Ask Lemmygrad

we're to their left and that hurts their feelings

For the same reason we were called "pinkos" and "commies" and "reds" during the Cold War. It's a meaningless epithet only designed to otherize and marginalize anyone opposing imperialism and siding with real socialist and anti-imperialist forces.

You can look at it just like any other perjorative used against someone who poses a threat to the ruling class and the status quo.

When people who ostensibly call themselves leftists start calling you these names, that's just a way for them to signal to the ruling class that they are not like you, that they are part of the obedient ones, that they do not pose a real threat, that they are a system-compatible opposition that the ruling class can ignore or even reward.

It's essentially a pejorative for "communist." I recommend the Prolewiki article on "Tankies," as well as Nia Frome's essay "Tankies."

As for authoritarianism, it's not really something that you lean more or less, but which class controls the state and what conditions the state is in. Socialist states wield authority against capitalists and fascists, and protect against imperialists. They are forced into more extreme measures the more endangered they are, magnified by imperialist aggression.

authoritarian

My response about a year ago: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5459443/4950749

All governance is authoritarian; the question is who are they authoritarian against.

In liberal democracies they are democracies for capital and authoritarian against the proleteriat - especially in the west they will be authoritarian against the workers of the Global South through imperialism. In these capitalist dictatorships they engage in electoralism as a pressure valve of discontent for the masses and claim this political theatre counts as a democracy.

Now consider actual existing socialist states surviving the siege by the West against socialism, under hybrid wars. These socialist states have a deeper understanding of democracy, a whole people's democracy that goes beyond theatrical electoralism (though if we are counting numbers then China has the largest voting electorate in the world). They are dictatorships of the proleteriat against capital.

In the west you can vote for whichever party you want and critcise whoever you want as long as it is not considered a threat to western capital and hegemony.

Westerners with a straight face will tell you they have more freedom while an Australian journalist was tortured in the UK because he exposed USAmerican war crimes.

These westerners have perceived freedoms because their actions are not considered a threat but if they find themselves on the wrong side of that perceived safety they will quickly be nullified - bank accounts frozen, media character assasination, imprisonment, torture and murder.

Authoritarianism often ends up being meaningless as a term because it is used as a slur for designated western threats.

For further reading I would consider Losurdo's take on totalitarianism where he tackles the virulently racist Arendt's concept of it (which was made popular in the west):

https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-totalitarianism/

Also by Losurdo:

https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/

(And if you want a direct comparison of a capitalist vs socialist democracy consider India vs China respectively - they have similar timeframes (ie when british formally left India) and population sizes)

Hope that helped

Tankie' was originally used in context of the Hungarian counter-revolution of 1956, which described the pro-Soviet people living in Hungary as 'tankies', because the Soviets brought tanks into Hungary in order to stop the Nazi-led counterrevolutionaries.

Prolewiki: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Tankie

Tankies don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism”, but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.

Frome: https://redsails.org/tankies/

Why are there so many trans tankies? What is the beef between trans studies and queer theory? This essay proposes to answer both questions at once by identifying homologies between trans (and other) criticisms of queer theory and Marxist-Leninist criticisms of Western Marxism.

Frome, again: https://redsails.org/the-problem-of-recognition-in-transitional-states/

Though I have included snippets here, all the articles in those links are well worth a read (and Frome is an excellent source).

If the third link is a bit too dense, then I would go through George Politzer's Elementary Principles of Philosophy first to better understand dialectical materialism (DM) though I have recently been recommended Adoratsky's Dialectical Materialism (an online search for pdfs should net you a copy):

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Elementary_principles_of_philosophy

A potential fuller reading list on DM is (I have included my personal summary understanding of DM below, which I may update over time):

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9962669/7401956

Dialectical materialism = a way of analysis that focuses on contradictions as engines driving change in a given direction to produce a deeper science. Dialectics allows us to understand relationships and materialism grounds it in reality. The material always come before the idea. It is teleological, not positivist and is the enemy of idealism.

Rabid anticommunism. There is really isn't more to it than people calling you a dirty commie. People just come up with new insults since the contradictions of capitalism are so appearant.

On Lemmy it's a lot easier to clock people as communists since you only need to check what instance they are from instead of digging through their posting history.

The best response is: damn I wish we had tanks.

Empty signifiers are an easy way to obscure reality.

We tankies

This comment is to clear up some miscommunication I believe I may have not stated clearly in my post that I am now noticing

1. I dont have a problem with the more "authoritarian" communists

2. I was just curious how the term expanded from it's original meaning

3.I don't have a problem being called a tankie but I was curious why I kept having the term be used when I was not referring to something that seemed like fit the older versions of the term and did not involve the USSR at all

Hakim explains it in this video

https://youtu.be/LcJ5NrJtQ8g