What is a "tankie" supposed to be / represent???

What is a "tankie" supposed to be / represent???

[Ignore Nazbol flag, just trying out these flags]

Basically if you think state capitalism is socialism, you're a tankie.

god, you don't miss the old fellas till their gone

Leninism in practice.

Tankie is a slur for Marxist-Leninists, like smashie is for Anarchists. It was originally coined as a term to describe the faction of British communists who were in favor of the Soviet intervention in Hungary, where the tanks rolled in - therefore, the name.

It's pretty much the only Marxist interpretation that has worked though. While most proclaimed Socialists screech "it wasn't real communism!!!!", which makes them the deservedly the laughingstock in a debate because it's a cheap cop out, we proudly embrace the achievements of the Soviet Union, Albania and Cuba towards Socialism, we criticize Khrushchevs and Breznevs revisionism, and wear the slurs and insults thrown at us by liberal propaganda as a badge of honor.

Yes, state capitalism has been very successful at industrialization and boosting your countries productivity. Congratulations for your immense success

how long before this thread turns into a massive discussion about tankies

State Capitalism
I don't get this meme, granted there were erroneous modifications made by the Krhuschevites, but calling the Stalin era USSR state capitalism beyond lazzy and non-marxist

Wew.

You forgot

lol

That's because you don't understand Marx

It doesn't matter whether there are private individuals controlling the means of production or if it is bureaucrats, as long as the base of society is organized around capitalists controlling the means of production and extracting surplus value from the labor of the proletariat, it is capitalism. And as long as you don't completely isolate yourself from the outside world and engage in trade with capitalist nations, it is absolutely imperative to utilize the capitalist system anyways. Lenin understood that, what followed, not so much

A pathological reactionary that nevertheless has some semblance of humanity by directing his reactionarism towards noble goals like equality, ending poverty etc.

A tankie includes one or more of the following traits:


CPGB-ML is a prime example of tankdom and excels in all these traits. Pic related.

is there anything wrong with supporting a little bit of both ?

What were trade unions(in the sphere of industrial production/planning), local commities/soviets/youth organizations(in political sphere), and the party, just because you don't know about then doesn't meand they didn't exist.
What do you mean by this, because this was the same arguments that revisionism used to dismiss economic planning and introduce the law of value back in the sphere of production after Stalin's death(that lead to worst bureocratization than what may existed before based on the growth of the black market).
Political freedoms in what sense, you sound like a liberal throwing empty words without contexts for cheap reactions.
I'm marxist leninist, i belive in debate inside the party, but once the question is settled every member must accept the party instance, not form factions to try and split the party weakenning it in the eyes of the workers and the enemies abroad.
Now your just lying, the only luxuries the parties officials had were the dachas and travels, the wage discrepancy was at maximum 10 to 1, the only porkies i can think of are the people that got rich with the black market that had and insane growth after Kruschev reforms to ""Market socialism"" and were ready to destroy socialism when they had a chance.

That's because you don't understand Marx

It doesn't matter whether there are private individuals controlling the means of production or if it is bureaucrats, as long as the base of society is organized around capitalists controlling the means of production and extracting surplus value from the labor of the proletariat, it is capitalism. And as long as you don't completely isolate yourself from the outside world and engage in trade with capitalist nations, it is absolutely imperative to utilize the capitalist system anyways. Lenin understood that, what followed, not so much.

Truly sad the state of leftypol this days

Ops

It doesn't matter whether there are private individuals controlling the means of production or if it is bureaucrats, as long as the base of society is organized around capitalists controlling the means of production and extracting surplus value from the labor of the proletariat, it is capitalism. And as long as you don't completely isolate yourself from the outside world and engage in trade with capitalist nations, it is absolutely imperative to utilize the capitalist system anyways. Lenin understood that, what followed, not so much.
Where was the Soviet bourgeoisie? Who in Soviet society hired labor-power and accumulated capital? What property did they own? If you can't answer those questions how can you conclude that the Soviet Union was capitalist or state capitalism(whatever it means after years of retards rapping this word), and no "bureocrats" it's not an aswer because like any worker bureocrats were binded by the plan and were subject to the same conditions of any worker. And there is nothing in foreign trade that impedes planning that i'm aware of(of course it makes it harder but not impossible as the USSR showed us).

