Remember kids, Tankies wants to undermine democracy - same as facists.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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I'm not against the hostility being shown towards tankies here... but it should be remembered that there are a lot of well-meaning and well-intentioned people who get caught up in the technocratic ideology tankies buy into. Let's face it... if you google anything about leftism you are more likely to end up reading about Marx and Engels than Bakunin or Goldman - and right-wing propaganda is as perfectly fine with conflating everything "leftist" with the technocratic (ie authoritarian) left as tankies themselves are.
If we are leaving some doors open for fascists and capitalists who turn against their programming, we should remember to do the same for tankies.
As someone who's read Marx and lenin, and Bakunin and Goldman... not to mention kroptikin(god damn that guy bullshat his way through conquest of bread)
The anarchists always decry practical steps that are needed for the transition, but they have a poverty of ideas when it comes to propose better alternative solutions to the problems faced by actual revolutions. And frankly, reading their literature I understand why. They're still hung up on ideas and values and not material analysis much more than MLs. They're still trapped within liberal hegemonic thought though they are against liberal capitalism.
Neither the anarchist revolutions in Ukraine nor Spain seemed to lack "practical steps"... what they did lack, however, was practical steps for turning into a reactionary elite as soon as they seized power - something the Bolsheviks and their ideological spawn seems to have no problems with.
They absolutely did, their inability to coordinate and make compromises during wartime absolutely led to their failures as revolutions.
Oh... being (respectively) stabbed in the back by Bolsheviks and being sabotaged by Stalin had absolutely nothing to do with it, eh?
No, tankie... I don't think you've read any anarchist literature at all.
so now we are gonna start calling names. Cool, very mature.
Well, then... what do you think we should call them? Do remember... it was Marxist-Leninists themselves that came up with that term.
Yes, the Spanish anarchists were unsuccessful because Stalin, and not because they refused to be integrated with the popular front(which even the fucking liberals joined), including militarily until the war was already well lost, which made coordinated actions against the fascists with the popular front impossible
The lessons of the Spanish civil war dont reflect well on the anarchist movement there.
Yes. That's why, tankie. And no... they didn't lose because they decided not to take orders from your outrageously incompetent and cynical two-faced realpolitking fetish object Stalin.
Okay?
Okay so how much did you actually study the Spanish civil war because this comes off as really ignorant? Like, what books have you read on the subject that have led you to the conclusion that Stalin was controlling all of the Spanish Republicans except for the anarchists? You seem to deify Stalin much more than me, who generally considers him a very flawed leader who was a better revolutionary, but doesn't consider him some octopus with his tentacles in literally everything.
I'm not the one demonstrating weaponized ignorance on the subject, tankie - you are.
But hey... bring it on.
It is a self dunk to get combative when someone asks you what books you've read on a subject you're opining about
Why would I compare books with you, tankie? You've already claimed to have read things you so obviously haven't.
Hey, just cause I disagree with their analysis doesn't mean I haven't read it.
For example, forming a secret vanguard party isn't the way to anarchism, and the Kronstadt rebellion wasn't the pinnacle of revolution, even though the Soviets fucked up their response to it.
And you would know what I'm referring to if you've read some of their main works.
Gee, you needed a book to tell you why nobody except your ilk gives a flying fuck about your precious vanguardism, eh? Most people don't need a book to see the obvious.
The stupid part is that the third-way labor parties and social democrats are doing a much better job at socialism than any Leninist or Maoist tradition. But every leftist space on the internet seems to hate these "fake socialists" as much as anything else. That's really all the evidence I need that these people are more interested in revolution fetish fan service than anything resembling actual statecraft.
Well... no, not really. It's not that leftists hate social democrats... every anarchist I've ever spoken to appreciates the effort of people like Bernie and AOC - it's just that we understand what they are allowed to do and what they aren't. The political establishment will allow them to protect capitalism from itself by restraining it's most obscene aspects it to a certain extent (and even such meagre self-protective measures are a bridge to far for the right-wing hivemind)... but that is all they could ever achieve.
Remember - no matter what the media hysterically screeches - the term socialism has a very hard and uncompromising meaning... a condition wherein the workers control the means of production. If it doesn't measure up to that or only pretends to measure up to that, we can't call it socialism with a straight face.