On lemmy.world I posted a comment on how liberals use ‘tankie’ as an invective to shut down dialogue and received tons of hateful replies. I tried to respond in a rational way to each. Someone’s said ‘get educated’ I responded ‘Im reading Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll burn that bridge when I get there’ and tried to keep it civil.
They deleted every comment I made and banned me. Proving my point, they just want to shut down dialogue. Freedom of speech doesn’t existing in those ‘totalitarian’ countries right? But in our ‘enlightened’ western countries we just delete you.
It’s why it’s really funny that there’s a decent amount of libs trying to pretend that Lemmy (either .ml or as a whole) is this super “tankie” thing when they’re really the opposite
Like, if the rest of the Lemmy universe was “tankie” we wouldn’t need Lemmygrad in the first place
It’s pretty funny that liberals see themselves as proponents of open debate and rational discourse, but in practice they start freaking out as soon as anybody challenges their dogmas.
Real “my girlfriend goes to another school” situation, except the girlfriend is their respect for other people
🤣
This is liberal mental space, full of “freedom of speech”. Liberalism is a cancer which leads to right extremism. And social democracy leads to liberalism. If you exclude ML from discourse, you eliminate whole left wing point of view consequently.
Unrelated, but I like your pfp.
Thank you comrade!
As Hakim or Yugopnik (I can’t remember exactly) said, “tankie” is the new “commie”
Yugopnik I think from memory. He was saying how libs can’t say “commie” because its such a dated word and nobody takes it seriously (except some conservatives who still say it unironically which is actually hilarious😂). It’s too much associated with redscare era propaganda. Tankie doesn’t carry this baggage but has exactly the same function.
Also Hakim, in his newest video.
ah cool didn’t realise
If someone calls me a tankie I roll my eyes, but what makes my blood boil is the term “red fascist.” What the actual F? I would have been in a fascist concentration camp for at least 3 reasons
No need to resort to suppositions; just look at Thälmann.
The term of “red fascist” is not only (purposefully) insulting to the memory of actual MLs who came under repression and execution from the hands of fascists (and ignoring that in many fascist states they were the forefront of resistance against it, see: the PCE under francoist Spain), but also dangerous as it blurs fascism as a word with a meaning, making actual fascism harder to identify and, thus, to combat.
There’s a reason why fascism has to be redefined, blurred, or otherwise trivialized. Most libs don’t do it on purpose but they serve reaction by doing so. If we actually learned the true socio-economic definition of fascism we’d very quickly realize that the golden billion live in nations which are arguably fascist.
Fascist or ‘authoritarian’ even. I asked for their definition so we couldn’t at least have some ground to debate on but yeah, naw. It’s just throwing memes. And I again reiterate the US is absolutely authoritarian. Prison population? Through the roof. Cop city? Murder protestors. War? Total media and popular support even to the tune of one trillion dollars a year.
1000000000000 dollars
Coming smugly from the people who have historically always allied with the fascists, it’s a special kind of disgusting.
We should call liberals coupies because of all their coups.
There is already the term dronie which is a defender of neoliberalism and their imperialistic policies.
Fair, although coupie is more accurate, since it’s like their thing IMO, drone is more common nowadays and not just for Obama.
cool idea but i think this gives them too much credit. libs blindly support every war and blindly swallow every hot distraction, while believing they do neither. i think it is too kind to focus on just the coups.
Call them boaties because NATO sent 19 warships to surround and blockade Lisbon in 1974 after Portugal overthrew fascism and started nationalizing industries and redistributing land.
Where can one read more about those events?
From Rogue State by William Blum, chapter 17
More from chapter 18:
Awesome, thanks!
I like David Graebers choice of calling them “extreme centrists”
I like what he proposes, I haven’t seen that video, thanks! Although that’s not much of an insult.
It gets up their noses though because they see themselves as the most moderate of people!
That’s a good one.
P.S. I want to take the opportunity to tell you that I like your username. I’m downloading my legally aquired copy of Metal Gear Solid now.
MGS saga has some good things, you need to be critical but for example Peace Walker is the gamification of guerilla warfare in a way, and Big Boss is kind of based in el Che. Kojima’s ideas are a bit flawed in terms of politics because he was born in the West but his heart is in the right place. Every one of his games is good in a very specific way.
fr
Sometimes it kind of of makes me feel really irritated in a way because like, a lot of these people who are so overly concerned over “tankies”, don’t have that energy directed at fascists or reactionaries? They seem more concerned over “tankies” than reactionaries or fascists who are in power in various places and are hurting people. Like they will make a post or whatever denouncing “tankies”, but where is that towards fascists? or reactionaries? If anything all they do is help fascists and reactionaries whether they are aware of that or not.
It’s also happens when liberals talk about foreign policy. The reduce critics of US foreign policy and NATO “America bad.” Which is exactly as reductive as the hyperbolic critique they’re trying to make.
A lot of this comes from the community from the streamer whose name starts with the v and who used to go by Irish Lassie. His community is especially toxic when it comes to using the term tankie as a pejorative.
