I don’t like spending this much time arguing against campism but they just keep talking at me.
If you value any economic system above democracy, you’ll end up being authoritarian no matter what your preferred system is.
You call this a democracy? The entire system is built to extract wealth from the working class
Call what democracy? I didn’t post about any place in particular. But no, the US is not a healthy democracy if that’s what you are getting at.
Yeah, but “democracy” looks exactly like western liberal democracy, right? Multiple parties and uses some European country as an example? All third world countries are dictatorships and should bow down to the superior ways of their white overlords? Or they just don’t know what real democracy looks like and they’re misled by Islam or something? Real democracy is a racist as fuck country like Finland, that has de-industrialized, has an economy of basically only consumers, exports nothing and imports everything from the global south that carries the social and environmental burden of actually producing everything? Democratic socialism seems to only be for the imperial core, the rest of the world is just too backwards to understand it, I guess.
(These are rhetorical questions, I know it’s not what you sound like, but it’s what it seems like all of you people are implying with pretend civility.)
If you don’t both-sides the genocide of Palestinians or the war on Iran, by bringing up that they aren’t democratic systems of government so that somehow makes them deserve getting bombed more than if they were. (If you do, then I just don’t have to talk to you.) If you can believe that, than you do actually believe that the struggle against imperialism matters more than the ideals of democracy.
How do you justify democracy when people are voting for life to be worse instead of better, even to the point of undermining the democratic process itself? Sure we could argue at some point democracy had the effect of improving living conditions but should we expect that to be true forever in all circumstances?
I dont believe that democracy is valuable as an end unto itself, it is a tool that should serve its people and if it stops doing that we shouldn’t be dogmatic about it. Authoritarian systems certainly arent the way, and I would guess what we need doesnt even have a name yet.
Democracy works, the problem is we don’t have a true democracy. We have corporate capitalist democracy. It’s a system that makes most people think it’s democracy — but it’s not.
Democracy and capitalism can not exist in the same stratosphere if democracy is to succeed.
The conditions under which democracy works are well understood.
You need a populace educated on how the society and government works at least in its broad strokes. That education should also instill a preference for democracy and describe the pitfalls of other systems.
An independent media system to keep the voter base reasonably informed.
Systems in place to prevent corruption.
Every single one of these have been eroded over 1-2 generations by crony capitalism to enable wealth accumulation.
I would not say that democracy in the US is a reasonable example of what democracy can look like. It is what happens when democracy is being deliberately sabotaged.
You also need a fully open and transparent government, any information being classified top secret or anything of the sort means you cannot have a democracy. No secrets can be allowed, ever. And really the only way to reasonably guarantee stuff like that is to make officials surrender all privacy related rights for life, just permanent publicly open insight into every aspect of your life, past, present, and future if you want to pursue office. I’d argue for attaching 24/7 live streamed cameras to them during their time in office as well. Obviously this would only currently work for rich countries with obscene military expenditures, like the US, but if the big guys were to do it then it would eventually be safe enough for the rest of them.
This seems extreme. I agree with more transparency of politicians, but I don’t see our current problems as stemming directly from the fact that our military has top secret information and an intelligence service.
Democracy works
Citation needed
There has never been a democracy, so we don’t know if it works or not. Democracy is an ideal state. We all live under a dictatorship of capital.
I mean small bits of democracy exist everywhere. Charity groups often work as a democracy. The youth organization I was in as a kid operated as a great democracy.
There are little democratic groups all over the world working just fine. It’s the large scale corporate hellscape that keeps it from working for us as a whole.
But just saying out of hand “democracy works” is not a fact, it is an unproven assertion. Some charity groups work, most do not. Many charity groups like the largest vegan group DXE have SA charges among the leadership. Youth organizations collapse all the time. If democracy works then how come democratic countries elect authoritarians and fascists like the Republicans in US or Nazi’s or even AFD in Germany? How come democratic countries elect people like Boris Johnson, Marie Le Pen, Bolsonaro, and Sanae Takaichi? Citation needed is just that, I’d like to know where these democratic nations and organizations that exist that actually work. Doesn’t seem like it works to me. Sounds nice in theory but I wouldn’t say it “works” and clearly if we just assume out of hand that it does, we’ll just keep repeating the mistakes that make it not work.
Idealist philosophy is the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. Just totally decouple your goals from actual reality, and make zero plans on how to get there, then critique movements that fail to measure up to your pie in the sky. You see, actually achieving things is secondary to these people, what REALLY MATTERS is looking like a good person when you’re doing it. “They don’t want power, they just want to endlessly critique power.”
