So I made a comment on worldnews criticizing Chinese activity in the south china sea and apparently got banned for it by the automod. This happen to anyone else? Is this Lemmy’s version of the need help post and the shape of things to come?
The instance I posted in was Lemmy.ml
a tankie is someone who tends to support “militant opposition to capitalism”, and a more modern online variation, which means "something like ‘a self-proclaimed communist who indulges in conspiracy theories and whose rhetoric is largely performative.’
I use this definition. And it perfectly applies to a wide range of lemmy.ml users and moderators.
That’s a bad definition.
A tankie is simply a ML who supports the use of force to restrict people’s freedoms. It’s named after the Soviets sending tanks into Hungary to stop a popular democratic uprising, but the same applies to China sending tanks into Tiananmen.
They’re basically super statists who value the state over the people.
All leftists are opposed to capitalism, but obvs tankies are a small minority of leftists, so your definition falls apart.
Marxism-Leninism.
Lenin was a scholar and developed his own take on Marxism, which has its own understanding of the communist society. Marx wrote very little about what a communist society would look like, but he had an understanding of history as moving towards an end: The classes will fight, over time the result of this fight will lead to them approaching each other, and at the end of this struggle we will reach a classless society. This classless society is the communist society in a traditional Marxist sense.
Lenin figured he’d make a shortcut to get there: Never mind thousands of years of class struggle, let’s just put in place a powerful ruling class imposing communism on everyone, designing a classless society from the top down. Which is a bit counter-intuitive, but the Leninist part of Marxism-Leninism basically boils down to trying to figure out what that could look like.
So then you get the Soviet Union, very much founded on the ideas of Marxism-Leninism. Today people who identify as Marxist-Leninist tend to not be the sharpest tools in the shed: Despite insisting that they have studied the texts carefully, a brief interaction with them reveals that they have never read neither Marx nor Lenin. What it boils down to, rather than anything theoretical, is either a longing for some imaginary version of the Soviet Union or a unshakable commitment to lick Putin’s ass.
The Soviet Union of course never did become a classless society, so you could argue that the greatest achievement of Marxism-Leninism was to destroy the traditional meaning of communism in a Marxist sense.
No it’s not.
The closest to support for capitalism would market socialism, but that still involves public ownership of the means of production, which is in difference to the defining feature of capitalism, private ownership of the means of production.
Of all the random things people downvote, I find this to be the most fascinating.
Not only are you correct, but you’re so obviously correct as well. There’s the old Jewish joke with “two Jews, three opinions” - that certainly holds true for leftists as well. Even more than the bootlickers I’m getting tired of the people who are so goddamn sure they’ve figured it all out.
They don’t oppose capitalism (example Russia & China). It’s closer to a support for authoritarianism (usually anti-USA, but even there shifts towards more authoritarian leadership receive support)
It’s not that they don’t oppose capitalism so much that they’ll ignore any sense of ideological consistency on their quixotic quest to make sure that everyone knows America is Bad.
If you oppose America, you must be good, it doesn’t matter if you’re a genocidal kleptocracy or a genuine fascist. Internally this is rationalized by viewing America as the most dominant and powerful force for capitalism in the world, it doesn’t matter if other, even worse capitalists tear it down because the American empire must fall for socialism to rise.
And it’s not like that particular thought is wrong, in a vacuum. America has proven time and time again that it will break any moral barrier to attack anyone even suspected of being a socialist, it’s just so evidentally self defeating you have to wonder if there are any true believers at all or if they’re all sockpuppets run from a Russian speaking basement somewhere.
The vibe is exactly like the astroturf shit that flooded reddit in 2016. Endless criticism of Democrats in the US, while never mentioning US conservatives for some odd reason. That’s why I get from the “Jor Biden really bad, genocide! Don’t vote for him, vote 3rd party!” They come to US left/democrat/liberal spaces and try to convince people to not vote for Biden, but where are the efforts to convince people to not vote for Trump? And then this “you say everyone is a russian bot lol!!” thing is also exactly what the shills on reddit did.
It’s not that they don’t oppose capitalism so much that they’ll ignore any sense of ideological consistency on their quixotic quest to make sure that everyone knows America is Bad.
Spot on. Whatever that’s called, that sounds like much/most of the hexbear and ml instances.
… America has proven time and time again that it will break any moral barrier to attack anyone even suspected of being a socialist,
Sadly, you’re right. More to the point there are many examples of the US knocking down anything or anyone even suspected of threatening capitalists. Whether that’s unions within the US, governments leaning too socialist (yet being democracies), or whatever else. I know you know this; I just felt like venting.
it’s just so evidentally self defeating you have to wonder if there are any true believers at all or if they’re all sockpuppets run from a Russian speaking basement somewhere.
When they all come out with new talking points about the same time, all bearing remarkable similarity, and coinciding with notable (geo)political events, and brigading certain posts, it sure makes you go, “hmm.”
its still part of Russian geoplitical strategy - shifts to the right are self-destructive and help USA’s enemies
during the 80’s, USA pushed the USSR’s allies in South America to adopt more conservative governments as a means of destroying them from the inside, and today Russia is attempting to employ the same strategy against USA
