After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
EDIT: Thank you to everyone who has responded! This thread has been very insightful :)
First and foremost, I think people should consume media that is not from the West. You really can’t claim to be an internationalist if your media bubble (I’m including social media as well) is entirely situated within the West. To be an internationalist means recognizing that Western thought isn’t the end all of human civilization. What constitutes the West is actually pretty small. It’s only through imperialism that the West has a very oversized presence. But the West is only one of many viewpoints. At a bare minimum, you have to read what non-Westerners say.
But it’s not just a case of picking any random non-Western country since many of their news media has been captured by the West through NGOs. Personally, I find news from Anglophone non-Western countries (India, Nigeria, and so on) to be bad overall as far as echoing what has already been said on Reuters and the BBC. The easiest way is to get out of the bubble is to pick news media from countries that are hostile to the West. That’s one of the reasons why you see Russian/Chinese/Iranian/Venezuelan news media cited in ML circles. It’s an easy way to pierce through the Western bubble even if you must be cognizant of the geopolitics at play. It’s not the only way by any means. In many ways, social media by non-Westerners can be superior even when accounting for botting and censorship. There’s a reason why the US wanted to get rid of Tiktok and I strongly suspect they will move to do the same with XHS, which actually has authentic Chinese people (of a certain demographic) on social media.
When you step outside the Western bubble, it’s very obvious that the vast majority of criticism of China comes from a broader Cold War 2.0 strategy by the US to attack China. Whatever is not wholly made up is put an exorbitant emphasis on. There are numerous problems with Chinese society, of course. Many of them are actually pretty apparent if you consume Chinese social media made by Chinese people in China. However, you’re not going to find this in any article by the BBC unless it’s to push some ridiculous narrative about how Taiwan is going to be invaded or Tokyo is going to be nuked by China. You have to step outside the Western bubble.
Cand you be my introductory news and let me know what you know about China? How is the standard of living there ACTUALLY? Right now it seems the consensus in the west is that life in China is horrible unless you’re well off or know a guy who knows a guy.
I know I could read online but I’d rather trust you than some article by Bloomberg… Or a chinese media outlet…
Not OP, but you can easily find statistics on public transportation, wages, healthcare/life expectancy, government approval, ecological policies, technological development, energy use and so on.
Collecting these statistics takes too much time for a single comment, but you can find statistics from a wide variety of sources such as the world bank, imf, rand (western sources), or Chinese sources like Chinese government data (like from the national burea of statistics).
Either way, the data is quite favorable for China and Chinese citizen’s quality of life. They have a higher life expectancy than Americans, world class public transport, the world’s best green energy industrial complex (by such a huge margin that in comparison, the rest of the world might as well not try). It is quite a decent place to live in, baring the issues with low wages, youth unemployment and high working hours (compared to western nations, as least until the fascists de-develop the west enough).
Hello. I am baby! :D why are tankie evil?
Too often these criticism’s of “tankies” involve calling questioning blatant cold war lies as tankie behavior and very often i get accused of being a tankie by both liberals and “anarchists” because i oppose the democrats its far past time to retire the word.
Yeah there’s really no room for nuance on some of these topics for some reason. You don’t accept the line, a line fed to us by a government we ostensibly don’t trust about a sanctioned enemy that it has every incentive to make you dislike, and somehow you are questioning objective reality to defend an authoritarian.
I think it’s the sheer volume of anti China consent-manufacturing material that does it. Westerners are just bathing in it constantly.
Yep was attacked by fellow anarchists ounce because they were sharing epoch media news about mass organ harvesting farms of falun gung members and I was like maybe don’t accept this uncritically which is an extreme example but still something your supposed to take uncritically with no sources outside of this literal fascist cult because to do otherwise you have to defend china even if only from the most nonsensical claims.
Many such cases, I stopped organizing with anarchists because some variation of this was happening in every different group I came across
As a couple of poster here are already demonstrating, they discover that western nations have lied about communist nations, but they don’t learn the more fundamental lesson that they shouldn’t trust everything a nation says. So instead of adopting a nuanced view, they just counter believing everything a western nation says with rejecting everything a western nation says and instead believing everything a communist nation says.
Yep.
I’m perhaps older than some here, so I saw something similar after 9/11.
Western media, especially American media, were often blatantly biased in favour of the US government and the so called ‘war on terror’. Especially when stuff leaked out about torture, mass killings and abuses. People turned to alternatives and often found channels like Russia Today. And to be fair, at first glance Russia Today did (certainly at the time) appear to be far more nuanced than mainstream media. It was certainly and often justifiably critical of what the US and its allies was up to around that time. But people who spent a lot of time uncritically watching Russia Today, often ended up believing the Russian government propaganda mixed in with truths.
I think it’s also in large part due to the human tendency to simplify reality. Reality is often complex, but we prefer to thing in categories, like black and white. And so you often see people thinking in or blindly accepting false binaries. Side A bad, so side B
badgood. (e: brain fart)It’s surprisingly common. I mean, look how common it is to think of Germany as the bad guy in WWI, when the reality was far more nuanced. The British empire really wasn’t great.
And in WWII the nazis were obviously evil, but that doesn’t mean the allies were particularly good either. For example, Roosevelt didn’t do that much to stop the deportation of up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps wasn’t moral, America was still virulently racist, and contrary to what you may have been led to believe about the Soviets up to 1 in 4 rapes by allied troops were perpetrated by Americans. Churchill arguably helped kill up to 4 million Indians during the war. Etc. etc.