The ruling class has put in place a system that is impossible to change without doing horrible, violent, and socially unacceptable things, that is why it’s so stable.
I really wished we lived in this world where convincing people of your ideas was enough to bring systemic change, it just won’t for some things.
Amerikkkan politician in the gif, lmao.
…Judge Judy? She’s not a politician. She’s barely political at all. She hasn’t even been a real judge since 1996.
Sorry I don’t watch slop I couldn’t know about that. I’m sure she’s very close to the real thing.
When the dollar can vote you no longer have a democracy.
Pointing out the flaws in some democracies is not a great argument when every other system is so clearly inferior. To answer your question, democracy requires a culture that supports it. It won’t work everywhere and it doesn’t work overnight.
How do you justify democracy when people are voting for life to be worse instead of better
How are you determining “better” and “worse”? In most cases, there’s no way of knowing what is “better” or “worse” sub species aeterinatis, because most government decisions are not optimizing a single parameter, and are instead making a judgement call by choosing one of multiple options from a Pareto frontier. With democracy, the people get what the majority of people want. Majority rule is better than minority rule.
Bourgeois democracy is minority rule tho, I want a democracy where money doesn’t have a voice
There’s a big difference between the ideal democracy and the bastardization of a democratic process we have in America, much like how Marx’s vision of communism is hugely different from any actual communist implementation. I personally don’t believe that any one governing/socioeconomic system taken in a vacuum is the right answer, they all seem to rely on humans being fundamentally good-natured but it just isn’t true for much of the humans attracted to positions of power.
an ideal democracy would be a democracy where the people have power, as opposed to one where money rules. such is the case in the fake ‘democracies’ under capitalism. it’s not just america and it’s nothing to do with humans needing to be ‘good natured’.
The problem is “the people” in a democracy literally just amounts to “the majority”, and would thus favor the average and the interests thereof over the interests of underprivileged minorities. Can we count on the average person to be concerned about the well being of those who lack the collective power they enjoy? As of now, I would say definitely not.
i don’t think that rich people are inherently better any respecting the rights of minorities.
the current system demonstrably does not protect minorities either.
also the current system actively manufactures consent through media ownership and economic coercion. capital owners play a major role in that process.
what looks like majority opinion is often manufactured preference serving capital. a democracy where people had actual material security and genuine information might produce very different majorities.
Elections are not democratic because the candidates are always elites of some form. Even with universal sufferage and an egalitarian society there will always be a selection bias towards people who want power and people who are good at winning elections (but not necessarily good at governing). A real democracy would have election by lottery to ensure every segment of the population was represented. This hasn’t ever existed because past governments who elected by lottery (e.g. Ancient Athens) had only a small percentage of society represented as citizens.
After I found out about Lottery Democracy, everything clicked into place. I can finally have a true political goal that I can actually see working. Easy to convince people too, if people just watched the Lottery Democracy video from Spectacles.
I’ll check it out, thanks. I always just think about the way my academic department is organized as an example. There’s a rotating chair, and nobody wants to do it because it’s a bunch of bureacratic bullshit, but people do their time and then go back to getting actual work done. This is how politics should be.
Let me know when you come up with a way to force people to accept an unpopular system without an authoritarian regime.
Idk what communist movement you think is going to emerge pristine out of this horrific, traumatizing, wasteland of human suffering without being wrong in really terrible ways.
A socialist or anti-imperialist movement does not have to be morally correct for me to back them. Class struggle does not have to be led by good people to succeed, they don’t have to have a correct interpretation of Marxism or be Marxist at all, they don’t have to not have corruption, and they will almost always carry reactionary baggage. In a lot of situations (almost universally) it’s not realistic or possible at all for a resistance to capitalist exploitation, colonialism or imperialism to exist without all of those problems and more, but doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. If they’re opposing capitalism, even if they’re doing it badly, they deserve support.
Also, yes, MLs shouldn’t do apologia for the things the USSR did or other socialisms did, they should state the truth clearly without discomfort. I’m kinda disillusioned with ML spaces on the internet, actually, because they really suck. It’s like a game to some people; a game about being right and not caring about fucking anything. It puts me off when I see like uncritical support of past socialisms as if they were perfect, which is impossible, and you’ll always end up being disappointed, which is the one of the points of this whole message, but it only serves to make them look like atrocity-denying historical revisionists to other people. Like the Soviets really did deport Tatars in trains, and really didn’t work to correct the colonialist past they inherited from the Russian Empire.
