True but only for terminally online liberals. I still haven’t heard anyone in real life ever use that word.
It will happen in a few years from now.
Bet is going to be conservatives using it to talk about anyone left to Hitler
Authoritarianism is authoritarianism. Doesnt matter how you paint it.
Not really, no. To a capitalist, all forms of leftism is ‘authoritarian,’ because they consider private property natural and oppose leftists ‘stealing’ in.
‘Authoritarianism’ just isn’t a particularly useful term because nobody who uses is is ever actually categorically opposed to forcefully compelling people to do or not do things. They will always have a build in exception for what ever they consider to be ‘legitimate authority’, and what they consider justified authority will just depend on what political philosophy they ascribe to. So really calling the word just means “someone with a different political theory to me with regards to legitimate authority.”
Just because some people might not use the term correctly doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful term
I left lemmy.ml because there were too many people defending or denying historical acts of political violence. That’s what we mean when we say tankies are authoritarian.
If you’d actually read my post, you’d know my point wasn’t about it being used “incorrectly”.
people defending or denying historical acts of political violence. That’s what we mean when we say tankies are authoritarian.
Defeating the Nazis was an act of political violence, freeing slaves was an act of political violence, over throwing the feudal system was an act of political believe, driving out colonial empires is an act of political violence, enforcing property rights is an act of political violence, ceasing the means of production is an act of political violence.
See? This is exactly, exactly what I was talking about.
I mean we both know I’m talking about specific acts of political violence, but you are right in that I should have clarified.
To be clear what makes it authoritarian is when it’s the state/government/leadership that is using acts of violence against citizens with political ideas that would threaten their power.
And tankies get the name specifically from either defending or denying that specifically the Soviet Union used violence to suppress attempts to leave their union. When I was on .ml I also frequently saw defense or denial of China using violence that way such as the infamous Tiananmen Square Massacre.
People from lemmy.ml love to shout that people who want them defederated are “capitalist” and hexbear has decided accusing people of being anti-trans is their move, but those are simply strawmen, and really poorly constructed ones at that.
Calling the 1989 incidence in Beijing the Tianenmen Square Massacre is like calling the 2021 incidence in Washington D.C. The Freedom Plaza Killings where the Democratic Party ruthlessly slaughtered innocent civilians after a peaceful protest, with the exception that the protesters in 2021 were more reasonable and less violent than the rioters in Beijing. Especially for the fact that when Washington decided to send the military in, the Jan 6 rioters, did not decide to stay and try to block the US military from entering the Capitol or Plaza.
I won’t be surprised to eventually see an actual equivalent type (demands from pro-palestine protesters for educational reforms) of protest happening in the US with far higher causalties as a result.
Are you seriously comparing the Tiananmen square massacre where at least 300 peaceful protesters/students were killed by the Chinese military to the Jan 6 riots where there were only two people killed? (Technically there were 5 deaths but three of them were either overdoses or natural causes). One was a cop killed by the rioters and another was a lady warned several times that she was going to be shot if she continued to break into the capital building.
These are not even remotely similar situations.
Wow that’s quite the revisionism there
I mean we both know I’m talking about specific acts of political violence
Yes, which was my point. These definitions always have some implicit carve out exception to allow the kind of political violence that the person giving them agrees with to “not count”.
To be clear what makes it authoritarian is when it’s the state/government/leadership that is using acts of violence against citizens with political ideas that would threaten their power.
This would include collecting taxes, enforcing national borders, enforcing private property, all gun control measures, suppressing domestic terrorists and militias, implementing a particular voting system and then enforcing the result, conscription, and indeed, enforcing the concept of “citizen” vs “non-citizens” in the first place. But, again, you’ve cut out an expectation for political violence you agree with already.
And tankies get the name specifically from either defending or denying that specifically the Soviet Union used violence to suppress attempts to leave their union.
And here’s yet another post-hoc definition of tankie that does not actually line up with how anybody uses the term. Or are you willing for me to ping you to chime in every time someone calls me a tankie for something that has nothing to do with the USSR keeping Soviets in the union (incidently, there isn’t a country on earth that will willing let parts of it leave.)
and hexbear has decided accusing people of being anti-trans is their move, but those are simply strawmen, and really poorly constructed ones at that.
Sounds like you’re a transphobe who got called out.
when it’s the state/government/leadership that is using acts of violence
So when a corporation uses or sponsors acts of violence it’s not authoritarianism? I guess Coca-Cola-funded fascist death squads are just smol bean libertarians fighting the oppressive tankie socialists!
You can’t even get your talking points in order. The main people on lemmy.ml are anti-capitalist, they would accuse those who would censor them of being anti-communist.
So when a corporation uses or sponsors acts of violence it’s not authoritarianism? I guess Coca-Cola-funded fascist death squads are just smol bean libertarians fighting the oppressive tankie socialists!