What’s an example of a piece of false Russian propaganda that you’ve seen blindly accepted by Western “tankies” (MLs) who watched Russia Today?
Off the top of my head?
The Russian line about Skripal, Litvenenko, or similar.
The idea that Russia and China are playing anything but a highly duplicitious role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Occasional strongly worded letters, some great propaganda, while close strategic and economic ties continue unhindered or even increase.
The idea that Russia is denazifying Ukraine or that Ukraine has a particularly big nazi problem. In the 2019 Ukrainian elections the far right got 2% of the vote. Meanwhile Putin has historically cultivated close ties with Russian fascists, skinheads and hooligans. He is also a fervent admirer of people like Ivan Ilyin, quotes him regularly and helped have his body repatriated to Russia . Ivan Ilyin, who was a self-avowed fascist, openly admired Mussolini and Hitler, and a virulent anti-communist.
Anyway, being a communist/ML and being a tankie aren’t synonymous. Actual communists realise tankies are cosplay communists. Actual communists don’t make excuses for anti-communists. They don’t make excuses for some of the richest people on the planet. They don’t make excuses for oligarchs and robber barons. They don’t side with fascists, because they happen to be anti-western. They don’t make excuses for authoritarian capitalist states.
That’s something tankies do. It’s embarassing.
If anything tankies are useful idiots for the far-right, because their nonsense and lack of critical thought helps undermine serious leftists, socialists and communists.
China’s opposition (or lack of it) to Israel is controversial among MLs. I’m not familiar with the specifics of Russia’s opposition to Israel or what RT has claimed about it, but I’ll grant you that it’s probably similar to China’s dynamic with Israel.
I strongly disagree with the characterization of everything else as false propaganda, however.
I’m inclined to side with people like Jeremy Corbyn, Aaron Maté, and academics like Stephen F. Cohen and David S. G. Goodman who all expressed skepticism over the Skripal poisoning. IIRC, he was supposedly exposed to poison on the doorknob to his home at a time when he wasn’t even in the city.
If the idea that Ukraine has a Nazi problem is Russian propaganda, then most Western media outlets prior to 2022 qualify as Kremlin propagandists. The Neo-Nazi problem is highly regional. Ukraine is a divided country, which is why it entered a civil war in 2014. You referenced the far-right party Svoboda’s mere 2% of the national parliament, however, in the Neo-Nazi stronghold of the western Lviv Oblast, where statues of Stepan Bandera are erected, that share rises to 34%[1]. Furthermore, their influence is outsized, because they’re highly organized. NATO armed and supported the Banderite Azov Battalion beginning in 2005.[2] Today, that group has been upgraded to encompass multiple brigades.[3] Ukraine is the only country in the world with a Neo-Nazi group formally integrated into its federal armed forces. Starting in 2014 under Poroshenko’s coup regime, after massacring leftists in an inferno in Odessa, these fascists began traveling to the east to ethnically cleanse Russian Ukrainians in pogroms.[4] Zelensky ran on a platform of peace with Russia, which is still the dominant position, but was powerless to rein in the NATO-backed far right in his country.
I don’t believe RT has ever claimed that Putin is a communist. Presumably you’ve enumerated his ties to Russian nationalists to suggest that he and the Russian Federation could not possibly be genuinely opposed to Nazis. But even Russian nationalists share the Federation’s immense pride in the victory of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War, for which the country still holds huge annual parades. A guiding tenant of past and present Nazi ideology is a boiling hatred of Russians, which is why they exterminated 18 million Russian civilians in that world war. Nationalism is characterized by pride in ethnicity and nation, and so nationalists tend to dislike people who consider them subhuman and want to kill them. Thus, opposition to Nazis and concern for the security threat they pose make sense from the perspective of both the left and right within Russia.
Apologists for Ukraine and its endless proxy war on behalf of NATO which is decimating Ukraine’s population and propelling the entire world towards WWIII and thermonuclear brinkmanship are IMO the embarrassing, useful idiots for the far-right and their genocidal ambitions in the Donbass.
https://ukraine-elections.com.ua/en/vybory/result/11 Svoboda translates to “Freedom”, which is how it’s listed here ↩︎
Per Col. Larry Wilkerson ↩︎
https://azovlobby.substack.com/p/how-we-learned-to-stop-worrying-and ↩︎
I strongly disagree with the characterization of everything else as false propaganda, however.
Because you’re a tankie and unlike actual communists, you people like to make excuses for horrible regimes.
I’m inclined to side with people like Jeremy Corbyn, Aaron Maté, and academics like Stephen F. Cohen and David S. G. Goodman who all expressed skepticism over the Skripal poisoning.
Stephen F. Cohen who is on the record as saying that Putin is not an autocrat, Russia’s invasion of a sovereign country was justified, and disputed evidence on MH17.
Aaron Maté who regularly appears at events hosted and paid for by the Russian government.
Corbyn is on record as saying the evidence points towards Russia, even if he urged caution at the time before the evidence became overwhelming.
I don’t believe RT has ever claimed that Putin is a communist
Bad faith argument. I didn’t say that. I said tankies make excuses for anti-communists, and authoritarian capitalists. People like Putin and his government, an argument you have just repeatedly proven to be true.
Actual communists don’t make excuses for anti-communists, the far right, and corrupt oligarchs.
