Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this.
halm@leminal.space 1 year ago
Just to weigh in here with a bit of political nuance — “tankies” are certainly defined by their leftist politics, but moreso by their apologist defense of regimes that more or less transparently use socialist or communist maxims as a cover for state capitalism or straight out autocracy.
Tankies may be the loudest voices to claim themselves Marxist or socialist, but please don’t mistake them as actually representing those ideologies truthfully or completely. Personally, I see tankies as more indebted to a cold war-style school of Soviet dogma transplanted to current autocracies. Marx and Trotsky would have rolled their eyes at either.
This is why it's so frustrating, because tankies being overrepresented in online leftist spaces is one of the things which harms the acceptance of leftist ideals more than most of their imperialist windmills.
People aren't scared away from socialism by economic democracy, egalitarianism or radical direct action. They are scared away by confrontational and aggressive tankies defending tyrants, who seem to care more about relitigating random cold war drama than lifting up workers.
The Hexbear and .ml instances aren’t really tankies/communists, IMHO. Some of them, sure, but mostly it’s just a facade for their propaganda.
A “tankie” isn’t the same as a communist.
A “tankie” is someone that takes China’s side (the tanks) in that famous picture of Tiananmen square.
Being a “tankie” is using communism as a facade for authoritarian governments where a small group of “upper party members” are essentially oligarchs.
They’re not truly communists, but wouldn’t they still be truly tankies then? Especially in the most literal sense of denying that the Tiananmen Square massacre even took place (or that anyone died from it, or that… whatever other BS interpretation the particular magat tanky you may read it from chooses to subscribe to)?
I think they’re paid to spread disinformation (or run LLMs that spread it) that makes “the West” look bad and their authoritarian leaders (CCP, Kremlin) look good.
So if someone mentions Tiananmen Square they delete it or lie about it, or say “what about Mk ultra,” but not because they actually believe in anything other than getting paid.
Never underestimate the utility of a useful idiot, who will do it for free ™.
Though I will add that the West also does a fantastic job, at making itself look bad:-). In large part by actually being thus:-).
Though also the West tends to be fairly open about that - e.g. here’s a segment from the Wikipedia page for Christopher Columbus:
Some historians have criticized Columbus for initiating the widespread colonization of the Americas and for abusing its native population.[300][114][301][302] On St. Croix, Columbus’s friend Michele da Cuneo—according to his own account—kept an indigenous woman he captured, whom Columbus “gave to [him]”, then brutally raped her.[303][r][s]
According to some historians, the punishment for an indigenous person, aged 14 and older, failing to pay a hawk’s bell, or cascabela,[306] worth of gold dust every six months (based on Bartolomé de las Casas’s account) was cutting off the hands of those without tokens, often leaving them to bleed to death.[296][114][307]
So our sins tend to be on full public view - Donald Trump’s suing anyone who criticizes him in order to shut them up notwithstanding - while in contrast, try saying something like “the Tiananmen Square massacre happened”, and see how fast you get banned from Lemmy.ml. They are not the same! (the badness of The West that acknowledges errors yet does nothing whatsoever to counteract them, vs. tankies who don’t even seem to be aware of the simplest of basic facts!)
Anyway, be advised that we must stop this conversation here - the last time I even so much as questioned whether Dessalines was receiving money from the Chinese government (as someone said, which I included an exact URL to iirc) or the Russian one, to develop the Lemmy codebase (nothing necessarily nefarious there by itself - grants should be sought out, no?), my comments were removed. In fact, I only have 3 comments removed across the entire Fediverse for the past 10 months that I’ve had this account, and all 3 were removed for talking negatively about Lemmy.ml. i.e. this conversation is not on lemm.ee that welcomes a diversity of ideas - we are at risk right now of being removed just for what we’ve said so far. So, I guess, if you want to criticize them further, don’t spend too much time typing it all out I suppose:-).
Unfortunately they take the mic and poison the conversation. Imo they hold back progressive adoption/discussion.
I don’t disagree, therefore the attempt to disentangle the actual ideologies from the totalitarian stans who got stuck on '80s propaganda.
Yeah, a little suspect OP’s account is a week old with barely double digit posts/comments if you combine them and most are from this post…
I’m guessing their favorite (of many) accounts got blocked by .ml, so now they don’t want anyone going there.
I don’t get the .ml drama tho, never. I realized it was a silly place long ago, so I blocked the whole instance.
