this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
7 points (100.0% liked)
Chat
7507 readers
11 users here now
Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm glad that Beehaw doesn't do it, but the other instances shouldn't be federating the Tankies.
Authoritarian, genocide-denial, Stalin-praising politics have no place on the left.
Personally I'm not sure I consider tankies leftists. Although communism is a leftists ideal, it's based on the premise of people being equal and deserving of basic needs. Tankies often embrace misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and authoritarianism and deny or even support injustices against other humans. Not very leftist of them imo
Yeah, I agree, I don't really see a lot of "left" in the position that Imperialist ethnostates are okay for some, but not for others.
ML-tendencies have also historically been opposed to the goals of even the Marxist movements. Considering the way that the Bolsheviks removed power from the People, Soldier, and Worker's Soviet to instead centralize into their own centralized "Soviet" organ of power. Or the reactionary, authoritarian and socially conservative policies pushed by the contemporary and often the historical CCP (though the history of Maoism is obviously complex).
I get where you're coming from, but this feels like a no-true-scotsman kind of thing that both the left and right do to renounce and endorse their extremes as and when necessary to ensure they can always claim they were right from the beginning.
Things are what they are (including the results they produce), not what they ought to be. Whether that divergence happens because of orchestrated dog-whistles or poorly set up incentives is irrelevant.
Don't get me wrong, I have the same tendency and the above is more like a mantra rather than an ingrained belief for me. A good litmus test has always been "Can I extend this argument such that I'm never wrong?" If so, I'm probably wrong already.
The term "Left" is nothing more than a team sport since the inception of the term in the 1800s. It's not a useful term, nor a consistent term, and we only really use it for convenience. It's not a meaningful model of classifying politics. That's why we should consider just saying what we mean: progressive? socialist? egalitarian?
Same with "right", of course.
But what are the ideals of the left? Isn't there a focus on social equality and human rights? There are circles and movements on the left that i don't fully agree with because you're right, it's not a monolith, but the core value of equality amongst humans feels like a requirement. I just think excusing genocide and supporting authoritarianism or totalitarianism are incompatible with the core leftist value of equality.
"Generally, the left wing is characterized by an emphasis on "ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism" while the right wing is characterized by an emphasis on "notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism"."
Where would tankies fall on that scale?
"Tankies" is basically a meaningless slur at this point, but I'll try to answer your question.
There are two overarching branches of philosophical thought, Idealism and Materialism. Idealists believe the world is shaped by ideas. Materialists believe ideas are shaped by the world.
Liberalism is an example of an idealist philosophy. If enough people believe in civil rights and democracy, then they are sure to manifest. Liberals approach politics from the standpoint of evangelizing their beliefs. They believe with the correct rhetoric and the correct positions, they can win the day and bring about their version of a just society.
Marxism is an example of a materialist philosophy. Social currents, ideology, and history are driven by the material conditions. Marxists aim to apply an empirical analysis to historical events, to identify the underlying systems and processes which are at play. To figure out where the meager resources of the oppressed and downtrodden might be applied most effectively. From this style of historical analysis, many theses have been formed, creating a very deep theoretical canon.
We can all agree that democracy is good. We can all agree that civil liberties are good. At the same time, when the United States declares it is going to bring democracy to your country, you know are going to have a bad time. Or when the Untited States, jailhouse of the world, brings up complaints about civil liberties, you know there are ulterior motives at play. This is because the United States is a world-hegemonic imperialist empire, always seeking to expand its markets, its influence, and its profits. There are other countries which exhibit imperialist tendencies. Imperialism is the inevitable endgame of capitalism, but none compare to the US Empire.
The idealistic paradigm of categorizing states as democratic or authoritarian crumbles under the past century of cold war. A state like Cuba, living under siege, facing very real threats of espionage, sabotage and infiltration, is forced to take a warlike posture. It can never let its guard down. It will take measures which seem repressive in order to defend its sovereignty. This is unfortunate, but there is an underlying material reality which drives this state of affairs. The artificially imposed scarcity. The constant threat of a coup and the imposition of western finance and privatization. And still, you can make a very strong argument that the conditions in Cuba are far more Democratic than they are in the US. You can make the same argument for China. These places are far from perfect, but when you examine them in the context of the geopolitical reality we live in, there are reasons why they are the way they are (and a giant steaming pile of sensationalism and vile slander dumped on top).
Democracy is good, but you can't just let the NED (a known CIA front) pour millions of dollars into reactionary media organs across your country and hold a direct election so every little victory the revolution has achieved can be sold off to gangsters. We got to see exactly what this looks like in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. We got to see exactly what this looks like when the US-backed coup in Chile overthrew Allende and installed the military dictator Pinochet. Shock doctrine, privatization, mass killings, neoliberalism. It looks like the parliament getting shelled by tanks, the former citizens of a socialist country getting sold into sex trafficking, and the dreams of millions turning into ashes while the capitalist gangsters take everything for themselves. It looks like the greatest decline in life expectancy and living standards in modern history.