Thus, opposition to Nazis and concern for the security threat they pose make sense from the perspective of both the left and right within Russia.
Russian propaganda. Ukraine didn’t pose a serious security threat to Russia prior to Russia’s invasion.
you’ve enumerated his ties to Russian nationalists to suggest that he and the Russian Federation could not possibly be genuinely opposed to Nazis. But even Russian nationalists …
Meanwhile in Russia:
I point out that Putin venerates an actual bonafide fascist, has and had ties with actual fascists, and you proceed to make excuses.
Once again, this is not what actual communists do. It’s what cosplay communist tankies and bad faith actors do.
Apologists for Ukraine and its endless proxy war on behalf of NATO
Ukraine didn’t start the war. Certainly not on behalf of NATO. Blatant Russian propaganda.
which is decimating Ukraine’s population and propelling the entire world towards WWIII and thermonuclear brinkmanship
The war started by Russia is decimating Ukraine’s population, correct.
Threats of nuclear war. Russian propaganda.
useful idiots for the far-right and their genocidal ambitions in the Donbass.
Russian propaganda from someone who has just repeatedly made excuses for far right nationalists and anti-communists, while claiming to be a communist.
I think it’s also in large part due to the human tendency to simplify reality. Reality is often complex, but we prefer to thing in categories, like black and white. And so you often see people thinking in or blindly accepting false binaries. Side A bad, so side B bad.
Agreed.
Nuance is difficult, and arguably more to the point, it’s sort of vague and insubstantial, not least because an awful lot of it necessariky boils down to “I don’t know.” People generally prefer something more solid to which to cling, so tend toward absolutes and unjustified certainties. And the most attractive ones are binaristic, because then you don’t even have to provide support for your claimed position - all you have to do is find fault with the (generally falsely dichotomous) alternative.
The Post 9/11 situation with Mass Media and RT is why it’s so desperately important for a Government to not lie or cover up it’s actions. Another example of this is Al Jazeera. The US Government’s dedication to hiding its dirty deeds opened the door for AJ to establish credibility which they later used against the US and it’s Government.
That’s just a straw man. The “critical” in “critical support” stands for criticism of the states which anti-imperialists support. A guiding principle of Marxist analysis is ruthless criticism of all that exists.
That that’s a “guiding principle” doesn’t even begin to imply that it’s something in which people actually engage.
Now that you mention it though, I’d say that it’s plainly obvious that tankies fail specifically by not engaging in criticism and instead engaging in apologetics. They stubbornly and often even angrily avoid even facing, much less analyzing, the inherent issues with state “communism” and instead dedicate their time and effort to making excuses for and distracting from any and all examples of those inherent issues.
it’s plainly obvious that tankies fail specifically by not engaging in criticism
Here are frequent criticisms of AES states from MLs off the top of my head:
spoiler
- For the Soviet Union:
- The criminalization of homosexuality
- Stalin’s deportation of certain ethnic groups
- Lysenkoism
- Stalin’s brief denial that Operation Barbarossa had begun
- The use of animals in the space program
- Stalin’s refusal to supply a “nay” vote in the United Nations and prevent the US invasion of Korea
- Excesses of the Great Purge
- Khrushchev’s secret speech
- China:
- The persecution of gay fanfic writers and general lagging of queer rights
- Excesses of the Cultural Revolution, including the destruction of artifacts
- Agricultural mistakes during the Great Leap Forward
- Pig iron production during the Great Leap Forward
- Lack of universal healthcare
I keep hearing that MLs are “campists” who don’t engage in nuance, but the side I typically see lacking nuance is the “anti-authoritarians” who refuse to acknowledge any successes of AES and label anything short of universal condemnation as “apologetics”. That’s actual campism.
You’ve probably heard of the expression “when someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. There is a similar dynamic going on here: When someone is accustomed to black and white thinking, shades of gray look like whitewashing.
Maybe it was different at one point, but right now, I think it’s fair to ask not if western governments/media are lying, but how they are lying.
What has anyone here said that isn’t true? You are making an assumption that any of us are “trusting everything a nation says,” but that is not what is happening. If you browse any “Tankie” instance you will see plenty of debate and criticism about every communist leader and state, as well as many western sources backing up our claims
As communists we are materialists, we rely on evidence to form our perspectives. Not everyone is going to do this perfectly all the time but generally a communist just wants everyone to be liberated from capitalism and understands that we can only achieve that through evidence based systems, science and pro-social community building. There is no need to “trust everything a nation says,” there is plenty of evidence from all sides to form our opinions.
As communists we are materialists, we rely on evidence to form our perspectives
Nerds 😤
Quoting a different comment from this thread:
“Authoritarianism” isnt even real, its jus [sic] another CIA op from the 60s so they could label any bad scary commie country as it
That doesn’t sound to me like any kind of good faith argument as much as an excuse to praise the consolidation of power in one person, which I still have trouble understanding how anyone on the fediverse is for - doesn’t it go completely against everything decentralization stands for? How is it so easy to understand the corruption of business billionaires but impossible to understand that a single person in charge of the means of distribution could easily become corrupt and authoritarian?
When I think of a “tankie”, I do not think of a Marxist-Leninist arguing in good faith, I think of the people who praise oppressive regimes simply because they are communist, and hold no place for debating alternatives to or safeguards against giving one corrupt individual complete power over a nation. Authoritarianism is not synonymous to communism (see: fascism) and it seems crazy to me to believe that it does not exist, or that it is somehow good.
Perhaps you are not one of the people falling for everything certain nation-states say; in that case, I wouldn’t consider you a tankie. But those people absolutely do exist.
I’m not going to speak for that user but in general I think they are referring to a few things:
-
All states are authoritarian. The idea that communists are especially authoritarian to a point that it means they deserve to be attacked and defeated by “non-authoritarian pro-democracy” nations is essentially an ad campaign by the US and their allies to justify their cold war aggression against communists. We are talking about the British and US empires, during the jim crowe era, accusing the USSR and China of being authoritarians and themselves as democratic. You see how this is nonsense right? There is no way that the British empire, a monarchy with an imperialist bourgeoisie was more democratic or less authoritarian than the USSR, even if most of the lies about the USSR were true. The slave holding jim crowe indigenous genocide USA, with its colonial holdings all over the world, was more democratic and less authoritarian? It just can’t be so. The reality is that this word is essentially meaningless, every state has a monopoly on violence and is authoritarian.
-
None of these people had power consolidated to one person. Stalin, Mao, all of them had a lot of people involved in the decision making process. This is well documented and even admitted by the US in their internal documents about Stalin specifically.
But those people absolutely do exist.
I have been organizing in the real world with leftists of all kinds for over a decade, and unfortunately have seen a bit of the online left in that time as well.
A lot of people call themselves things and don’t even know what they mean.
I think calling them tankies is reductive and ignorant because it is misrepresenting every party involved and only serving to paint well meaning MLs as bad because people who are not actually MLs are being allowed to represent us.
-
instead believing everything a “communist” nation says.
Your comment is on point, but it is your username that makes it perfect
Burn the palaces, baby 😎
Kinda like how when someone finds god, they go hardcore devout-mode, only surprisingly…. More ignorant.
Actually existing socialism actually exists: imperfect, flawed, with tragic excesses and rightist deviations. But it exists.
And I’m interested in the real world, not creating an ideal world in my head that can’t actually become reality.
How socialist is a system that crushes the working class beneath it’s boot heel, though? Is that really the working class seizing the means of production because that just seems like someone else beating us to the punch and becoming our new overlords.
The working class in China are not being crushed under anyone’s bootheel, though. They really do enjoy a dictatorship over the bourgeoisie, which has been used to great effect to improve working class lives. Yes, a dictatorship of the proletariat as mediated by the party, but vast swathes of the working class people are the party. And those who are not, well, there is a reason the party has an over 90% approval rating and it’s not some disgusting racist trope about Asians being sheep. It is because they’ve watched their quality of life rise by leaps and bounds, repeatedly.
Yes I’m sure the suppressed LGBT really enjoy the weight of that boot as much as you enjoy its taste
Nuance? In my hate thread? You get out of here with that nonsense!
It’s more or less the same position the rest of us “tankies” have. We push back on bourgeois framing of the flaws of real socialism, be it fabrications, exaggerations, or minimizations, but we acknowledge that there are real flaws.
Omg someone who is named specifically!
Can I ask you what you believe/want to happen?
Real talk homie, I’m genuinely curious!
What do you mean by “named specifically?” Either way, I want the end of the era of imperialism, and the completion of the already begun global transition to socialism, and then the global transition to communism. I want a better world, one I believe we are in the long, queer, protracted, messy process of bringing about, and as such I support the movements that further this process.
Someone said your name further up in the comments.
And that sounds dope as fuck from an objective pov.
“Queer” as in complex and not easily defined, though communists are very often queer sexually.
I think I’m going to refer to myself as queer from now on.
Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
yes it does you fucking moron, if you’re being lied to about one thing, you should absolutely question whether the same sources saying shit at you are lying as well, jesus fucking christ
how do people fall into the NATO “leftist” mindset
This is a bit, right?
Interesting response
Unfortunately you’re incapable of writing an interesting response yourself. Why do you refuse to engage with people who point out the flaws in your line of thinking?
I’m interested in understanding why people have this viewpoint, not arguing about it
Personally, I kept reading and that’s where it lead me. You can be part of the team too, comrade
wishing i had the mao hexbear copypasta bot right now though
Personally, I kept reading and that’s where it lead me.
Same reason I’m an anarchist 🙂
I’m curious (in a genuine, friendly way) what you read that led you to anarchism over Marxism-Leninism. Was it a theoretical text that reverberated particularly well with you, historical texts that you felt made anarchism a more justifiable position than MLism, something else entirely?
Because for me, like others have answered, it was reading more that led me from identifying as an anarchist to (to me, personally) recognizing MLism as far more theoretically sound and realistic. And to answer my own question, it was mostly reading Lenin that did this for me, but plenty of others helped, from more contemporary advocates like Michael Parenti and Vijay Prashad to actually reading and contemplating the works of the big bad Stalin and Mao themselves.
I still am strongly tied to an anarchist mindset, despite seeing MLism as simply the factually correct position. For example, as someone else (u/axont) in this thread mentioned one difference in irl organizing she’s noticed with both MLs and anarchists is that the latter tends to be more willing to do illegal stuff - let’s just say I am far more likely to side with anarchists in situations where that more immediate tactical question might come up. I’m also a bit more sympathetic to so-called adventurism, given the current political climate and lack of organized left in the west, than most of my ML comrades are.