I did the same for a couple others. It takes like two seconds.
Who cares if it has bigger communities than others? If that’s all I cared about I’d still be on Reddit
I think a lot or people (like OP) can’t drop this mindset because they’re not on the fediverse willinging. It’s probably the only social media site where IP bans aren’t a thing. So people IP banned from the big ones, are gonna trickle down here and do dumb drama hunting shit like OP.
Yes, I hate to be “no true Scotsman”, but they are not actually leftists, just fan of a few dictatorships, some of which claim or used to claim to be socialist.
Eh, I disagree. Left isn’t “when good,” right isn’t “when bad.” There are bad leftists, and you’re looking at them, right there on .ml, grad, and hexbear. These morons actually believe not only that “those states would have dissolved themselves given the opportunity if it wasn’t for ‘western interference,’” they also have such hubris to believe that if they tried the same thing they’d actually achieve what none of them did in the past. They can’t grasp that their autocrats would never cede power either to usher in Communist Utopia™.
It’s worth noting that when a Marxist says “stateless,” they don’t mean “governmentless.” The Marxist theory of the state surrounds classes, while the Anarchist theory of the state surrounds hierarchy.
When an Anarchist says they want a stateless society, they envision a complex web of horizontal communes, networks of mutual aid, like a spiderweb.
When a Marxist says they want a stateless society, they envision a world Socialist republic that has managed to fully absorb all private property into the public sector, which no AES state has managed to accomplish thus far.
The idea that Marxists are advocating Socialist states to dissolve into Anarchism is wrong, nobody claims that. What Marxists claim is that their notion of the state will wither away, leaving a classless government.
Right, and both of these ideas represent the same form of flawed modernist structuralism which has been largely supplanted by more contemporary theories which take a more pragmatic view on harm reduction as an iterative process in pursuit of post scarcity materialism. The entire problem is that so many MLs immediately reject any form of leftist revisionism which doesn't mesh with, questions, or even dares to reject the authoritarian traditions of Mao or Stalin as some kind of capitalist conspiracy which has infested western academia. This is as ridiculous as it is ignorant and seems to betray their underlying motivation not as one which seeks to uplift workers, but one which seems obsessed with some long defunct geopolitical rivalry. It's exhausting, and frequently very stupid, despite these people believing that they are some collective political ubermensch.
Actually users on .ml, hexbear, and thank god I’m able to avoid grad but probably them too, claim exactly that all the time. Might want to teach your own commerades instead of me, комиссар.
No, completely fair point! I think on a platform with a lot of Americans (currently locked in an election where many seem to consider the centrist candidate “too far left”) it’s good to call out the differences on the left that aren’t otherwise discerned.
I don’t want to spiral this out of control, but I do think you might be interested in Why do Marxists fail to Bring the “Worker’s Paradise?” as well as Why Public Property? The former is a critical examination of why states guided by Marxism haven’t been worker utopias from the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist, the latter is an exploration of why Marx believed Socialism to overtake Capitalism. It isn’t a moral argument, rather, as markets consolidate into monopolist syndicates devoid of competition, they make themselves ripe for public ownership and central planning.
What is Socialism? is also good, it goes over the various arguments between different strains of Marxism over what can be considered Socialist, but at this point I think I’ve recommended far more than enough articles. Really, the first one about “Worker’s Paradises” is the one I think you’d find the most interesting.
Sure, those [Medium posts all by the same author that I’ve never heard of] look interesting enough at a glance — but I’ll admit to only skimming them, and I’m not going to go any further down one random, person’s online ruminations. Thanks for the offer, though.
I tend to recommend their posts because they are written in modern lingo and in the last decade, so there’s specifically modern analysis there. I recommend Marx, Engels, etc. frequently as well, but a lot of their writing is several times longer and as such several times less likely to be read by people I recommend them to, perhaps with the exception of Engels’ The Principles of Communism, which is a great and to-the-point intro to Marxism.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
halm@leminal.space 1 year ago
Whether you’re talking about Russia or China here, both of those countries have massive resources, both natural and in terms of population. I’d argue that they didn’t have to look for (other) third world countries to ruin; they had plenty of area and people of their own to turn to.
Also, a Lemmy ML user charging into the comments to defend state capitalism in oppressive regimes kinda proves my point.
zbyte64@awful.systems 1 year ago
You have a sales pitch that works for the poorest countries, what do you have for the wealthiest?
Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
But can they hit the dismount back to communism?