Until Coca-Cola is its a government, no, that’s not authoritarianism. That doesn’t mean it’s good. Things can be bad without being authoritarianism.
You can’t even get your talking points in order. The main people on lemmy.ml are anti-capitalist, they would accuse those who would censor them of being anti-communist.
Yeah you’re right I was caught between two phrasings and I mixed them up. I edited it to fix it. Thanks for pointing out my mistake!
Until Coca-Cola is its a government, no, that’s not authoritarianism.
Which was more authoritarian: slavery or freeing the slaves? Slaveowners were not the government, therefore, according to you, nothing they did could be considered authoritarian, right?
It seems pretty arbitrary to single out one single heirarchy and say that only that heirarchy is capable of being authoritarian.
Bwah bwah bwah what about coca cola, what about Gaza, what about south America, what about Iraq bwah bwah
The problem with tankies like yourself is that they can’t recognise that the CCP is evil, Ukraine was not full of nazis needing to be invaded and not everything is western propaganda.
The US is a fucked up evil empire, Europe has a violent colonialist past and is still doing bad shit around the world, but your Communist Utopias are just misery spreading machines on everything they touch.
Not Washington nor Beijing, but Washington
the CCP is evil, Ukraine
Do, uh, do you know which country it was that invaded Ukraine?
And tankies get the name specifically from either defending or denying that specifically the Soviet Union used violence to suppress attempts to leave their union.
I fucking knew it, Lincoln was a soviet plant all along, fucking tankies.
Tankie doesn’t really mean anything to me anymore. Even self-proclaimed tankies often have trouble defining it in a way that is consistent among leftist groups.
Tankie = derogatory term for Marxist. It’s that easy
No, and never was.
I believe in reclaiming “tankie” in the same way as “queer.” Schoolyard bullies don’t really care to distinguish between the many different labels encompassed by LGBT+, and so they inadvertently invented a term that could be very inclusive and all encompassing, even if you’re still figuring out who you are, you call always fall back on “queer” to give the general idea.
In the same way, the term “tankie” gets applied to people of all sorts of different left ideologies. There are significant differences between different leftist ideologies, but our critics don’t care to understand or distinguish between them, so I consider tankie to be a similarly inclusive term. Do you support anything that any socialist government has ever done? Do you think Cuba had an effective literacy program? Congratulations, you’re a tankie, welcome to the club.
Note that my identifying with the term isn’t really an invitation for people to use it. But, you know, if people want to keep using it as this broad, meaningless term that lumps a bunch of people together, as I see it, it only works to our advantage as “tankies,” it pushes people towards us and helps us remember what we have in common instead of fighting over our differences. So I’m not exactly going to fight the label particularly hard.
A tankie is anyone to the left of whoever is using the pejorative. Usually because they expressed a critique of imperialism or aren’t sufficiently racist towards the Chinese.
This seems to be how I see it used most. I usually stick to calling people tankies when they walk around explicitly talking about how proud they are to be one.
Anyone you see self identifying as a tankie is just fucking around because of how meaningless the term is. If you want to insult a Marxist try directly engaging with whatever it is they’re saying that annoys you. You might even learn something along the way.
Knowing Marxists, we also will never shut up lol
Yeah I’m a tankie
generally it vaguely means “communists” as well as “anti-imperialists”, with the caveat that left communists are excluded as a separate thing
I was under the impression it was the intersection of the venn diagram of communists and imperialists, as long as imperialist means imperialist (defined as using economic, military, diplomatic and cultural power to influence countries around you in a way that is beneficial to you, and may be either beneficial, inconsequential or detrimental to them) and not just “western and capitalist”
That’s generally a disagreement over what “Imperialism” even means. “Anti-Imperialists” are talking about Lenin’s identification of modern Monopoly Capitalism as it brutally expropriates wealth from the Global South through outsourcing and debt traps with the IMF, like Coke and the Columbian death squads.
Tankie always meant a fan of authoritarianism but not of the nazi variety. And hand to hand with that goes hate for America, but hate for America isn’t enough on it’s own, it should be paired with love of Strong Hand Of The East.
Tankie thinks China, Russia, North Korea are just swell, and not because of some underlying ideology, but because they have an authoritarian model of governance and generally in opposition to the west to some degree.
And that’s the reason why it’s so hard to define for some people, boiled down to it’s definition, it’s very hard to spin into something universally good, so talking to a general public they have to do what authoritarian lovers from the other side of the spectrum call “hiding the power lever”, which muddies the water.China, Russia, North Korea
Conveniently all enemies of the US State Department. Don’t those tankies know that these countries are bad because checks notes they do the authoritarianisms.
Countries that do authitarianism become bad, yes. That’s exactly how it works, glad you’re getting it.
I can’t believe anyone would enforce class interests with violence, instead of debating tenants out of houses they’re in arrears for. Smh
On some level when you’re doing sophistry like this do you understand you’re acting real stupid?