Still, when it comes to a broader understanding of history, theory, long term tactics, and the support of international AES projects, I can’t come to any other conclusion than that Marxism-Leninism is simply a more accurate lens to see the world through than anarchism is, more theoretically robust as well as being proven a more successful methodology for revolution. And given the phrasing OP used, I also don’t hold the frankly naive and simplistic (not to mention convenient for our bourgeois enemies) view of AES = bad and “authoritarian.”
nonsense, we all know anarchists can’t read!
/s
i love my anarchist comrades, i promise
Are they even that big in the west? It seems like anarchists are the largest and most acceptable form of “far-left” in these countries compared to ML’s.
I actually thought this post was about how so many self described leftists get so obsessed with bashing ML’s that they forget to challenge the actual powers at play.
I can do both, thank you very much.
My experience on Lemmy has been that most users have a generally negative view of MLs , but 90% of the rants, memes, etc bashing another (non-maga) political side are MLs bashing “leftists” as opposed to the other way around.
I suspect that this actually doesn’t have to do with political association at all, but rather that so many people in general would rather just pick another faction to bash rather than challenging the actual powers, since that’s much easier.
The destruction of american hegemony is a material necessity and their rivals thus require critical support. Call it campist if you want, i don’t see western proletariat doing anything to put an end to the America’s genocides and ecocides.
Other capitalist hegemonies are, however, fine.
Most people come to Marxism through being disaffected by the liberal systems we grow up in, work in, etc, and look to Marxist theory for answers. I actually came to anarchism first, found myself dissatisfied with it theoretically, then came to Marx. This leads us to organizing in real life, reading more theory, and gradually beginning to read western framing of socialist states and other designated “baddies” more critically, seeking a multi-sided and comprehensive view. There’s a lot to unpack in your comment regarding preconceptions you have about China, largely being western, Red Scare style framing, but what I answered is why I’m a Marxist-Leninist and uphold socialist states as legitimate.
For a look at theory, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list you can take a peak at.
How do you reconcile all the queer people and dissidents your dream states murder with the theory you read?
I don’t have “dream states.” No socialist country has ever or will ever be perfect. If we look at Cuba, they originally criminalized homosexuality. However, because Marxism-Leninism is an emancipatory ideology, socialist states generally were more progressive than the regimes they replaced, and continued to improve. Cuba now has one of the world’s most progressive and queer friendly family codes, and has apologized vehemontly for how they treated queer people in the mid-20th century. By placing the working class in control, social progress is expedited.
As for “dissidents,” the large majority were landlords, slavers, fascists, capitalists, murderers, terrorists, etc. I won’t cape for them, and instead state that it’s sheer brutal necessity that building up state power in socialist society is a necessary evil to protect the gains of socialism.
So state sanctioned murder is fine as long as you agree with who’s getting murdered? That tells me all I need to know about your values, thanks.
Killing fascists, landlords, slavers, etc. is a good thing, yes.
not a tankie, but how would you deal with fascists, parasites, slavers, murderers, terrorists, etc.?
I just don’t think giving the state license to mass murder its political enemies is a smart idea. I think steps need to be taken to prevent bad actors like that from harming people, but I’d favor an approach based more on education and rehabilitation than outright murder. Every innocent you wrongly deem an enemy of the state should be an unforgivable occurence, not the cost of doing business.
Ultimately I’d prefer no state apparatus exists that could wield that sort of power to mass murder members of the population. Even if constructed with the best of intentions it’s corruptible and fallible.
I concur with you completely, but again, how do you prevent fascist genocides, landlord hostile evictions, slavers, state murderers (cops), terrorists, etc.? Education and Rehabilitation hasn’t worked on them for 143 years, and science keeps proving why. RN, fascist are genociding in China, Gaza, US, Cambodia, etc… And educated folks are letting it happen.
I disagree with your premise that it doesn’t work, I don’t believe many people have ever put serious effort towards that.
I read marx/lenin, found them to be compelling.
I am very interested in the science of economic planning and ecosystem management.
Originally, I considered myself to be an anarchist, but other anarchists had a very strong tendency of supporting imperialists in their actions against non-western countries, and frankly, I’m not white enough to be tempted by the benefits I would not be gaining from installing rightist dictatorships in Venezuela or China or Cuba if the “anarcho-bidenist” types had their way.
Looking back at it I find the whole “fight” between anarchism and marxism-leninism to be very silly, but since I think that China and Hamas are actually doing useful work, this automatically makes me incompatible with many anarchists.
Looking back at it I find the whole “fight” between anarchism and marxism-leninism to be very silly, but since I think that China and Hamas are actually doing useful work, this automatically makes me incompatible with many anarchists.
Yeah thus should be the main crux of things. There haven’t been real conflicts between anarchists and ML organizations outside of internet posting for decades now. The closest thing I can thing is during the Burkina-Faso revolution, some of the trade unions that called themselves anarcho-syndicalists were also allying themselves with the French government.
There’s just no real conflict otherwise. I’ve done organizations in both anarchist and ML orgs and it’s 99% identical. Maybe ML groups are more willing to endorse someone in an electoral race, maybe an anarchist group will be more willing to do something like petty theft from a grocery store or squatting. That’s been the only real difference I’ve noticed in tactics is that an ML group will usually try to stay above board and anarchist groups will commit crimes if necessary.
