Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
If you really care that much about “Authoritarians” and “Tankies”, maybe you should just move to exploding-heads.
I, for one, fully support the explicitly antifascist politics of the core maintainers
Agreed. There is too much false equivalence of “Tankies” and fascists.
Fascists want to enslave your sisters and daughters and stick your trans friends in psych wards until they “decide” to stop being trans. They’re fine with Blacks wallowing in poverty as second-class citizens and having militarized police on every streetcorner.
“Tankies” (Marxist-Leninists) believe in all the same progressive things other (so-called) Socialists do but have different views on historical figures and foreign policy, something that does not matter a bit in the here and now.
Here is the difference between Fascists and “Tankies”: if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that China was trying to exterminate the Ughyr people through mass execution, 95% of the “Tankies” out there, myself included, would disown China and denounce the genocide (this will not happen, because it isn’t a genocide except in the broadest and most meaningless of terms). If it was proven beyond a doubt that the Holocaust happened (which it more or less has), the majority of Neo-Nazis would still say it was good.
Based and materialist take
I see this “based” used now and again. Does it mean something special, or do people not know how to spell biased?
It’s basically equivalent to saying something is legit or insightful
Like another commenter said, the most basic explanation is that it’s the literal opposite of “cringe”.
The more nuanced explanation is that it was a term co-opted from hip-hop, originally used to celebrate pure expressions of individuality, personal style, and/or personal belief. It was quickly appropriated by internet reactionaries to celebrate anti-liberal and anti-left sentiments, often ones that were explicitly unpopular or socially unacceptable. Eventually it kind of entered the mainstream internet culture and was sanitized by ironic re-appropriation to mean “the opposite of cringe, even admirable, but possibly a difficult position to defend for any number of reasons”.
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What does ‘disown China’ mean? Your ideological support changes nothing materially. I hate how much importance people put in ideological stances with no material impact.
Ughyrs are being genocided rn, but otherwise your points are correct
Saying you’d denounce a genocide you deny is happening isn’t accomplishing what you think it is.
People don’t equate “tankies” with “fascists” because you advocate some sort of marxist-inspired system of governance… it’s because denying the suffering of others when it’s politically convenient is absolutely the opening strategy of the fascist playbook.
Also, “Disown China”??? Nothing wrong with liking other countries but the way you guys talk about them is off putting and doesn’t come across as informed or even remotely unbiased.
Being “unbiased” is not a virtue. I am a Marxist. I judge people, governments, and ideas based off of a Marxist framework. That is my bias.
I give China the benefit of the doubt because they are, at least, claiming to be a Marxist state. This on its own puts them above any non-Marxist state.
Isn’t claiming to be a Marxist state while still maintaining power within a small group of people (the inner party, a political version of the bourgeois) worse? By effectively being the same power structure, it allows critics to dismiss Marxist ideals as the same or worse. China is a particularly bad case as they disallow proper freedom of speech, basically castrating the proletariat. This harms perception of Marxism, hurting your case in arguing for it
The Chinese system isn’t perfect but I think questions like these put the cart before the horse. Is the Chinese system set up in such a way that, if bad actors got their way to the top, they would wield an immense amount of power? Yes, definitely. This question is separate from whether or not the people at the top right now are bad actors. And I think, like in any country, it’s a mixed bag; there are oligarchs and business-industry plants and corrupt officials, but there’s also well-meaning bureaucrats (Xi Jinping broadly fits into this category) and ideologically-driven Marxists.
The idea that Xi Jinping is a power-hungry dictator is an overblown trope. He is a fat, old, boring bureaucrat who got into office because he is an agreeable political moderate; a compromise between the ideological Marxist wing of the party and the pro-business Dengist wing.
As we saw in the Soviet Union, unrestricted Freedom of Speech is the downfall of Marxism. Home-grown Liberals are only the first issue; the United States government spends literally billions of dollars propping up anti-government organizations, whether that’s Uyghur terrorist groups, the Falun Gong, Tibetan Independence movements, or “LGBTQ+ Rights” organizations who always seem to spend more time arguing for political liberalization than they do actual LGBTQ+ Rights (and, before you strawman me, I want to make my point here clear: LGBTQ+ Rights are good, but many such organizations in China are funded by foreign actors in order to disrupt Chinese politics. The bad things about them are not their LGBTQ+ Rights advocacy, but their advocacy for other forms of Liberalization that undermine Communism in China. If an LGBTQ+ Rights organization in China calls for the downfall of the CPC, they do not deserve to exist)
Sorry, but you are exactly the kind of person everyone is talking about being awful.
I dare you, go to Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung, where there are much - vastly - greater lgbt rights, freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom to protest, uncensored internet and media, etc, than in China, and tell anyone passing by this Xi bootlick spiel. Ask them if they’re happy to see how Hong Kong has been treated.
He is far from harmless. He’s an imperialist who, in his own words several times wants to use military force to impose his flag on millions of unwilling people who already have their own democracy.
I think some of the foundations of your arguments are shaky at best.