And they don’t even keep the smear to people that support the Bolsheviks. They’ve been saying that about Noam Chomsky and Jeremy corbyn and basically anyone that has been critical of NATO in the last few years.
A lot of this comes from the community from the streamer whose name starts with the v and who used to go by Irish Lassie. His community is especially toxic when it comes to using the term tankie as a pejorative.
And they don’t even keep the smear to people that support the Bolsheviks. They’ve been saying that about Noam Chomsky and Jeremy corbyn and basically anyone that has been critical of NATO in the last few years.
Imagine calling fucking Chomsky a tankie XD
XD
The polish virus spreads! Yes! Hahaha! Yes!
Sounds like a psyop.
I don’t think more info is needed to conclude he is a fed.
I got 11 upvotes on a Ho Chi Minh quote in the clown shoes thread. Was that all you guys?
I see it got deleted. Ho Chi Minh should have known better and organize Vietnam’s liberation from colonialism through confederated and horizontally-organized municipal communes, I suppose.
Can they delete this?
If he had just asked the US nicely for support to follow through on Wilson’s self determination thesis first. This would’ve avoided war but communists can’t help themselves, can they?
(Ho Chi Minh did ask nicely at first, then realised Lenin’s theory of self determination was the only legitimate one when the yanks laughed him out the room. Turns out Wilson was only talking about self determination for ‘civilized people’.)
One of them was me. Love your username BTW
I’ve talked about this before, albeit the topic was about self‐identified anticommunists, but I am sorry to say that it applies to a lot of leftoid noobs as well. Anybody who poses obviously loaded questions like ‘why is it being a “lib” to say that governments who repress the human rights and civil liberties of minorities are not practicing leftism in good faith? the same governments who have horrifically and violently crushed workers rights movements?’ does not need to be dignified with a serious response. You can’t make these bipeds educate themselves no matter how good your evidence is; it simply isn’t a matter that’s within your hands.
Do something else: unionize, agitate for better working conditions, exercise, train with a weapon, do some volunteer work, contribute to volunteers (like Food Not Bombs), or engage with communists or communist sympathizers who are very clearly asking in good faith. Personally, I spend my most productive time studying modern history, and I’ve amassed a respectable répertoire of knowledge. I can confidently say that you’ll learn more about capitalism in decay from me than you’ll ever learn from any horseshoe theorist or dullards saying ‘red fash’ unjokingly.
Basically, get offline. Every single conversation I’ve had about communism in person, I can at least get people to view communist history from a rational perspective less clouded by propaganda. Even if they don’t “agree” they can at least respect it and can marinate on it later.
Online arguments with liberals are pointless. At least the arguments on lemmygrad are mostly good faith and even if there are disagreements there’s a lot of learning that happens. Arguing on mainstream liberal forums just opens you to being brigades by bots, reactionaries, and people who are participating in bad faith to begin with.
Damn, son, you went off and gave me a reading list… continue
Liberals are incapable of intelligent conversation with others, especially those of opposing viewpoints. They’ve been trained to desire and maintain the status quo (Capital), even in the face of creeping fascism, and will parrot insults at anyone who doesn’t tow the line. ‘Tankie’ is just the newest term.
It’s just western red scare paranoia with a millennial twist. I hadn’t peeked at those communities before, but I’ll make sure they’re given a wide berth now.
often true. But judging from this thread same goes for stalinists
Wow you’re not using liberal the american way are you? What is your definition of the world liberal?
Liberals in America are capitalists just as much as they are in the rest of the world. The Democratic party never fails to extol the virtues of capitalism. At best they say it should be regulated.
I mean liberalism in the sense of support for things like private property, liberal ‘western’ democracy and an exploitative, laissez-faire approach to market economies. I am American; perhaps I’m just not understanding the varied meaning of the word?
Sorry for the long comment, hope this clarification helps. If others disagree with my explanation, feel free to clarify or call out any wrong ideas. I’m a new Liberal convert so I’m still working through these details.
In essence, the “left” are socialists, the “right” are fascists (Glossing over some details here). Fascism is authoritarian capitalism, but Liberalism is capitalism that’s not fascism. Liberalism is theoretically to the left of the political spectrum, but it’s a compromise to the capitalists.
Our problem with Liberals is they seem completely incapable of having a real conversation about how the world works, and how to make change. As well, they demonize anyone that doesn’t share their viewpoint.
For example: “Woke” is kind of a fake word now, it means whatever conservatives want it to mean, but it comes from a real place. Initially being woke meant that you see the injustices that are institutionalized in the world, and seek to better yourself after learning that information. This is a good thing and lead to more people understanding the contradictions of our wold. But Liberals kinda turned into “I’m better than you because I went ‘woke’”, “If you aren’t woke, then leave my circle of friends”, “Anything that isn’t woke isn’t worth talking about”. This perpetuates the culture war that the conservatives are winning, because in the end, who wants to side with the assholes who push their own out at any sign of disobedience? The fascists are playing open arms to everyone the left excludes, perpetuating the growing movement of right authoritarianism.
