U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday called China a "ticking time bomb" because of its economic challenges and said the country was in trouble because of weak growth.
You’re right: that wasn’t a fair comparison. Sure, they’re both loud, immature, hateful idiots – but the MAGA crowd can unfortunately organize to some degree and exert their will in the real world.
The “communist” pro-authoritarian crowd … can’t. Being obnoxious online is the peak of their abilities.
For the debate bros in the crowd, the error RoomAndBored is pointing out is an example of the fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias.
So, like, instead of making assumptions about someone’s internal life, look at the material, economic, social situations they’re in and ask of those situations are dictating or constraining their behavior?
Not really. If you see a stranger kicking a vending machine, there’s a (well-documented!) bias to think “that much be a violent and angry person” instead of “that person is having such a bad day they’re kicking vending machines now.”
You could go dig all the way into material and social situations that caused a person to yada yada yada, but that’s way deeper in.
Well, there’s a fair chance I wasn’t talking about you.
Are you a communist, or are you one of the authoritarian worshiping shit-heels that don’t deserve the title? Because I thought communism was fundamentally about equity and human dignity – which means the later needs to be kicked back into the sewers whenever they try to crawl out.
Anyone that fellates or defends authoritarians (or those that aspire to be one) regardless of their “side” can fuck off.
A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.
Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing with it, whether — given the conditions of present-day society — we could not create another social system, in which this authority would be given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear.
On examining the economic, industrial and agricultural conditions which form the basis of present-day bourgeois society, we find that they tend more and more to replace isolated action by combined action of individuals. Modern industry, with its big factories and mills, where hundreds of workers supervise complicated machines driven by steam, has superseded the small workshops of the separate producers; the carriages and wagons of the highways have become substituted by railway trains, just as the small schooners and sailing feluccas have been by steam-boats. Even agriculture falls increasingly under the dominion of the machine and of steam, which slowly but relentlessly put in the place of the small proprietors big capitalists, who with the aid of hired workers cultivate vast stretches of land.
Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to have organisation without authority?
Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared, or will it only have changed its form? Let us see.
Let us take by way of example a cotton spinning mill. The cotton must pass through at least six successive operations before it is reduced to the state of thread, and these operations take place for the most part in different rooms. Furthermore, keeping the machines going requires an engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the products from one room to another, and so forth. All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy. The workers must, therefore, first come to an understanding on the hours of work; and these hours, once they are fixed, must be observed by all, without any exception. Thereafter particular questions arise in each room and at every moment concerning the mode of production, distribution of material, etc., which must be settled by decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour or, if possible, by a majority vote, the will of the single individual will always have to subordinate itself, which means that questions are settled in an authoritarian way. The automatic machinery of the big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been. At least with regard to the hours of work one may write upon the portals of these factories: Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate! [Leave, ye that enter in, all autonomy behind!]
If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organisation. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.
Let us take another example — the railway. Here too the co-operation of an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no accidents may happen. Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case there is a very pronounced authority. Moreover, what would happen to the first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the Hon. passengers were abolished?
But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.
When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that’s true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! 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.
We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.
We have seen, besides, that the material conditions of production and circulation inevitably develop with large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture, and increasingly tend to enlarge the scope of this authority. Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.
A form of government in which the governing body has absolute, or almost absolute, control. Typically this control is maintained by force, and little heed is paid to public opinion or the judicial system.
A form of government in which the ruler is an absolute dictator (not restricted by a constitution or laws or opposition etc.).
Maybe something was lost in translation, but I don’t care if Marx himself descended from the heavens and tattooed that on my forehead: no. Anyone willingly to unquestioningly submit to authority isn’t worthy of consideration or respect. Leaders need to be questioned and held to law and decency. My issue is with the people that follow leaders that don’t head the will and well being of others.
I’ll happily be an “enemy” of anyone that takes issue with that.
Letting liberals write your political theory isn’t doing you any favors. I don’t give a shit what sect you are, you’re no better than a Blairite. All states are maintained through force and that judicial bit is 100% extraneous because, if the judicial branch has observable sway, it will be declared to either be kabuki theater or part of the oligarchy (see: people talking about China’s Supreme Court).
So you are basically just saying “undemocratic” but with a pretentious buzzword sanctioned by liberal morons and hucksters.
Here’s a fun one though: if that’s the only relevant measurement, China does great because it has immense public approval even according to hostile western polling!
So you would therefore need to admit that it wasn’t a good fit for the term “authoritarian,” right?
A form of government in which the governing body has absolute, or almost absolute, control. Typically this control is maintained by force, and little heed is paid to public opinion or the judicial system.
This definition of “authoritarian” applies to everybody. And literally none of the leaders of the Soviet union or the dprk qualify as dictators according to your definition either lmfao.
Please, please read State and Revolution. There are a lot of confusions that you have that that reading would do a lot to clear up. You have no historical materialist understanding of the state and frankly I think a lot of the disagreements that you have are not in actuality disagreements on principles but of confusion on the topic.
I disagree with your definition of authoritarianism. 50.5% of a population voting to elect a representative or enact a referendum versus the 49.5% is authoritarianism. The same if the margin is 67-33, or 80-22 or 99.9 to 0.1. In any case, the minority is imposed upon by the majority. The individual is imposed upon by the collective, or even merely another individual.
Like Engels said, the revolution is certainly an authoritarian endeavor. The original expropriation was authoritarian, and the counter-expropriation would be a counter-posing authoritarianism. How can you take something from someone without imposition? If asking nicely worked, then we wouldn’t be posting here.
The opposite of authoritarianism isn’t democracy, but pure volunteerism. That would be nice.
Please try harder. This is really tedious. Posting half baked “definitions” of political boggarts makes it hard to take the piss. I need you to give me something to work with here.
I’m one of those authoritarian shitheels. Forcing people to build a better world is good and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.
Communism is about workers owning the means of production, and the end result being a moneyless, classless, stateless society. Maybe you should go read the book.
fellates
What is it with y’all and the homophobia? And it’s always blowjobs. Why not give the vagina’s some love? Why can’t we flick the bean of authoritarianism? Paddle the love canoe? Munch the carpet of repression? Can’t escape the damn patriarchy anywhere these days.
Bro didn’t you know? We hold the power of life and death in our blood stained authoritarian hands. If we don’t the demon rats will lose and the greater of two evils will win! The horror!
It’s not, and those aren’t the comments myself or the person I responded to were talking about. And yes, that take is dumb.
We were talking about the tankies – in the original meaning of the word as coined by communists, not as a slur against communists in general. Authoritarianism and its apologists can get fucked. People that think we’re in a zero-sum-game where they have to offset the (legitimate) evils of “the west” by being equally disgusting and brutal while on “the left” are fucking morons and don’t deserve the title “communist”.
The British communists, you mean? The ones that were pissed that the Soviets were violently crushing other communists for daring to object to their oppression? The ones that coined a term for their fellow Brits out of disgust that they were cheering it on?
The Brits called themselves communists, but you’ve spoken at length about how calling yourself communist means very little.
The Brits were morons or useful idiots and, while I hate Khrushchev and view him as a revisionist, it was correct for him to put down the color revolution lead by liberal reactionaries who called themselves communists.
I bet you’ve been keeping that dunk in your pocket for a while and you were so excited to use it, but I don’t think you understood the comment you were replying to.
That dunk is for when someone replaces one word with another to make it seem bad. The comment you replied to was pointing out that you had simply replaced the standard Western TM anticommunism with a more refined anticommunism, which you express as “anti-tankies”
you get that “tankie” and “communist” as a pejorative are functionally identical, right? Coincidentally, they’re also basically the same as “woke” as far as pejoratives go.
Where are people on this Internet forum being as disgusting and brutal as US imperialism? You know, the global hegemon, violently enforced through hybrid warfare
The Politburo’s decision to put down the revolt in Hungary prevented the countless fasicts soldiers who had just ten years ago fought for the Reich and the Arrow Cross party, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jewish people and many other’s beside, from seizing control of the country and bringing back the horrors of fascism. After the destruction of the USSR and the fall of the Eastern Block Hungary rapidly fell to Fascism once again.
Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong”, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).
The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.
The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist”. The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists”. This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.
It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different”. Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy”. And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD [5]. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts — couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.
Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.
Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.
Wild self admission that you consider “left wing Maga” to simply be people that do not share the same geopolitical outlook as mainstream western opinions.
You know that there are plenty of people globally, including centrists and even right wingers, that do not share the same ideology as western countries on geopolitics? Are they all “left wing Maga” now? Is any country in Africa that prefers to align with China over the USA “left wing Maga”? Are the people of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali “left wing Maga”? Are the majority of global citizens outside of the west “left wing Maga”?
This is just an extremely childish opinion to hold.
Well, the “real world” labor movement and activism is a great way to make all kinds of friends. A lot of socialists and a few communists, given the history of the movements. They tend to be actual adults too – so very little drama.
I’m just glad I outgrew my “angsty teenage communist” phase where I was just an ass on the internet. Blindly quoting Marx with no self awareness or understanding of context. Hell, blindly quoting Marx before I realized sometimes even decent, intelligent people can have great ideas but still get parts wrong: he was a man, flawed as any of the rest of us.
Oh, I’m aware. There is drama to be had if that’s what you want.
The nice thing about movements is you get to pick who you work with. You get small groups that do 99% of the meaningful work and a large “groups” that are just involved to make noise, feel like they did something, and accomplish … absolutely nothing. The worst are the kind that want to raise “awareness” for something that everyone is already aware of, followed by the people that are just pissed off and can’t be bothered to do anything productive with that anger.
Stick with the former: they’re cool and they get shit done.
The fact that you’re so focused on marx is really what showing your ass here. Almost like you’re full of shit.
But also I and plenty of others do spend time organizing offline. Turns out I have the free time to both organize offline and post if I want to. Actually I suspect most anyone who does organizing has that much free time.
Yeah, some of these posts get wild. It’s a shame, since the actual communists are cool.
It is interesting seeing the left’s version of MAGAts, though.
there’s no difference between good and bad things, I insist
You’re right: that wasn’t a fair comparison. Sure, they’re both loud, immature, hateful idiots – but the MAGA crowd can unfortunately organize to some degree and exert their will in the real world.
The “communist” pro-authoritarian crowd … can’t. Being obnoxious online is the peak of their abilities.
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I saw a MAGA drink water once. I also saw a tankie drink water… COINCIDENCE?!
For the debate bros in the crowd, the error RoomAndBored is pointing out is an example of the fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias.
So, like, instead of making assumptions about someone’s internal life, look at the material, economic, social situations they’re in and ask of those situations are dictating or constraining their behavior?
Not really. If you see a stranger kicking a vending machine, there’s a (well-documented!) bias to think “that much be a violent and angry person” instead of “that person is having such a bad day they’re kicking vending machines now.”
You could go dig all the way into material and social situations that caused a person to yada yada yada, but that’s way deeper in.
Cool, thank you for the explanation.
Well, there’s a fair chance I wasn’t talking about you.
Are you a communist, or are you one of the authoritarian worshiping shit-heels that don’t deserve the title? Because I thought communism was fundamentally about equity and human dignity – which means the later needs to be kicked back into the sewers whenever they try to crawl out.
Anyone that fellates or defends authoritarians (or those that aspire to be one) regardless of their “side” can fuck off.
Lenin would kill it on here
The kind Vladimir Ilyich would have killed everyone here.
If twitter had existed in the 1910s communism would have died on the vine. Non of them would would have ever stopped posting.
Maybe something was lost in translation, but I don’t care if Marx himself descended from the heavens and tattooed that on my forehead: no. Anyone willingly to unquestioningly submit to authority isn’t worthy of consideration or respect. Leaders need to be questioned and held to law and decency. My issue is with the people that follow leaders that don’t head the will and well being of others.
I’ll happily be an “enemy” of anyone that takes issue with that.
Letting liberals write your political theory isn’t doing you any favors. I don’t give a shit what sect you are, you’re no better than a Blairite. All states are maintained through force and that judicial bit is 100% extraneous because, if the judicial branch has observable sway, it will be declared to either be kabuki theater or part of the oligarchy (see: people talking about China’s Supreme Court).
