the exact same playbook as Charlie Kirk:
There’s no way to have a conversation unless you already start in agreement with their priors. I’ve watched them get backed into a corner on basic stuff that contradicts their own talking points in the same thread. Paraphrasing it went something like “Communism is a perfect rational science” => Why don’t we discard the pseudo-religious trappings and make decisions that optimize for quantifiable quality of life indicators à la the HDi? => “Well actually communism is required for the vibes”
It certainly is very easy to make shit up about people! No examples provided, no links, just pure unfiltered strawman.
Look ladies and gentlemen, no straw man needed! Already here in the flesh! Like a terminally online Candyman, say the name you’ll summon the keyboard praxis warrior.
Too hard to search your own comment history? I don’t blame you, 21.4k comments at an average of 668 per month is too much for me too. And of course that’s just your .ml account, lord knows what you’d have to sift through on your alts.
Having actual real life responsibilities prevents me from keeping up with your Kirk-esque pace of a reply every 43 waking minutes, so how about we compromise. You can just copy-paste the existing comments calling out your bullshit right underneath the drivel you regurgitate. It’s all the same conversation anyway, it will save us both time.
So you don’t have any actual examples, got it.
You’re literally doing it right now.
No?
I’m glad I’m not the only one who sees it
Odd considering it’s a strawman.
Cowbee uses the same ‘debate’ style as Charlie Kirk.
How so?
I don’t do that, though. Seems people would rather discredit me than directly respond.
Can you give some examples?
What a pain in the neck
Oh hey, it’s you, the person who said voting for Democrats was accelerationist. How ya been?
Actually collapsing ‘all of leftist thought’ as Tankie-owned is the mistake here. Leftist thought is broader and more flexible than you’d like to think because you’ve painted youself into the most austere, ineffective corner that consistently results in the worst possible outcomes. Leftist thought is a biiiig panoply of ideas and strategies of every color, and you guys are the button that says ‘clear all’, indicated by little grey and white squares.
Accelerationism means supporting the most competent capitalists and imperialists, to speed up concentration of capital and speed up collapse as a consequence. The Democrats are the more competent party when it comes to ensuring capitalism remains more stable. This would make them the accelerationist option. Accelerationism isn’t “burn down the system now,” it’s a specific (and wrong) strategy.
As for claiming “all leftist thought is tankie-owned,” I did no such thing. I generally categorize the left as being predominantly Marxists and anarchists, those who oppose capitalism. I myself am a Marxist-Leninist, which is an ideology that has consistently managed to both take power for the working class, and wield it to do tremendous things like double life expectancies, eradicate homelessness, and more. Not sure what you mean by your assertion that I am painting myself into an ineffective corner, nor the bit on saying “clear all.”
Marxist-Leninist strategy is time-tested and clear-cut. Capitalism runs into crisis from its own contradictions, so to make revolution we need to develop a working class party that builds up disciplined, educated cadre that struggle along with the rest of the working class directly against the system. With this party, we can make effective organizers, educate the working class, agitate among them against the capitalist system itself, and create unity among the working class that can become an unbreakable hammer, an unblockable spear. The party just becomes the spearhead, the actual working class is the one making the real moves and changes. You know, the old adage,
Educate
Agitate
Organize!
Jesus christ never met a person more eager the talk incessantly without paying attention to a single word that’s said to them.
I’ve seen quite a few people in this thread that fit that description, and don’t believe that applies to me.
See there we go, a biting comeback and you’re still pleasant and polite about it.
I don’t fully get your angle but we can make you an effective interlocutor one of these days.
I think I’m decently effective. I’ve managed to convince people both in real conversations and online. I’d like to see what you mean by me being condescending, because if that’s true I would like to correct that.
You said he thinks that voting for democrats is accelerationist, and he explained why he believes that.
You claimed that he thinks all of leftist thought is whatever tankies think (a pretty vague claim, tankie is not exactly a well established term), and then you use some flowery sequence of platitudes without real refutable specifics to propose a broader definition of leftism. Cowbee responds by clarifying what he believes leftism is, which is broader than his own ideology.
What words are you saying he ignored? Are you upset he didn’t answer “how ya been?” Are you confused as to which comment he’s responding to?
Man you’re late I ain’t going over all this shit again. There’s a whole conversation you can go look over and be weird about if you want to try and draw any more context from my interactions here. It’s all in the open in the replies. I don’t even understand if you’re trying to make a point or. White kniting at this point and I don’t care. Come at me with your own shit or stay out of it.
That’s why I said “most of them”.
Try to keep up, eh.
You’re clearly trying to identify a pattern, though, and simply implying there are exceptions to this pattern doesn’t mean your assertion that the pattern itself exists is justified in reality. I think it would be better to directly attack the ideology/ies you are taking aim at, than to concoct a strawman.
For a non zero chunk of them, this is about getting paid in Kremlin bucks.
To be honest, I think they only get Kremlin money indirectly in a form of propaganda, having everyone on a paycheck is way too expensive when you can make them work for free
That’s why i switched to piefed. Out of sight, out of mind.