Xi is a bad actor. He actively removes opponents, like his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who sat right fucking next to him and was publicly removed. Under Xi, China is asserting ownership of international waters in the South China Sea that have historically been either international waters or even owned by smaller nations. Under Xi, the Uyghers’ and Mongolians’ culture is actively being erased by outlawing local religious and cultural customs. I fail to see how any of these active are “agreeable” or “moderate”. Going back to the Marxist theme, Uyghers and Mongolians are of the working class, too. Why should they be persecuted?
Free speech is the downfall of Marxism??? What? Seriously? The Soviet Union didn’t fall because people were complaining. It fell because their systems weren’t economically viable. While many of the domestic programs of the Soviet Union were excellent, the cost due to size versus productive population was prohibitive. Most of the USSR’s land wasn’t economically viable, but they held things together through totalitarianism, which again, isn’t really empowering the workers. Once they let up on the totalitarianism, the cracks started to show. Maybe if the USSR was smaller and had managed their bureaucracy better, they could have succeeded, but that wasn’t the case. It had nothing to do with freedom of speech. And if the workers can’t voice their needs and desires, that’s depriving workers of power, which is the opposite of Marxism. I don’t think there has been a properly Marxist state.
I don’t know where you’re getting your information and history from or what your path is for your reasoning, but it really doesn’t make sense to me
This is a bad conspiracy theory. Hu Jintao was allowed to sit at the table because he is an important historical figure. He’s in his 80s and has Alzheimer’s. He was having an episode at the table and was escorted out. The idea that he was publicly removed from building and disappeared is tabloid-level misinformation.
Nations fight over territorial waters all the time, whether it’s Turkey or Kenya or China. There are EEZ disputes in the North Sea between Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the UK. Why should I care whether China or the Philippines own the Spratly Islands? What does it have to do with China being Marxist or not? I really don’t understand why you even brought it up.
Neither their local religion nor cultural customs are being infringed upon. If anything, the re-education programs in Xinjiang seek to remove recent (90s-now) religious influence from Arabian missionaries, who have spread Modernist interpretations of Islam that are what is endangering local Traditionalist Islam in Xinjiang.
The one thing I would actually agree is an issue is language - the biggest sticking point in Mongolia is that recently public schools have been mandated to teach in Mandarin. However, nothing is being done to prevent locals from speaking Mongolian at home; the goal is just to guarantee that all people in China are fluent in Chinese, while a Mongolian-language school system means some amount of people are just never learning Chinese. Cultural assimilation isn’t even really the goal; not knowing Chinese is correlated with worse career prospects for indigenous people in China.
And of course, most countries in the world, including the U.S., mandate that public schools teach in the official language. This is nothing new nor unique to China.
There is a similar problem in Tibet, where in addition to the above issues, boarding schools are being mandated for rural children because it’s less expensive to have a large, centrally located boarding school in low-density areas than managing a public school in every remote Tibetan village (China recently outlawed private schools, which I think is a big plus for equality of opportunity).
The communist party has engaged in a huge crackdown on labor unions and workers rights in the last 10 years. Words are just words.
Why? I am a socialist democrat and don’t would never support North Korea just because they claim to be a democracy. China is an authoritarian state that does nothing to support socialist ideals.
This is a spectacularly stupid assertion. Like, we’re talking trumpian levels of idiocy here. Y’all tankies really want to make horseshoe theory a thing.
Neither is being biased a sin. It’s when your bias allows you to ignore facts that people stop taking you seriously.
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stay mad, nerd
That phrase stuck out for me too, and supports my growing suspicion that the majority of people that claim to be marxists are actually just another group of fascist conspiracy theorists. I hope to be proven wrong.
You could literally prove yourself wrong by exercising just a little intellectual curiosity. Marxism is, at its core, an economic theory based on the idea that democracy has as much a place in the workplace and economy as it does in our political system. If that’s fascist to you, you’re unserious.
Now, if you’re just unwilling to correct or criticize your own beliefs, and you want to conflate Marxism with Stalinism and Tankies, you’re better off just saying so.
I joined Lemmy a while ago and I suddenly got exposed to many “tankie” debates going on. Is there a reason this group suddenly became relevant on Lemmy (I mean, from the view of a Reddit migrant)?
“Suddenly” is the key here.
When I first checked Lemmy because of the reddit shitstorm beginning, Lemmy as a whole was much smaller. How much? The specific day I checked lemmygrad had 268 active users out of over 500 for the entirety of Lemmy.
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I use “tankie” to refer to the type of people that claim to be Marxist but are actually just anti-West, like the ones that support Russia’s love of genocide simply because Russia is opposing the western world. I’d love to have conversations with actual Marxists, I’ve just become increasingly less sure that they exist.
Honestly a lot of Marxism would absolutely have a lot of criticism of NATO, US, the “west” how they have handled the situation and got us here in the first place. But that doesn’t give Russia a pass for invading a sovereign nation.
Under Marxism this is basically a bullshit neoliberal capitalist power structure vs an oligarchic Imperialist POS.