So you are basically just saying “undemocratic” but with a pretentious buzzword sanctioned by liberal morons and hucksters.
Here’s a fun one though: if that’s the only relevant measurement, China does great because it has immense public approval even according to hostile western polling!
So you would therefore need to admit that it wasn’t a good fit for the term “authoritarian,” right?
This definition of “authoritarian” applies to everybody. And literally none of the leaders of the Soviet union or the dprk qualify as dictators according to your definition either lmfao.
Please, please read State and Revolution. There are a lot of confusions that you have that that reading would do a lot to clear up. You have no historical materialist understanding of the state and frankly I think a lot of the disagreements that you have are not in actuality disagreements on principles but of confusion on the topic.
I disagree with your definition of authoritarianism. 50.5% of a population voting to elect a representative or enact a referendum versus the 49.5% is authoritarianism. The same if the margin is 67-33, or 80-22 or 99.9 to 0.1. In any case, the minority is imposed upon by the majority. The individual is imposed upon by the collective, or even merely another individual.
Like Engels said, the revolution is certainly an authoritarian endeavor. The original expropriation was authoritarian, and the counter-expropriation would be a counter-posing authoritarianism. How can you take something from someone without imposition? If asking nicely worked, then we wouldn’t be posting here.
The opposite of authoritarianism isn’t democracy, but pure volunteerism. That would be nice.
Please try harder. This is really tedious. Posting half baked “definitions” of political boggarts makes it hard to take the piss. I need you to give me something to work with here.
Yeah! Fuck fake communists like - checks notes - Engels
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I’m one of those authoritarian shitheels. Forcing people to build a better world is good and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.
Communism is about workers owning the means of production, and the end result being a moneyless, classless, stateless society. Maybe you should go read the book.
What is it with y’all and the homophobia? And it’s always blowjobs. Why not give the vagina’s some love? Why can’t we flick the bean of authoritarianism? Paddle the love canoe? Munch the carpet of repression? Can’t escape the damn patriarchy anywhere these days.
Ok vaush
you’re talking to an organizer sweetheart. we’re doing quite well, thank you for checking in!
Cool, what have you changed? We routinely to get pro-labor candidates elected and stopped local social services from getting defunded.
nothing I’m willing to talk about on a public forum. doxxing myself would be quite the oopsie.
Oh, that’s a shame. We also pushed for our city to require a PLA for all tax funded development. It was much easier with our candidates in office.
Edit: fixed the link.
awesome! glad you won
The government has a long sordid history of violently suppressing which of these groups?
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Hey now, kink shaming isn’t kind. There’s nothing wrong with having a cuckoldry fetish as long as everyone is a consenting adult.
Bro didn’t you know? We hold the power of life and death in our blood stained authoritarian hands. If we don’t
the demon rats will lose and the greater of two evils will win! The horror!
How is saying this ‘China’s going to collapse any second now I promise bro’ is dumb being MAGAt
It’s not, and those aren’t the comments myself or the person I responded to were talking about. And yes, that take is dumb.
We were talking about the tankies – in the original meaning of the word as coined by communists, not as a slur against communists in general. Authoritarianism and its apologists can get fucked. People that think we’re in a zero-sum-game where they have to offset the (legitimate) evils of “the west” by being equally disgusting and brutal while on “the left” are fucking morons and don’t deserve the title “communist”.
The British morons who coined “tankie” were wrong then and their ideological successors are wrong now
The British communists, you mean? The ones that were pissed that the Soviets were violently crushing other communists for daring to object to their oppression? The ones that coined a term for their fellow Brits out of disgust that they were cheering it on?
The Hungarian uprising? The one prominently featuring Nazi collaborators? That the one you’re so concerned about?
Nazi = National Socialist
This is what British communism was about and what British communists fought so hard to defend
You’re just being racist because you’re not respecting their culture and material conditions that shaped their unique version of communism /s
Holy shit this gave me such whiplash lmao
The Brits called themselves communists, but you’ve spoken at length about how calling yourself communist means very little.