Hmm, I’ll have to look into that. Thanks.
And a big problem with a lot of them is they antagonize you into saying shit they report you for. It’s not just about spreading propaganda, it’s about removing anyone that disagrees with it.
you are responsible for your own actions. you need to make sure your conduct is congruent with the community rules.
Their civility rules are fake. They will say the most vile, violent shit to you, and never have a comment removed. But suggest that their political strategies are stupid, and you get banned.
And most lemmy mods make reddit mods look fuckin reasonable.
Yeah. Many do. I was a mod for a few communities here for a while. Was in on the discord chats and such… not a thing I’d do again.
Oh you poor thing…
Ehh… it wasn’t horrific or anything, just not something I’d want to do again. Sometimes it’s best to not know how the sausage is made.
I actually made sausage for a couple months every year as a kid for the church sausage and pancake breakfasts when I went to catholic school. It was during winter so it was cold and didn’t smell that bad but watching cleaned carcasses get turned into sausage links really wasn’t that bad. I got to put the casing on the grinder and feed the pork bits in to make the actual sausage, twisting the links and everything. We literally did this shit in the school cafeteria. That was still the best fuckin sausage I’ve ever had. Anyway now I’m an atheist and I still eat sausage occasionally but really it’s the killing and butchering that’s the rough part. I did not participate in that as a kid. Or adult.
I’ve said it in another comment but I’m pretty sure most lemmings genuinely believe that the cow is a perfect sphere. Lemmy US political discourse is fuckin garbage.
Let’s be straight here: the likliest scenario is that Lemmy was explicitly created for the purpose of giving tankies a platform to spread misinformation and hate. It is the Nazi bar.
Lemmy was indeed made for the purpose of spreading communism, as a reaction to Reddit’s censorship. Communism isn’t “misinformation and hate” though, that’s your ideological spin on it.
I dislike the term Communism, as it’s associations with Stalinist thought muddies the waters between it and Fascism. I identify as socialist, myself.
What I take issue with is the fact that you support fascism and call it by a different name. I quite enjoyed “misinformation and hate” as a more direct statement. As an aside, go fuck yourself, fascist.
Communism is a post-socialist society where class has been eradicated and all production and distribution has been collectivized. Socialism is the transitional system between capitalism and communism. All socialism either moves towards communism, or falls backwards.
As for “Stalinism,” that doesn’t exist. Marxism-Leninism is an ideology, the one guiding Cuba, the PRC, former USSR, Vietnam, Laos, etc. Stalin’s contributions to it are extremely minor, the vast majority of Marxism-Leninism comes from Marx and Lenin.
Socialism, as it has historically existed, is by no means “fascism.” Equating the Soviets with the Nazis is a form of Holocaust trivialization. The communists represent the working classes, and always fight in their favor. The Nazis created an ideology based on racial supremacy, and cemented bourgeois rule with an iron fist. They are not at all equivalent, and to do so is immensely anti-socialist.
LOOOOLLLLLLLLL, Mao literally took direct inspiration from Stalin’s innovations over Leninism. Mao, whose version of “communism” was then propogated to most of those other countries you mentioned.
If “Stalinism” doesn’t exist, then neither does “Maoism.”
Your only hope in this conversation is that no one here knows enough about it to dispute your attempts at obfuscation.
What were Stalin’s innovations over Leninism? Be specific. Mao was a Marxist-Leninist, same as Stalin, carrying over Lenin’s ideology the way Lenin carried over Marx’s ideology. “Maoism” isn’t the ideology of Mao, but a deviation made by Gonzalo.
You mean, like, in the same way that “Marxist-Leninism” isn’t the ideology of Marx, but a deviation made by Lenin? (i.e., not Marxism).
Well for one thing, you say he coined the term that people today use to refer to Lenin’s ideology (not Marx’s, which is just “Marxism”).
For another thing, there’s literally everything that people like you ever say was “Stalin’s fault, not Lenin’s” when attempting to derail conversations away from “bad shit that happened under the USSR.”
Beyond that, I’m getting bored with you and I don’t feel the need to go dig up information that literally anyone can find easily, just to prove a point to someone who will ever accept facts and logic.
🤡
Excellent point, great job.
When you’re involved it sure is.
I don’t see that at all, can you be specific?
Fortunately, it also has instructions on how to build your own bar, with built-in methods to kick out the Nazis.
Nah, more like they found a small enough community that they could abuse with their relatively weak numbers. Also the fact that there’s no corporate backing to ban them and that’s by design. This is free speech in a nutshell. There’s a lot of people with really stupid political views.
Lemmy is developed by communists, the communists were here first.
Shhh! You’re interrupting their fart-sniffing!
These people are really like swarms of mosquitoes and Lemmy is somehow infested with them.
