a drawing of a person wearing a balaclava and holding a gun with the text “all my homies hate tankies” :3
Authoritarians of all kinds fuck off!
Ah yes, because there is no way someone can be against capitalism while not supporting dictators.
I never suggested that. You can be against capitalism in the same way you can be for manna raining down from the heavens and feeding all the hungry. What matters is what actually happens, and when what actually happens is leftist infighting, Porky over here couldn’t be happier.
The tankies just helped elect Porkie as USA president.
Shocking.
Are you… trying to own me by pointing out that you yourself applied a label to me? 🤣
The label was applied months ago. The only people getting upset in the comments are tankies.
Lmao!
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Y’all really get weirdly triggered when someone says “we shouldn’t be arming Nazis.” Why is that?
Yep just keep punching left 😮💨
"First they came for the **socialists**, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." —Martin NiemöllerTankies. Not leftists. Tankies specifically.
They literally came for the “tankie” KPD first, JFC.
Isn’t tankie just a pejorative for socialist?
No, tankie means specifically authoritarian socialist.
Tankie is a pejorative for anyone to the left of Netanyahu.
🤡
I’m tired of this red scare bs. It belongs in history books, not on the internet.
this has nothing to do with red scare. tankies suck and its not because capitalist states say so
i deffo hate some tankies, in the same way that i deffo hate some vegetarian/vegans when they actively chase people away for seemingly no reason. sometimes though i do feel like i see more blind hate for entire communities than actual worthwhile discussion.
i guess the problem could really just come down to your definition of “tankie”. to some folks it’s a very specific kind of obvious troll, and to others it’s just anyone on an .ml instance.
and not to turn it into a “lesser evil” discussion, but between .world and .ml, i definitely know which which meme community i’m hanging out in. i’ve yet to have a single bad interaction with anyone in .ml communities, but i also don’t talk politics in fucken marxist/leninist spaces either. YMMV hahahah
Not all ml-ers are tankies, but most of them are, and all it takes is most of them.
fair! but i do worry the term is at risk of being overused to the point of no longer having a cohesive meaning.
I d l t n a t a p w t t a n h . S y a , a I t o o n a h ?
what? X3
Digging the anti-corporate vibes of a Games Workshop Chaos Star.
Ugh this type of bullshit infighting within leftist spaces is about as serious as debating your tabletop RPG actions, and sends regular people packing. None of this shit matters. Real people don’t care about it and they have no idea what a tankie is. Feds love this bullshit. We’re losing, we lost, the world is becoming a fascist hellscape but apparently somebody has time to make memes about fighting each other. It’s amazing how that always seems to happen, especially now when you’d think most people could feel unified?
Tankies and their instances promoted Trump and apologized for Putin and Xi.
They are the enemy of the left.
apparently somebody has time to make memes
A) to be fair, memes are the principal monetization strategy of the internet
B) there is a factory somewhere that is mass producing injection-molded fake dog shit out of plastic and this post is the thing that gets your hackles up about an ineffectual expenditure of time, thought and human capital?
Thanks a lot, now I’m just thinking about the fake dog shit factory.
To fix everything people gotta stop being tribalist idiots. Lol!! Maybe try to get murdoch and Koch the memo
disagree i think it’s
a) fun
b) helpful to be aware of the stakes at play. authoritarianism has hurt many people and it does no justice to be quiet about that.
c) something that doesn’t even happen that often anyway so like idc
yknow what feds love? hierarchical organisations, where they just gotta assassinate or compromise the leader to make it fall appart or coopt the entire organisation.
but real talk discussions like this are valuable for voicing real criticism against harmful “leftist” ideologies and through that developing our own views more wholistically. and this is important. you cant only criticise fascists, neo-liberals, and fudalists, or you might miss out on the underlying criticisms and will reproduce their flaws because of that. and while tankies might be able to do similar work as anarchists in the here and now, they are still flawed and this will only get worse, the more power they get. this discussion is important to any real person, who because of it wont fall for the lie of authoritarianism or might even escape it.
and this world is turning fascist but tankies are cheering on half of them. you know what sends regular people packing? support for china, the soviet union, and north korea. authoritarianism takes the credibility away from libratory struggles.
also its just good to vent frustrations sonetimes…
yknow what feds love? hierarchical organisations, where they just gotta assassinate or compromise the leader to make it fall appart or coopt the entire organisation.
