- cross-posted to:
- anarchizm@szmer.info
- cross-posted to:
- anarchizm@szmer.info
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I have about as much to disagree with anarcho-primitivists (look up some other texts by that author) as I have with modern day Marxists.
That’s fine. Same here I guess.
Yet I feel that both of them are still part of a common emancipatory struggle.
Sure. Agree.
But I don’t know why you reply this to a text called “Tankies and the Left-Unity Scam” You can be a Marxist, without being a Tankie.
Same old nearly 100 year old argument. The soviet union doesn’t even exist anymore for 30 years and most modern day Marxist were not even born when the term “tankie” had actual meaning.
The point is, modern day tankies, use what happened in the USSR as part of their ideological foundation. They admire Lenin and often also Stalin. That leads to political consequences that are harmful for any emancipatory struggle. I’m not saying everything they do is harmful, but that there are very specific elements that are, and it’s important to address them. And no, it doesn’t make sense to invalidate that criticism, because Marxist-Leninists have Marxist in their name. That’s an absurd method to silence such criticism, yet very common.
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quite reasonable (even though in my personal view ultimately misguided)
Well most people are quite reasonable though misguided. Same goes with bosses, or fascists, or cops. Are they all, as individuals, sociopaths that cannot be redeemed? I don’t think so. But as a group/movement, they are an objective threat to the well-being of society as a whole.
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Yes, but refugees are not a problem for society by any standard. The same cannot be said of autocrats, bosses, patriarchs and cops.
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Sure. I can elaborate on my worldview with a detailed analysis of why that is the case, just like they also could. But the facts i’m presenting for my arguments are, in my view, much more true and consistent than an opposite side blaming immigrants and queers for all their problems in life. We all have different points of views (and truths), does that invalidate my argument? In order to protect myself and my surroundings from a phenomenon, i need to be able to name it and describe it and understand it. In this case, authoritarianism it is.
Personally, i find more value in point out authoritarian discourse/actions themselves rather than labeling individuals. But that’s also because i have mental energy available to engage in debates, which is a privilege (time/energy is not available equally to all). So i understand why people develop different self-defense strategies and i respect that.
The soviet union doesn’t even exist anymore for 30 years
I think this adds an unecessary weakness to your point. as it would automatically create resistence to the point you made… it’s easy to think : if we forget history we are doomed to repeat it etc… Sometimes building bridges is hard and one wrong word could lead to disaster, I still remember the day that I pronounced the word Krondstadt in front of a trotskist. So much regret.
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yeah this, when you trigger prerecorded answers, it’s so frustrating.
Here comes the struggle session!
Thanks for this. It’s very easy for anarchists to get caught up in the affairs of authoritarian socialists because of the weakness of the anarchist movement. Once the anarchist movement is strong enough to achieve its own ends, new anarchists will not be as tempted by left-unity.
Just as anarchist promote lemmy, depsite knowing it is run by Tankies.
I’m not against using lemmy or engaging on such a platform, but I believe it’s important to understand that their political position will sooner or later lead to unpleasant action, unless they don’t change their ideology. They are open about their politics, there is no reason to not believe them when they state being Marxist-Leninist.
Yeah well I wasn’t aware of that until quite recently. I gained interest in Lemmy only because it was a link aggregator which supports federation, and I am a promoter of federated services. I don’t see harm in using the software itself if anarchists go ahead with their own instance.
I believe it’s important to understand that their political position will sooner or later lead to unpleasant action
TLDR: Maybe we could start an anarchist lemmy instance?
I’d like to think otherwise, but i agree to some extent. I mean so far here i’ve met a few lenin-heads but i’ve met many more people who are attracted to communism as an ideal of freedom and equality and are genuinely curious about anarchism and why we don’t consider marxist-leninists to be communists (because they build the exact opposite in practice, but they don’t know about popular history)… which is a criticism we share with anti-authoritarian marxists (and most people are also not familiar with those).
I mean, i don’t know about you, but i wasn’t born and raised an anarchist. Part of my becoming an anarchist was through reasoning, debate and self-criticism (deconstruction), while another part of that was people showing me how to become a better person AFK. So i tend to assume good faith on the part of my peers unless proven otherwise and keep the mental doors open for them that were opened for me by other people.
