At first I thought using the term “tankies” was similar to how rednecks call the left “libs.” Mostly it was because I didn’t understand the term.
Then I asked what it meant.
Once I knew what it meant- I was determined to stay out of it. I didn’t really have a dog in that race as I didn’t have much of an opinion either way.
Then I came here and saw first-hand the sheer lunacy from those people.
I call them tankies now.
Genocidejoe
Dude literally running around commenting just this and like 2 other phrases
The horror
Oh shit it knows more words
Cultural Genocide is wrong. -someone who has been called a tankie alot.
There are certainly people who misuse the term. Only bootlickers for authoritarian regimes painted a thin coat of red are tankies.
I do support a dictatorship of the Prolitariat as a necessary step if achieving true Communism, dont get me wrong.
It is certainly a path. One which has failed repeatedly. I don’t quite understand the dogma which surrounds this particular bit of conventional wisdom. It seems to intentionally ignore an entire century of revisionist thought, and rapidly becomes a braindead purity test in my experience.
Do you mean that in the original Marxist sense, where a dictatorship of the proletariat is contrasted to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie - ie that it is referring to the domination of one class over the structures of democratic government rather than a literal autocratic or oligarchic regime? Or the ML sense where it means “Everyone obeys the Party Line, please ignore who controls the Party”?
The classic Marxist sense, although i think Lenin’s ideology was necessary for a successful revolution to occur in his time. The Party went down hill majorly when Stalin took over instead of Trotsky.
I’m down. I understand support of Lenin, even if I personally disagree and side more with the SRs, and have sympathies for the Makhnovists. Post-Lenin is when it gets truly gruesome.
Yeah, but being a Tankie isn’t liking communism, it is saying that the Soviet Union did nothing wrong in Hungary in 1956.
Yes that’s the OG definition, but as of late it has become a catch all for people anywhere left of classical lib.
It depends where, but I’ve only really seen it said on Lemmy in discussions regarding international relations and my time on Reddit has been significantly reduced.
I have also seen a lot of people on Lemmy who are obvious tankies argue that it is a slur against communist supporters rather than a specific criticism about tribalism, realpolitik, and internal imperialism engaged by communist countries.
It is in the vested interest of tankies to change the meaning of the word.
Drake meme:
Archieve true communism
Stay dictator of the proletariat for just a bit longer
The dictator of the proletariat isn’t one guy. It’s the group of people who work. As opposed to now where most countries are a dictatorship of the wealthy.
It literally means the workers (like you and I) dictating the rules. If you’re a commie it means democratically. Who dictates the rules now? The wealthy.
Red scare propaganda is so exhausting…
It really is exhausting, i hate that there is effectively zero Marxist lit in libraries in the USA and if there is, somone stole it or hid it.
There’s no dictatorship of the proletariat in Marx, though.
“Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”
