That’s one ofvthe best summations I’ve seen yet of the problem.
I can’t understand how tankies can’t see it. Granted that some of them are undoubtedly liars and they’re really just angling to be among the few who get to live privileged lives on the backs of the people, there are many who are more or less sincere. How? They see how it works in capitalism - you give a relative few people control over an outsized portion of the wealth and they use it to influence politics and ultimately to fuck the country up in pursuit of their own short-term self-interest. But somehow the same people who see that that’s how it works in capitalism seem to sincerely believe that you can give a relative few even more political power and even more control over even more wealth and just so long as you hang a different label on it and surround it with enough communist rhetoric, it’ll all work.
It’s as if they think that the rhetoric, or maybe even just the label, is the important bit, and the part where you give a relative few control of most of the wealth and most of the power is somehow irrelevant.
I find that a lot of them can’t really discuss the political side of how communism is implemented, which ends up leading to major issues in how they understand it.
I remember a lot of English speaking tankies having an issue processing an internal Chinese political document where a Congress political scientist self described China as not being a democracy.
I even see a tendency among anarchists - especially young and obsessively online ones - to sort of default to authoritarianism. It’s as if authoritarian presumptions are so deeply engrained in their thinking that they can’t even conceive of any alternative. They essentially start with the (generally unstated) presumption that some group of people simply can and will decree what everyone must or must not do, say, think and believe - that that’s somehow just a fact of life - and that the only questions are who specifically gets to do it and what specifically they’ll impose, with one of the alternatives being “anarchism.”
A lot of what I see with tankies though seems to boil down to impatience. They can’t stand the thought of waiting around for the whole process to play out - for capitalism to so thoroughly and completely fail that virtually everyone sees it for what it is and willingly chooses to turn away from it.
Instead, they want to impose communism tomorrow, which means they’ll have to institutionalize the necessary authority both to impose it and to defend it once it’s in place.
But they don’t seem able (or willing) to grasp the simple fact that the thing that’s going to end up being imposed by the institutionalized authority their impatince demands is not going to be anything close to the communism they envision - that with institutionalized authority, it will and can only end up yet another scheme by which the most greedy and power-hungry establish and maintain their own privilege.
That last bit is the part I don’t get though. How do they not see that? I mean - it’s so incredibly obvious that it’s the taken-for-granted first half of an aphorism - power corrupts. Not can corrupt or might corrupt or will corrupt unless X - it corrupts, full stop, inevitably.
Yet we have this group of people whose entire ideology hinges not only on pretending that this time it won’t, somehow, but that the multiple instances in which it’s already been proven that that’s exactly what will happen, even when the power is in the name of “communism,” don’t count, somehow.
I see that that’s the case, and I can sort of see why they do it, but I don’t have the foggiest idea how. I mean - I could no more believe that than I could believe that I could flap my arms and fly.
That’s one ofvthe best summations I’ve seen yet of the problem.
I can’t understand how tankies can’t see it. Granted that some of them are undoubtedly liars and they’re really just angling to be among the few who get to live privileged lives on the backs of the people, there are many who are more or less sincere. How? They see how it works in capitalism - you give a relative few people control over an outsized portion of the wealth and they use it to influence politics and ultimately to fuck the country up in pursuit of their own short-term self-interest. But somehow the same people who see that that’s how it works in capitalism seem to sincerely believe that you can give a relative few even more political power and even more control over even more wealth and just so long as you hang a different label on it and surround it with enough communist rhetoric, it’ll all work.
It’s as if they think that the rhetoric, or maybe even just the label, is the important bit, and the part where you give a relative few control of most of the wealth and most of the power is somehow irrelevant.
I find that a lot of them can’t really discuss the political side of how communism is implemented, which ends up leading to major issues in how they understand it.
I remember a lot of English speaking tankies having an issue processing an internal Chinese political document where a Congress political scientist self described China as not being a democracy.
That’s undoubtedly a lot of it.
I even see a tendency among anarchists - especially young and obsessively online ones - to sort of default to authoritarianism. It’s as if authoritarian presumptions are so deeply engrained in their thinking that they can’t even conceive of any alternative. They essentially start with the (generally unstated) presumption that some group of people simply can and will decree what everyone must or must not do, say, think and believe - that that’s somehow just a fact of life - and that the only questions are who specifically gets to do it and what specifically they’ll impose, with one of the alternatives being “anarchism.”
A lot of what I see with tankies though seems to boil down to impatience. They can’t stand the thought of waiting around for the whole process to play out - for capitalism to so thoroughly and completely fail that virtually everyone sees it for what it is and willingly chooses to turn away from it.
Instead, they want to impose communism tomorrow, which means they’ll have to institutionalize the necessary authority both to impose it and to defend it once it’s in place.
But they don’t seem able (or willing) to grasp the simple fact that the thing that’s going to end up being imposed by the institutionalized authority their impatince demands is not going to be anything close to the communism they envision - that with institutionalized authority, it will and can only end up yet another scheme by which the most greedy and power-hungry establish and maintain their own privilege.
That last bit is the part I don’t get though. How do they not see that? I mean - it’s so incredibly obvious that it’s the taken-for-granted first half of an aphorism - power corrupts. Not can corrupt or might corrupt or will corrupt unless X - it corrupts, full stop, inevitably.
Yet we have this group of people whose entire ideology hinges not only on pretending that this time it won’t, somehow, but that the multiple instances in which it’s already been proven that that’s exactly what will happen, even when the power is in the name of “communism,” don’t count, somehow.
I see that that’s the case, and I can sort of see why they do it, but I don’t have the foggiest idea how. I mean - I could no more believe that than I could believe that I could flap my arms and fly.
??