Holy shit i'm drunk


Where was the Soviet bourgeoisie? Who in Soviet society hired labor-power and accumulated capital? What property did they own? If you can't answer those questions how can you conclude that the Soviet Union was capitalist or state capitalism(whatever it means after years of retards rapping this word), and no "bureocrats" it's not an aswer because like any worker bureocrats were binded by the plan and were subject to the same conditions of any worker. And there is nothing in foreign trade that impedes planning that i'm aware of(of course it makes it harder but not impossible as the USSR showed us).

The defining feature of capitalism is that a bourgeois class extracts surplus value from the labor of a proletarian class and uses this surplus value (represented as profit) to reinvest in improvement of existing capital and acquisition of capital. Through a variety of resulting mechanisms, this causes capital to hold everyone at gunpoint while the proletariat needlessly suffers. Thus, capital-ism is the belief in and practice of the complete rule of capital.

How does this apply to the Soviet Union? Well, markets and private property were not present. This much is true. Property and an extractivist pseudo-bourgeoisie, in the respective forms of complete state control over the MoP and an ever-hungry military and nomenklatura in direct competition with classical capitalism, did indeed exist. The end result was that the workers remained completely alienated from the product of their labor and were continually exploited more and more as technology advanced in the name of competition.

In short….
In mutualism, the market itself becomes an abstract capitalist. I think I've seen you make that precise argument before, and I don't disagree. Just replace "mutualism" with "the USSR" and "market itself" with "state". In fact, it was openly state-capitalistic in many ways, with wages being determined according to what people needed to survive and nothing more, with what else was produced going to some sort of production for and by the state. The state was a single proprietor, and yet subject to forces similar to those of corporations in market economies. In fact, I fail to see a significant difference between it and the British East India Company in both structure and practice. Ayn Rand's utopia is the USSR with the Politburo and Gosplan merged under the name of "captains of industry". The authoritarian left and libertarian right do not exist because there is no difference between domination by private institutions and domination by state institutions.

If you really understood Marx, you would recognize that it makes no different whether the bureaucrats were workers beforehand or not. What matters is their current relation to the means of production. A worker is a worker is a worker as a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat because of their respective power relations. A true communist would seek to end all unequal and hierarchical power relations, not reconstruct them under a different name. You are no communist, just like your idol.

Tankie was originally coined as a termed used for those who supported the Soviet Union shutting down the 1956 Hungarian uprising with tanks. What they won't tell you though, is that this was a fascist putsch and thousands of Jews fled the country from fear of pogroms carried out by "revolutionaries." You'll notice if you look closer, the people who use such terms discount every anti-imperialist, anti-colonial movement and will united with racists and anti-semites whenever it's convenient. Of course the board where all the left wing racists run to, the leftcoms come as well.

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Malcolm X was in no way a tankie, he was not even a socialist.

There is a big difference between the anarchy of production that comes from production itself being organized by the law of value in capitalism(or mutualism), and concient and objective planning in socialism without the law of value being its guide, this is the point market socialists don't get, you can't have the law of value controlling your production without the consequent anarchy of production(this pehonomena observed even by soviet economists after Khruschev/Bresnev reforms)


What power does a bureocrat has over a plan that was already decided by the class workers(trade unions, party etc) with he's part, and by the way Marx was no t an anarchist and he didn't deny the role o hierachy in the building of socialism because he wasn't a idealist.

but some of them are bad guys

Certainly, capitalism of any form conforms more to common laws when it explicitly adheres to certain directives such as a defined profit mechanism (as state capitalism in the USSR did after the Kosygin reforms), but that does not mean that it wasn't state capitalism prior. "Anarchy of production" isn't a marking feature of capitalism, but rather of market capitalism in particular.

This isn't an argument, unless you're implying that I'm a market socialist (like almost all anarchists, I'm not).

The working class had no democracy through the party. If it did, they would have implemented Glushkov's cybernetic planning mechanisms. The only conceivable losers in the case of their implementation would have been the Western capitalists and the bureaucrats.