What’s authoritarianism, and how does a country do it?
Seriously?
its the one with the… and they have ttank, with… the one with ehe tan, you takn. rhe tanker. tabker is the with the
Posting in a thread that will have 300 comments and 20 visible on hexbear
Probably for the best because if you click through to the .ml version you get worlders saying things like
I dunno, I perceive it more as a letft wing term for left-extremist fascists
Words mean nothing to these people lmao
It’s a very silly place here.
.ml is the best instance because you get to see the comments from all other instances
That also makes it a very draining instance where there is constant skirmishing, but the plus side is that it’s a good frontier to try to push Leftist ideals for other instances to see.
It provides a good balance between seeing mainstream right wing opinions without having to deal with full on Republican fascists.
Not being in an echo chamber helps to keep us grounded to what the layman CNN watcher believes.
Sure, but discussing the same points day after day is frequently unproductive. Hexbear and Lemmygrad, as an example, can be seen as an “echo-chamber” within the context of Lemmy, but Lemmy itself exists in the context of a western-dominated internet. It’s rare that a liberal wandering into Lemmy.ml brings a new argument to the table unheard of by leftists in their daily lives going against the grain.
The benefit of such “echo chambers” is that there’s potential for higher understanding and discussion. I’m not going to find nuanced discusdion of, say, Marx’s Law of Value or Dialectical and Historical Materialism here as applied to current events. There’s opportunity to give the briefest overview to visitors here, but such topics require being a particular nerd for Leftist politics and theory as well as reading more in-depth than Lemmy conversations can provide.
Where are you seeing these right wing opinions? I batangas haven’t seen any since wolfballs dropped
.world is full of them.
The best instance is subjective to the user. That’s why the fediverse is so rad, people can join whichever digital commune that best reflects their values.
Some people like bowling with the little gutter bumpers raised up. Some like to throw bowling balls into the wall to see how many holes they can make. Something for everyone!
– and they both punch left; exactly as conservatives like to do.
I consider tankies to be on the right end of the socialist spectrum, so when I say it I’m punching right. They’re still comrades even if they are miss guided by state-capitalist governments. Cheers
Call it whatever the fuck you want. It’s working 100 million times better than this shit we’re doing. It’s lead to the most rapid increase of quality of life in human history for it’s people. Do you really think they care what you think about their government not being socialist enough?
Poverty is not socialism. To uphold socialism, a socialism that is to be superior to capitalism, it is imperative first and foremost to eliminate poverty.
Do you believe there has ever been a socialist state, even one?
Lemmygrad admin here. I normally don’t look at reports from other instances but for this I had to make an exception. Probably the dumbest shit I have read so far lmao.
What did the report say? Lmao
Reason: “state capitalist”
Hence my reply:
Because the Chinese state has fiat monetary sovereignty, it doesn’t function in the capitalist mode. It has no need to make a profit because it has infinite money[1]. It doesn’t need to extract surplus value from workers to satisfy investors, and it doesn’t even need to break even. The logic of capitalism doesn’t apply.
I think if you’re comparing “degrees” of left vs right, at that point you’re missing the forest for the trees. Ultimately, Anarchists and Marxists disagree on strategy and end goal, but both oppose Capitalism and Imperialism. At that point, there really isn’t a “more” or “less” left, there’s just differences in analysis and what must be done to get from A to B, as well as what B itself is.
Cheers
Personally I’ve found that bashing myself in the head with the book is just as effective as reading it
Cheerze
I love it when people call a transitional economy state capitalist because it betrays a lack of understanding of actually existing capitalism and the role the state plays in it.
If you’re one of those people who just considers “tankie” to be a synonym for “Marxist-leninist” then I suppose I agree, but I think the term is used too nebulously to meaningfully place on the political spectrum.
V I B E S B A S E D A N A L Y S I S
They’re still comrades even if they are miss guided
This is unironically the nicest and most reconciliatory anti-tank post I’ve ever seen. We have different assessments but neither of us are writing off the other as stupid or an LLM, which is actually a breath of fresh air. The bar for political discourse may be in hell these days, but I still appreciate your clearing it.
As for where our views diverge, I would like to understand the nature of the divergence. I guess my main question is: what decides your ideology’s position on the spectrum?
Because the Chinese state has fiat monetary sovereignty, it doesn’t function in the capitalist mode. It has no need to make a profit because it has infinite money[1]. It doesn’t need to extract surplus value from workers to satisfy investors, and it doesn’t even need to break even. The logic of capitalism doesn’t apply.
Truly. Any moderate support for AES? Immediately labeled a tankie, I’ve seen Anarchists and even Liberals labeled a tankie. The term only exists to punch left from the Liberal POV, just like “Woke” is used to punch anything left of fascism.