In this case, i do not believe the lemmy admins/mods (or most of them anyway) are affiliated with a political party or a vanguard. It is my understanding they’re more part of a left-wing folklore or union struggles maybe. So sure there’s hostility towards anarchists from some parts of the community, and there’s a very worrying nationalist sentiment in some regards (for example /c/China), but i don’t really see a politburo around here, and in fact i truly appreciate that the moderation log includes “deleted” entries (at least for logged-in users) so we can evaluate the work of admins and judge for ourselves whether we belong on an instance.
So to be honest i’m practically more worried about centralization being a problem in itself, than i’m afraid admins are after us. Opening new instances makes perfect sense, and anarchist circles (most of them anyway) are usually bad at relaying/aggregating information. I think an anarchist lemmy instance could help address both concerns.
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You’re framing this as if MLs are the ones attacking Anarchists while in reality I see far more antagonism from Anarchists than the other way around.
The situation was more or less the opposite in the early days of lemmy, where anarchists and other anti-nationalists were banned en-masse for criticizing imperialist nation-states like China.
Even so, did you even read the linked article? It makes some really good points about why anarchists (and most other segments of society) have exactly zero trust in marxist-leninists to accomplish social change. Because it’s been proven time and time again that “dictatorship of the proletariat” means “dictatorship over the proletariat” and no social progress can be achieved with this.
The counter-revolutionary crimes of Lenin and Trotsky and the bolsheviks are well-known. They have systematically dismantled anything that resembled “communism” in the name of their all-powerful State.
We have to learn from the past. I appreciate a lot of “marxist-leninists” we meet online are merely fetishizing something they have no idea about. Most of them have never been involved in the communist party or any form of enlightened vanguard, so they idealize it. I’m willing to engage faithfully with such people, but i’m not willing to loose my time and mental energy for people who will refuse to look at facts and learn anything.
Coming back to the perception of leninism by the broader population. Most people understand soviet russia to have been a violent tyranny. If “communists” can’t do that, then they’re reinforcing anti-communist sentiment by feeding into this narrative that communism is dictatorship. That is, in my view, highly detrimental to our cause. In that sense, anarchism, which has never been affiliated with genocide and tyranny, has much greater changes to attract people to “communism”.
We must build communism, here and now. We can’t accept any compromise, especially a higher power (with a political police) deciding for us what’s best.
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no social progress can be achieved with this.
The USSR gave women the right to vote and get an education since their founding. They were among the first countries in the world to have a woman minister (possibly the very first). They put a stop to the old regime of the tsars, which included semi-servitude (serfdom was abolished earlier but still existed to some extent). Later on several people (mostly black people from the USA) visiting the USSR were amazed that they felt like a citizen there, and not like a minority.
Sankara in Burkina Faso vaccinated 1 million children, and stopped the exploitation of women (stopping forced marriages, allowing them to get an education, making men share the chores). He also had the army build infrastructure projects like roads and wells for rural villages.
The revolutionaries in Cuba put a stop to years of colonial domination (first from Spain, then from USA). Cuban people were effectively slaves to their bosses, and prostitution was the main reason Amerikans visited Cuba. All of this stopped, and now they are poor because of the embargo, but they don’t have to work for the mafia. They get free healthcare (eye and dental included) for free. In remote villages, they have a permanent doctor and a dentist comes once a week.
Vietnam had been a colony for much of their history. Ho Chi Minh’s fight started way back during the second world war when Japan seized the “Indochina” colonies and ruled over Vietnam as ferociously as the French did. You can find articles written by Ho on marxists.org, where he details examples of French atrocity towards his colonized people. Settlers employed Vietnamese people in quasi-servitude and were allowed to kill and maim them for the slightest transgression. Now that Vietnam has their independence, this does not happen any more.
