this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Communism
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So I've heard tankies defined as "someone who specifically supports the centralized, authorization flavor of communism practiced by the USSR". They also often mention worship of Stalin and Mao, and a revisionist version of history supporting such a stance
This seems odd to me, especially since a group of tankies flocked early to a decentralized platform geared for long-form discussions
Personally, I believe capitalism is an ideological virus. You can trace a clear path from the Roman empire to the modern day, where a hyper-specialized society eradicated every other system of resource husbandry by sloppily harvesting as quick as possible and using that advantage to gangpress everyone else into service under them (and destroying anything that would even slightly slow down the process )
I don't think communism is the answer, because I don't think it's a path we can walk without first curing the disease, but the guiding concepts resonate with me.
So in that light, I'd like to ask in good faith:
Self-identified tankies - how do you define a tankie?
you're not going to get an answer because people don't self identify as a tankie - it's a pejorative term. you should ask for the opinion of modern marxist-lenninists and you'll get plenty of explanation. like most political persuasions it's not the ideology that is flawed it's the execution.
Fair enough, a pejorative term for what exactly though? The most nuanced answer I've gotten is from a proponent of communism who pointed at the authoritarian bent to it... Which seems super weird to me.
The way I see it, a bureaucracy has more leeway in allocating goods the higher up you go, which is very literal administrative capitol - it's totally in conflict with the core concept of Marx, which is a person getting the fruits of their own labor, and no one getting to milk others (which is really the only way to get much inequality)
I'm a lot more critical of lennonists. While on the surface it imitates capitalism's ability to optimize production (and with a more aligned goal, minimizing scarcity instead of maximizing the supply-demand equation), it also reintroduces the alignment problem. As you scale up, individual action and ideological beliefs become blips in the data, and the super organism created through humans arranged in the structure.
Individuals have a perverse incentive to maximize their own authority, the number of people under them, and the scale of their operations - by doing that they appear more meritocratous and are more likely to move up the hierarchy. Eventually someone gets the idea to fudge the numbers, and since the metrics are too complex to spot this in a spreadsheet, the most widely selected for skill to move up the ladder is to distort (or spin) the numbers so an individual appears to be serving a greater need than what actually exists.
Lennon's theory is great, the more centralized the distribution, the greater the potential for optimization - but it ignores the emergent properties that appear when humans form an entity too complex for individual humans to grasp the full picture. You can reign in the worst excesses through watchdogs and harsh punishments, but ultimately that just becomes another layer for power to concentrate. You can keep layering and slow down the rot, but it's a fundamental alignment problem - either you purposely concentrate the power in a person or group and regress to autocracy, or you constantly keep adding layers of checks and balances (which eats away at the efficiency gains)
So I see a fundamental contradiction here, which is why I can get behind techno-communism with intelligent agents running the show, or I can get behind decentralizing the system and creating something more anarchistic (or ideally, both), but Lennon always seemed to me to be a smart architect given a problem with a scale and an urgency beyond his abilities
Or am I missing something fundamental?