However, the dissolution of the USSR and the throwing of its people to the wolves of finance capital was a humanitarian catastrophe for Eastern Europe and created a situation that even now is actually sickening to think about, and I don’t know at all how or when things will recover and get better for people there. It put into motion the fucking tragedy that is happening now in Ukraine plus all of the unseen suffering in the poor regions of what was the Eastern Bloc. The ex-Soviet countries are are perfect example of what losing looks like.
Like I’m sure there are lurid, real crimes that Hamas, or Iran, or Ansar Allah committed, but I hope to god they don’t lose, because they’re fighting against the IDF and the American military and all of the bad things that the resistance has done cannot hold a candle to what the US and Israel have done. That’s how I feel about resistance to capital.
Like you’ve gotta understand historical materialism and a lot more than just that, you have to keep trying to understand things for years to be good communist. I’m not a good communist. If you approach politics with the goal of having the correct hot takes, you’ll never want to understand anything. Just stop making hot takes, and look at the world.
Thanks for sharing this perspective.
As a baby leftist, I don’t want to fall into the traps of others when it comes to heralding the goods of past socialist experiments without criticizing the ills as well.
Nothing is perfect, as you say, and it a materialist socialists’ life long project to see the world clearly for all the material conditions that exist, and have existed up until this point. Idealist socialists and idealist communists will capsize their entire movement, and endlessly make things about purity tests.
The words “purity tests” sets off my liberal detector, because of accusations of “purity testing” being used to defend Democratic party entryism and terrible DSA candidates from criticism.
The words “purity tests” sets off my liberal detector, because of accusations of “purity testing” being used
Outside of any liberal usage, you have to acknowledge the phenomenon of leftist purity testing, especially on Lemmy. It’s part of what makes the ML spaces so unsavory.
defend Democratic party entryism and terrible DSA candidates from criticism.
I mean,
A socialist or anti-imperialist movement does not have to be morally correct for me to back them.
Even the terrible DSA candidates are DSA candidates, and so far as socialist movements go they have the absolute advantage of popularity right now. I’m really, really tired of publicly glazing Democrats because the general class consciousness is so low that slowing the bleeding is the best we can get electorally.
I would be absolutely chuffed if terrible DSA candidates displaced terrible DNC candidates, because at the very least it puts “Socialist” in the general public awareness, and lowers the barrier for decent DSA candidates. And the DSA is a better class of lesser evil overall. And the better the lesser evil, the more effective my dual power is going to be.
Which is to say, purity testing is a real problem, and you don’t have to be a liberal to recognize that any proper leftist movement is going to need to engage the actual proletariat, and most of those guys are tribalistic dummies.
The DSA cannot at all be compared to the groups I was talking about because they fail at one of the main requirements, to be an anti-imperialist movement, their candidates have like backed out from every meaningful thing. They are not really “democratic socialists” they are closer to social democrats.
Not really? The official DSA platform includes dissolving the Senate. The movement itself is pretty anti-imperialist, even if individual candidates have to waffle a bit to get elected by the tribalistic dummies.
Still though, a better class of lesser evil than the DNC in any case, that can’t be denied. I haven’t seen a significant level of “backing out”, and certainly not from every meaningful thing. Until class consciousness attains a level to make more direct means practical, I’d rather shill for a lesser evil that sucks a bit less. DSA > DNC, even if both are a far cry from a proper International.
Yep, I agree with all of that.
I’m not sure if you’re into this sort of thing, but I’m working with some friends on a tabletop game jam that we’re planning to run (online) over a weekend some time early next year about stories set in the midst of a future revolution. You can see the draft document into which we’ve been occasionally adding ideas here. Let me know if you’re interested.
That link is broken on my browser.
What about now?
Someone agrees with me? That’s cool. I thought all of that was going to be for naught.
It is possible. We had socialist consenus not that long ago :/ The only possible way to achieve at least near-socialist system is democratic. If the system does not directly represent views of their citizens, eventually you get oligarchic corpocracy with planned economy, that will crush all the nations beneath their boots. Furthermore: Bolsheviks were fucking extremists. When post-revolution parliament was established, and parties ran for seats, the majority of votes were Social-Revolutionaries, bolsheviks didnt have nearly as much votes. But then bolsheviks just shut down the parliament because they lost, and put their opponents in jail or even executed. So much for the people’s republic ig.