In China, Mao put a stop to the exploitation of women as well. Feet binding (“traditional Chinese culture” if you believe some people) was common in some areas, and it was effectively maiming women for an ideal of beauty. There were also famines every decade in China, and the PRC put a stop to them – they faced one major famine, because a huge drought and adverse weather that year was combined to the deep reforms of the cultural revolution, (but the death toll is disputed, because the higher estimates use shoddy methodology) but that was just one famine after their founding and absolutely none since then. They also gave their pride back to their people, who had just come out of the century of humiliation and were addicted to opium by and large, introduced by the English as a form of imperialism. People in China were so poor that in the 60s, having a tractor to work your farm was a luxury and the talk of the town (and either was reserved for rich landlords or, starting with the PRC, were progressively but rarely being rolled out). Today they’re building museums, libraries, theatre houses and other public interest projects that put to shame our best architects in the west.
As legitimate curiosity, please give me some examples of social progress anarchists have achieved too.
sounds like trolling. it’s a strong assumption to say that anarchists didn’t take part in these struggles, actually that other left leaning people didn’t take part tbh.
iirc bolshevik means minority, so it would at least imply that they worked with others before sending to jail many people who didn’t think like their leader.
I’m legitimately asking for social progress anarchists have achieved in their own projects. If we go by the metric that several groups took part in struggles (despite the struggles I listed above being led by marxist-leninist principles), then it would be fair to say there were marxists taking part in anarchist struggles like in Spain, and then that would mean we can’t ever point to a group’s achievement because it was achieved with the help of thousand of different people.
iirc bolshevik means minority
Yeah probably… I don’t know Russian haha. But by the time of the October Revolution they were the majority, otherwise they would have never had the momentum needed to actually achieve the revolution. And yes, probably there were anarchists and even social-democrats (the bolsheviks were after all the leftmost faction of the socialist party of Russia) in their ranks who may have thought “look I don’t entirely agree but this is as good as it’s gonna get”. Like I said earlier, what matters is that the bolsheviks (to name just them) worked on marxist(-leninist) principles. They would not have let a socdem take a cadre position and do socdem stuff (advocate for electoralism, appeal to both sides to stop the hostilities…).
If you’re interested in learning how a vanguard party works (the vanguard party, as I’ve learned recently, is only the party that is successful, it’s not a title you decide for yourself but something that happens to you), Harman wrote a bit about it in his book: https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1979/marxism/ch10.html
Didn’t Sankara fire teachers for daring to strike for better working conditions and have them all replaced by people with no teaching experience?
No matter how moral someone is, no one is infallible. Authoritarian power will always fail us.
Later on several people (mostly black people from the USA) visiting the USSR were amazed that they felt like a citizen there, and not like a minority.
Of course. The USSR didn’t have the history of black slavery and prejudice that the US has. That doesn’t mean racism and prejudice doesn’t exist.
He did fire striking teachers, because there were other ways in Burkina Faso to make your problems heard and addressed. But they didn’t, they went straight into the strike right after the new government was established. And in this case the context is different from a typical strike where workers demand better wages or working conditions: the union that launched the strike was essentially owned by Joseph Ki-Zebo, a university professor, who wanted to have power for his party instead of Sankara. There were other unions that tried to coup the government, and others that worked alongside Sankara’s government.
If you think about it strikes are the resolution of a contradiction when the state does not give you other means to resolve it. In a healthy society, there is no need for strikes because your grievances are addressed in different ways. Strikes essentially evolved in class society because it cuts production, it cuts the exploiter right where it hurts and forces them to take action. If you provide people with the means to achieve results without stopping production – and I’m guessing anarchists plan for this as well – then you don’t need strikes.
However I wouldn’t say that because there was a teacher’s strike in Burkina Faso where the teachers were fired, that authoritarian power will always fail us. Even if the strike was about better working conditions, which it wasn’t. This is one ~shaky incident in a country that otherwise achieved progress on an unprecedented scale in the short 4 years Sankara remained in power, while being embargoed. Compared to what came before, this was an incredible upgrade to the people of Burkina Faso. Today, there is not one youth in Africa that doesn’t know Thomas Sankara. He still gives hope to the people.
Are you aware of lemmy.161.social? From what I can tell, it’s run by a German anarcho-communist and the instance has an antifa theme. Maybe we could migrate there and start an anarchist community on that instance.
i am confused, do people identify as tankies ? what would it be today ?
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to discredit Marxists that made some authoritarian leaning argument
Marxists, like anyone else, are either authoritarian or anti-authoritarian. For sure anarchists are going to point out authoritarian arguments wherever they show up, even in the mouth of a pretend-anarchist.
