• Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
    144·
    6 months ago

    There was no dictatorship of the working class. They defanged the Soviets - you know the workers’ councils that the USSR was named for.

    You don’t have to watch a video, here’s the script text for the entire series:

    https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-the-state-is-counter-revolutionary

    MLs love reading, don’t they? Oh but wait, that’s anarchism. Go ahead, tell me it’s beneath you and I should read On Authority. I have. It was underwhelming to put it nicely.

    And yes, the system they built was on the back of and patterned after the authoritarian monarchist regimes they followed. That’s not a favourable light to put that system in. Was it marginally better than a monarchy? Sure, why is that relevant to anything? We live under neoliberal regimes of which none to my knowledge has ever been toppled by an ML revolution.

    That ideology is centuries out of date. Anarchists saw its downfall before it started. It’s failed.

    Even if you’re combatting some bizarre strawman about absolute dictators, it’s equally bizarre that your response is to attempt to rehabilitate Stalin’s character. That puts you squarely in tankie territory.

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
        94·
        7 months ago

        Assuming you’re trying to ask what that term means, it’s short for Marxist-Leninist, it’s a polite way of referring to tankies, where you accept their rebranding of what is effectively Stalinism. It was after all Stalin’s term to coopt and puppeteer the legacy of two dead men to give legitimacy to his reign of terror. They will try to tell you there are principled MLs but if they think there is any merit in the concept then they are doing the same kind of historical revisionism that all tankies do.

        And you can see this person was in fact clearly trying to defend Stalin, if only indirectly.

        Edit: Also look at the username - they’re from lemmy.ml, where the .ml is the Mali country code but in this case it definitely also stands for Marxism-Leninism. It’s a tankie instance.