Instead, we need to actually get support in southeen countries, fight US hegemony and get votes in european countries, but this time hwlping global south first would be priority, so the european and us capitalists couldnt move their capital to poorer parts of the world and thus destroy the socialist consensus.
What is “socialist consensus?” What are these words? “Oligarchic corpocracy?” “Social Revolutionaries?” Are you talking about the Mensheviks? Is this some kind of social democratic stroke?
The fact you have no idea who social-revolutionaries are, means you gave a huge rant about your views, meanwhile having no idea how the most important socialist revolution went. Or even such a simple thing like socialist democratic consensus of pre-60s Congratulations you are a fucking tankie. And I dont get paid to explain history to americans. May your extremist pseudosocialist brainrot mythology stay with you
The SRs supported the Whites during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, but the White movement’s anti-socialist leadership increasingly marginalized and ultimately purged them.
Seems like a very successful political ideology right there.
The Socialist Revolutionary Party, the ones who supported the provisional government originally?
“Hey gemini, pls tldr history of social-revolutionaries”. Just shut up and dont embarass yourself. Dont try to narrow my original answer and read the wikipedia at least.
With every answer Im more and more convinced you live in american suburb or some.
I thought you were talking about some mythical social democrats or something, based on your language and talking about votes in European countries. My brain turned off after I read the words oligarchic corpocracy. I thought you were a garden variety rad-lib. First person I’ve known who supports the SRs it didn’t even register in my brain.
What I meant is that bolsheviks were not popular nor they ever represented people of russia. And you still cant bother to read how the revolution went. Any totalitarian ‘socialist’ regime is not socialist, it is purely oligarchic corporcracy. Why corpocracy? Because both USSR and China busted worker unions, had hilarious elections, prevented regular people from becoming politicans or have any say. And ensured only their oligarchic circle could get to power. How is this different from authoritarian capitalist corporacy? Corporations also have planned economy, they also bust their worker union, and they also keep their people in fright of the state machine.
This kind of system is just as far from socialism as a late-stage capitalist state, and serves capitalists and imperialists.
For tankies, communism must be authoritarian, and the worst tankies will just prefer even actual fascism to “childish naivety of democracy”. Technically tankies are just the leftist version of your right-wing grandpa trying to convince you to finally grow out of leftism, except they’re overtly obsessed with “On authority” by Friedrich Engels.
I hate being told I’m not socialist for wanting coöperative ownership and a coöp commonwealth economy, but that they are real the “real” socialists when they just want state owned corporations.
Because then the workers are just owned by capital when the point of the economy is still to create exchange value.
What happens then is the coops that pay their workers less will amass more capital than the ones that have better working conditions and push the better ones out of the market. When the goal is to generate profit, then a company that is privately owned by a capitalist class is the most efficient at doing that.
the leftist version
Are they leftists, though? They call themselves leftists, sure, but if it walks like a duck…
Yeah. I dont know exactly what I would call them but the German “far”-“left” splinter party BSW just supported the actually far-right party AFD in voting for the first far-right state governor since the Nazi era… that’s not exactly behavior that anybody would seriously consider left.
Red fascists
Probably cause they both get their funding from moscow and don’t care about anything other than destroying western society, so they voted for the disrupter even though he’s a fascist. Typical tankie behavior.
Good point, they seem to be authoritarian with the extra requirement that government should also control the means of production.
walkssteps like aduckgoose…FTFY
which was written in 1872 and is kinda way way way way way way way past its selling date.
Tankies: ackshually, the term “authoritarian” is not narrowly defined and therefore has no meaning! Checkmate libs1
Democracy is akshually authoritarian because there are laws.
Natural laws? Sounds like authoritarianism.
Freedom is slavery.
All governments are authoritarian at some point. Even anarchist communities theoretically will exert force on intruders by mustering up the people where they are, where they live.
Exerting force ≠ authoritarian. These words have completely different meanings. For example, community defence against an authoritarian state can involve the exertion of force, but would be categorically anti-authoritarian.
Sorry, I should have said intruders as well as internal bad faith actors.
There will still be psychopaths and sociopaths and serial killers and pedophiles in a communist or anarchist society.
Communities will still need to deal with those malignant people, whether by outcasting/exiling/deporting them or inflicting punishment + delivering rehabilitation. Those activities will be authoritarian over the bad actors.
No, those activities would not be authoritarian over bad actors. Authoritarianism specifically involves concentrated hierarchical power that operates without accountability or consensus. Anarchist communities would handle bad actors in a bottom-up manner, even from the perspective of the bad actor.