And in decentralized organizations, all a fed has to do is come in and constantly raise objections and debate to splinter the group and prevent anything from moving to the point of action.
there are basic strategies to prevent conversations from being derailed. not hard and already being done.
Yes, and the wrecker will denounce those strategies as authoritarian and call you a tankie when you use them.
Most communists/socialists arent tankies (even if .ml tries really hard to convince everyone otherwise) but identify with hammer and sickle too :(
But fk tankies, I’m with you on that
i agree. i hope anti-authoritarians dont feel targeted. i personally would not call myself a communist or use hammer and sickle, because they are too charged but they can definitely represent things i can stand behind.
Just tag anyone getting upset in the comments. I’ve already seen 2 people I’ve previously tagged as tankies.
I kinda do, that’s why I wrote, but no hard feelings :)
All my homies agree, I really look good in black, fool.
I love my anarchist comrades and I love my communist comrades. I hate seeing memes like this. May we all be lucky enough to argue in the midst of a real revolution. Until then, focus on the fucking fascists.
Unity above all else. Absolutely. However Tankie rhetoric in good faith or from an agent provocateur is something that needs to be addressed directly. Any power structure without egalitarian praxis is antithetical to the movement. Communism and Anarchism are very similar to the point where there are anarcho communists.
I want to make sure that there is space for us to figure out self governance immediately after the revolution. I don’t want to rely on a nascent “interim” government to hand it down to me.
Anarcho communism just makes sense. If communism is a moneyless, classless, stateless society, is it not by default anarchist as well?
And I’m not referring to any of the so called “communist” countries because they’re all variations of socialist and not communist. They all have a state.
we dont need power to the people after some magical revolution somewhere in the future. we need to prefigure non-hierarchical structures in the here and now, and while even building the capacity for violent insurrection.
i dont trust a revolutionairy army, that is build on authoritairian principles, to give power away to a newly forming anarchist society, once in power. if all that people know is hierarchy, thats the structures they will tend to recreate.
looking at real revolutionairy movements, it appears to me that they either turn anarchist during the prolonged struggle or forever stay authoritairian despite their best efforts.
Hear you on this. Most people just want to be on the top of the hierarchy which is at least partly why none of the so called “communist” countries ever actually achieved it.
Most people can’t fathom a lack of hierarchy. Even in interpersonal relationships.
The parent above the child. The boss above the worker. The principal above the teacher. The husband above the wife. Etc etc. that’s why queer people are so attacked, besides the “we’re not normal” part, we upend hierarchical beliefs. I’m a lesbian, and when I’m dating someone, there’s always a hetero (who is queer friendly, just stupid!) asking who’s the “man” in the relationship. None! That’s the point!
We have to get over a lifetime of conditioning. I’ve always been anarchist since I was young - when I was 4, I became vegetarian. My reasoning, at four: why is a dog more valuable than a cow? If I wouldn’t eat my dog why would I eat a cow? And you know what, 32 years later I still abide by that logic.
The thing is historically leftists ally with anarchists until they get power and then they execute the anarchists. They want unity as long as it’s convenient for their agenda, but that’s true of any philosophy that encourages power structures of any kind.
This.
Also, tankies are that not because they’re communists (they’re not, no matter how hard they insist) but because they support an oppressor on the same scale as the one they demand we unite with them to oppose, simply because said oppressor calls themselves communist (again, they’re not), seemingly without understanding how that might make those of us opposed to all oppression mistrust them, and be unwilling to simply overlook their values and actions.
