I’m so mad at goddamn Lenin and Stalin for co-opting socialism. We went from the Paris Commune to the fucking USSR?
Now we gotta deal with shit like China being an authoritarian dictatorial hellscape that commits genocide (and denies the groups ever existed). And because they pay lip service to Marx you get people bowing down to grovel at Winnie the Pooh’s gaze, or mummifying Lenin and treating him like a deity or something.
And of course then when you say “Hey, capitalism is unsustainable especially when automation starts replacing jobs en masse” people go “YOU MEAN YOU WANNA BE CHINA YOU TANKIE???” And the fact that there is a subset of people (many of whom are right here in the threadiverse…) who would love to be China and openly spread Chinese-style communism where protestors get run over by tanks and turned into a fine paste really doesn’t help matters.
They suck all the goddamn air out of the room and cause serious discussions of socialism to get dismissed out of hand as supporting USSR-style “fascism with socialist characteristics”.
If these hardcore authoritarian tankies didn’t exist, it would be a lot easier to make the point that capitalism is incompatible with democracy as well. I’m not just talking about how money is speech and bribes are okay as long as you call them “campaign contributions”.
But you don’t see capitalist defenders pointing to Putin or the Democratic Republic of the Congo as examples of the wonders of capitalism. They’re capitalist countries, yet they don’t get accepted as such by people trying to discredit socialism. Curious. Yet China, Cuba, Venezuela, and the USSR are always their go-tos for discrediting communism. It’s almost as if fascism/democracy is largely separated from capitalism/socialism (a fact that’s frequently ignored…).
But it’s really hard to make the point of “socialism does not mean authoritarianism, you can have democracy in a socialist state” when the largest group of socialists loudly advocate for an authoritarian communist dictatorship where they silence all dissent.
So now we can’t have that discussion at all. Even people who hate “elites” and are class-conscious immediately shut down when hearing the “socialism” word because of how badly the USSR and China fucked Marx up.
God, I hate tankies.
I‘ve had a phase in my life where I was really trying to see the socialism in China, but I just can‘t find it. I wish someone would explain to me for real, it might have been there decades ago but right now? What is even socialist about it?
See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_relations_in_China
How anyone can read this and not see the state capitalism idk.
Then also they got tang ping just like we have antiwork and I mean, for all of democracies ills, at least I‘m allowed to have a negative attitude towards work and it‘s not getting censored off the internet as a danger to the state.
I have a few communist friends and here they try to achieve socialism through democracy and even have some local successes (Graz KPÖ mayor!), but even though they are not like tankies, have some blind spots there where sometimes I wonder if I‘d be in trouble if they got a dictatorship going (myself being more Anarchist). So the tankies hurt their efforts by association, sucks.
But it’s really hard to make the point of “socialism does not mean authoritarianism, you can have democracy in a socialist state” when the largest group of socialists loudly advocate for an authoritarian communist dictatorship where they silence all dissent.
I don’t really agree with this. There are a lot of socialists that are colloquially called unionists and/or syndicalists. Mick Lynch is a perfect example of this. He’s the head of a prominent rail union and is an unabashed proponent of socialism by means of unions. He’s also relatively popular among the general British populace atm.
Authoritarians definitely do suck the oxygen out of the room, but I would argue it’s because it’s very easy for an average person to point at that and go “You’re crazy”, and either intentionally or accidentally miss the nuance that socialism is a lot bigger than stalinism/maoism.
Is this a copypasta?
“don’t see capitalist defenders pointing to Putin or the Democratic Republic of the Congo as examples of the wonders of capitalism.”
Definitely, last week a guy was telling me how Putin was a good example of a communism/socialism failure.
Are you really surprised? You put garbage in, you get garbage out. Socialism as a full state economic system is an obsolete thought experiment dreamed up by a rich NEET who lived in a world economy that predated light bulbs and refridgeration, it’s a dead end that was never going to produce anything but failed states and weird amoral zealotry. It’s beyond me why people think full socialism will ever be the answer, when the iron pen of history has written into stone that the extent of socialism’s usefulness is as the social/welfare component of liberal democracies with regulated capitalist economies.
Marx
The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. While some of the concepts Marx presented are still great, Marx’s ideology is as outdated as Adam Smith’s. No modern day economists are quoting The Wealth of Nations so I don’t understand why people who want to fix modern economies are quoting a man who had no idea what a car was, nor overnight delivery via cargo planes, nor tech giants who control our access to information. Marx lived in a different world.
I may be naïve but I really struggle to understand why anyone would advocate for an authoritarian system, regardless of flavour.
Capitalism is definitely far from perfect. It seems to me to work best when it incorporates certain socialist elements(?), like nationalised healthcare. I feel like UBI could be the solution to a lot of problems with the system. As for my own country (UK), things have got worse since the privatisation/neoliberal policies of the 80s and whilst it feels like we have a good system in principle, it’s currently being rowed by a conservative government who aren’t putting the necessary funding back into the services to keep them viable. And then people point to those services, saying that the NHS is a failure (by no fault of it’s own). I don’t understand why we’re not taxing the rich more.
Anyway those are just my feelings. No system is perfect, but I don’t see why anyone would strive to become like China.
Socialism = will never work. Source.: I just know it.
Is this tankie agitprop?