Also, your use of the terms “psychopath” and “sociopath” are harmful. These are medical conditions and should not be stigmatized. People with these conditions can lead normal lives if they get the help that they need.
Edit: Apologies if I come across as a bit of a pedant. I just think it’s important that these terms are used correctly. <3
I was meaning authoritarian as in the sense of authority being commonly understood as the legitimate power of a person or group over other people. And my argument was that even communist and anarchist societies will use power over other bad actors inside that society if those bad actors pose as threats to the prevailing political system.
If a bad actor seeks the pain and suffering of others, regardless of their mental health, or even if a bad actor seeks to persuade a society’s peoples away from the prevailing political principles, such as someone advocating for hierarchy in an anarchist society or a capitalist advocating for private property in a communist society, then those societies will still use their power to self preserve those modes of political power.
To the bad actors, those societies will appear authoritarian.
According to that logic the warsaw uprising was also authoritarian because the rebels imposed their will onto the nazi occupiers.
there is a difference between using force as a means of self defense and for dominance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_d8_VpLc-k
Shouldn’t have just said intruders. Of course self defense isn’t authoritarian. Authoritarianism takes place above and over a society’s own people. I meant to also include internal bad actors like psychopaths, sociopaths, serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, racists, etc. For those criminals within society, it’s still best to remove them from that same society via exile/deportation or take away their rights to punish them then rehabilitate them. Those actions will appear as authoritarian to the bad actors.
Oh okay that makes sense now
Upvoting not because I agree but because this claim is very common and needs visibility.
Didn’t Marx warn of an authoritarian takeover of a people’s revolution and how that was no different than having a bourgeoisie?
Rosa Luxemburg certainly did but who cares about women in history am I right? /s
Right? Who’d ever listen to women of history, like Emma Goldman, and especially women of color, like Lucy Parsons. They’ve certainly never mentioned anything worthwhile about this topic. /s
Sylvia Pankhurst promoted Luxemburg’s views after her death. She also became disillusioned with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
I don’t think Marx ever condemned the word “authoritarian.” Or said anything about a dictatorship of the proletariat becoming more unjust than a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. That doesn’t sound like anything he’d say.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
this is like a page long, maybe worth a read
Guy Debord criticized the Soviet Union for creating a new class system. He still believed in Marxism, but didn’t believe that the structure of the Soviet Union was able to create the conditions for communism.
Not according to “tankies” :D They love shiny boots holding a red flag. They just hate brown flags, but love a good boot-liking
Yup.
I prefer Stakeholder Socialism.
In every story what post apocalyptic society survives? Communist. Every post apocalyptic society that leads to hellish dystopia? Capitalist. Prove me wrong.
Ok.
Every post-apocalyptic society we can point to is fictional. After all, we’ve never actually experienced an apocalypse on that scale.
But just off the top of my head, The Book of Eli depicts a post-apocalyptic society that has largely devolved into anarchy, with power concentrated in the hands of warlords and whoever can enforce their will through violence.
Cyborg presents a similar picture: societal collapse, competing factions, and survival through force.
Then there’s Mad Max, where civilization has collapsed into violent competition over increasingly scarce resources, with whoever controls the necessities of life holding the power.
But I’d also venture to say that many of the post-apocalyptic societies people point to as examples of socialism are actually post-scarcity societies, or at least societies in which scarcity has been resolved to some degree. When the necessities of life are readily available, the incentive to hoard resources and compete for basic survival diminishes. That creates the conditions for people to organize society around collective needs rather than individual accumulation.
In other words, what people identify as socialism in these fictional settings may actually be the result of a fundamental change in the material conditions of society.
The interesting question isn’t whether people are naturally selfish or naturally cooperative. It’s how the conditions people live under influence which behaviors become necessary for survival. When resources are scarce and institutions collapse, people may turn to violence and self-preservation. When their basic needs are reliably met, cooperation and collective ownership become much more practical.
Of course, neither outcome is inevitable. Scarcity doesn’t automatically produce anarchy, and abundance doesn’t automatically produce socialism. But the material conditions of a society have a tremendous influence on the political and economic systems that can realistically emerge.
you know anything can happen in fiction? you can plausible write a post-apocalyptic capitalist society as well.
Snowcrash is an example.
yup
Dune. Turns out feudalism was what made it out of the machine apocalypse and ensuing Butlerian Jihad. Feudalism with nukes.
So you’re saying that communism only exists as a literary fantasy?
Alright here’s my 2 cents.
There exists an impossibly we’ll organized & funded ruling class. Our society broadly is uneducated or misinformed.