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Isn’t it worth explaining to them
Yes, isn’t that what i’m doing most times? But when your first encounter with someone is in ardent defense of bigoted views, then i understand that some people need to name the phenomenon and blow off some steam. Who knows, maybe naming someone a tankie will make them investigate what a tankie even is, and develop some critical thoughts in regards to authority? Not sure about that, but i’m not excluding the possibility either.
From the article:
Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce.
The close similarities between fascism and Marxist-Leninist ideology are hard to ignore. Both Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism masquerade as socialism but in reality have little to do with it and are simply excuses to mount dictatorships.
Tankies are people who make excuses to justify the atrocities committed in the name of communism. Tankies crave power and work to create rigid hierarchies to amass that power. They support a totalitarian one-party state that governs all of society with an iron first. They defend forced labor, polluting mass-industry, population displacement, mass surveillance, genocide and brutal punishment for anyone who would speak out against the state or the new ruling class.
Tankies praise these genocidal population transfers because they “lifted the peasants (that survived) out of poverty”. But they are measuring “poverty” by materialistic, capitalist standards that are simply of no use to the subsistence farmers, hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders that made up much of the pre-industrial world.
most peasants (…) only needed to work a few hours a week [1] to produce all the food they needed to survive. The progression of Soviet state capitalism quickly changed all this, and they now had to labor endlessly in grungy, polluted cities or on industrial battery-farms for the state or face being branded a “kulak” and exiled, imprisoned or killed.
Nomadic herders in Central Asia and Kazakhstan were especially unaccustomed to this new way of life being forced on them, and their resistance was met with brutal force by the Soviet state, who declared them “kulaks” and confiscated their herds. The resulting famine in this region killed between 1.5 million to 2.3 million Kazakhs
Tankies celebrate Lenin and Trotsky’s massacres of socialist revolutionaries, including the Mensheviks, the sailors of Petrograd, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anarchists, unaffiliated peasants who had their food confiscated and so on.
Lenin successfully hijacked a popular revolution fought by the peasants and workers of Russia, sabotaging communism to install a state capitalist dictatorship with him as its life-long ruler, and then murdered most of the people that actually fought the revolution.
In 1918, Lenin wrote to G. F. Fyodorov, ordering a massacre of sex workers in which hundreds were killed: “Appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like. Not a minute of delay.”
Lenin was an oppressor of the peasants and working classes, a despot, and, by 1918, the victorious enemy of the Russian revolution. A true counter-revolutionary. Which isn’t too surprising, considering his bourgeois background and trade as a lawyer. He perfectly met the Marxist definition of a reactionary, yet tankies hold him up as the father of their “Marxist-Leninist” ideology and praise him as a great communist.
Regardless of the fact that “communism” actually means “a stateless, classless, moneyless society with common ownership of the means of production”, Marxist-Leninists support state-capitalist regimes that use money issued by the state and have a ruling class of party elites that control the means of production and enjoy extreme privileges compared to the average workers. Tankies claim that these hierarchical, oppressive regimes will somehow bring about communism at a later date.
They defend modern-day China’s brutal oppression of its citizens, the use of deadly force to suppress democracy and quash protests, China’s overseas colonialism and territory expansion, its concentration camps for minorities and organized destruction of the environment for short-term profit.
A tankie is anyone that claims communism can be achieved by replacing a state with another state. A tankie is anyone that will swear up and down that state-capitalism, dictator personality cults and ecosystem-destroying mass-industry will eventually lead to communism through the “withering away” of the brutal state that they uphold.
We can’t lose sight of the historical fact that genocide, nationalism, capitalism, bigotry, imperialism, struggle sessions and mass incarceration are some of the central tenets of ML(M) practice, and whether they admit it publicly or not, something all tankies believe is necessary to ensure their vanguard’s dictatorship and cement their own power on the party hierarchy.
If you welcome tankies into your spaces, if you engage tankies in civil discourse, if you entertain their repugnant ideas or buy into their absurd notions of “left unity” and enable their attempts to create divisions between anarchists and sow discord, then they have already succeeded in poisoning your movement and rendering it useless.