The Brits were morons or useful idiots and, while I hate Khrushchev and view him as a revisionist, it was correct for him to put down the color revolution lead by liberal reactionaries who called themselves communists.
Even
boy got a few things right. He may have been a shitty commie but even a bad commie can put down little a fascism, as a treat.
goddamn i hate it when liberals think they’re communists
if you replace “communist” with ‘tankie’ in your anticommunist propaganda, you are still a useful idiot for the state department.
Brilliant.
I bet you’ve been keeping that dunk in your pocket for a while and you were so excited to use it, but I don’t think you understood the comment you were replying to.
That dunk is for when someone replaces one word with another to make it seem bad. The comment you replied to was pointing out that you had simply replaced the standard Western TM anticommunism with a more refined anticommunism, which you express as “anti-tankies”
you get that “tankie” and “communist” as a pejorative are functionally identical, right? Coincidentally, they’re also basically the same as “woke” as far as pejoratives go.
Where are people on this Internet forum being as disgusting and brutal as US imperialism? You know, the global hegemon, violently enforced through hybrid warfare
The Politburo’s decision to put down the revolt in Hungary prevented the countless fasicts soldiers who had just ten years ago fought for the Reich and the Arrow Cross party, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jewish people and many other’s beside, from seizing control of the country and bringing back the horrors of fascism. After the destruction of the USSR and the fall of the Eastern Block Hungary rapidly fell to Fascism once again.
Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong”, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).
The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.
The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist”. The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists”. This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.
It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different”. Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy”. And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD [5]. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts — couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.
Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.
Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.
from https://redsails.org/tankies/
Wild self admission that you consider “left wing Maga” to simply be people that do not share the same geopolitical outlook as mainstream western opinions.
You know that there are plenty of people globally, including centrists and even right wingers, that do not share the same ideology as western countries on geopolitics? Are they all “left wing Maga” now? Is any country in Africa that prefers to align with China over the USA “left wing Maga”? Are the people of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali “left wing Maga”? Are the majority of global citizens outside of the west “left wing Maga”?
This is just an extremely childish opinion to hold.
I’m sure you know a lot of these real communists and they don’t exist entirely in your head
Well, the “real world” labor movement and activism is a great way to make all kinds of friends. A lot of socialists and a few communists, given the history of the movements. They tend to be actual adults too – so very little drama.
I’m just glad I outgrew my “angsty teenage communist” phase where I was just an ass on the internet. Blindly quoting Marx with no self awareness or understanding of context. Hell, blindly quoting Marx before I realized sometimes even decent, intelligent people can have great ideas but still get parts wrong: he was a man, flawed as any of the rest of us.
Ha, could you imagine?
Levels of cap off the charts
Oh, I’m aware. There is drama to be had if that’s what you want.
The nice thing about movements is you get to pick who you work with. You get small groups that do 99% of the meaningful work and a large “groups” that are just involved to make noise, feel like they did something, and accomplish … absolutely nothing. The worst are the kind that want to raise “awareness” for something that everyone is already aware of, followed by the people that are just pissed off and can’t be bothered to do anything productive with that anger.
Stick with the former: they’re cool and they get shit done.
Cool story brah.
The fact that you’re so focused on marx is really what showing your ass here. Almost like you’re full of shit.
But also I and plenty of others do spend time organizing offline. Turns out I have the free time to both organize offline and post if I want to. Actually I suspect most anyone who does organizing has that much free time.
where would you say Marx went wrong? any particular critiques?
Well you clearly didn’t outgrow your ‘being an ass on the internet’ phase.
I outgrew my angsty teenage communism and just got a new pair two sizes up. It’s hard to follow the latest trends.
MAGA: Racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, right-wing.
Hexbear: Not racist, not xenophobic, not sexist, not homophobic, not transphobic, not right-wing.
So apparently being the opposite of MAGA makes us MAGA now, lmao.
real horseshoe theory moment
Give us some credit we’re much scarier than MAGA. We cost Hildawg her prophecied kingdom, after all!
If you’re a fan of genocides and totalitarian regimes then yeah, communists are cool.