I was once called a tankie for saying that people should organize tenant unions.

haha yea they throw tankie on anything approachin leftist 🫠

On the one hand, Western Marxists and Marxist-Leninists are not the same, but on the other hand, both of them—and even anarchists sometimes—get called tankie by liberals anyway.

"Western Marxists" like Sartre or Parenti?

Western Marxists meaning compatible-left Marxists of the imperial core. Western Marxism: How It was Born, How It Died, How It can be Reborn

no, more like chomsky. it's not nationality that matter but who you're aligned with.

Who would consider Chomsky a Marxist? 😭💀

libs?

FFS

and Zizek

Chomsky's Epstein ties kinda lead me to dismiss anything he has ever wrote.

parenti wrote a book which is kind of like manufacturing consent but better which is called inventing reality, i think you'll learn something reading chomsky beyond him being a piece of shit, but you'll learn more if you read parenti, lol.

https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-inventing-reality

funny thing about tankie is that they just revealed it's based on another cia coup attempt. it proves tankies right lmao.

i don't mean this antagonistically but do you have a source to share for that?

You're a few decades late to the party

I remember getting called a tankie for criticizing Elon Musk back when he was wholesome chungus liberal Iron Man.

I've seen it used against people wanting better than ACA in America or pointing out it's just Romneycare

Anything left of Reagan will do it

In liberal circles, "tankie" functions as the counterpart to conservatives' use of "woke."

i should really have some good sources saved for this, the tankie thing is a perfect way to expose the irony. took me a while to find this again but it's worth digging deeper than me if you are interested in it:

basically "tankie" comes from how soviets crushed the hungarians with tanks and the us said it was a brutal suppression of anarchists or something similar.

soviets denied it and accused them of working for the empire, and now the cia under trump has declassified their role in trying for a color revolution in there.

You know what? I'm gonna go make a reply meme.

Should I link it? Or just let folks find it organically?

I think Epstein called him that in one of the emails

The funniest part about the whole tankie thing is that it was coined by British reactionaries in response to the suppression of a counter-revolution in Hungary, which has now been revealed to be a CIA op.

https://lemmy.ml/post/53759200

I shared it for you, to save you from the effort. Now I'll admit that I don't know really much about the Spanish civil war, or the Zapatista uprising in Mexico (the two examples of "non-tankie communism" mentioned in the comments), so if anyone has any good resources or insights on these I'd be happy to read those.

First I'll say I don't have anything against anarchists or AnComs on principle. Whatever works in class struggle, we're all comrades. That being said there seems to be some idealism and misconceptions related to the comments especially. Comments like

Authoritarian and hierarchy types don’t have a lot of imagination and are kind of bad at creative exercises for building new ideas. Their creativity is iterative so requires an existing idea. There has only been Soviet style centralized authoritarian communism so that’s all they imagine. Literally unable to imagine any alternative (unless they read political philosophy).

As we all know "authoritarian" is a meaningless term. This has been gone through so many times. Now if "there has only been Soviet style centralized authoritarian communism" is true, why is that bad? Why shouldn't people work by what has been proven to be viable by past experience? Every socialist experiment has always been born to be besieged by imperialism constantly working towards its downfall using any means necessary. Idealism or "creating new ideas" is shunned among MLs because it hasn't really produced any real change. It seems to me the commenters are actually only against "the tankies" because of "the tanks", which usually refers to the Hungarian counterrevolution which itself was proven to be a CIA-backed counterrevolution attempt by recently declassified CIA-archives. It could refer to the tanks in Tiananmen Square, which was funnily enough also a similar attempt. Afaik there were organic protesting related to both incidents, but in both the government's response was specifically towards the western aligned violent agitators.

Furthermore one could argue against the statement itself, as for example Yugoslavia, China, and the Soviet Union itself engaged in different kinds of economic and authoritative decentralization, with differing results. So this seems to be a misconception.

idk, just had some issues with some of the comments there. which are pretty much the same issues I have trying to present anarchism as a viable alternative: that is to say mainly the issue of armed struggle against imperialists (that would inevitably happen) without a central authority.