How do people intend to reverse course without a very powerful form of authoritarian-leftism?
Do we intent to reform our governments so radically without the use of authoritarian mechanisms?
How do you get the average person on board with a communist society without striping the privileges the ruling class has almost always enjoyed?
I’m in favor of radical reforms. Those reforms would necessitate authoritarian mechanisms geared against the ruling class and their consolidation of wealth & power.
I think the problem I’m seeing is that you seem to be equating any use of force with authoritarianism.
You can have a revolution, restore the means of production to the commons, and then just not have a single-party state. You can deliberately distribute power among the working class. Use of force doesn’t require unchecked state power.
Use of force is by any state is unchecked state power, and having multiple parties does not imply democracy, nor make things more democratic.
But yes, I actually do support giving proletarian communists (specifically women and minorities) guns, so that the state can be terrorized into not making reactionary compromises that will lead to doom.
Restore the means of production to the commons. I’ll have to see what that means concretely. I’m not familiar with the idea.
In my idea of how the government should be run, one would need to implement an extremely steep taxation structure.
That would adversely effect a minority group within the nation enacting those laws. I feel that this action as a consequence would be authoritarian.
I agree with you, I believe. The difference being that the authoritarian nature be geared towards exclusively a group that is VOLUNTARILY JOINED and nothing else. If you want to own that much wealth, you get some fancy new governmental oversight and regulations. Congrats. I don’t believe that that has be “authoritarian” to the VAST majority of people. Well over 95%.
Totally agree but, it would have to be aggressive in our current world. They will not willingly part with their wealth.
I’m assuming all options would be on the table for mitigating this level of greed. Obviously in an effort to get to a better society.
If the wealthy were willing to give up their wealth without the very real threat of violence against them, we would simply not be having this conversation and instead be discussing the appropriate levels of wealth with the wealthy. The existence of this debate implies that we have all - in some form or another - accepted that the wealthy need to be parted with their wealth against their will.
To achieve a society where all are free and able to live out their potential, regardless of the labels we put on this freer society, wealth redistribution is necessary. If we say the wealthy keep their wealth then we are describing a society where only the wealthy are free.
The rich aren’t a minority group, and the action you’re describing is literally the polar opposite of authoritarianism. If you have to redefine words to make an argument, you don’t have an argument.
Minority group - any group holding less power than the group exercising the majority of it.
Authoritarian - concentration of power into one or just a few ELITE members.First, regarding recommoning the means of production: it’s not a single discrete thing, but rather a collection of economic and political policies and approaches.
Look into is Solidarity Economies: this is a term that bundles together worker cooperatives, housing coops, public banks, credit unions, and all the other structures that allow groups of people to cut investors out of the critical institutions on which we rely.
As for the other part: progressive taxation is not authoritarian and does not require authoritarianism.
Progressive taxation would be a bandaid solution in my opinion but, maybe I’m being dramatic. Solidarity economics sound great as a shift in production.
The point I suppose I failed to make. In order to reverse course and affect radical change, you would need to enact taxation policies (FBI style raids on penthouses, IRS investigations into corporations, ICE style black bagging of CEOs etc.) that would be heavy handed. The heavy handedness one would think of when a regular person, like myself, misuses the term “authoritarian”.
Well, I’ll give you some nuance then:
You’re right. A revolution is not going to be bloodless. Use of force requires moral compromises, and we probably won’t get there with our hands clean.
But: I think there’s a big difference between the contradictions we struggle to navigate as we strive to build a world without masters, and the choice to enthusiastically hand unchecked power to “good” masters who we naively expect to treat us well even when we have no means to constrain them or impose accountability.
Put another way, I can tolerate grey areas we’re reluctantly forced into if our goals are anti-authoritarian, because I believe that such a project would have a good chance of reigning in those excesses. But if we accept and embrace domination from the start, the outcome is inevitably that we all wind up under a boot. Does that make sense?
Agreed. I wouldn’t want to help create hierarchy I’m just seek rigid rules around wealth.
Great! I’m a billionaire and I’m going to start my own fascist party and buy out and flood every means of mass communication with propaganda for my party. I sure am glad you’re going to allow my legitimate political party to flourish.
Yeah, like I’m trans and it seems like the majority of people want to erase me for it. Do we just let that go on until we have a democratic consensus that trans people actually do exist while 3,000 people are socially murdered in the time we wait?