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That’s because that’s just Russian propaganda used to justify doing imperialism and conquering Ukraine.
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Wonderful revisionist history you have there. Russia blindly believed they could roll over Ukraine and seize the country in threeweeks, (Russia’s words not mine). They didn’t do a “shock and awe” destruction raid at first because they wanted to steal the land in tact and re-add it to the Russian “empire” that Putlin wants to rebuild. Putin knows he doesn’t have much time left and he wants to rebuild the glorious USSR before he dies. He has made moves towards that for the last 10 years. So far his only real success is the puppet state of Belarus. If it was really about Nazi’s this was the stupidest police action in modern history.
Read the comment you’re replying to carefully. He’s not referring to Marxists. He’s referring to pro Russian warmongers / anti wests trolls that wrap themselves in Marxism flag.
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Lmao which proxy war? It’s Russia committing to a full scale invasion of Ukraine and losing. That’s like calling WW2 a proxy war because the soviet union received critical amounts of US aid.
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Ngl you’re going to probably isolate yourself from Marxists by using the label “tankie” since they typically see it as a label used by liberals to put down revolutionary leftists. I can’t speak for all Marxists/ml’s but that’s what I’ve noticed
China is not communist, it’s an authoritarian state doing state capitalism and performing ethnic cleansing/genocide. It’s quite far removed from the ideals of communism.
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This is a good comparison because I also oppose car-dependant infrastructure and think we would be better off with more public transports and an infrastructure closer to the people in general.
I suppose I don’t get why someone who claim to be communist would adhere in any way to capitalism knowing full well how much harm capitalism bought about.
But then I’m an anarchist so it’s not that surprising to me that a state would perpetuate oppressing power structures such as Capitalism or Police forces.
OMG Chick-fil-A becoming “woke” was the highlight of the week. 🤣
Tankie is a term coined by dissident socialists and communists to refer to authoritarian Stalinist/Maoist leftists who are hostile to libertarian or democratic leftist movements, or any other kind of democratic movement. Comparing it with “woke” (which has no well-defined meaning) is ridiculous.
The people who are labeled tankies are very much anti-democratic. Them being leftist or communist is actually not an issue at all. The problem is they either 1) Attempt to gaslight about authoritarian regimes (for example by claiming said regimes are not authoritarian, that their “elections” are real, or that everything is western propaganda), or 2) Unabashedly support these regimes, sometimes claiming that their victims “deserved” it.
Tankie was recouperated from dissident socialists, the way it’s used today has very little to do with its origin. Just because something starts out as a politically radical idea doesn’t mean it can’t get twisted in bourgeois society. It’s mostly just used as a smear to mean “communist I don’t like”
It’s like woke - what started as a term used by BLM to criticize oppression of minorities was recouperated and now it’s been turned into a right-wing smear and lost all meaning.
No, not at all. It simply means “Communist who supports oppression & authoritarianism”. European socialists, especially eastern Europeans, still use it in this exact same meaning to this day. The non-bourgeois workers & trade unionists who were subjected to decades of oppression under various Stalinist regimes also use it.
The entire argument is pointless and trite anyway. Most of the people in this thread taking offence at the term “tankie” do in fact support authoritarianism and are attempting to gaslight readers about it.
“support”
You keep using this word, but do you really think any of the people you call tankies have actually done anything to support these countries? Or, more likely, are you using “support” to mean “refuse to condemn/disavow”?
Well, count me in to that group.
I will not join the imperialist dogpile against China. My opinions about their government is irrelevant at best, and at worst by joining in the echo chamber of “China Bad!” then I am helping America pave the way for a war it so obviously wants.
If you want to call that support, then I have to ask why supposed “socialists” are joining America in attacking China!
I couldn’t care less if tankies “only” refused to condemn China/Russia/DPRK or whatever oppressive regime they think is anti-imperialist – indeed, I wouldn’t even describe this group as tankies. The cold-war “tankies” weren’t passive or neutral either.
The tankies you see here, even in this thread, actively dehumanize and gaslight people resisting these regimes, and attempt to delegitimize any act of resistance against them, even if indigenous. These are the kind of people who would smear actual leftist activists in Russia, China or Iran as “CIA Agents” in the hope that said regimes continue existing, to take revenge against the US. This worldview espouses that nobody has any agency except the US (and its authoritarian adversaries), because every opponent of these regimes has to be agent of the US.
Refusing to condemn something isn’t the same as lending support. Gaslighting people about the Tianamen Massacre, about the treatment of Uighurs, or about creeping authoritarianism in HK is, however, definitely a form of support.
Socialists who oppose the CCP tend to do that for entirely different reasons than the US. Not that there is much socialism to support there. Labour rights and protections under the CCP are inferior to the average European country, with the rampant 996 culture and very few instances of collective labor action, which is seen as undesirable and suppressed by the party.
As the saying goes, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.
By refusing to condemn China, I must therefore support it. That’s how it works. You can’t just be a third positionist about this and say “I oppose everybody with my own special snowflake socialism!”