Comment by hark@lemmy.world on "Genocide is good if an Anti-Imperialist Country(tm) is doing it!"

Nah, the mask is off. It’s clear that a lot of people who are obsessed with tankies just hate the left in general and use tankies as a proxy.

I keep hearing this but I almost always see the word used correctly for communists supportive of authoritarianism

Ironically, they’ll call you a “lib” for holding any position in between “we should revoke Obamacare” to “it’d be nice if we could organize more unions”.

You’re literally looking at a post with the word “leftists” to talk about people who support Putin, do you really not think there hasn’t been a slide of what “tankie” means to the point that now some people like OP will use it indistinguishably?

The use has expanded but I haven’t seen it used as a general term for the left, if that’s what you mean.

The term is now extended to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin,[9][10] Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. In recent times, the term has been used across the political spectrum and in a geopolitical context to describe those who have a bias in favour of anti-Western states, authoritarian states or states with a socialist legacy, such as Belarus, Cuba, China,[4] Syria,[11] North Korea, and Russia. Additionally, the term pejoratively describes political activists who are said to have a tendency to be favorable towards non-socialist states and political groupings with no affiliation to socialism if they are opposed to the United States, regardless of their ideology, such as Iran or Hezbollah.

Can be pretty vague but doesn’t really label all leftists as tankies, rather those that are authoritarian or apologists for authoritarians. Last part is pretty vague though, but I haven’t seen it used like that iirc.

I didn’t mean that they’re using it to describe the left, I meant that OP is using “the left” to talk about tankies.

The point is it’s tankies (and Trumpers) that defend Russia, not people on the left side of the spectrum.

But I thought tankie (and not just authoritarian or some other word) meant leftists (specifically communists) that are pro-authoritarianism. I’ve seen people often saying that tankies aren’t leftists but to me it just seems like they are, but just the shit kind. Would be a lot nicer not to share even the vague space of “leftism” with them but I think there’s not much to be done about that.

What can be done is to start calling them tankies instead of leftists.

I think that’s already being done, it’s just they don’t call themselves tankies that often so people who don’t know as well get confused

Nah, people who support authoritarianism can’t be leftists or communists by definition. Marx defined communism as stateless. There’s no such thing as a communist who supports the state.

The stateless communism is the end state and I think many authoritarian communists still (at least claim to) believe and want that, but they are fine with authoritarianism of one sort or another while building towards that end goal. Marxism-Leninism is like that I believe.

There’s a lot of currents of communism and leftism that are fine with authoritarianism as a “temporary necessity” or some other justification like that. I think both Marx and Engels wrote about that.

I feel like left-wing is similar sort of vague grouping as right-wing that it incorporates both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian views and ideologies.

Marxism-Leninism isn’t about authoritarianism, the idea of a vanguard party composed of intellectual revolutionaries that guides the broader people to revolution, isn’t authoritarian in and out of itself, as much as anticommunist leftists try to smear it. It’s about understanding the usefulness of centralization and coalition in a wide front that shows unity in action. That doesn’t go against democracy.

But their actual plan for the socialist state “withering way” amounts to pixie tears and fairy dust. People who theoretically want leftism but have no plan of action to achieve it are just liberals.

But their actual plan for the socialist state “withering way” amounts to pixie tears and fairy dust.

A lot of people say that about communism in general. There’s quite a few prominent leftist ideologies that are utopian and I wouldn’t use that to claim they’re not actually leftist.

People who theoretically want leftism but have no plan of action to achieve it are just liberals.

I don’t understand how that would make it liberalism. That’d just make them impractical or utopian or maybe even half-baked but I see no reason to claim they’re not leftist. “Leftist” isn’t a guarantee of quality in itself, after all. It’s just a vague grouping of very distinct ideologies.

I’m not entirely sure about this one but wasn’t Marx’s ideas also at least somewhat without a proper plan of action since it was rather a vision of things to come than a guide?

What a ridiculous and reductionist thing to say. Marx and Engles strongly and frequently criticized anarchists, instead taking the position that after the revolution, the state would need to be maintained under a “dictatorship of the proletariat” at least until the social conditions that created it had been changed, at which point it would gradually “wither away.” Of course the end goal is a stateless society, but it’s plain as day in his writings and his opposition to anarchists that he believed it was necessary to use the state to achieve the necessary conditions for that end goal. Regardless of what you think of it, that’s just a historical fact.

Yeah, Marx was a fool sometimes.

Fool or not, he was, pretty indisputably, a communist who believed in using a state to achieve his goals.

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