Not sure where these people exist IRL or at all. So weird …
When voting is treated like the absolutely most important means of political struggle, people do tune out and neglect to organize. The electoral system is a pressure valve, and political theater is a funnel to direct people’s rage away from the system itself and towards said pressure valve. Organizing is far more important than voting, yet societal pressures make it seem like the opposite is the case. That is the point Marxists are making, and this is why organizing in a working class party isn’t just optional, but necessary for progressive change.
Every major reform and concession has been won through struggle. Not because the ruling class was bested in the marketplace of ideas or anything. The Stonewall Riots were the catalyst for progressive change, not a change in heart in the ruling class. Same as the Civil Rights Movement, where Dr. King was assassinated as he began pivoting not just from anti-racist agitation, but towards the Poor People’s Campaign, a growing socialist movement. It’s why the Black Panther Party was infiltrated, and its top leaders killed or imprisoned. That’s why we need to actually focus our political energies on organized struggle.
Prove it. Where’s the peer reviewed study? If you can’t back that up with some science this entire argument is based off of an assumption. What if voting gets people more politically active? If this is the whole reason why you think people shouldn’t vote and take direct action, it’s a flimsy one.
And, even if it was true, there’s nothing that is stopping you from reminding people to be active and not just vote. You could go into comment sections and say people should go participate in building a revolution after they vote.
But I digress, you made a claim that’s the basis of your whole argument, do you have any proof that voting leads to less organizing?
No Lenin quotes please I want an actual study ty
Stop putting words in my mouth. I never said the act of voting makes people tune out, or that people should not vote. I said treating voting like the primary means of gaining effective change deflates organizational pressures. If you cannot respond to the actual arguments at hand, then do not invent new ones.
I literally quoted you saying voting causes people to check out and not organize. Prove it.
No, you quoted me saying that treating voting like the absolute most important means of political struggle causes people to tune out. Not the act of voting, the treatment of the concept at a societal level. Stop making up strawmen.
So prove it. Where’s your source?
The closest direct source I found suggests that there is a negative correlation between system-justifying beliefs and collective anti-system action. If people believe voting legitimately is a means by which they can enact social change, they are less likely to organize against the system itself. This does not mean voting itself is against organizing, in fact organizers vote at higher rates than non-organizers. The importance here is that collective action is diminished when that is directed towards engaging with the system itself.
I feel like it would be more effective to highlight political movements that required changing the status quo of the political landscape all involved more than just voting. Like lgbt rights starting by throwing a brick at a cop or women’s suffrage obvious not coming from women all showing up to the polls to vote for their right to vote.
Basically take a look at any history book and the case is clearly made that effective political change never came from voting alone.
Even reading through the abstract, this study is irrelevant to what we’re talking about here. They did a study that showed how people who are against the system and protest the system will inevitably butt heads with people who want to keep the system, the status quo.
Nowhere is it talking about voting, and that voting causes people to stop organizing.
The fact you said you “found” it instead of having that information on hand, and that you had to stretch to say this proves your theory means what I thought from the start.
The whole “people who vote will organize less” theory you state as absolute, the whole basis of your criticism, is made up. You assumed that this was true instead of checking. Shameful.
His ass.
The majority of those keyboard communists are just paid russian propagandists trying to sow discord in every election.
Their opinion is literally worthless.
Half of internet Tankies are sockpuppets and the other half are under 25 years old. Any other category of Tankie is statistically insignificant.
Primaries are for getting the candidates you want. General elections are for picking the candidate who is closest to your values. If you really want change, get involved for your primary candidate. Just bitching on here and sitting out on civic action is selfish catharsis.
Exactly. You shouldn’t treat voting for a politician as a marriage, you should treat politicians as a vehicle to get you to the place you want to be.
There almost never is an ideal candidate because everyone has different opinion what ideal candidate is. Even in countries where there are multiple parties most people don’t get exactly who they want.
If you want better choices you need to get more involved on politics, vote in primaries, vote in local elections, find and help candidates that are not popular but are closer to what you want or even run yourself.
If you don’t get involved at lower levels don’t be surprised the candidates in general aren’t what you want. Of you don’t vote, don’t be surprised that candidates ignore needs of your group.
Who downvotes this? Even if you are a tankie this should register to you as an entirely sane take.
I see a few potential ways someone might disagree:
I should note that I’m neither an American nor would I consider myself a subscriber of any particular political ideology beyond an assortment of vaguely leftist beliefs. This is mainly just me paraphrasing some sentiments I’ve seen/heard which would probably disagree with the comment in question.
Thats right. But I do understand where it comes from. Theo lesser Evil evolved to a downward spiral.
The less evil is bare minimum. And it sometimes feels like that politicians are more busy With being a bit better than the actual Evil, to still satisfy their own voters and trying to win the others. Better Take would be to actually improve stuff.
But yes. No vote will Just hand over the vote for the stronger party. So the less evil kinda ist the only option… and I rather Take that, than nothing
No, you gotta be lying. There certainly have been plenty of billionaires beheaded and police stations burned and politicians tarred and feathered.
Clearly theyre doing what they tell everyone else they should be doing.
Edit- triggered all those tough keyboard warriors with this evidently.