Any moderate support for a non-US aligned capitalist country as well
What are you referring to with “AES”? (I only know it as an encryption method and Google ain’t helping)
Actually Existing Socialism. Cuba, China, Vietnam, the former USSR, etc.
Tank you very much
“Liberal” is just
I’m not into that authoritarian stuff. Worshipping a fascist authoritarian state is not a leftist make.
Communism and fascism are entirely different, and conflating the two has roots in Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi Apologia. The Nazis industrialized murder and attempted to colonize the world, the Soviets uplifted the Proletariat and supported national liberation movements such as in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Palestine. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.
If you look at the holodomor I think it’s hard to continue painting the Soviet Union as having uplifted the proletariat. Soviets starved their people to achieve rapid industrialization - a tradeoff that most of those who died would probably not have agreed with. IIRC most historians say that collectivization was a horrible failure and was not good for the working class.
First hand accounts of life during stalinism make it clear that people had to develop weird mannerisms to avoid making it seem like they were disloyal/anti-party; basically everyone walking on eggshells all the time.
What most historians agree on is that the famine happened, and that collectivization was botched. Kulaks burning their crops and killing their livestock, rather than handing it over, certainly accelerated the issue. However, outside of World War 2, where the Nazis took Ukraine (the USSR’s breadbasket), this was the last famine, and as such life expectancy doubled. I am sure that if anyone could go back in time and prevent the famine from happening, they would. The fact that famine went from common and regular to stable food supplies and no more going hungry is an important one.
Moreover, again, this is just one aspect of a country where the working class saw free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, a dramatic lowering of wealth inequality with a dramatic raising in wealth, doubled life expectancy, lower retirement ages than the US from the State, women participating in the highest rungs of government, and more cannot be erased either.
Taken in total, again, there wasn’t a country better for the working class in the 20th century, certainly none that did not owe part of their existance to the support recieved from the Soviets, like Cuba and China. There were many far worse, such as the US Empire and Nazi Germany, and the Soviets opposed both.
*there wasn’t a country better for the working class that survived
Imo you can’t just ignore all the people who died as a result of the rapid industrialization and collectivization. And how great is your life if you have to change everything about what you say and how you act just to appease party officials?
I don’t want to ignore all the great things that happened during the Soviet era. I think you’re right about better access to education and many of these other things, but there are so many asterisks.
I argue that the same things could have been achieved without collectivization and without so much political violence. Social support programs are great, but they should be available to everyone, regardless of how much you support the prevailing political party.
And just how sure are you that Stalin would have gone back in time to prevent the Holodomor? I’m unconvinced - it quelled an inconvenient uprising.
I am not ignoring collectivization. I am noting that it ended famine in a country that had regular famines. I believe collectivization could have been done better, but industrialization of farming had to be done to stop famine regardless, be it Capitalist or Socialist.
As for the hundreds of millions that got to live to their 70s vs dying in their 30s thanks to Soviet Policy, I think they were quite happy to not be dying en masse. They didn’t have to change everything just to appease party officials.
As for whether or not these huge expansions in worker rights could have been achieved without Socialism, I believe the answer is no. The Soviets were the first to give such sweeping safety nets, and the Capitalist countries that expanded theirs did so in response as revolution became increasingly popular. Now that the USSR has fallen, these safety nets are eroding over time. Read Consessions. And yes, these were given to everyone, even immigrants without citizenship (including the right to vote if they worked there as well).
As for Stalin, here is archival evidence suggesting that he would rather not have had the famines happen. I’m not defending everything Stalin did, of course, but purely calling this point into question:
From: Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.
Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.
The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine.
Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee – J. STALIN
Letter to Joseph Stalin from Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine regarding the course and the perspectives of the sowing campaign in Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
There are also isolated cases of starvation, and even whole villages [starving]; however, this is only the result of bungling on the local level, deviations [from the party line], especially in regard of kolkhozes. All rumours about “famine” in Ukraine must be unconditionally rejected. The crucial help that was provided for Ukraine will give us the opportunity to eradicate all such outbreaks [of starvation].
Letter from Joseph Stalin to Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
Comrade Kosior!
You must read attached summaries. Judging by this information, it looks like the Soviet authority has ceased to exist in some areas of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Can this be true? Is the situation invillages in Ukraine this bad? Where are the operatives of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate], what are they doing?
Could you verify this information and inform the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party about taken measures.
Sincerely, J. Stalin
Basically, the Ukranian Communists appeared to havw tried to save face and lied about how bad the situation was. You could chalk this up to fear of Stalin or whatever, but it seems pretty clear that Stalin was anti-famine.
What in the everlasting embrace of god. Soviets, who - I’ll admit - simply chose to work people to death painted as the good guys? The same soviets that starved, beaten and let people freeze to death? The same that put people in cattle wagons and rode them out to syberia in nothing more than clothes they had on their backs?
