- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I tried explaining my problems with tankies without calling them tankies. In fact, I used their own terminology to describe my disagreement with them. It, uh… well it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
George Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war on the side of the Marxists. His army was betrayed by the Marxist-Leninists. After that experience, he wrote 1984, in which a totalitarian government uses “newspeak” to suppress dissent by suppressing the very ideas that people are capable of communicating. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marxist-Leninists describe their disagreements in terms that turn criticism of them into gibberish. I think it’s exactly what Orwell was writing about based on his experiences.
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When people say Communism had never been tried it’s because communism is the end goal. It’s the place we want to get to. A stateless, moneyless, classless society where everyone is truly equal. That’s the ideal.
And Socialism is how we get there. Socialism is a scientific method of governance. It’s not the insanity of “free-markets” nor is it the dictate of an autocrat. You need hospitals. You put the force of govt behind building hospitals and staffing them. You have a giant landmass so you need mass transit. You don’t twiddle your thumbs waiting for the market winds to blow just right. You invest in building it. Because you need it. Because it’s good for your people.
CATALUNYA TRIOMFANT
OUR LAND WILL BE BOUNTIFUL AGAIN
SO DESTROY THE ENEMY
THEIR CONCEIT HAS SENTENCED THEM TO DEATHRAISE UP YOUR SCYTHES!
RAISE UP YOUR SCYTHES!
RAISE UP YOUR SCYTHES, DEFENDERS OF THE LAND!
What? No, it’s specifically Anarchists who want to speed run straight to communism. Marxists want to seize the state and guide it through a transitional stage (often called Socialism), which will end in the withering away of the state, and thus lead to Communism.
This was the whole nature of the split in the First International between Marx and Proudhoun.
To your point about Orwell, bringing up 1984 doesn’t make a ton of sense here, as that’s a book that is much more about fascism. Case in point, Immanuel Goldstein, the avatar of everything that Oceania opposes, is a man with a Jewish name.
Animal Farm, meanwhile, comes from Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War, where he was largely embedded with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). The POUM were more ideology diverse than history gives them credit for, but was largely composed of what we would today consider Trotskyists.
That experience, coupled with his experience as a journalist during WW2, unable to publish his trotskyist influenced criticisms of the USSR due to wartime state repression, ultimately lead him to write Animal Farm.
The Stalin analogue pig is named Napoleon in large part due to debates between MLs and Trotskyists about the nature of world historical revolutions, since their only point of comparison was France, which ended up with Napoleon in charge. Was Stalin a Napoleon of Socialism? Was that a necessary phase in these sorts of revolutionary processes? Things like that are what Animal Farm is gesturing towards.
All of that aside though. I think it’s needlessly limiting to lop yourself off into an ideological box and say “Only my pet socialist experiment is the Real one!”
As Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, etc. Whatever our ideological convictions, we all have the same ultimate goal, and are apart of the same broad tradition.
I have stark disagreements with my Anarchist friends, but they’re still my comrades, and I still respect many things about their commitment to direct action, and will defend their political projects, current and historic, to the hilt. Our struggle is ultimately the same, and we have much to learn from one another.
And that is why tankies cream their panties for dictators with imperialist ideas. Got it.
deleted by creator
I made an edit to my original post that is relevant to your comment here.
But in brief, as someone you might consider one of these “Stalinists” I have no interest in gatekeeping Anarchists. We are a part of the same broad political tradition, and the ultimate end goal we seek to achieve is the same.
I have a great respect for my fellow socialists of other tendencies, be they Anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists, etc. And consider their struggles to be my struggle as well, and I make common cause with people I disagree with in my own organizing all of the time, despite our ideological disagreements.
Editing your comment to add 7 paragraphs after it’s already been argued with is very bad manners. I’m going to delete my comment because after you’ve inserted 7 paragraphs of rebuttal before it, I’m sure it’s no longer relevant or persuasive.
I agree that it’s bad manners. I accidentally hit reply before I was done. Idk what to tell you, shit happens.
But That’s why I summarized. But it’s deeply immature of you to look for any excuse to not engage with someone who is disagreeing with you in good faith.
Textbook communism is an ideal utopia that can never be achieved.
Except for in Catalonia
Huh? You mean Catalonia in 1936-1937?
Fan of Chomsky I presume?
Yeah, but that’s just an attempt at something like communism. They didn’t reach full communism.
