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
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.
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.
I think Lenin missed the part where the powerful ruling class imposing something is the opposite of a classless society.
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.
not just private ownership, but structures that ensure an increasingly concentrated private ownership by ever fewer people who use that advantage to create a set of rules that further increases the ownership gap
ie a system where the owners of capital get to make the rules
capitalism is antithetical to democracy
It is though. This is what people mean when they say so much of internet leftism is outdated and misinformed.
Treating capitalism as a Boogeyman is outdated. Capital modes of production are a tool which can be wielded by market socialists towards the ultimate goal of post scarcity, classless society, the same as any other other economic structure. Putting dirty words in in a particular historical box is just as dumb as worshipping those words. It’s modernist garbage, plain and simple, and all to often this gets manifested as braindead “everything I hate is capitalism.”
The goal of socialism is worker control of production. This is often in conflict with capitalism in practice, but is not orthogonal to capitalism in theory. This is a large part of contemporary leftist theory which has developed over the past 50 years, and dismissing it reveals pretty stark amateurism imo
I guess there’s this American sense of capitalism as an ideological commitment to letting the forces of the marketplace run wild, and that once you regulate the markets it’s not capitalism any more. That’s laissez-faire though - there are other forms of capitalism as well. In the broadest sense capitalism basically boils down to having a market economy, which a lot of leftists are in favour of.
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.
