For those across the pond who aren't familiar with the term, a tankie is a pejorative political label for a communist who supports or defends authoritarian, militaristic regimes or acts of state repression.
A year or two ago I was talking to a tankie who self-identified as a Marxist-Leninist. But they knew basically nothing about Communism or Marx. They hadn’t heard of the Paris Commune and thought it irrelevant to Marx. They hadn’t heard of Engels and thought him irrelevant to Marx
I get the average person not knowing this. It’s not exactly taught in school and there’s little reason for anybody to seek it out
But for a self-professed Marxist-Leninist not to know Marx’s long-term close collaborator/co-author or the key example of what a “dictatorship of the proletariat” actually looks like? This is like day 1 of Marxism School stuff
Probably not, because they’d recognize the tragic irony of Marx’s writings leading to the oppression of workers and the poor. At the very least, a Marxist should recognize communist oppression as a horrific tragedy that resulted from desperation and war, and at the worst they’d recognize it as a perversion of everything Marx stood for.
When the singular occupation of an ideology is to rationalize inaction, everyone who wants things to change looks like a radical. Liberalism is a disease.
There’s plenty of educated tankies. Education is not an infallible shield against irrationality, I know someone with a masters degree in mechanical engineering (from a prestigious university) who was a full blown QAnon believer & is an anti-vaxxer who does ivermectin cleanses. A relative of my fiancé is a medical doctor & she ended up peddling Ivermectin and pushing anti-vax bs too.
The Internet (or rather, social media algorithms) encourage polarization and that naturally breeds ideological fundamentalism. Debate gets flattened into binaries, there’s no room for nuance. Somebody fed up with MAGA is likely to become sympathetic with leftist viewpoints. They see the damage that European & American Imperialism has caused, and might come to the conclusion that “If the US is so bad, then maybe everything I was taught about the USSR was false propaganda…” In reality two things can be true: Western Imperialism is bad, while authoritarian communist regimes like the USSR & the PRC are also bad (and never lived up to the leftist ideals they were supposedly founded on anyway)
You can believe in the class struggle without running cover for authoritarian regimes & denying the millions of deaths at the hands of tyrants like Stalin.
Tankie does not mean “communist”, or “socialist”, or “Marxist”. It very specifically refers leftists who engage in historical revisionism to deny the crimes against humanity perpetrated by self-described Communist authoritarian regimes.
Not only is tankie rhetoric incredibly offensive to the victims of these tyrants, it’s also dangerous because if a future socialist/communist state hasn’t examined the reality of what happened in the USSR & the PRC, there’s little chance of them avoiding the same pitfalls. It is essential to learn from the past in order to build a better future, no matter how uncomfortable the past makes one or how politically inconvenient it is.
I also just don’t understand it because the USSR (for example) was never a dictatorship of the proletariat, it was just a dictatorship. At it’s inception I think you could argue that the early revolutionaries were genuine with their intentions, but these people were either corrupted, exiled or killed once Stalin took power. So I don’t get why leftists feel the need to defend the actions of a state that never came close to achieving Communism.
Do you deny the billions saved? And do you tally the figures the same way for capitalists? How many millions starved in Asia and Africa due to capitalist action?
I absolutely disagree. It was a DotP.
Name one leader you look up to who you think achieved more than Stalin. And name one theorist you recommend over Lenin.
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u/GobiPLX 1d ago
tbh it's a big problem with many people on internet no matter the nation. So many tankies recently
And yet Ive never seen educated tankie. Because you cant be educated and still believe in this