The USSR was perhaps the single most progressive movement in the entire 20th century. It was not free from flaw, of course not, but in total it was a massive leap forward for the Working Class not only within the Soviet Union, but its very existence forced western countries to adopt expanded social safety nets (along with the efforts of leftist organizers within these countries).
From a brutal, impoverished backwater country barely industrialized, to beating the United States into space, in 50 years. Mid 30s life expectancies due to constant starvation, homelessness, and outright murder from the Tsarist Regime, doubled to the 70s very quickly. Literacy rates from the 20s and 30s to 99.9%, more than Western Nations. All of this in a single generation.
Wealth disparity shrank, while productivity growth was one of the highest in the 20th century:
Supported liberation movements in Cuba, Palestine, Algeria, Korea, China, Palestine, and more. Ensured free, and high quality healthcare and education for all. Lower retirement ages than the US, 55 for women and 60 for men. Legalized, free abortion. Full employment, and no recessions outside of World War 2. Defeated the Nazis with 80% of the combat in the entire European theater. Supported armistice treaties that the US continuously denied.
The bad guys won the Cold War, and they did so by forcing the USSR to spend a huge amount of their resources on keeping up millitarily, as the United States had much more resources and could deal with it that way.
I’d have to challenge that “the bad guys won the Cold War” rhetoric. If the USSR was as successful as your argument claims, why did so many Soviet republics seek independence?
The answer is that most didn’t seek independence originally. The referendum on the preservation of the USSR, shortly before its dissolution, wanted it to persist. in looking at Soviet Nostalgia, most say they were better off under Socialism than Capitalism and say the dissolution was a bad thing.
Moreover, it directly compares, say, the Soviet treatment of Estonia with the fascist slaver regime over Cuba that the Soviets helped overthrow, or the Israeli treatment of Palestinians via genocide. It equates what can’t be equated. Further, that means that the US Confederacy should have been allowed to leave purely on the basis of wanting to. It’s not a real point, it’s cheap.
If you keep going with Blackshirts and Reds, it gets to the events surrounding its dissolution, such as the botched coup attempt, liberalization in order to try to make up for spending so many resources on the Cold War, and more, though not a full picture. If you genuinely want to know more after you finish Blackshirts, I recommend Parenti’s 1986 lecture, which is even more entertaining because Parenti is a fantastic and passionate speaker. I’d throw on Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies Work? as an additional articls, around 30 minutes to read, going over the merits of the Soviet Economy and why it was dissolved.
All of that is well and good, but not enough to say that the Soviets were the good side. It’s also necessary to truly look at how disgustingly evil the United States is, and for that I recommend the podcast Blowback. If you listen to Blowback, there will be nothing but hatred and disgust of the highest order for the United States, from lying about WMDs to thoroughly destroy Iraq, to dropping more bombs on Korea than in the entire Pacific Front of World War 2, to countless war crimes intentionally done to make populations suffer and no longer support their governments just to make it stop.
Okay, so I’ve got a couple of issues with your response. First of all, the referendum only polled 9 out of the 15 republics. The other six boycotted it since they were already pushing for independence. Moreover, within months, nearly every republic declared full independence. If they truly didn’t want to secede from the USSR, would they have declared independence?
Secondly, I don’t think nostalgia is a good gauge of what people want. Individuals have a tendency to romanticize the past especially during hard times. For example, many citizens of African countries revel in reminiscing about the colonial era due to economic hardships faced today. Is that what they truly want? Probably not. It is usually due to poor knowledge of colonial history that they have these sentiments.
Furthermore, I’m well aware that the US is a despicable country, and my increasing knowledge about its history only fuels my hatred of it, but you’re bordering on whataboutism if the standard for the most progressive movement of the 20th century is being “not as bad as the US” which is a pretty low bar.
Edit: You can’t compare the confederacy - a slave-owning rebellion fighting to preserve human bondage to the soviet republics - nations seeking independence from an authoritarian superstate. If you really want to compare the USSR with the US civil war, it would be better to compare it to the 13 colonies fighting for independence from the British crown.
Besides, you still didn’t address the core argument: If Soviet rule was truly beneficial, why did so many nations (at least 5) risk war and economic collapse to escape it?
The small few that were boycotting it each deserve more investigation than a single Lemmy comment thread. The simplest answer is that they had reactionary, sometimes fascist rising nationalist movements. It isn’t sufficient to say that they boycotted it, therefore the USSR was evil, it’s more accurate to say that it needs investigation. I can’t do the intricacies of their nationalist movements any justice in a Lemmy thread other than telling you that they exist.
Secondly, yes, they did vote to leave months later. The mess with the botched coup, the existence of a weird new political position that stood against the Soviet balance of power in a way that messed up the economy (long story as well), and privatization had already been at play and came to a head months later. The USSR didn’t collapse so much as it was killed.