Antiimperialism can seem perplexing at times, and nothing makes this clearer than the war in Ukraine. The invasion and the war are clearly abhorrent, but if that is where your analysis begins and ends, that Ukraine is a wholesome smol bean democracy and Putin is punishing them because he hates democracy on principle, you are missing a whole lot of what's going on. The Reddit response to the war was that everyone became Ukrainian nationalists overnight. Even as Ukraine descended into martial law, banned opposition parties, media and labor unions, and devoted itself to full mobilization. The actions of the Ukrainian state are somewhat understandable under the circumstances, but I'm not sure how you get back to egality, fraternity, and liberty coming out of these conditions. You might just get the fraternity, but a very dark, nationalistic one.
Instead of taking sides, what most of these "tankie" / "russia apologist" leftist communities are trying to do is figure out what the hell is actually going on. They certainly aren't on NATO's side, which is enough for most to call them Russian stooges. There is an intense fog of war, and the only thing you will find from either side is war propaganda. Ask the Ukranians and they have killed a million Russians. Ask the Russians and they have killed a million Ukranians. The enemy is constantly on the verge of running out of munitions. Tons of "great man theory" attempting to do psychoanalysis of Zelensky or Putin, instead of examining the political and economic factors driving this war. At the end of the day, it is the working class killing each other in another war for bourgeois states, and the apologia for national chauvinism only makes excuses for it. No war but class war.
That is the one thing that still makes me unsure of whether I should fully support Lemmy or not. I know how the federation works and that those communities can be easily excluded, but what is off to me is that the two main devs of Lemmy itself (and the Android app) are themselves tankies.
Yeah it's not like theyre uncomfortable with socialism in general, this is like full on self identifying STALINISM. That's something that comes with it's own mess of human rights totalitarian crap, and pointing out that the US has also done terrible things(and oh boy has it) doesnt make that any better.
Like they arent the power to the people kind of socialists their logo is literally a tank.
I consider myself a socialist.
But Stalinists and other authoritarians have essentially reactionary politics.
I'm anarchocommunist (though I often say anarchosocialist because of loaded term stuff), and I view all authoritarian stances as truly horrific. The big great huge tragedy with capitalism is that the people with capital control the state, and therefor have authority to harm the populace. Bolshevism does not do anything to fix the tragic part. Vanguard party politics consistently devolves into authoritarian regimes, and those authoritarian regimes then harm the people.
The standard by which we should be judging any political or ethical framework is the degree of agency the most disenfranchised person in the system has.
China is also an Imperialist state, with borders and a realpolitik firmly grounded in ethnic supremacy.
Worth repeating that line I think. That China is an Imperialist ethnostate, because it is very true.
There is no doubt china is an imperialist state that views itself has having a manifest destiny like right to rule the world
The beauty of it is that we don't necessarily have to use lemmy.ml at all. Beehaw and Sopuli.xyz, two of the largest instances outside of lemmy.ml and the tankies, don't federate with the tankies. It some ways it's a good thing, as it encourages people to branch out instead of clustering around a "main" instance.
Do you know if the lemmy.ml owners run join-lemmy?
As far as I'm aware, yes.
So considering that those individuals are supportive of genocide- not even denying, but supportive- That is a fairly big problem for the ecosystem.
Presumably, with their extremist and toxic views, they will be acting to keep criticism of their favorite Imperial states (say, China) from being too prominent.
They've actually been quite tolerant of all of us, to be honest. I don't think they have any desire to be exclusive to tankies.
I have to say that I had a really rough whiplash when I saw what kind of communities the admins of lemmy have created and are maintaining (I guess that is what you mean by tankies). Absolutely shocked that this is the credo of people making this "open/free/not controlled by company" software. A company might be preferable at this point >.>
These 2 people are the ones we're supposed to put the faith into to maintain and develop the framework and architecture for all these potential sites? If we fund lemmy we fund them, if they give up then nobody else is probably going to take over, it sounds like a disaster just waiting to happen.
And okay, nice to hear that beehaw is blocking those communities but we're still federated with everything else there, if I'm understanding it correctly, and it's the same users that can easily cross between the instances? That's not very reassuring either.
Considering that Reddit's capitalist shenanigans is what brought redditors here, having socialist devs is not necessarily a bad thing.
You'd probably also be shocked at how many communists are strongly involved in FOSS development, and just how nice and great people they are on average.
In any case, don't worry too much about it, their software is open source so if they suddenly turn evil, a fork is enough to fix it.
Socialism is not the same as what's going on here. Socialism means you believe in good for the common citizen, not denying reality and wishing death and destruction on peaceful people.
Minor correction, socialism has one definition and one definition only: worker ownership of the means of production
While I have to admit that I've been frustrated by the tankies during my short stay on lemmy.ml, I don't think that's a fair representation of their views.
Most I believe seem frustrated by a western world that seem entirely too content in accepting a narrative heavily biased in favor of laissez-faire capitalism and right wing narratives, to the extent that it has blinded them to the cruelty of regimes in China and Russia.
I think that in order to foster a fruitful discussion here and avoid the trenches that often form between differing political views on the web, trying first to understand and empathise with an opposing view is crucial. It's been a good heuristic for me at least, except in those cases where there is zero intention of even trying to understand each other (where just ignoring works well).