this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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To be fair, the community depicted in the show is the communist Utopia that Marx envisioned. The end goal of communism has always essentially been a collection of autonomous, democratic communities.
Where "Tankies" generally go awry is the handwaving away of all the mass murder and totalitarian terror that occured when Lenin, Stalin and Mao had a crack at it.
The problem is not the communist utopia as envisioned by Marx, the problem is that the way to get to it on a large scale, which was also envisioned by Marx and implemented in every single so-called "Communist" nation is through the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat, which is definitelly not Democratic.
Unsurprisingly in practice every single so-called "Communist" nation out there got stuck at the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat stage: not a single one ever reached the communist utopia stage (even though they all call themselves "Communist"), they all remain authoritarian and all of them essentially just changed to way the local elites are chosen from one based on wealth to one based on Party Membership and connections.
Tankies aren't really communists (of the kind that supports a system were everybody has the same), rather they're Communists (tribalists in one or other of groups associated with those countries which call themselves Communists but in fact got stuck in the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat stage of the path to the communist utopia from were they just drifted backward to having elites just like the rest of the dictatorships out there).
This is why Tankies have a hard-on for any the very hierarchical structure of authoritarianism and a "might makes right" conduct in politics - the ideologies they follow with tribalist blindness are all heavilly subverted versions of the "dream" with layers upon layers of justifications and slogans built over decades (in some case more than a century) to excuse, obfuscate or justify the many and very deep ways in which the countries that promote those ideologies deviate from the utopia that they claim to represent.
Or to put things another way, they're Nazis with a different set of slogans.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as envisioned by Marx, is not a literal dictatorship; it is meant to be democratic.
I've always thought Dictatorship BY the Proletariat gave a better impression of what the statement actually tried to say. From what i understood of it, its supposed to be that the rules are made by the Proles (working population) rather than the "upper classes".
"Democracy of the Proletariat" would be the most accurate descriptor, but no one ever accused 19th century writers of not being melodramatic enough.