It became confusing when liberals learnt of the word - now they hurl the word at anyone who dares to remind them that being pro-capitalist is still a right-wing thing to be.

I'm an anarchist, we don't call anybody tankies. Tankies is a term coming from the UK i think the 80s some eastern european nation was taken over by the USSR and some Brittish came out in support of it. So they were called tankies.

These political fighting words need to be layed to rest. Communists hate me as much as anybody else but I'd rather engage on the idea level instead of ad hominem attacks and name calling.

I suspect this whole tankie thing might be a coordinated propaganda campaign geared at discrediting communists and at the same time creating tension between them and other leftits. I suspect this as this whole infighting over small differences doesn't lead to a victory for the left but effectively disables and neutralizes it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsqE9kEsDVY

Maybe it's just the circles I run in, but I understand "tankie" to mean leftists who think Soviet/Maoist/vanguard-party styles of Communist revolution/rule were good, actually, to the point of denying any bad things they did/do as "Western propaganda".

Given the red scare in the US, our ability as a whole to use any sort of leftist political labels accurately across the population is basically non-existent, so I do understand the frustration by both tankies and non-tankie leftists about how the term gets used lately, especially in produce circles on social media.

But again maybe that's just me. I don't know if I would consider myself a communist, but I do consider myself as a yet undetermined variety of socialist, if that helps at all.

...because none of those groups are Tankies and they are all unified against Tankies.

Tankies aren't socialists or communists (not that those two things are the same either). They are the purist ideologues of communism, where compromise is defeat. Rampant in telling you why you're wrong, and why only the purest form of communism will bring nirvana. All without understanding the consequences of what they propose.

Even the Communists don't want them on their side.

Then there's folks like me who have no idea what the term means, you're not alone in your confusion.

Edit: thanks for all the replies folks! TIL

Communists seem to be sad, pathetic people now. I thought ya'll had something, but you're all just a bunch of fractured apologists trying to get one over on each other.

Sad, ya'll actually had something going on at one point, now you're just irrelevant