Anarchists don't reject all authority on principle - they reject it where it cannot be justified. Marx was against hierarchy, which is certainly a commonality with anarchists. There was a reason why he supported the Paris Commune as a perfect example of the dictatorship of the proletariat - it was a non-hierarchical, free model of association with potential to be a building block of future socialism.

No, Marx was not an anarchist. No one is saying this. He was, however, overwhelmingly more similar to anarchists than you are to him.

It was the party bureaucrats who drafted the plan, who put in their little personal desires, who did unnecessary work whose only purpose was to prop up the system, as counterposed to the alternative of workers running their own workplaces and confederating them into syndicates to horizontally plan the economy.

The brutal Taylorism of Lenin and subsequently Stalin is well-documented in both its existence and its ineffectiveness. The workers never chose this - they hated it and at Kronstadt and Tambov and Huliai-Polye rebelled against it, only to be put down and vilified by a lying propaganda machine. The trade unions and soviets were organs of the party to further pacify the populace. Accepting them as legitimately democratic while seeing how the party's luminaries shamelessly imposed brutal measures on the workers to maximize production in a capitalistic fashion is just sticking your head in the sand.

A) He was against hierarchy - it is in fact the opposition to hierarchy which spawns the original ideals of communism and anarchism, seeing as both aim to maximize positive freedom by abolishing material constraints
B) Stop it with this infuriatingly dumb meme of "anarchists are idealists". Proudhon was a materialist socialist before Marx, according to Marx's own words describing him as "the first exponent of scientific socialism". Bakunin was a materialist as well - his proposals and ideas make no sense from any other perspective. Kropotkin is better at being a materialist than Marx - he's very straightforward in his language and bases his analyses not off some bullshit quasi-Hegelian metaphyiscal construct of "dialectical class struggle" but rather the pragmatic interests of human individuals, as informed by elements of actual biology like mutual aid. Stirner was an idealist, but that always has been the real divide between individualist and social anarchists, then - that social anarchists extend and at times negate the individual-centered idealist analysis of individualist anarchists into the realm of material things.

First off you are a strawmanning faggot by implying workers had absolutely no self-administration in the Soviet system. In 1928, 11% of the entire population was participating in workers and local council, this is more participation than in Revolutionary Catalonia. I told you that in another thread to which you never replied.

Secondly you keep ignoring that in an agrarian country like Russia you might want to educate your working class first, throwing "proletarians" who couldn't even read at manager positions didn't work out at all. This was the lesson of the NEP. Therefore the narrowed down, bureaucratic elite. You may not like it, but there was little option for anything else unless you want another Kulakization.

Plus, you are an Idealist, you want decentralization but refuse to explain how this should even be able to compete with the centralized mode of production as technology and the means of planning and administration progress over the course of modernity. Democratic feudalism is not gonna make it.

Pointing at democratic instutions to prove that there was no democracy is not a good tactic for a debate, son.

You love to have the broadest fucking defintion for capitalism (like, using management to allocate resources is apperently already capitalism), completely ignore the lack of surplus extraction and a bourgeoisie and resort to the dusty leftcom/trotskist argument about international trade (ignoring the fact that most Eastern Bloc states where based on mutual aid).

At the same time, you apperently have no fucking problem to call Mutualism and decentralized Syndicalism socialism, where law of value would still apply. You are intellectually dishonest.

It is used to label extremely autistic people

Lets name them all, I'll start:

Thats cute, sadly you forgot to abolish the value form

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Only to those who think stalinism is orthodox marxism-leninism, that is to say, stalinists

Man tankies are so sad to watch

But you're a Nihilist, you value nothing anyway.

Nice imagination, do you also think freddy kruger haunts your dreams?

Wow someone ban this kid

Wow a building!! do you want a fucking star in your forehead??

Feel free to prove they stablished worker control of the MoP, got rid of alienation, got rid of the value form and so on autist

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There is a big difference between the anarchy of production that comes from production itself being organized by the law of value in capitalism(or mutualism), and concient and objective planning in socialism without the law of value being its guide, this is the point market socialists don't get, you can't have the law of value controlling your production without the consequent anarchy of production(this pehonomena observed even by soviet economists after Khruschev/Bresnev reforms)

How does it feel to be retarded kid?