I was a liberal for a long time, but always felt out of place because although the conservatives made up a lot of bullshit about liberals, they touched on some real things that also irritated me. Instead of moving to the right, I was educated and looked at the source of some of these things. That led me to find where the real problems of the world were, opened my eyes to those that were in charge, causing these problems in the first place. That lead me to socialism, communism, etc. and now I think I’m more on the ‘left’ than I have ever been.
This turned into the longest thing I’ve written in ages.
You gave quite a good explanation, and there are just two big points I want to add to it. Sorry if I get basic with it or seem condescending, but I’m also writing with new people in mind. The first point is that liberal capitalism is capitalism that is not yet fascist, and the second point is that for anyone living in one of the many places the west exploits, it already is fascist. Because of how writing this shook out, I’ve tried to make these points in the opposite order, because it’s easier to follow that way.
Nothing is static, everything is a process. A mountain is the process of plate tectonics, an animal is the process of cellular life, and a capitalist economy is the process of accumulation. It outcompeted and replaced feudalism, a more primitive form of accumulation. Every form of social organization has inherent contradictions, inherent tension points where the interests of one group pull against the interest of another. Peasant vs landlord, yeoman farmer vs slave, industrial worker vs factory owner. These roles are defined by their relationships to the means of production and to each other, and when conditions make those relationships untenable, they break, and a new dynamic arises. For example, when the conditions of defeat in the Civil War but also a paltry reconstruction effort by the US made chattel slavery an unviable arrangement for the wealthy, they started up the sharecropping industry, a form of wage slavery the new government found acceptable. Obviously prison slavery also started ballooning afterwards, and now we have more prisoners in a larger carceral system in the US than anywhere else on Earth. The profit margins of chattel slavery were stabilized by other types of slavery. Because a capitalist economy requires infinite growth, it requires new frontiers to exploit, places where resources and labor can be had cheaply and sold for more elsewhere. In US history, these frontiers (and the wretched economic conditions necessary to extort cheap labor) have always been enforced by military and intelligence organizations. Look into the history of any country the west uses for cheap labor, cheap materials, or as a trash dumping ground, and you’ll find a history of naked imperialism that set the conditions for all these “voluntary, free market” transactions that always seem to screw over anyone who isn’t part of the so-called first world.
The need for profits drove colonialism, it drives neocolonialism today, and when one frontier closes, another must open. If no external frontier can be opened, it will be an internal one. Fascism, economically, is is the attempt to open up an internal frontier against a segment of ones own society. It’s capitalism in crisis mode, a rampant imperial economy that has begun chewing at it’s own flesh to make up for the caloric deficit. This is the stage at which decline will be felt by the people living inside the empire, with things like infrastructure failures, mass poverty, mass incarceration, crimes of desperation, an explosion in new cults, and outbreaks of disease becoming commonplace. These conditions are symptoms of the contradictions between the classes becoming irreconcilable: decades of austerity, of public funds and programs being looted by the wealthy, of endless imperial wars, of the privatization of every industry and resource, even vital resources like food and water that people need to live. This is where we’re at now-and I havent even mentioned the concentration camps.
Looking at it from a class perspective, these are conditions that the American and westen bourgeoisie have inflicted both on the proletariat of their own countries, and to a much greater extent on the rest of the world. The people of all these countries we ruin don’t choose fascism, our ruling class chooses it for them. The people of America don’t choose to go to war, or for healthcare to cost a million dollars, or to give the police tanks and combat robots. Our ruling class chooses it for us. We don’t actually live in a democracy, we live in a dictatorship of the rich.
When we consider that a capitalist economy has only one goal -to accumulate capital, to make fewer and fewer individuals richer and richer- and that it will fufill this goal at any cost and when we consider that extreme fascist policies are very good for private accumulation, it leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: that any liberal capitalist economy, after exhausting or losing access to it’s external frontiers, will inevitably become fascist, must inevitably become fascist, or be outcompeted and absorbed by a more ruthless competitor.
As long as capitalism is the dominant mode of production on this planet, fascism is it’s only logical endpoint.
TLDR what we think of as liberalism is actually just when the fascism is contained in the countries we inflict it on.
I love a good Parenti video, thank you for linking that!
And thank you for the clarifications comrade, I agree with you completely.
Unfortunately I was a bit short on time and did not clarify liberalism to the extent that I could. You also bring up good points of view that I didn’t quite have solidified in my thinking yet. As evidenced by your long explanation, it is difficult for a liberal to understand why liberalism is just a path towards fascism. I think you eloquently pointed out that any capitalist system, even with a population who’s opinion has a lot of overlap with communist ideas, will still slip into fascism over time.
TLDR what we think of as liberalism is actually just when the fascism is contained in the countries we inflict it on.
Damn that’s a good TLDR
Fantastic diatribe. Instructive and not condescending at all. If those people who insist on calling us ‘tankies’ for understanding this and calling for actual global socialist revolution would take the time to understand why we are where we are politically maybe they would join us.
but Liberalism is capitalism that’s not fascism
Got it, didn’t know that yet. Usually in english-speaking political debate, liberals just means “not racist gun-nuts” lol
That’s not really true. Self identified liberals in America don’t really put much thought into it beyond what you stated. Everyone starts somewhere and that’s fine.