Historically yes. Any transition of power is a dangerous time. There’s a history of communists factions and bad faith actors working with fascists in Italy to murder anarchists who were planning to kill Mussolini. However that’s not a conversation that’s necessary this very second. Stratification of power and the way in which it’s weilded is not lost on me. The problem with people that make bombs is sometimes the only cause they have is the one that necessitates bombings.
“However that’s not a conversation that’s necessary this very second”
“Trust me bro we won’t kill you immediately afterwards, just do what helps us and you’ll be fine, trust me bro”
Kinda feels like what the DNC told Bernie supporters the past 10 years.
I’m someone with a leg in both tendencies, as it were. I purposely avoid getting too into the theory weeds, in favor of interacting with actual people. I see the word “tankie” used veeerrryyy liberally lately, and it feels like it doesn’t signify very much. Respectfully, thinking about “immediately after the revolution” is getting way ahead of yourself, at least in relation to who you work with today.
I don’t agree with the vision of an authoritarian state, even as a step towards something else, but my tankie friends, for example those in PSL, are doing a ton of good on the ground by organizing and funding busses to prison for the families of prisoners, helping support tenant unions, providing support for immigrants in the form of legal representation, continuously organizing against police injustices (especially in cases involving disabled, black, or queer people), and other issues that might arise in their locale. I respect the people continuously putting themselves and their resources on the line for others. I would be much quicker to lend disrespect to those that only talk and do nothing.
Are they doing this to support the organization of a politburo and a direct line of authority from a single charismatic leader at the top? Do they make apoligistic statements for human injustices and advocate for the expansion of borders through war?
Otherwise they’re just communists doing rad communist shit and you should labor to help them organize and shoulder their burdens.
I think there is a general misconception of communists especially here in the US and it’s been a problem in leftist circles for a while.
Those people dont sound like tankies.
Tankies are authoritarian, and unions are the opposite of that.
PSL is marxist-leninist in ideology and doing all the activities I described. Perhaps way in the future I will have to fight with them, but for now we align on many issues and work side by side. Don’t allow propaganda to paint too broad of strokes.
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The moment your interests stop aligning, your friends kill you in your sleep. They want you dead because you don’t 100% agree with their totalitarianism, and if you help their revolution, they’ll betray you for it like every other ML has post-revolution. Run while you still can (not that they’ll ever actually be part of a revolution, but you know what I mean cx)
I know my ML friends quite well. Some of the most loyal people I know. Quite a presumption you make.
Personal loyalty aside from what I’ve seen most people who organize together frequently put a lot of trust in each other creating a bit of a mutually assured destruction scenario that disincentives throwing each other under the bus.
No amount of disincentives is gonna change the fact that the end game of tankies includes killing all counter-revolutionaries (everyone who helped them win the revolution but thinks authoritarianism is bad). No amount of good deeds will make them a leftist. We’re not out here praising catholics just bc they do some charity stuff, why do your murderous “friends” get a pass? Again, history has shown over and over and over again that tankies betray their fellow revolutionaries. Your “friends” are no exception. They’re loyal to eachother and to authoritarianism. To them, you and I are tools to be used and discarded
You’re attaching a lot to labels to be an anarchist (I am too btw). I place my trust in individual humans not projects, and some of those individuals happen to be MLs. They’re not organizing against any cultural or ethnic groups, they do work that impacts their local communities and no global organizing, so I don’t find much issue with them also having some fantasies about what North Korea is up to.
Right now they’re not doing any harm, and I think an armed revolution is unlikely enough they never will, but that’s still their goal. It’s cool they’re doing good things now, but we can’t mistake that for them being good people any more than we would call a nazi a good person for working at a homeless shelter. I’ll take them doing good things, but they’re my enemy, and I’ll treat them as such if they ever gain enough power to actually go after their enemies (comrades with slightly different ideas on how things should be run)
What lmao? The people who you call tankies are aggressively pro union. Find me a “tankie” site that thinks otherwise.