This is too fucked up. Yesterday, I was accused of being a rapist in an instance with a beef against "tankies", and their behavior was really shitty and shady. These instance wars are plainly stupid and sad.

As we all know "authoritarian" is a meaningless term.

Figures you have no counter to that

I just did. But I have another one queued up if you want it:

name a non-authoritarian country

"Nuh-uh!" Isn't actually a counter.

Figured as much tbh

I think calling it an op is going too far. There was a democratic students' movement that siezed the radio station, and they had mass support. The CIA gave support to an ex-Nazi who provided military training after this had happened. The crackdown by the Soviets was brutal and many innocent Hungarians were killed. Dismissing the whole thing as just a CIA op makes it sound like another Bay of Pigs, which this was not.

Authoritarian and hierarchy types don’t have a lot of imagination and are kind of bad at creative exercises for building new ideas.

Me when my totally new and radical ideology where nobody makes me read theory simply leads me to recreate liberal political phrenology against liberalism's enemies

damn, these 2016-era coworker memes are devastating

There was no mass support. The US was cultivating a proto color revolution, a formula that's been used time and again since then. What we do know is that in cases where there was no crackdown on Western funded reactionaries, then we got outcomes like in Chile. Thinking that this was some organic movement is frankly absurd. Also, can read up on precisely the tactics used, and how they have direct lineage in nazi propaganda https://november8ph.ca/psychological-warfare-in-the-strategy-of-imperialism-v-l-artemov/

Which country isn't authoritarian?

What does tankie mean

I was actually kinda expecting more from this person, I think they were in the comments claiming not to be attacking tankies. But I guess really just don't have shit to say in defence of their ideology, or this commenter's idealism. So my bad for being naive i guess.

People hated the Rákosi government for its political repression and economic austerity measures. Imre Nagy was not a western-sponsored colonel in the Hungarian military, he was a communist. After the fighting in Budapest, revolutionary workers councils organized all over the country. You think the CIA and Radio Free Europe were responsible for that?

My issue with this type of logic is that it's all or nothing. Thereis a sentence in the declassified document, therefore the whole thing was orchestrated by the US. There was more going on here than Operation Gladio.

Oh I didn't mean to criticize you at all, I apologize if it came across that way

No no, it didn't come out like that at all! No worries there :) Nah I just kinda hoped I'd get some kind of a reply, other than snark. idk, silly me

edit: i see they've made another "shitting on the tankies" circlejerk meme. i don't personally fuck with "shitting on the anarkiddies" circlejerking either, so maybe i had too high hopes of this individual :D

Read the book I linked to educate yourself.

Lol, yeah, totally reasonable way to engage with someone.

It's just an updated version of "commie" or "pinko" for anti communist who don't want to sound like cold war boomers.

Sorry, I always forget that books to a liberal are like garlic to a vampire.

maybe you need to mask the garlic smell. Try writing Harry Potter on the book and you might just be able to get them to read.

Comrades, we must engage in fierce ideological struggle to determine whether the correct reading of the current moment comes from The Hunger Games trilogy or the later, more mature work of The West Wing.

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and told them "I can't talk to you because you're too ignorant, you have to read this book first"? How did that go?

I try to avoid interacting with imbeciles in day to day life.

So ignoring your namecalling and dogmatism, I read the first two chapters of the book, introduction and the chapter on psychological warfare in the 1950s and 1960s. The only thing it says about Hungary is that it was a counter-revolution. Do I have to keep reading into the 1970s and 80s to find out where it's revealed that the imperialists orchestrated the whole revolution? Should I cite histories by marxists and communists that talk about spontaneous worker councils?

Here, just for kicks

https://www.union-communiste.org/it/1996-12/30-hungary-1956-the-workers-councils-5619

I look forward to the next round of insults, comrade, you're really doing your movement a service.