Once you start understanding political ideology, liberalism becomes less of a catch all than just “not-conservative”.
Check out a great example of Phil Ochs lampooning the liberals of his time. This isn’t a new definition.
Because this is a communist sub, and he is using the world liberal in the way that communists use it, in the way it was meant to be use when it was created, that actually describes what it is. You’re getting downvoted because it’s really frustrating answering the same simple concept questions over and over again to people who don’t care to actually learn, and who are already being slightly obnoxious when answering the question right from the get go.
omg i just had the misfortune of wandering into this thread, https://lemmygrad.ml/post/806853 i am so glad we have our own space where we can safely laugh at these fools. omg.
Holy shit what an insufferable group.
“Define Tankie”
Red fascist
Who defines a buzzword with a buzzword ffs.
Also! (Paraphrasing)
[…] people who justify genocides. […]
'scuze me what the fuck? Who here says genocides are cool and good actually? We are like the first fuckers to point them out and scream about them???
And even more!
Comrade Spood
Now that’s dose of Anarcho-Debilizm let me tell you. “Just press the communism button Xi and we’ll succeed no problem! They will just let us exist and everyone will love each other :3”
And it just still keeps going!
Educate yourself. / Please change and grow as a person. / Read a book.
Motherfuckers I read too much compared to your sorry asses.
Educate yourself. / […] / Read a book.
Their education:
I refuse to believe there’s actually 1.6gb of anarchist literature in existence that’s not supplemented with lots of random unpublished PDFs and saved blog posts that are rife with poor grammar and spelling errors.
It could be a bunch of breadtube videos.
Nah, it’s only 1.6gb thanks to videos of Chomsky rambling included.
There’s a lot - it’s the default organization structure for humans.
Friend groups are more often than not anarchist. Valve (the makers of steam) is designed as an anarchist company where workers freely start and join projects (they’re not the only ones with a similar structure, but their employee handbook is an interesting read). The fediverse is generally anarchist
There’s very few pure ideological systems out there - certainly there’s never been a pure capitalist or pure dictatorship. There have been pure anarchist communities out there, because it’s not rule by consent or through will of the people, all it takes is people coexisting with an aversion to hierarchy
Friend groups are more often than not anarchist. Valve (the makers of steam) is designed as an anarchist company where workers freely start and join projects
Gotta break some myths here because despite Valve making some of my favourite games of all time I can’t let you call them anarchist.
- There is very much a hierarchy between workers since they have a ladder scoring system that gets you fired when you’re underperforming
- They only recruit industry veterans, you can’t enter Valve if you are a beginner, they are not inclusive
- They have a CEO who owns yachts and shit meaning there is still exploitation even if he is a funny dude and not a corporate ghoul
Oh for sure with valve - they’re still a company and they’re certainly capitalist, which basically means they’ll get more cold and ruthless, and it means they’re making money for someone else through their labors
That’s still anarchist though - no ruler, not no rules. They don’t get told what to work on or how - the threat of getting let go (with a reasonable chunk of severance) doesn’t make it not anarchist. Neither does the fact they don’t get to keep their profits
You can mix and match systems - you can have pure anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-communism, although by operating in a predetermined framework it’s not really pure anarchism
The ranking system doesn’t take much away though, team roles are aren’t assigned, they’re ad-hoc. And with software we don’t have the same hierarchy within a team unless there’s a massive gap in skills/experience. You can’t code what you don’t understand after all - leadership is more about communication. You might have an architect designing the big picture and a team lead coordinating, but even in strict chains of command, programmers usually write tasks as a group then choose their task from what needs doing and what they feel confident in
But anyways, it might’ve been transformed to be more corporate over the years (I dug into all this a decade ago), but it was certainly designed to be anarchistic - that doesn’t mean good, not exploitative, in any way fair or equal… Just that the group functions through the individuals autonomously working towards the groups goals
Very interesting, I will meditate on your answers
“I have” doesn’t mean “I’ve read”, what a pretentious dumbass.
In the second part of this pic she tells the reader not having read any of it.
it’s real lmao
Hilarious how she doesn’t even have a problem admitting it’s all a matter of fitting the edgy cyberpunk aesthetic of blue hair, computers, skateboards and slapping stickers around. All about individual image and no political dedication.
And I can understand listening to theory audiobooks instead of reading them, although I think it’s worse as it’s harder for you to re-read lines and take notes, but… While skateboarding? Can you imagine yourself attempting to make any sense of a Das Kapital audiobook while playing basketball? Probably just to be able to say “yeah i’ve already read it” and nothing else. Once again, all about aesthetics.
For a lot of anarchists it’s just an edgy aesthetic to use, not about political philosophy
I also refuse to believe this person is a real human being and not some Fed or Fed adjacent bootlicker. lol
So when she said 1.6GB of litterature, it was basically two audiobooks. That’ll show them how litterate she is for sure lmao
This is so on brand. Especially the “I lack the discipline to regulary sit down and read a book, so I tell people I have ADHD even though we all know no licensed professional ever diagnosed me”-attitude.
