I'm not a tankie but a empirical western Marxist with ML sympathies. I've met "tankies" irl, for example there was this one guy i argued with by saying Mao was a great guerilla/theorist and military leader but a shit politician cuz he did the great leap forward. He tried to argue with me by saying the furnaces used in the great leap forward were used afterwards for years and therefore the great leap forward was a net benefit or something. Also unironically claimed Stalin dindu nuffins (ironically, even Mao himself though Stalin did things about 50% wrong).
My problem isn't with describing those people as tankies, but rather, with anyone who claims actually existing socialism/the soviet union was 100% bad and a hellhole, regurgitating western/american cold war propaganda wholesale with no nuance.
I believe the old Soviet Union actually wasn't hell on earth, it had a lot of accomplishments (rapid industrialization, defeating the nazis, space travel, full employment, universal healthcare, housing and education, basic living standards for all) however it also had many downsides (authoritarianism, famines[pre 1950], corruption, inefficiency, lack of democracy, periodic shortages of goods [the 'bread lines', etc.]), also the quality of their finished goods wasn't that good either, except for the military and space industries.
Claiming modern marxists (except for soviet nostalgists) want to simply re implement the soviet system with no changes is absurd and a strawman. We can look upon the positive aspects of the SU, while seeing where it went wrong and how that would influence future projects for alternative political economy. The problem is, any positive opinion at all of parts of the eastern block countries is considered ‘tanky tanky tanky’.
As far as I can tell the term is mainly used as a strawman to slander basically any ML or even other types of Marxists. TBH it seems like a lot of other leftists have swallowed porky/amerifag propaganda wholesale without any critical thought and tried to rebrand leftism as their preferred label: but the problem is, this won’t convince any centrists or right wingers, the attempt to divorce the ideas of anti capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. from the Soviet Union and ML just seem like equivocation and semantic hairsplitting ‘muh not real socialism’.
To quote Paul Cockshott:
“we believe that there is much of value in the classical Marxian project of radical social transformation. On the other hand, we reject the idealist view which seeks to preserve the purity of socialist ideals at the cost of disconnecting them from historical reality. We recognise, that is, that the Soviet-type societies were in a significant sense socialist. Of course, they did not represent the materialisation of the ideals of Marx and Engels, or even of Lenin, but then what concrete historical society was ever the incarnation of an Idea? When we use the term ‘socialism’ as a social-scientific concept, to differentiate a 1 2 Introduction specific form of social organisation by virtue of its specific mode of production, we must recognise that socialism is not a Utopia. It is quite unscientific to claim that because the Soviet system was not democratic, therefore it cannot have been socialist, or more generally to build whatever features of society one considers most desirable into the very definition of socialism.“
So all of you out there who can’t stop spitting the word ‘tankie’ for one minute when discussing the soviet union, if you have ever unironically used the words ‘state capitalism’ to describe the soviet union, Shut the fuck up and google this great man: