this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
4 points (83.3% liked)

The Democratic People's Republic of Tankiejerk

892 readers
178 users here now

Dunking on Tankies from a leftist, anti-capitalist perspective.

Rules:

  1. No bigotry of any kind.
  2. No tankies or right-wingers. Liberals are allowed so long as they are aware of this
  3. No genocide denial

We allow posts about tankie behavior even off fedi, shitposts, and rational, leftist discussion.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
(page 3) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

"Russian special military operation in Ukraine is an anti-imperialist project."

"US military aid to Ukraine is an imperialist act."

Statements made by the utterly deranged.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm quick to ban communities from my feed that are political. I'm just here for the memes and tits - Not to doomscroll or argue about shit I don't understand.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

That's fair and I hope those communities continue to grow and mature. I do enjoy the good faith discussions that happen here more often than other sites myself.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I feel like no matter what instance I go to I'm probably just going to end up disliking a large chunk of the posters, because I think after 20 years of being raised online, I just fucking hate memes straight up.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

It's much easier I find in .ml to just ignore the tankies tbh. Though the bingo sheet is admittedly, very funny.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (11 children)

To be fair. "that wasn't true Communism" is true. The problem is dictatorships keep getting sold with its name. Ironically proving how hard it would be to actually achieve a world or country of communes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Communism is inherently authoritarian as it puts the needs of a social construct (in this case a "commune" or "society") over the needs, rights and freedoms of an individual. It is hard to achieve anything good with communism, because totalitarian dictatorship is the only possible outcome for any advanced enough authoritarian ideology.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Except those people prefer the Chinese and USSR style of social autocracies to actual socialist projects. Some of them even trash worker coops, although that was more true to the InfraHaz style lolcows than the tankies of lemmy...

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The only kind of Communism I'm willing to accept is the Star Trek Communism. Since then I'm pro Team "Social market economy"!

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The bolshivek revolution made it certain that any communist nation is a dictatorship. The menshiveks would have achieved better results.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The Mensheviks wouldn't have been much more different than German and French socialdemocrats who accepted capitalism. But there were other relevant left-leaning political forces during the Russian Revolution that were neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks - I wonder what happened with them?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I wonder what happened with them?

Gulag happened to them.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's the problem though. When you study revolutions you overwhelmingly find there is a group doing reforms in a civilized way after the previous government is removed. And they almost always get lined up against a wall by a power hungry asshole.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

You have to remember that your slow and patient reforms can drag their feet to the point it becomes indistinguishable from malice. That's what happened to e.g. the "socialists" who allied with the Russian provisional government and kept supporting the war against the will of the people.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i don't think "that wasn't true communism" belongs with the rest. saying Russia good , USSR good and China good requires you to pretend they are true communism, isn't that what tankies do?

i think this is more what actual leftie/communist people say about those countries because they think the authoritarian regimes don't reflect communism, not to mention the fact that Russia and China are capitalist countries in everything but name.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

saying Russia good , USSR good and China good requires you to pretend they are true communism

Russia hasn't been anything resembling Communist since perestroika and the subsequent dismantling of the USSR. Might as well call France a monarchy or complain about Japanese Imperialism.

The long struggle session over "Is China Communist?" has been tilting back in the "Enthusiastic Yes!" column for years, as Xi's abandoned the Dengist market integration strategy and increasingly put his chips on a new Third-World Export model for Chinese aid and trade (incidentally, much more in line with the USSR peace dividend strategy circa 1950s/60s). If nothing else, Xi's proposal to have a housing sector that is 30% public (up from the current 5%) would be the AES guy's wet dream.

Russia and China are capitalist countries in everything but name.

Russia after '91 spend a solid decade under the Shock Doctrine mass sell off of domestic assets. Its rapid transition to capitalism had more in common with a pillaging than any economic reform. The Russian state was never fully integrated into the European trade model. And it was always held at arms length by NATO military advisers, limiting the possibility of fully internationalized markets. After the second failed "Russian Reset" under Obama, the state has begun re-nationalized a host of traditionally private assets as multi-national industries abandoned the country.

Chinese single-party state administered economic policy - the Five Year Plan model that's been building steam since the 1950s - is about as far away from the Western Laisse-Faire model of capitalism as you can get and still plausibly cling to the name. If China is capitalist, it is doing capitalism in a way wholly alien to any Chicago School economics professor or McKinsey consultant.

You might be able to shoehorn their economies into the broad definition of profit-seeking private ownership. But in both form and function, they look radically different from a US, German, or Japanese private economy.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I think you may have missed the word "pretend" there

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›