Wow, they managed to burn all of anarchist literature into one USB thumb, that must have been hard praxis!
I… Words fail me.
Context aside: Am I the only one who thinks having actual usable flash-drives as ear rings would be kinda… neat?!
It is kinda neat, but I prefer having a pendrive on my keychain tbh.
Who here says genocides are cool and good actually
I say that Mao’s landlords genocide was pretty neat actually. Please don’t tell the libs.
😑
I will make an exception.
Landlord is not a racial/culturalreligious/natural group, therefore not genocide
Please continue to be based tho
Always the 196 shitheads.
Yeah it was torture. I tried to keep it civil and lighthearted and actually engage but they are so programmed it’s almost knee jerk comment reaction at this point.
Also fun and great that so many Lemmy instances won’t federate material that threatens their worldview. I mean, I’m 100% anti Nazi anti fascist and anti authoritarian but what does that even matter right? How dare I say there might be a different way to view say Cuba China Vietnam or North Korea…
That whole thread:
hmm, I wonder who controls the socialist state
I am guessing that their response would be ‘the bureaucracy’ (which would be inaccurate).
It’s partly because liberal westerners can see how shit their system is, see how shit their lives are or are becoming, see how much shit they have to take from unaccountable people, and then cannot fathom how people who they’ve been taught to see as subhuman could possibly achieve anything better. So a combination of racism and self-hatred. The only way out begins with self-reflection.
We only know the fucked up, one sided abusive relationship we have with our capitalist governments, so we can’t imagine anything different.
The only way out begins with self-reflection.
🏅🏅🏅<–In lieu of hexbear medal emojis
😊
Not long after I wrote this, I poured a cup of tea and picked up Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism by Kwame Ture (a name he took later, leaving behind ‘Stokely Carmichael’). He writes (p. 29–30, emphasis added):
As for white America, perhaps it can stop crying out against “black supremacy”, “black nationalism”, “racism in reverse,” and begin facing reality. The reality is that this nation is racist; that racism’s not primarily a problem of “human relations” but of an exploitation maintained—either actively or through silence—by the society as a whole. Can whites, particularly liberal whites, condemn themselves? Can they stop blaming us, and blame their own system? Are they capable of the shame which might become a revolutionary emotion?
It’s as much analysis as you can expect from the userbase of Tumblr lite.
Tumblr lite, or tumblr alt right?
Let’s be fair to them, at least they aren’t reactionary. Still, unfunny “uwu” memes mixed with Lockheed Left behaviour does not paint a much more enjoyable scene.
Lockheed Left is reactionary though.
Yeah they’re “left-wing”
The left wing of a lockheed martin plane
DA SEE SEE PEE
That’s another one. Leftoid nubs and self‐identified anticommunists usually see governing communist parties as highly élitist and exclusionary institutions (which is pretty dubious, to say the least).
Just because a state brands itself socialist doesn’t say anything about the level of democracy or workers’ control of it.
sure, but if we were talking about non-socialist states that call themselves socialist, we wouldn’t call them socialist states
Well IMHO both USSR and China shows how gaining workers control and keeping it, or moreso making significant headway towards communism, is just much more complicated. Representative worker ownership of the means of production through the state doesn’t have a compelling track record. I think it’s dishonest, reactionary and anti intellectual to laugh off arguments like that of comrade spood from the screenshot above.
Edit: checked out my claim on calorie intake and discovered it was dubious. Removed, but letting the main argument stay.
The USSR was eventually compromised, so it technically failed in that sense, but how is China an example of failing to retain worker control? If you’re claiming that capitalists control China’s government, I’d challenge you to provide some evidence
Lack of press freedom, organization freedom, social credit system, great firewall of China, over 2000 work hours pr year (France has 1500), severely low scores in democracy rankings. This doesn’t smell much like worker control, more like authoritarianism. But then again, I’m very much from the West. Happy to be educated on my shortcomings in understanding 👍
Above, you seemed to suggest that you agree with the need for material analysis over idealism. You seem to be saying the same here, by saying what MLs already agree with: that state power in the USSR and China was/is complicated.
But then you say:
Representative worker ownership of the means of production through the state doesn’t have a compelling track record.
You responded to GrainEater about that, but I’ll add here that revolutionary states run by Marxist Leninists are the only ones to have made any headway at all. The track record is at least 5-nil against all other revolutionary ideologies and that’s only counting self-proclaimed ML AES states that still exist. These are Cuba, Vietnam, China, Laos, DPRK. A materialist analysis of these states may lead you to change your mind.
This isn’t counting the massive, overwhelmingly positive contribution to humanity made by the USSR in it’s short existence. Defeating Nazi Germany. Ending Feudalism in Russia and elsewhere. Supporting third world liberation movements and helping to ‘end’ colonialism. Raising the living standards of it’s inhabitants. Providing an impetus for western social democracies to implement a welfare state (how fast these have deteriorated since the Berlin Wall fell!).