It’s the same for capitalist and imperialist oppression. Pro-imperialist or pro-capitalist ideologies or ideologies that comprimise with capitalism or imperialism are not neutral and shouldn’t be respected just because a majority of people have them. People who who end up supporting liberalism or fascism should be oppressed.
Americans programming will break when they see it working. Why do you think they try so hard to stop it?
Tenderly, you may have far too much confidence in programing being broken. Simply because physical conditions change, does not mean conservative amygdalas shrink.
There will, by necessity, be some degree of deprogramming.
Four legs good!
Two legs bad!
Four legs good!
Two legs bad!
Animal farm?
Indeed.
it’s incredibly ironic that you are using a phrase meant to ridicule people who reduce communism to black and white moralistic idealism… and repeating it like a mantra (like a sheep, perhaps) as part of a conversation where bringing up that excerpt from that Orwell book makes extremely little sense. You are making a satire of yourself, stop doing it.
You sound like you think you are much smarter than you actually are, and you didn’t understand my point.
Being “cool with communism” for the vibes (that don’t even exist, every revolution is authoritarian) vs being “cool with communism” for it’s negation of capitalist mode of production
and yet neither can actually discuss Marx and shit for real
I struggle with the term “Tankie”. Who is a Tankie? What makes them a Tankie? What makes them so frustrating? This term feels so vague that it just makes it easy lump all leftists into the term.
As far as I can tell, you’re a leftist if you’re not unpleasant to deal with and you’re a Tankie if I find you unpleasant.
It sounds like some Boogeyman I’ve never seen or spoken to but I’m obligated to dismiss everything they say even tho I’ve never seen one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
If they have a god damn wiki definition, I’m not sure where you think its vauge. You just literally never looked.
wikipedia, lmao, I could go in there and change the definition, lol.
Hear that? Thats goal posts moving.
You went from no definition, to not liking mine. Instead of clicking on any cited sources, you closed off.
Go ahead, change it, see how well that actually works and how wikipedia is actually moderated.
Yeah, exactly and also if you mention the Gaza genocide on Wikipedia without putting in a billion allegeds then you’ll also be banned, the article you linked even admits the definition has changed throughout history to refer to different things.
It even has a section on how its used on the internet!
Its almost like language isnt static, and has history beyond a one line deffitnition!
You are systematically dismantling your own arguments. “Tankie” is vague because it’s a word for a label and the underlying concept being referred to can be very different when different people say it.
Also, my original point was that op didn’t look for a definition and just decided to bitch about it. Not about a specific definition.
And thats true for a lot of the English langagr.
In fact it can even be geographical, like the word faggot. But its still clear when its a slur and when its a cigarette.
There’s the entire history and usage on that page for you.
Not all leftists blindly support Russia or China just because they’re anti-western. Tankies seem to ignore all the evil shit Russia does just because they’re not the U.S./E.U/Israel.
Ok but we all agree that the US/Israel is the greatest evil on Earth right? Like sure Russia does bad stuff, but like the US is worse.
The point is it’s not a contest, and we should be opposed to it no matter which country is doing it.
Yeah but if your goal is to bring the most good to the world, you’ll get closer to your goal by fighting against the US than you will fighting against Russia.
“Lesser evil!”
“No! Not like that!”
Again, you’re making this into a two-sided contest between two huge turds. I don’t choose either of them. I choose to fight the bad ideas and behaviors they’re known for, at all scales and in all walks of life, regardless of comparisons between them.
They’re both guilty of imperialism on a world wide scale and all the evils that includes, but aside from it’s early days the US has generally been a better neighbour by pointing their evil overseas, Russia has largely been a menace to it’s neighbours in every era of history. I would say that’s the biggest difference.
Meanwhile, non-tankies blindly ignore the evil shit the west does on a much larger global scale and blindly accept the western narratives about Russia and China just because they’re too propagandized to realize they’re being lied to and misinformed. Not sure who the “blind” ones in this scenario are.
I’ll keep saying this:
One side is a hyper-financialized economy of almost only consumers, which sits at the endpoint of the most global supply chains, devouring on a scale that is devastating the planet, pushing the environmental and human cost of that production on the global south, and who basically only export loans, monopoly priced essential goods, and IPs back to the rest of the world, that feeds their surplus production into an enormous military industrial complex that they use to force this global extraction system on the rest of the world.
While the other “side”, we’ll start with Russia, is an impoverished hellhole place to live in that has been economically gutted, and now has been fighting a war against Ukraine that has been going on for over 12 years, a war that is being used to throw the entire military might of NATO member states against, not to liberate Ukraine, but to try to use the opportunity to fight a proxy war directly against Russia, and the real goal is to bleed out Russia so it submits again to other side and they can put in a new dictator in charge that they can actually control this time. (I, for one, remember the time when Putin was their neoliberal darling.) Supporting Russia is a bit like supporting Saddam, you shouldn’t support Saddam, the Ba’athists were morally corrosive (maybe too unfairly bad for this analogy, actually), but you definitely shouldn’t support the US military and their allied countries in the Iraq war. (Like if you want to support the people of Ukraine, do it in a way that doesn’t feed into the war, like hunger relief, or humanitarian aid.)
And China hasn’t been at war with any other country since the Korean war. I guess China just kinda sits there, menacingly, as they build their productive capacity. And they’re against Taiwan (which literally calls itself the “Republic of China” btw), but I don’t think they do anything at all other than negotiate and respond in kind when the US moves more ships and drones there. Then there’s the Uyghur stuff and the Tibet stuff, which I know there is probably a kernel of truth to, but I think that’s up to people in China to deal with, and definitely won’t be solved by like the US sending aid there, because again, when the imperial core does these things it isn’t actually about the people, it’s about exploiting the problems countries those countries have in order to tear them apart.
Keep coping.
The term originally comes from a divide amongst Anglo communists between those who supported the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, and those who were critical. The tankies were the ones who supported “sending in the tanks.” These days it’s a disparaging term for any authoritarian socialists.
The tankies were correct.
https://www.joewrote.com/p/jfk-files-reveal-the-cia-role-in
In 1996, journalist Michael Smith published a book where MI6 officers, a branch of British intelligence, admitted they trained and armed Király’s fighters.8 The officer told Smith:
“We were taking them [fighters] into the mountains and giving them a crash course. I would be told to pick somebody up from a street corner at night in the pouring rain. Graz was our staging point. Then, after we’d trained them — explosives, weapons training — I took them back. We were training the agents for the uprising.”
Nagy admitted such factions were active during his October 28th radio speech.
“The Government condemns the viewpoints according to which the present formidable movement is a counterrevolution [against socialism]. Without doubt, as always happens at times of great popular movements, this movement too was used by criminal elements to compromise it and commit common criminal acts. It is also a fact that reactionary and counterrevolutionary elements had penetrated into the movement with the aim of overthrowing the popular democratic regime.”
Here’s the newly released, un-redacted version. It reads:
The Hungarian Freedom Fighters were Agency sponsored.
The “Agency” in question was, of course, the Central Intelligence Agency. In the context of the JFK assassination, the CIA was suggesting anti-Castro groups meet with Béla Király, likely to replicate the Hungarian uprising in Cuba to oust the communist government.
Undoubtedly, some will downplay this revelation and claim the CIA’s role in the Hungarian Rebellion was minor, insisting it was always a popular movement against Soviet-style communism. As has been since 1956, I’ll be called a tankie for suggesting the American foreign policy establishment was 100% honest and weren’t the pristine Good Guys of History. Oh well. It won’t be the first time and it won’t be the last.
In my opinion, there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the Central Intelligence Agency encouraged, if not instigated, the bloody fighting that swept through Budapest in 1956. I don’t doubt the students and protestors shared Nikita Kruschev’s desire for de-Stalinization. But as that movement went from a demand to readjust the Hungary-Soviet relationship to outright destruction of the Soviet Union’s defensive pact in less than two weeks, there was obviously a secondary, driving force that compelled Nagy to go further. As these documents admit, Béla Király and the broader combative force were supported, trained , and armed by the CIA and MI6; you don’t need to be a genius to figure out who was pushing the Hungarian Uprising to move from civil protest to alignment with Washington D.C.’s geopolitical goals.
A Tankie is anyone who self-identifies as a Tankie.
I don’t apply the term to folks as insult, I’m just acknowledging people who choose to identify as such.
Anarchists and what would become social democrats were calling Marx an authoritarian socialist during the 1st International. This is not new. This debate has existed for at least 160 years, just let that sink in, we haven’t come to an agreement on this stuff for 160 years.
Honestly the base concept is fine, we’ve just never seen a working model.
We just don’t really see many governments that are actually for and by the people. Most are closer to an oligarch tribunal that boils down to a slightly distributed dictatorship, then the slap a non-dictatorship name on it and press play.
This reminds me of the book “Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When it’s Gone”.
Benevolent idiot vs malevolent idiot, or as they were historically called: trotskyites and stalinists.