As for Soviet Nostalgia, that’s just the term. Look at the polling data, the questions specifically ask about economic situations or if it was bad that the Soviet Union fell. These numbers are more positive among older populations that actually lived there, times are harder now for most post-Soviet states. After the fall, an estimated 7 million people died due to the collapse of social safety nets and the destruction of the economy. Capitalism was and is disastrous for these nations, whose metrics are only just now approaching their Soviet Levels, such as life expectancy, while metrics like wealth disparity and poverty are massive.
What chapter are you on in Blackshirts? They get into almost all of this in deeper detail.
As for US bad, I’ll ask you to name a more influential country than the US or the USSR during the 20th century. In terms of sheer impact, the USSR was by far the most progressive. The alternative? A genocidal Empire that tried to crush the Soviets at every chance, and ultimately succeeded. It isn’t just a “low bar,” the United States is perhaps the single most evil country to ever exist outside of Nazi Germany, and the Soviets opposed both.
For the same reasons California or Texas keep entertaining independence ballot initiatives every 4 years; internal politics.
The USSR’s republics didn’t just debate independence, they actually left. If it was just “internal politics,” why did every non-Russian republic take the first opportunity to break away?
The Texas/California comparison is a weak false equivalence. The USSR suppressed nationalist movements (read on the Hungarian Revolution), while the U.S. allows open political discourse.
It’s the only equivalency there can be between the two countries; unlike the Soviet Union, the United States was not formed by colonial absorbtion of neighboring nations. The closest thing there is, is the Mexican land grab in the 19th century and Europe has a long history of nationalist movements being suppressed, so the Soviet Union is not unique in that regard.
And, just like the USSR, the US has a track record of not allowing political discourse that threatens its hegemony; the Black Panthers, Pinochet, and Cuba are probably the most glaring examples.
Did they support liberation movements in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland etc etc?
Bit of a cheap pivot, isn’t that? Not all nationalist movements are good, many are highly reactionary, even fascist in nature. On the whole, Soviet foreign policy was cleary in the interests of the working class, from helping Cuban workers liberate themselves from the fascist Batista regime, to helping Algeria throw off the colonizing French, to helping Palestinians resisting genocide, to assisting China with throwing off the Nationalists and Imperialist Japan.
Moreover, it directly compares, say, the Soviet treatment of Estonia with the fascist slaver regime over Cuba that the Soviets helped overthrow, or the Israeli treatment of Palestinians via genocide. It equates what can’t be equated. Further, that means that the US Confederacy should have been allowed to leave purely on the basis of wanting to. It’s not a real point, it’s cheap.
Really? Cheap pivot?
USSR walked into Poland to “save” it, shot it in the back, started massive executions of polish people, cooperated with Nazi Germany, stole most of resources, glorified brutalizing people, forced glorification of Lenin, made everyone stand for hours in lines to get basic products like flour or meat, made everyone distrust everyone because, their armies seen civilians as playthings with a little better approach to farm families…
I do not claim USSR had only bad influence. But there is no way in hell anybody who knows history can call them good guys. They had their own agenda.
And yeah, they marched against Nazi’s and won, but when was that? Ah, yes, only after Nazis betrayed them and failed. From this point onward, it was great way to make other countries back off from USSR whille making sure Nazis - already weakened by failed invastion of USSR and constant war with UK, USA and rebels - won’t be able to reorganize and strike again.
There’s a lot of historical inaccuracy here.
- The Soviets tried several times to form an alliance with Britain and France against the Nazis prior to the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression treaty. The west, of course, denied it, as they were friendly with the Nazis. The Soviets hated the Nazis, and the Communists in Germany were the first the Nazis killed, and saw an enemy in “judeo-bolshevism.”
Harry Truman had this to say:
If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.
-
Poland. The Nazis invaded Poland, and then the Soviets waited and tried to get the Western Powers involved. They did not, so weeks later the Soviets went in to prevent the Nazis from taking all of Poland. Of course, the Polish people saw the Soviets as aggressors, but at the time the Polish government had already collapsed, there remained nothing more than to be overtaken by the Nazis.
-
Social services. I think it’s very silly to complain about feeding those who need it. There were stores, and there were farms as well, and to fill in the gap there were social services. The US has also had Bread Lines, this isn’t an especially evil thing to do. Moreover, the Soviet Economy had stable and unceasing growth until its dissolution, outside of World War 2, despite having 50% of dwellings destroyed by the genocidal Nazis.
-
No idea what you mean by “made everyone distrust everyone.”
-
Again, the Soviets and Nazis hated each other from day 1. Read Blackshirts and Reds, you only need the first couple of chapters in an already short read.
Soviets also played a big role in helping India achieve independence which is one major reason why relations between India and Russia are so good to this day. https://actofdefiance.wordpress.com/2022/09/05/soviet-support-for-indian-independence/
I don’t think it’s a cheap pivot at all. If you want to say “look at all these places where the people there wanted freedom!” While completely ignoring that they were violently surpressing those same scenarios within their own annexed territories? That’s just willful blindness.