I think it’s dishonest, reactionary and anti intellectual to laugh off arguments like that of comrade spood from the screenshot above.
The problem with Spood’s comment is that it doesn’t really make sense. Do they mean the workers need to control the state that controls the means of production? If so, there’s little or no disagreement.
Or that the workers need to control the means of production directly? If so, what does that mean? Does this mean worker co-ops? Or something else? If co-ops or something else, it’s not Marxism. Plus, what happens to the logic of capital without a central authority, i.e. a state, to organise these units of workers? How do workers abolish the relations of capital (markets, competition, etc) if all they own is their own workplace? If they own more than the place they work, what structure are they using that isn’t a state by another name?
If it is the latter (direct control), then it could instead mean simply that communism will only be achieved when the workers control the means of production. This is (1) a trite tautology with which no ML will disagree, and (2) either (a) only one side of the story or (b) anti-dialectical, and (3) not mutually exclusive with the workers controlling the means if production through the state.
As Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology, communism is the process of overturning capitalism.
From a dialectical perspective, which treats the world as interrelated contradictory processes rather than static things, a communist revelation must be a contradictory process. One can’t claim to be an historical materialist and then refuse to treat revolution – the focus of all revolutionaries – in an anti-dialectical way. To reduce communism and revolution as a status that can pop into existence is to deny that these are, again, interrelated, contradictory processes.
Communism is not just the end goal or the ‘end’ end goal. Communism is the next stage of human social development, which will happen over a period of time. After that, humans will have to resolve other contradictions and society will develop further. Or not. Maybe humans are doomed to strive for communism forever. (Not my view.)
Either way, communism is both the name for the struggle and the goal that revolutionaries are struggling for. If this is what Spood means when they say that communists should never stop striving, every ML would likely agree.
If that’s not what they mean, they seem to be making an empty left-communist slogan that means we either go straight to 23rd century communism in one fell swoop or don’t bother trying.
Slogan-making like that is anti-intellectual for relying on models that don’t account for the fact that reactionaries are armed to the teeth, violent, and merciless. Thus also dishonest by claiming knowledge that excludes salient facts. And reactionary for suggesting a path that will inevitably lead to failure and for criticising the revolutionaries who are actually doing revolution rather than waiting for a fairy godmother to wave the magic revolution wand.
In sum, it’s idealist and anti-Marxist to reject the concept of and need for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
That’s why Marxists reject idealism and rely only on material analyses.
No one should control the state because there shouldn’t be a state. If there is a state then there’s oppression.
there shouldn’t be a state
Agreed, now let’s abolish the state through developing the material conditions necessary for it to happen instead of just saying “STATES BAD!!” online :^)
Absolutely, I agree - I’m doing what I can - but it seems a little strange to act like I shouldn’t participate in this discussion and should just be organising instead, like I’m somehow held to a higher expectation than everyone else in this comments section
I don’t want to speak for them but I don’t think Krause was saying that you’re not doing enough organising. I interpreted the comment as a reference to the Leninist concept of the state (following Engels). To put it somewhat crudely, a state (a) has class characteristics and (b) is a tool for organising class society and exercising authority.
From this perspective, it is reductive to say ‘states are bad’. If there’s an implied question in Krause’s comment, it’s not, ‘what are you doing to change they material conditions?’ but ‘how are we to secure those changes without, and why can’t we fast track them using, the state?’ Or, ‘how is any region supposed to secure its gains without a state in a world in which the US exists?’ (Also, most people on Lemmygrad are involved or trying to get involved in organising.)
Just in case it seems as though I uncritically see states as necessary in revolutionary action, I’ll mention Roland Boer’s excellent short book on Engels’ concept of socialist governance, which might help us here. He explains that a ‘socialist state’ is an oxymoron. Socialists must seize state power to prevent the capitalists from re-gaining power. After that, there’s no socialist state, only socialist governance.
As an ML I actually agree with you, the state is a weapon and i would like to see it one day outlive it’s usefulness and wither so that communism can be achieved. However, it’s a weapon that you absolutely cannot discard until capitalism has been destroyed, and until then, unilateral disarmament is guaranteed suicide for a revolutionary movement.
I could not have put it better myself, thank you for your illuminating comment.
guaranteed suicide
As is blind faith in a revolutionary movement’s ability to wield such a weapon in the interest of the proletariat and towards communism. Seems like a lot of people in this thread are forgetting Mao’s critique of the USSR.
"The revisionist Khrushchov clique abolish the dictatorship of the proletariat behind the camouflage of the “state of the whole people”, change the proletarian character of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union behind the camouflage of the “party of the entire people” and pave the way for the restoration of capitalism behind that of “full-scale communist construction”. - Mao - marxists.org
But is this not equally true for China today?
No offense, but I can tell you’re some flavor of ultra/liberal by your use of dramatic, bombastic language to make sweeping statements that don’t hold up to scrutiny.
It is not.
You are an ultra? Then why do you sound like a yankee flag huffing neoliberal all the time?
Oppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, absolutely; the point is to eventually eliminate the bourgeois class. When class distinctions no longer exist, the state will, by definition (a tool for oppression of one class by another), cease to exist. How would you go about abolishing the state while classes still exist, or abolishing classes within a bourgeois dictatorship?
The issue is that where there is a state, definitively there will be still social classes - those with power within the state, and those without. If your position is “we can’t abolish the state until there are no class divisions” then you’ve got an infinite loop.
Obviously with the way the world is there is no way to go straight from the current situation to communism, but the goal is still the abolition of the state, and so many leftists seem to get angry with the concept that we should (and have to) abolish the state. That’s all I am saying - reading any deeper into my comment than that isn’t recommended!
I’m not sure if anyone is getting angry that you’re saying the state must be abolished. MLs fundamentally agree with that. It’s what revolutionaries are aiming for.
The criticism is that you seem to be saying that revolutionaries cannot use the state because it’s an incoherent notion:
If your position is “we can’t abolish the state until there are no class divisions” then you’ve got an infinite loop.
By this do you mean to say that the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is logically contradictory? That it won’t work? You seemed to agree, above, that you don’t think that’s the case (i.e. you think the state can be used as a tool), but here you appear to be saying just that?
It may be helpful here to reiterate the dialectical element of Marxism-Leninism. It’s not a step-by-step sequence of events. First one, then the other. It’s a dialectical development.
The plan isn’t to seize the state, then to use the state to abolish classes. That won’t work. It’s anti-dialectical.
The idea is that by seizing the state and wresting control over the means of production from the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie will become redundant and whither away. This will take a long time. The state is needed to keep the reactionaries in line in the meantime.
It’s taken China over half a decade to start the process and most of the rest of the world hasn’t even begun the task yet. The DotP and the abolition of classes and the state are one process. They’re interrelated.
Have you read State and Revolution or ‘Better Fewer But Better’ by Lenin?
Of course there will be social classes – as I said, a state is a tool for the oppression of one class by another. For a socialist state, that means the workers (mainly the proletariat, but also other smaller classes of workers that remain from the pre-capitalist mode of production) oppressing the bourgeoisie. Most of the capitalists, especially the smaller ones, will gradually become proletarian. When there are only proletarians left, there will no longer be a state, unless the state stops acting in the interest of the proletariat at some point before that. A proletarian democracy (i.e. an actual democracy, where the people can force any elected representative to step down at any time if they’re not satisfied, and money has no role in the electoral process) will eventually turn into a democracy for everyone as everyone becomes a proletarian (which is equivalent to a classless society, since a class only has meaning in relation to other classes).
Yeah-yeah, and that’s why we’re supposed to jump through the magic portal that skips socialism right into communism. Move along trot…
I didn’t say that there couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be a provisional state. I was just reminding people of the end goal and that we should be actively working towards the circumstances necessary to end unnecessary power structures and, absolutely, the state.
Oppression of whom?
Those without (or with lesser) power than the ruling class of the state. Abolishing the current state and replacing the bourgeoisie with proletariat workers merely creates a new bourgeoisie. Power corrupts, so it has to be diluted or entirely dismantled.
Those without (or with lesser) power than the ruling class of the state
In other words: the bourgeoisie, they are the ones who would be oppressed.
Abolishing the current state and replacing the bourgeoisie with proletariat workers merely creates a new bourgeoisie
No, it puts a new ruling class in charge of the state, it replaces the current bourgeois state to form a new proletarian state.
Power corrupts
This is idealism.
Unless you have a state which is fully, 100%, directly controlled entirely by the working class, then there will be working class individuals who have more power than others.
Unless you have a state which has no monopoly on violence and no authority to make and enforce laws, then the individuals with power within that state have the power to oppress others who do not have that power.
Unless you have a 100% unified, educated, omni-benevolent working class, then there will be those who have power to oppress others who will use it to benefit themselves at the expense of others and society at large.
While I will grant you that there are people who can be trusted to wield power selflessly, honestly and with wisdom and who would give it up when it is no longer needed, there are definitely many people who cannot. It is difficult (or impossible) to differentiate those people. Therefore, every time we empower an individual (or worse, a group) we are taking a risk. A state is that same risk, thousands of times, on a national scale.
“These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world”
My favorite Engels tweet.
“…which is why we won’t do shit, but raise a lot of stink, until communism just kinda happens on it’s own.”
And I had the misfortune of not resisting to participate in it. Do not recommend.
oh dear. I told myself i wouldn’t engage. (narrator: but he engaged). Just trying to gently nudge an anarchist towards materialist analysis, i’ll try resist getting sucked into any arguments for my own sake.
Like moths flying into a bug zapper: we know it will hurt, but we just cannot help it.
I mean, in the end it is kinda hilarious how hard they will push strawman arguments and just outright ad hominem attack to defend what? Their ambiguous ivvective terminology? LoL I shall call thee a spoon. You, my internet interlocutor are a spoon. Wide at the top fillable with soup or antifreeze. It matters not. You are a spoon.
