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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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That’s a bad definition.
A tankie is simply a ML who supports the use of force to restrict people’s freedoms. It’s named after the Soviets sending tanks into Hungary to stop a popular democratic uprising, but the same applies to China sending tanks into Tiananmen.
They’re basically super statists who value the state over the people.
All leftists are opposed to capitalism, but obvs tankies are a small minority of leftists, so your definition falls apart.
What is a ML ?
Marxism-Leninism.
Lenin was a scholar and developed his own take on Marxism, which has its own understanding of the communist society. Marx wrote very little about what a communist society would look like, but he had an understanding of history as moving towards an end: The classes will fight, over time the result of this fight will lead to them approaching each other, and at the end of this struggle we will reach a classless society. This classless society is the communist society in a traditional Marxist sense.
Lenin figured he'd make a shortcut to get there: Never mind thousands of years of class struggle, let's just put in place a powerful ruling class imposing communism on everyone, designing a classless society from the top down. Which is a bit counter-intuitive, but the Leninist part of Marxism-Leninism basically boils down to trying to figure out what that could look like.
So then you get the Soviet Union, very much founded on the ideas of Marxism-Leninism. Today people who identify as Marxist-Leninist tend to not be the sharpest tools in the shed: Despite insisting that they have studied the texts carefully, a brief interaction with them reveals that they have never read neither Marx nor Lenin. What it boils down to, rather than anything theoretical, is either a longing for some imaginary version of the Soviet Union or a unshakable commitment to lick Putin's ass.
The Soviet Union of course never did become a classless society, so you could argue that the greatest achievement of Marxism-Leninism was to destroy the traditional meaning of communism in a Marxist sense.
Well said. The ML offshoot caused deaths of numerous communists and gave a reason to the red scare, harming the progress of Marxism for decades
I think Lenin missed the part where the powerful ruling class imposing something is the opposite of a classless society.
To be fair, I downloaded Das Kapital once and started reading it, but after just one or two pages in this old German language it was just too difficult to follow so I gave up.
Marx actually did write quite a bit about revolutionary praxis. It's actually what ends up renders his otherwise reasonable stuff about historical materialism down to modernist screed.
Marxist-Lenininist, or Stalinist. Sometimes Maoists are included. It's like a pseudofascist offshoot and later antagonist ideology of Marxism. Historically they've purged communists etc.
Marxist-Leninist.
That's simply incorrect.
No it’s not.
The closest to support for capitalism would market socialism, but that still involves public ownership of the means of production, which is in difference to the defining feature of capitalism, private ownership of the means of production.
not just private ownership, but structures that ensure an increasingly concentrated private ownership by ever fewer people who use that advantage to create a set of rules that further increases the ownership gap
ie a system where the owners of capital get to make the rules
capitalism is antithetical to democracy
It is though. This is what people mean when they say so much of internet leftism is outdated and misinformed.
Treating capitalism as a Boogeyman is outdated. Capital modes of production are a tool which can be wielded by market socialists towards the ultimate goal of post scarcity, classless society, the same as any other other economic structure. Putting dirty words in in a particular historical box is just as dumb as worshipping those words. It's modernist garbage, plain and simple, and all to often this gets manifested as braindead "everything I hate is capitalism."
The goal of socialism is worker control of production. This is often in conflict with capitalism in practice, but is not orthogonal to capitalism in theory. This is a large part of contemporary leftist theory which has developed over the past 50 years, and dismissing it reveals pretty stark amateurism imo
You're playing semantics and the "modes of production" stuff is like the weakest stuff in Marx. Market socialism still means the abolishment of the capitalist class (nowadays "the 0.1%"), therefore, can't be capitalist, the primary distinction after all being class relations, and not mode of production.
There's been a ton of equivocation of capitalism with market economies which is probably where all this is coming from. You can have markets with socialism, you can have markets with capitalism, but you can't have socialism with capitalism.
You’re the first person I’ve ever heard say “internet” leftism is outdated.
I think you’ve just convinced yourself that it is because you don’t agree with it mate.
Yes, it would definitely seem that way if your primary exposure to leftist ideas was leftist internet forums, where leftism is primarily about revolutionary fan service and gatekeeping leftism.
Except it isn’t my primary exposure?
My views largely predate the Internet.
Like I said, keep telling yourself you must be right.
I guess there's this American sense of capitalism as an ideological commitment to letting the forces of the marketplace run wild, and that once you regulate the markets it's not capitalism any more. That's laissez-faire though - there are other forms of capitalism as well. In the broadest sense capitalism basically boils down to having a market economy, which a lot of leftists are in favour of.
No, capitalism basically boils down to private ownership of the means of production.
A market economy is a market economy, hence market socialism. Market economies have existed for thousands of years, capitalism for a few hundred.
State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial (i.e. for-profit) economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises.
You should read up on social democracy.
Soc Dem was co-opted by right wingers, just the same as they stole the word Libertarian from us.
Soc Dems today are not leftist, Dem Socs are where the leftist part went.
And the People's Front of Judea needs to fuck right off, what a bunch of traitorous scum
Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.
That sentence is objectively retarded.
In Finland, the social democrats are leftists only in right wing rhetoric. Their actual politics are definitely still inside capitalism and not actually leftist. One could consider them centrists in a way
Scandinavian countries are not leftist.
They're some of the most left leaning of Western countries, but they're not actually on the left side of the spectrum, they're just less right.
Yes historically Soc Dems were part of the left, that leftist element is now referred to as Democratic Socialism.
Soc Dems still sought to do away with capitalism by transitioning to socialism, they just wanted to approach it through gradual change of the system.
The clearest split between right wing and left wing is the belief in capitalism.
Of all the random things people downvote, I find this to be the most fascinating.
Not only are you correct, but you're so obviously correct as well. There's the old Jewish joke with "two Jews, three opinions" - that certainly holds true for leftists as well. Even more than the bootlickers I'm getting tired of the people who are so goddamn sure they've figured it all out.