Authoritarianism won’t be given up to transition. What a brain dead take
That’s the part I can never understand.
Granted that some number of them are undoubtedly just astroturfing for authoritarians, some significant number of them seem to be sincere, so it has to be the case that they actually believe that authority can be institutionalized for a limited time to serve limited ends, then eliminated when it’s served those ends.
How? How can anyone be so hopelessly naive or delusional to actually believe that? Particularly when history has shown the exact opposite without exception?
To me, they’re as inexplicably nuts as the flat-earthers.
I think they neither understand how authoritarean states manage to stay in power, nor how even discounting that you’d need some paragon of socialist virtue at the top to give that up.
What I mean by the first line is that even if your leader genuinely wants to dissolve the state eventually, they can’t stay in power without surrounding themselves with people that are both power hungry and stupid, so dissolving the state would fail on account of those people. I guess maybe they believe it’s realistic to also have all those people have genuine intentions, but it’s just not.
They think “Marx said it, and he knew what he was talking about!”
The issue is, when Marx suggested the socialist state would wither away, he was suggesting that a state weakened in comparison to the prior bourgeois state would wither away with the active self-ordering of society by independent workers’ organizations that were not part of the state controlling steadily-more of society’s resources than the state.
Which is pretty much the opposite of “Give MORE power to the state, and then it will someday have LESS power!”
Have you considered them being very dumb?
It’s a strong signal of pure dogmatism when they pick a fringe view about a region that wasn’t even treated seriously by the Soviet Union and make it one of the core tenets of their ideology. The “Holodomor is Nazi propaganda” point still being made years after that post is like the far-right’s obsession with trans women in sports. Too specific and inconsequential for an ideology for someone to just land on by chance when they think critically. All they do is regurgitate.
Stalinism intentionally misrepresents what the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” means. It was never meant to imply that an actual dictatorship would rule over the working class during the transition to communism, even though normal laws would have to be suspended while an entirely new set of societal conditions was implemented.
The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the idea that the working class would be free to dictate the rules of society for themselves…ideally through democratic processes…not authoritarian rule. It was meant to stand in contrast to the concept of the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”, where the wealthy elites dictated the living conditions for the working class by means of coercion and exploitation.
Replacing the bourgeoisie with a new ruling class of political elites, was never part of the plan.
I have a friend who literally doesn’t get it. He identifies very strongly as a “leftist”. I don’t know that he identifies with any more specific label, but he’s got a big primitivist streak. (As do I, really.) He’s the one who inspired me to read Ishmael. No way he could be considered a Tankie in the slightest.
We were talking about politics in the U.S. and about how right-wingers, despite major ideological differences, tend to band together to… for instance… elect people like Trump. Just by virtue of being right-wing, they can work to accomplish common goals. The left, meanwhile, cancels each other and themselves constantly and can’t really manage to get any kind of momentum as a result.
He kindof implied that the ideological differences between leftists aren’t consequential and we should all be working together.
And I was like “well… tankies, though, right?” And he’s like “what’s a tankie?”
We’ve been talking about it a lot. I’ve shared lots of examples of tankies defending DPRK and Stalin and stuff. And I think he’s still skeptical that such people even exist, somehow.
It’s not that he’s a tankie who doesn’t get why authoritarianism is a losing strategy. He’s an anarchist who so can’t understand or identify with the tankie mindset that he thinks they’re some tiny group of inconsequential nuts so worthy of being ignored as to not even require a footnote in any discussion of left-wing solidarity.
I envy him, sometimes.
It’s not that he’s a tankie who doesn’t get why authoritarianism is a losing strategy. He’s an anarchist who so can’t understand or identify with the tankie mindset that he thinks they’re some tiny group of inconsequential nuts so worthy of being ignored as to not even require a footnote in any discussion of left-wing solidarity.
tbf, if you were talking in the context of the US, tankies are a tiny group of inconsequential nuts who aren’t even a discussion in left-wing coalitions in this country.
The issue comes with how quickly the rot can grow… like the Bolsheviks going from single-digit percentage support at the beginning of the anti-Tsarist provisional government in February 1917, to couping the socialist-aligned provisional government in October 1917. And that’s often a harder thing to wrap one’s head around.
the issue with these guys isn’t that they are going to take power
the issue with them is their memes break containment because they post ten thousand times per second 24 hours per day, and all of their memes encourage losing on purpose and encouraging others to lose on purpose
if you are mad about this, name a political thing you personally succeeded at lol
I wonder how many Bolsheviks were monarchists and fascists simply expressing their desire for oppressive hierarchy in communist terms. They didn’t all die or join the white army, and if reactionaries were suppressed many of them would find the closest tolerated ideology.
Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are against the dictionary definition of leftism. There are countless political parties that pretend to be for democracy and even put it in their name but promote far-right politics, such as the FvD in the Netherlands or the LDPR in Russia. I don’t know why anyone would accept that tankies are leftist.
Bait used to be believable :(