Otherwise there was never any real conflict. The people who comprised these movements came from largely identical political interests.
supporting imperialists
What part of opposing hierarchies equates in your mind to supporting extreme examples of hierarchies?
None, if you’re a principled anarchist. That’s why I don’t have a fundamental problem with anarchists (other than my philosophical objections to anarchism)
However, many self-proclaimed anarchists do in practice support imperialists because they have a big bone to grind with AES states or even anyone who positions themselves against western imperialism.
They internalise western propaganda against these states/nations, because I guess, it’s a state so therefore it must be as comically evil as the worst fearmongering described by anglophone media. Or my favorite, “even only 10% of the atrocities were real, they would still be super evil”, that kind of thinking.
Of course, I have some contact both with actual chinese or russian people (many of whom aren’t even socialists), and they clearly have a much deeper and nuanced understanding of their nations than the even the most “I hate the government not the people” type of western anarchists. It makes the anarchists come off as silly white supremacists.
Most likely, if my contact with anarchists had begun with third world anarchists, I would never have had a phase of hating anarchists (which itself was a silly thing to do). But either way, I still find Marx more compelling than any anarchist writer, so I am still philosophically a Marxist.
or even anyone who positions themselves against western imperialism.
I’ve never met or spoke online to an anarchist online who wasn’t opposed to western imperialism. I’ve also never spoken to someone “with a bone to grind” with those against western imperialism unless they are rival imperialists in which case the “bone to grind” is with imperialism.
They internalise western propaganda
“Our glorious people’s Ministry of Truth has determined that their wretched Mistry of Truth is lying while assuring us that OUR Ministry of Truth would never lie”
“I hate the government not the people”
I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, encouraging racism instead of criticism of the state?
unless they are rival imperialists in which case the “bone to grind” is with imperialism.
This is where the issue comes down to because many western leftists pretend, based on their own misunderstandings that many western rivals are imperialists, despite the fact that many of these western rivals have a net export of surplus labor/commodities, being exploited by international capital, therby having a class interest opposite of imperialism.
Not to mention the military encirclement that these nations face, which their enemy nationalists take as some sort of natural God-given equilibrium. Deviating from this encirclement by forceful measures is then taken as a sign of evil/imperialist ambition, meanwhile leftists at home in the west fail to resolve military encirclement by pressuring their governments. I mean, for how many decades has Cuba been under a blockade? What horrific conditions gaza has been subjected to. Can any of these situations be resolved without force? And if these people use force, they get called imperialists.
In the interests of fairness, the PRC during Mao and Deng’s time also famously considered the USSR to be “social imperialists”, helping cause the downfall of the USSR and setting back socialism by a century. So this isn’t exclusively a western leftist problem.
“Our glorious people’s Ministry of Truth has determined that their wretched Mistry of Truth is lying while assuring us that OUR Ministry of Truth would never lie”
My sibling in christ, do not insult my intelligence. The gaza genocide isn’t even over. At least wait for the bodies to become cold before you start defending western media institutions.
I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, encouraging racism instead of criticism of the state?
It is a common deflection that I have seen. Furthermore, it is quite stupid as well, since governments don’t fall from the heavens. They are made from the people. Modern states are not small warlord bands, but significant fractions of the entire populace and economy.
China and Hamas are actually doing useful work
like?
Hamas, by carrying out the Oct 7th attacks, has exposed Zionism in the world and a ton of formerly milquetoast “millenia old conflict” uneducated takes (myself included, to my own shame) have been cured.
China produces 93% of the solar panels in the planet, provides useful economic trade and affordable commodities to developing economies without the usual debt traps of the west and without a positive trade balance (i.e. without neocolonialism), and by simply being the strongest economy in the planet it’s breaking western imperialism’s monopoly over the planet.
Im a tankie because i want there to be clean water anywhere on earth in the future. We have less than 50 years to overthrow capitalism before the earth is a depleted cinder. Marxist Lenninist revolution has worked in the past. 2 out of 3 post WW2 superpowers arose from it. Anarchist success stories include… Rojava? For a while? If you ignore all the US support and how it fell apart without that. By the time the US is weak enough that it can be destroyed without the need for regimented party and military structures it will simply be much to late.
It’s also quite telling that you squishily back away from “the tiananmen square massacre” but then gesture vaguely at some other unspecified crime. Parenti called what you have an unfalsifiable orthodoxy.
Im a tankie because i want there to be clean water anywhere on earth in the future. We have less than 50 years to overthrow capitalism before the earth is a depleted cinder.
See this is why I’m an anarchist and not a state socialist. Like I’m not “squishy” about violence, but I don’t think that the state is an optimal or even suboptimal-but-certifiably-good way to liberate the masses. States are just not practical for what anarchists want to achieve.
Marxist Lenninist revolution has worked in the past. 2 out of 3 post WW2 superpowers arose from it.
That would be a scathing indictment of anarchism if that was the result of an anarchist revolution. I’m not interested in building “big” “powerful” societies; I want to build networks of consensual, decentralized, sustainable, free communities. Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists have different metrics for success.
What is your timeline for creating this consensual, decentralized, sustainable, free community and how does it compare to the timeline on ecological collapse? When an already extant “big powerful society” such as the US comes to knock you over what do you propose to do about it that won’t require you to establish a disciplined military of your own?
What is your timeline for creating this consensual, decentralized, sustainable, free community and how does it compare to the timeline on ecological collapse?