Tbh I’ve spent a long time without libs to bully and now I’m on lemmy I feel like a demon someone released from a stone
Thank you for your service comrade o9
the brainworm infestation has proved devastating
Go ahead liberals. Call me a tankie. See if I give one ten thousandth of a fuck. Literally such a low-tier insult. “Uhh its like… uh…you support this large cool looking machine that stopped Color Revolutions and was responsible for Liberating the Eastern Front during World War II” “Yea, I do😐” “😨”
Tankie means you approve when a communist state uses military/tanks against its own people… Not against a Nazi state. I would reconsider if you really want to wear that label with pride…
Tankie just means “any communist I don’t like” at this point. Take your McCarthyism and complete ignorance about color revolutions elsewhere.
Nice definition of tankie! Got that from wish?
At what point does being clowned on by an entire instance spur self-reflection?
Look what people wrote as replies to my comment, look how the upvote downvote numbers are, think.
My key takeaway from this post is: people on lemmygrad say they are interested in discussion and all those other instances are oh so bad, because they block them or doenvote them or call them tankies, which people on lemmygrad interpret as slur.
At the same time, you get down voted to oblivion, when you even write the definition of tankies to someone, who calls himself one. People who are pride to be a tankies onLemmygrad: cherished People who criticise this in anyway: laught at.
And simultaneously everyone who calls anyone else except him self a tankie no matter the context is automatically a liberal, when Servers defederate them, they are all facists or love fascists
People making strawman arguments when I say in a discussion that I don’t agree with Stalin (“ohhh so capitalism is sooo much better” - no, its not, and I didn’t say that, I can disagree with capitalism and stlinism at the same time, go figure)
And people defending (literal) tankies get upvoted, people who don’t get down voted.
This server has lost one of the strongest tools in material dialectic: (self-) critical thinking
I really hoped I would find interesting debates here, but this is a circlejerk
At what point will self reflection kick in? At what point t people in an echo chamber realise its one?
Mathematician 1: 1+1=2 Mathematician 2: 1+1=2
Debatebro: Muh echo chamber!
Yeah, cause stating “tankie” means “every communist I don’t like” is the only truth and like saying 1+1 =2
Also comparing societal questions to mathematical ones is totally unconcerning
/kappa
If you don’t send tanks into hungary, the nazis will do pogroms and construct concentration camps there. Not sending tanks is inhumanly cruel.
I 100% agree, and tho I very much like Stalin(he’s my favorite writer) it doesn’t take a “Stalinist” to understand that Color Revolutions and Nazism need to be crushed for socialism to survive
What is your opinion on the standing rock protests and the Kentucky state massacre
Also the 1956 Hungarian coup attempt that the epithet “tankies” comes from was literally full of nazis lmao
The nazis aren’t our people.
And everyone who don’t likes Stalin is a Nazi
/kappa
The uprising in hungary was a nazi uprising, with pogroms.
There’s a really great graphic novel called ‘Berlin’ that goes into how the Nazis came to be, how the communists were the ones that organized worker strikes to stop railroads to death camps etc. I don’t think our meme warfare on the net will change anything but if your looking for a fun read checkit. Is there anything you would recommend for me? I probably I’ll read it. I’m a reader.
Oh i totaly agree that communists were often the strongest force against fascists. Don’t have to like Stalin to be a communist nor to be antifascist though
That’s correct, specifically a state that uses tanks against its people in revolt.
However, people on Reddit (and on Lemmy now) basically use it to refer to any leftist they have a disagreement with.
Well saying tankies support using tanks against civilians gets you down voted on lemmygrad.
No tankies here though, all just libs propaganda
/kappa
So you want the nazis to murder everyone in hungary?
Thats such an obvious strawman, i dont think i need to answer that ;)
Because if you would answer that you would have to admit that the wokes were right.
This is a rhetorical trap called “reality”.
Oh I think there are a lot of people who get called woke and are right. Your rhetorical trap is not reality, its trying to get me to say something which confirms your prejustices.
Remember, my claim, forwhich you guys are fighting me here was “tankie” has other than “someone I don’t like”
You attacked me verbally for saying that, and then realized, that you can’t win this argument, cause in reality you agree with me so you try to shift the battlefield to a discussion you can win (and kept pressing really hard with your Hungarian Nazis ^^)
That’s your rhetorical strategy, it has nothing to do with reality ;)
Liberals once again refusing to acknowledge their hippocracy. They must be fuming after Comrade Hakim’s latest video
Hakim is so on point. Brilliant video.
By the way, it seems that moderators in 196 are deleting those comments from lemmygrad posters in a way that appear as visible while seen from lemmygrad while they appear as deleted by mods from any other instances (or so I suppose, I do not know very well how does Lemmy work). This is happening even if there is no breaking of rules in sight.
it seems that moderators in 196 are deleting those comments from lemmygrad posters in a way that appear as visible while seen from lemmygrad while they appear as deleted by mods from any other instances
Whoa, that’s pretty 1984 Animal House of them
I just need a bot that blocks any user that used the word. Problem is it would block all if you here.
I dislike hateful talk, and it includes “tankie”
The bot could single out lemmygrad users and not apply to us