The law of value states that aggregrate prices are proportionate to the verage amount of human labour, If there is no price, as there is no money, as there is no government to provide the necessary protection to the currency, how do you find the aproximates needed for the lawof value to work??

Moreover, lets not forget that labour vouchers are currency, even if they are non transferible, as what is transfered to the is the information of supply and demnd of each product, in tje same way as price signals

Lets not forget that in the soviet union I couldnt demnd more value than what I generated, and the only way to calculate this is with the law of value

Basically you are fucking retarded kid, like every other moustache flag

The only way to abolish the law of value is to abolish currency, to abolish currency we need to abolish the government, currency can be money or labour vouchers, as labour vouchers are proprotionate to the average labour time of the commodities they are traded for

There are no ifs or buts, the reason why gift and barter economies didnt had the law of value was due to their anarchical and decentralized structure

So what's to stop the issuing of bank notes

The fact that I could counterfeit it

See, you need a repressive state apparatus to have currency, it has to be abolished by any means necessary

kek

Feudalism wasn't hierarchical

Worked out well for Katalonia and the Paris commune didn't it

Worked good enough for hundreds of thousands of counterfeiters and other illegalists you mean

Both katalonia and the paris commune tried to stablish a state and were infected with marxists


How cute, the tankiddie still doesnt understand that abolishing the government isnt just starting a coup and taking over the void left behind

Except there was money in feudalism you massive idiot

Tankie varies from someone who says the USSR wasn't all bad to full blown Stalin cultists. I'm going to roadtest something I've been thinking about for a while.

Lets nail something down first: the USSR's 'state capitalism' != capitalism in the West. That's a point so-called value form critiques ignore. It's character was fundamentally different, i.e. there was a quantitative difference. Value form critiques ignore the significance of this because all they see is qualitative similarities, and thus capitalism in the form of the ideal total capitalist embodied in the Soviet state.

Another point: far from consolidating a new ruling class, the purges weakened the USSR to the point that, if Stephen Kotkin is to be believed, Stalin did not receive foreign intelligence reports for over 100 days at one point. I.e. he was effectively blind. In a roundabout way, the purges effectively set back the development of a semi-autonomous class by decades. It wasn't their purpose, but that's what it accomplished. This goes heavily against the accounts of a united and consolidated ruling class in the USSR from the time of Lenin onwards.

This doesn't make Stalin a positive force in the USSR. Quite the opposite. Everything he accomplished could have been accomplished without him, and a lot more good Bolsheviks like Bukharin could have lived and achieved their full potential. Lenin set the whole thing in motion, all Stalin could do was run with it and set himself up as Lenin's natural successor as the good student of the master. In turn, Stalin's successors had to deal with this legacy. It was an endless accumulating weight of tragedy and historical inertia away from Lenin and the original Bolsheviks.

Case in point: the 1928 Five Year Plan was the last major attempt at economic reform in the USSR's history until Gorbachev. It's difficult to overstate the significance of this. Everything outside of heavy industry (which incl. the military) was conducted on a shoe-string budget – even the space race. Light industry and agriculture suffered the worst, with well-known results: a crisis of overproduction in heavy industry and underproduction and underdevelopment everywhere else, which trading in hard currencies bartered from oil etc. could not change. In other words, the same 'capitalist' crisis with a different character.

So the label of 'state capitalism' obscures more than it explains. Indeed it functions as a way to shut down debate about the USSR's true significance and history. It cannot explain the Cold War. It's classification of the USSR as a form of capitalism is correct, but it ignores fundamental differences and incompatibilities between the USSR and the 'original' form of capitalism in the West. Very early on in the Cold War, the US State Department, influenced by George Kennan, shut down the idea of economic cooperation between the two superpowers. Not only was it Russian "neurosis" that stood in the way but the fundamental fact that communists were "traitors". The Marshal Plan was partially rejected by Stalin for the simple reason its multilateral economic features were incompatible with the Soviet economy; and in hindsight, it's clear the US deliberately constructed the Plan in this way so it would be rejected. Containment, advocated by Kennan, was in motion from 1946 onwards.