ASAP. In the here and now. Don’t mistake anarchism for moderation or flippancy. I am honestly not sure if worldwide anarchism can be realized faster than the climate crisis, but in my view it has the best shot out of all the existing plans.
When an already extant “big powerful society” such as the US comes to knock you over what do you propose to do about it that won’t require you to establish a disciplined military of your own?
IMO in the here and now, part of anarchist praxis needs to be organizing defensive militas, frankly in a way that aesthetically might resemble a military, but is in practice informed by anarchist principles and goals. Anarchists need to wage actual war against the bourgeoisie and world governments. Frankly, we need our ideas to be more widespread and accepted by the masses, i.e. numbers — a reality that, in my view, equally affects all communist struggles, and no ideology can overcome. IMO, militias should be formed for specific purposes, disbanded as soon as their mission is complete, and only exist subject to the people they claim to defend.
The need to disassemble and then reform your military inbetween each action doesn’t strike you as an extreme limitation? Just how fast do you think you can pull a militia together if you want to do it from scratch in response to each case of capitalist aggression? I agree that both our movements would need much greater numbers in order to challenge the west militarily but I don’t see how an anarchist force could maintain those numbers if they had them when you only ever want to field completely green, newly formed units. Seems like your just feeding shelter cats to coyotes.
The need to disassemble and then reform your military inbetween each action doesn’t strike you as an extreme limitation?
It is, but I think it’s a necessary one. But also, I do want to be a bit more concrete about what constitutes an “action”. I’m really thinking that “liberation of region X” is an example of an action, so it is possible to have militias standing for many years. Honestly…no, I really don’t want to see militias lasting any longer or getting any bigger. And that is a feature, not a bug.
Seems like your just feeding shelter cats to coyotes.
I mean I’ve never gone to war before, but can’t we train people to be “generically” good at fighting so that we can form and reform units in finite time? I.e., how to use firearms, basic urban and wilderness survival, basic tactics, and how to be part of a unit? Because yeah, it would be a bad move to just throw complete rookies into battle with no training.
Sure individual veterans of many different militias would accrue individual military knowledge but no amount of individual knowledge is sufficient on its own, there is also a need for institutional knowledge. Leadership must have an intimate understanding of the force which it leads. Effective logistical practices must be developed. Long term relationships with other allied forces must be cultivated. All of this is achieved through the repeated iteration and refinement of military institutions over many subsequent conflicts. These necessities cannot be liquidated and reformed at will.
Clean water you say…
It’s also quite telling that your answer became a “communism vs anarchism” out of nowhere.
The teams and labels are a fucking cancer of human society…
What is meant by “tankie” if not ML communist? And what other ideology would OP, who posted this from anarchist nexus to an anarchism community, propose i hold instead if not anarchism?
The topic isn’t a comparison between the two and the fact you needed to bring it up is pretty funny.
anarchist comm deriding “tankies” but totally no comparison or debate here, fellas, no-sireeee
Can you show me in this doll where anarchists touched you?
CSA sure is hilarious
It’s an anarchist complaining about “tankies” and parroting NATO propaganda, it is absolutely a comparison between the two.
And what does your side parrot?
Of course there is implied comparison. If one doesn’t “fall into the tankie mindset” they must necessarily believe in something else. And if nothing else is equal to the task before us, which I assert to be the case, one must be either a tankie or resigned to extinction. I presumed based on OPs choice of instance and comm that the something else they believe and implicitly compare to “tankieism” is anarchism. OP asked why someone would be a tankie and I told them why I am a tankie rather than what they seem to be.
Exactly what i was talking about teams: "if you don’t agree with us you must be < insert whatever is perceived as the current enemy >
I consider anarchists misguided, not my enemy. My enemy is the bourgeoisie and not because they disagree with me but because they exploit me, my peers, and the environment. Do you never argue with people who aren’t your enemy?
I don’t propose you hold any ideology, I’m just curious as to why people choose this one
Because I see no other credible way to stop capital from devouring the world.
The teams and labels are a fucking cancer of human society…
I can’t stand people who treat everything like team sports, especially those who treat POLITICS like team sports and vilify absolutely everyone who doesn’t root for their guy coughMAGAcough
My approach to politics is “like team sports” only in that I acknowledge the existence of teams and have chosen one. Do you really think we’re all on the same side? When liberals insist that we all want what’s best for everyone, that there are no conflicting interests only conflicting methods, do you believe them?
Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer
wow really, who did he kill, did he order drone strikes on a wedding or something
Mao’s policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in China during his tenure, mainly due to starvation, but also through persecution, prison labour in laogai, and mass executions.
Li Rui, Mao’s personal secretary and CCP comrade, opined that “Mao’s way of thinking and governing was terrifying. He put no value on human life. The deaths of others meant nothing to him.”
Mao has been credited for boosting literacy, reducing poverty, a near doubling life expectancy, a near doubling of the population, rapidly developing China’s industry and infrastructure, and creating a self-sufficient and self-reliant economy, paving the way for its position as a world power.
Believe it or not, it is possible to recognize that someone did a lot of good things, while also accepting that they did a lot of bad too. Reducing Mao to a “mass killer” is disingenuous, but so is denying the deaths that occurred under his rule.
The construction of these false dichotomies between complete supporter and complete opposer is the exact same construction responsible for the constant infighting among the working class of the west. I really wish people would allow any nuance into these conversations…
Blaming a single guy for famines that had historically been happening in China for hundreds of years is pretty disingenuous too isn’t it?