And you would call the PSL tankies. Here’s a Wikipedia excerpt from their page:
International affairs
PSL calls for a 90% cut to the military budget of the United States, the closure of all overseas military bases, and a halt of US aid to Israel.
PSL supports the Worker’s Party of North Korea. PSL describes North Korea as a “communist government” and North Korea as “one of the few top-to-bottom, actually-existing, alternatives to the global capitalist system”. PSL has defended North Korea’s human rights record against criticism by the United Nations, which it calls “thinly veiled justification for U.S. aggression toward North Korea”, and argues that “conditions in North Korea are vastly better than those in other developing countries”. PSL supports North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
PSL supports the Communist Party of China, criticizing only Chinese economic reforms into a “market socialist economy”. PSL argues that “militant political defense of the Chinese government” is necessary to stave off “counterrevolution, imperialist intervention and dismemberment”. PSL defends China’s human rights record, and strongly denies that the People’s Liberation Army massacred peaceful student protestors in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. PSL denies that China has suppressed democracy in Hong Kong. PSL has praised the 1950–1951 annexation of Tibet and defended the status of Human Rights in Tibet under the administration of China, claiming that “progress made [since the annexation] has revolutionized life for Tibetans.”
PSL supported the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. PSL did not support the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but blamed the invasion on NATO and the United States. In its statement on “Russia’s military intervention”, PSL highlighted the “plight of ethnic Russians […] in the Donbas”, Russia’s “legitimate security concerns”, and NATO’s “provocative behavior”.
PSL opposes US intervention in the Syrian Civil War, and has generally been supportive of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Russian military efforts in Syria. PSL denies that the Syrian government used chemical weapons.
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Oh no, someone fell for tankie memes rather than talking to a tankie and learning what their deal is.
If someone calls themselves a tankie and they dont understand where the term tankie comes from, theyre either not telling the truth or are not worth talking to hecause they dont understand their own ideology.
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Your friends are assholes, and not leftist. Your friends want me dead for being an anarchist. Your friends love Russia stealing land and children from Ukraine. Your friends deny any genocide not committed by a western country. Fuck all tankies, especially your friends :3
“provides support for immigrants” as long as they’re not Uyghur, those guys are all terrorists and need to be reprogrammed am I right?
“organize against police injustices” as long as it’s not The People’s Police, they serve the people and can do no wrong
Your tankie “friends” are shit people and shit friends, you shouldn’t associate with them. Again, they want you and everyone else who doesn’t lick their boots dead
Already replied to you in the other comment. I think you have some issues to work out with your own comrades if you are politically involved at all irl, which I suspect you aren’t just based on these two responses.
I’d love to be if I didn’t live in the middle of nowhere, I used to go to rallies but I don’t have a car to get to them. You seem like a good and smart person, and I hope it hasn’t seemed like I’m mad at you or anything. I just have no patience for people whose idols betrayed their comrades and ruled with an iron fist. No matter how nice your friends seem, if they achieve their endgame, they will murder me, and likely you too unless you can kiss their ass hard enough. Either tankies need to be ignored, or if we’re gonna use them for our own ends, we need to be ready to ditch them and defend ourselves the moment they turn on us
I’m deep left libertarian, borderline anarchist, but if I have to make a choice between auths- tankies or Nazis- I’ll take tankies every time.
What if I told you that’s a false dichotomy and not a choice you will ever have to make?
Then you will have told me that.
But real talk, it’s looking more and more like some kind of auth future may be inevitable. I hope not.
Socially left, economically right. Generally.
I think my economic stance can be broadly summarized as: “I believe that free markets generally work well where they actually exist.”
That is, things like Healthcare aren’t actually free markets, and treating them as free markets despite the inherently coercive nature of needing them in order to not die is still coercion. It doesn’t taste better just because someone is making a profit.
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