And also Australia
Can you expand on that?
During the Spanish civil war, Catalonia was governed by the Marxists and the Anarchists. They dismantled the state and gave control of the government over to the trade unions. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the middle of a war, and they were making progress every month. Until they were betrayed by the Marxist-Leninists.
They were Anarcho-Syndicalist and tbh we have never forgotten them. The collapse of the CNT was one of the greatest tragedies in human history.
One of the only large-scale “communist” societies that worked, and it was promptly destroyed by authoritarians.
Stalin: It’s going to be at least another hundred years before I can do communism
Catalonia: Yeah so it’s been a few weeks and we’re already doing communism. Come visit and shoot a Nazi!
Stalin: Fuck fuck fuck they’re making me look bad. Uhhhhhhh destroy Catalonia!
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marxist-Leninists describe their disagreements in terms that turn criticism of them into gibberish. I think it’s exactly what Orwell was writing about based on his experiences.
Nail on the head. There’s a particularly active lemming from the tankie instances that always, and purposefully, devolves everything into arguing about everyone else using words incorrectly.
Name and shame
Cowbee!
Facts
I think this meme is referenced to this quote Orwell wrote after fighting for and living the revolution in Spain.
Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist Party thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers’ control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why ‘liberal’ capitalist opinion took the same line.
This meme describes anarchists. Are you sure you know what the terms mean?
Many anarchists are also communists. So I’m not sure I follow.
OP is talking about tankies and ML and how he doesn’t like them, but the meme he posted doesn’t describe those.
also
Anarchists are communists. No one thinks anarcho-capitalists are anarchist except themselves and those they’ve misinformed.
I’m agender
No one thinks anarcho-capitalists are anarchist except themselves and those they’ve misinformed.
How isnt anarcho-capitalism a form of ancarchy? Like there’s no state, and if some company starts acting like a state, then its not anarchy anymore.
Anarchy isn’t just “no state”, is also non authority by force. Anarchic capitalists think that companies should rule and impose their will by force.
The subset of communists that do not support a state-backed socialist transition and argue for direct implementations of communism are precisely (mostly) anarchists/libertarians, i think that’s what they were saying, so this would be compatible with them being communists.
Not really. I mean yes Anarchists believe that the state inherently breeds authoritarianism and should not be seized but abolished. However, most Anarchists believe in horizontal systems of governance with no centralisation of power, which is different to communism.
Anarchists believe and they are correct, that Marxism, M-L ect are authoritarian and violent.
Communist is a broad word, and i think we have not the same meaning in mind.
To the very core, communism is to think that private property should be abolished. Marx was the most influential thinker of this, and we nowadays call ‘communist’ all the thinkers and movments that inherit Marx (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Trotsky, etc.). But anarchists also belong to the very root of communism, they just dont follow Marx (historically, they belonged to the First Internationale and were banned by marxists, with Bakunin as their main figure).
Horizontal system of governance can be communism in its broad sense if there is no private property. This explains some movments like ‘libertarian communism’, which are closer to anarchism than to marxism. But yes, if we equate communism and marxism, anarchists are no communists.
It describes the tankie strawman of anarchists.
Read som marxism ABC.
Read som marxism ABC.
“Normal people are too stupid to achieve communism on their own, so they need to be guided by a vanguard party of corrupt yes-men led by a psychopath.”
That’d be vanguardism. But that’s a component of Leninism, which is itself subset of Marxism.
A part of a part of Marxism probably shouldn’t be a working definition of the whole.
Ah tinfoil lib. Again read some marxism ABC
You mean history?
Oh here it comes, no true scottsman
I mean basic understanding of what words mean.
What does ABC mean? Its not a word in my native language
It’s an English idiom. The alphabet is also called the “ABCs”. As in “kindergarteners need to learn their ABCs”. Americans refer to any kind of basic knowledge as ABCs, like “The ABCs of cell biology” - this would probably be identifying organelles in a textbook. “Marxism ABC” is a very bad attempt at using this idiom by someone who neither understands other cultures nor their own.
I get it now, thank you. I kindly accept any list of top “ABCs” (correct?) of what I am supposed to know, but going with wha?t I’ve read and my historical knowledge I doubt I’ll learn anything new.
Thanks for the explanation!
Instructions unclear. I read maximum ACAB.
George Orwell was a snitch who ratted on communists to UK intelligence.