Here we can see why the Cold War started between two 'capitalist' superpowers. From a fundamental economic incompatibility, which saw the Ruble remain worthless outside the Bloc states, to an ideological compatibility – the USSR was rightly considered a form of Marxism, even with a particularly neurotic character. Value form/leftcom critiques cannot account for this as they don't consider Marxism-Leninism as legitimate. If the object of your analysis is a priori illegitimate, then any kind of conclusion will be shaped by this view – i.e. it's bordering on the tautological. I'd welcome any commentary on this, provided it's of the constructive kind.

Soviet apologists who continue to stick up for a mediocre regime which failed.

Quick history lesson: the only ones Stalin drove over with tanks were nazis. Tankies aren't MLs, they're the fucking revisionists.

The word has shifting meaning since then to refer to any supporter of the USSR and associated regimes.

anti-horse benis bump

No, the law of value exist only in so far as production for profit exists, so in the case of the Soviet union(Stalin period) we can say the law of value operated between the state industries sphere and the farming coops, as even the latter, being a form of socialized property they still needed produce for profit, but thats was the limit in the law of value operation in the USSR, as in between the state sectors interprises(that were the majority of the economy) there was no production for profit/commoditie production.
Money in the USSR was used as a form of acounting, the individual enterprise didn't need to raise it's own resources/money/profit because it was raised/created by the state acording to the plan and the output and input designed to that enterprise, so can we say that the law of value is operations here? No, as i say again where there is no production for profit/commoditie production the law of value can't be the regulator of production.

And it has no nuance. It doesn't differentiate between those defending socialist states under certain leadership, defending them against imperialists or defending them against blatantly false anti-communist propaganda. Then there's nazbols who are willing to just suck any strongman's cock, socialist or not.

Of course anarchy of production is a defining caracteristic of capitalism, and there is no capitalism without markets.The working class had no democracy through the party. If it did, they would have implemented Glushkov's cybernetic planning mechanisms. The only conceivable losers in the case of their implementation would have been the Western capitalists and the bureaucrats.
It was the party bureaucrats who drafted the plan, who put in their little personal desires, who did unnecessary work whose only purpose was to prop up the system, as counterposed to the alternative of workers running their own workplaces and confederating them into syndicates to horizontally plan the economy.

The plan was traced around major lines(like growth in output of x material), but then the plan was passed around to the various trade unions and industrial organizations that modifyed the plan, so yes, there was worker involvement in the plan, and cybernetics was put down by the revisionists not Stalin.


There was no hierarchy o paper(and Marx didn't praise it by it's Lack of hierarchy), but the reality was diferent, because as marxist leninist know that when the diferenciation between the tecnical level of workers still exist, discipline in production is inevitably necessary for the development of the forces of production, and we don't deny this material reality as anarchist do, because of this we can the idealists.

Fugg


Of course anarchy of production is a defining caracteristic of capitalism, and there is no capitalism without markets.


The plan was traced around major lines(like growth in output of x material), but then the plan was passed around to the various trade unions and industrial organizations that modifyed the plan, so yes, there was worker involvement in the plan, and cybernetics was put down by the revisionists not Stalin.


There was no hierarchy o paper(and Marx didn't praise it by it's Lack of hierarchy), but the reality was diferent, because as marxist leninist know that when the diferenciation between the tecnical level of workers still exist, discipline in production is inevitably necessary for the development of the forces of production, and we don't deny this material reality as anarchist do and because of this we call then idealists.

test

wrong, the law of value exists as long as labour is commodified, thus planned production, with a system of labour vouchers still has such law in place, where the proprotion between labour vouchers and the amount of human labour is literally 1:1

which is why the USSR never ever abolished the value-form

yes you dummy, and I just pointed out why, the total amount of labour vouchers are literally equal in proportion to the amount of labour, the prportion is literally 1:1

but there is commodity production under planned economies you dumb dumb, as proved by mixed economies and artifical markets


You dumb dumb, there is centrally planned capitalism, Do you even know what a mixed economy is, what an artifical market is? were the allies in WW2 not capitalist because they engaged in central planning for certain sectors of the economy?