Mao became leader of China after a period they call 100 years of humiliation. They lost over 22 million during WW2, had mostly illiterate peasant economy, and had been brutally colonized by Japanese, British and others, opium addiction, poisoned water…
Mao did not order the death of tens of millions of people and to equate such is actually an insane thing to do.
Hitler literally called for the death of people for being subhuman, that’s what makes fascists evil.
Mao was one part of a large leadership circle of an even larger communist party who inherited the ruins of a nation and laid the foundation for one of the poorest nations in the world to become the most powerful in one lifespan.
You are sourcing from Wikipedia which has long been proven to be heavily influenced by US and Israeli intelligence, but I would challenge you to follow their sources and see which ass they pulled these numbers out of to blame on Mao and look it right in the eye and give it a smooch.
Believe it or not, it is possible to recognize that someone did a lot of good things, while also accepting that they did a lot of bad too.
What’s so funny about this is that it is exactly what communists say. Deng Xiaoping famously said Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. Every actual communist can talk in depth about the failures of communism, it just isn’t worth the time with liberals because they already live in a fantasy world
I support your quest for nuance.
Mao was critical of his own policies which exacerbated the famine during the Great Leap Forward.
My understanding is that the executions were a form of justice doled out by the peasants (not Mao himself) against their former landlords and oppressors. As Mao said, “a revolution is not a dinner party”; it’s a class war. Violence is part of it. Given the scale, it’s plausible to me that some of the killings could have been unjust, but I would need to learn of the specifics in such cases before arriving at that condemnation.
I agree that acting like Mao never had anyone killed is disingenuous and counterproductive. Jabril already explained some of the issues with the opposite side of trying to make him responsible for deaths due to famine when famine was just the reality before communism in China. I just wanted to add that rejecting the dichotomy and acknowledging that a figure like Mao, Stalin, or whoever else made huge mistakes (including selfish, cruel, and dogmatic decisions) doesn’t mean that you don’t get to celebrate them for their achievements either. They led a world antifascist and anti-colonial struggle that every person alive today should be grateful for.
Going back to the subject of the thread, there shouldn’t be anything weird with having a Mao Zedong megathread. There’s no part of having a Mao Zedong megathread that denies the complexity of the history of the PRC, simplifies it, whitewashes it, or whatever. As we stand, the only piece of information that points toward “tankies” being intellectually dishonest dogmatists that ignore any of their heroes’ wrongdoings (I take it that this is OP’s accusation even if it’s implicit) is the comment you’re replying to, which is itself a flippant reaction to OP’s premise.
prison labour in laogai
I hate this trend of using scary foreign words to refer to prisons in socialist countries. Soviets didn’t have prisons, they had gulags. Chinese didn’t have prisons, they had laogai.
I am yet to encounter this applied to fascists, Franco putting political prisoners in cárceles. I guess it’s a tool reserved only for left-punching.
mass executions
Weren’t most of the executions during Maoism carried out by decentralized grassroots councils of peasants and workers? Isn’t this the wet dream of any anarchist?
And here we see it
A lot of people get fed up with slow or no progress, so they fall for supporting approaches that “get things done.” Even though they go very wrong, and by that point, some are too lost in the sauce to admit it’s wrong or severely off-base.
Being involved in anarchist and decentralized leftist orgs, it’s very discouraging how few people care and how little power we have.
Often times it takes weeks of planning and everybody’s collective effort and spare resources to provide meals to a few dozen people, or to host a single information booth or class at a larger leftist meet up.
After years of that, the temptations of centralized power to just dictate to the masses what will happen is very strong. The justification goes something like, “yeah there are a ton of problems with XYZ, but at least they are accomplishing ABC!”
I feel it too when I look around my country of the USA. Sure China is State-capitalist, authoritarian, pseudo-dystopian police state, and super politically repressive. But god damn it, they have some of the best public transport in the world, a kickass tech and manufacturing sector, solid public healthcare, and the actually imprison and even execute billionaire scumbags…
When I have to encounter the level of American idiocy on a weekly basis, listen to the most asinine politicians and talking heads, and endure capitalist bootlicking propaganda everywhere, I start to get really tempted to advocate for the China way…
So it boils down to “at least the trains run on time”?
No it boils down to “we kicked the Japanese fascists out and have a pretty decent standard of living now compared to the rest of the world”
Wumao shills are everywhere now.
Edit: The amount of conjecture and thought terminating cliches in this thread is through the fucking roof lmfao. Peak reddit.
My journey started here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/3763871How they piqued my interest:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5606499The reason I switched:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5355388It was a combination of them just not being horrible “redfash” monster everyone says they are, them being able to consistently back up their seemingly “obviously wrong” takes and me and seemingly no one else being able to come up with better answers.
In discussions tankies were the only ones who had good faith discussions, obviously they didn’t always, but if it wasn’t just an internet slapfight the tankies were the ones citing sources and having incredibly nuanced understandings while me and the other libs didn’t really. All I ever saw was a “nuh-uh” backed up by “obvious” claims that “everybody” knows like your “mao zedong was the worst mass murderer”.
There is a post I could make about this “black book of communism” statistic now, having read about these sorts of claims, but not on my phone.
me and the other libs
Is this a parody?
At the time I was a lib even if I didn’t identify as such