How familiar are you with, for example, Estonian nationalism? How familiar are you with its treatment within the USSR? These were not at all the same conditions as, say, Algeria.
Not my fault people are conflating them
It is, because “authoritarian” is a nebulous word not based on any actually reality, used to try to refer to both the USSR and Nazi Germany as if they are similar in any way.
Words don’t have meanings!
China, Russia and the US are all authoritarian states and none of them are your friends. Why is it controversial for me to say people should not worship or prop up states that only wish to subjugate their citizens to hoard power to a select few of elites?
Conflating this belief with Nazism or Holocaust trivialization is ridiculous, dishonest and juvenile.
Any flavor of authoritarianism is bad. Full stop.
China, Russia and the US are all authoritarian states and none of them are your friends
I guess it would be hard to be friends with a country, it’s quite big… with lots of people.
Jokes aside, this is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. You’re more concerned with sounding like a good person rather than investigating the truth. Using the word authoritarian, just like how many liberals use the word totalitarian or tankie, is just a way to generate self-flattering, psuedo-intellectual discussions based on pure idealism.
deleted by creator
Everyone I Don’t Like is Authoritarian: A Guide to Online Political Discourse
Big brain time
I did a le maymay on the Internet. I am le smarts.
You sure pwned me. I’ll concede to your infinite intellect. I know when I’m bested.
I know when I’m bested.
This is not true
Can you name a single non-“authoritarian” state, please?
The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.
The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.
What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.
Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China,
The fundamental disagreement lies here. The Chinese government does not serve the working class. Modern China is not a communist state and suffers the exact same problems the US suffers from.
The exact same problems
Modern China is not a communist state and suffers the exact same problems the US suffers from.
Good thing you mentioned modern China since obviously the warlord era of China was obviously better. It all went downhill since the Xia dynasty.
The fundamental disagreement lies in your shameful ignorance of the subject you’re attempting to provide opinions on. Modern China is a socialist state where the working class holds power, but capitalist relations have not yet been abolished. That’s what socialism is, it’s a transitional state between capitalism and communism.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
None of these things happen in capitalist states, and we can make a direct comparison with India which follows capitalist path of development. In fact, without China there practically would be no poverty reduction happening in the world.
If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty
The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty
As a result, even as mainstream western media openly admits, Chinese government enjoys broad public trust and support:
- https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
- https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230511041927/https://6389062.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6389062/Canva images/Democracy Perception Index 2023.pdf
- https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-say-people-98686
- https://web.archive.org/web/20201229132410/https://en.news-front.info/2020/06/27/studies-have-shown-that-china-is-more-democratic-than-the-united-states-russia-is-nearby-and-ukraine-is-at-the-bottom/
https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/
Time for some learnin’
You conflated them, though. It may not be originally your fault, though, that dishonor goes to figures like Joseph Goebbels.
Do MLs consider anarchists liberals now?
No, but a lot of liberals consider themselves anarchists.
Anarchists tend to be smart enough to not use the word tankie.
There are exceptions of course.
That’s been my only exposure to the term, is hearing/seeing anarchists say it. Do liberals really use that term?
Liberals do use it since “commie” lost its zing. Go to any reddit thread where somebody is speaking sense and there’ll be a liberal going “don’t listen to him, I saw his history and he’s a tankie”, likewise with any Facebook thread when some blue no matter who page says something profoundly silly
Generally not. Anarchists and Marxists want separate goals and have separate means, but Liberalism is a separate ideology.
I’m aware, I’ve just never heard/seen a liberal use the word “tankie”- though I don’t often expose myself to liberals… Are libs actually using that word now? I would literally laugh out loud at the hypocrisy if I witnessed that
Go to lemmy world. Any political comm. Or check in on reddit.
Don’t go to Reddit, even to prove a point. It’s a very silly place.
I block every liberal with a shit take I come across (like 200 .world users so far lol) so that could explain why I haven’t seen it much
I’ve seen many I definitely don’t think are Anarchists use it, and I’ve even seen Anarchists and Liberals get labeled “tankies.” It’s a generic term used like BadEmpanada is referring to, a largely meaningless catch-all for Leftists.
That is whack; thanks for sharing
No problem. There are many on Lemmy.world for sure who use it that way, same with Reddit.
That would be silly but tankie is also a silly term.
Are a anarcho-capitalists considered anarchists here?
No, Anarcho-Capitalism is a deeply unserious ideology that doesn’t even understand Capitalism well enough to understand that it can’t exist at any significant length of time without a state enshrining Private Property Rights.
Do people genuinely take badempanada seriously?
He starts a lot of shit, but dammit if he isn’t right most of the time.
Shut up, tankie!
The conversation around “tankies” reminds me heavily of “neolibs” - loosely defined in the minds of the folks discussing them. Basically a catch-all term for your own idea of what a liberal outgroup should be.
[Referring to the Tiananmen Square Massacre] We (at least many of us) have read the sources that have been linked. What is described there, particularly the accounts of people who were there, is what we assert is what happened. In the few instances where there may be contradictory first hand accounts (and mostly, the accounts are not contradictory but rather corroborate each other) there may be some ambiguity. But even taking that into account, it is ridiculous and downright ahistorical to say “Chinese authorities massacred people.”
This is from a conversation with the kind of people I would consider “tankies”. It’s from a community I think has since been deleted, but the general vibe of the comments in the post was that the Tiananmen Square massacre isn’t a real thing and any civilian deaths were actually justified.
You consider tankies to be people who have actually dug into the sources and done enough research to come to their own conclusion rather than just accepting the cold war narrative without question?
I consider tankies to be people that are incapable or unwilling to admit that China or whoever else massacred their people.
You consider tankies to be people who have actually dug into the sources and done enough research to come to their own conclusion rather than just accepting the cold war narrative without question?
I dunno, I perceive it more as a letft wing term for left-extremist fascists
Communism and Fascism are entirely different, and purely antagonistic. I suggest reading Blackshirts and Reds.
I think they’re reffering to the extremely authoritarian elements
First, “authoritarianism” is a nebulous term itself, the Communists had developed models of Democracy you can read about in Soviet Democracy, by Pat Sloan. The Communists were “authoritarian” towards the Bourgeoisie, and had democratized and uplifted the Proletariat and Peasantry.
Second, fascism isn’t just a synonym for “authoritarianism,” that takes an already nebulous term and further mystifies it. Fascism has always served the interests of the Bourgeoisie, which is why until the Nazis started attempting to colonize Western Europe (and even after in some cases like Ford), Western Countries were quite friendly towards Hitler (despite Leftists protesting).
When directly equating fascism and Communism, you drastically misrepresent the purpose of each and who they serve, and make it difficult to figure out how to stop fascism itself. It is, in fact, the Communists who have been history’s most effective anti-fascists, and the fascists who have been history’s most brutal anti-communists.
Fascism is also antagonistic to other fascism once it served it’s purpose. See a good chunk of the night of long knives.
That doesn’t mean the target of fascism is fascism, though, so I’m not sure what that adds. In the Night of Long Knives, the Nazis purged the millitant labor organizers that they had used to purge the Communists beforehand, as these right-wing labor organizers were beginning to take on a leftward character and served to risk the overall purposes of the Nazi movement, violent suppression of leftward movement in a country at risk of Communist revolution. They were used like tools and discarded as such.
I mean the target of one’s fascism is not the same fascism. It’s one that is arbitrarily less “correct”. For example the Slovenian fascists turned on the Germans, and the Germans turned on Vichy as soon as it suited them. My point was being “antagonistic” to fascist groups doesn’t mean you “cannot” be one. It is correct they did turn on their leftmost group after they’d served there purpose. They still (wrongly) called themselves socialist afterwards though. I wonder if anyone else could have done that.
Hitler proudly claimed to have “stolen Socialism from the Marxists,” meanwhile the Soviets and Nazis hated each other. The Soviets held to Marxism and worked to uplift the Proletariat, while the Nazis held to an incoherent ideology only explainable by what it served, wealthy Capitalists.
Again, calling things “fascism” that don’t meet the definition just obfuscates what you’re trying to talk about.
I completely agree with what you said about Hitler. In fact, even worse. His stealing of the word socialism for his own purposes did major damage to the concept people had of socialism. Calling a system that exploits workers and laborers socialism, when the whole idea was to put the workers in charge, damages the idea in people’s minds.
The biggest damage Hitler and the Nazis did was stop a genuine Communist revolution within Germany. Had Germany genuinely gone Socialist, it’s very likely other highly developed Capitalist countries would have had revolutions as well, and not just the underdeveloped countries like Cuba, China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, etc. Had Western Europe gone largely Communist, only the US would really stand as a bulwark of Capitalism, separated by the Ocean, at which point it would have been only a matter of time.
That’s not even to mention that the Holocaust would have been stopped before it happened, and the USSR wouldn’t have had half of its dwellings destroyed by the Nazi invasion. The Soviets would not have had to focus so much on rebuilding, and likely would not have had to spend so much of their overall GDP on Millitary R&D to keep the United States at bay during the Cold War, crippling their economic growth and eventually leading to dissolution.
Israel as a genocidal project would likely not exist either. Palestine would be free.
I can’t understate how different history would look today had the Communists succeded in Germany.
Hey, just so you know for when you make decisions in the future, calling socialist states fascists is rooted in double genocide theory.
This Wikipedia article has a good list of sources about double genocide theory and how it serves to trivialize and obscure the holocaust: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory
