Tankieism

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:

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0A7FFF28B99C1303
soundcloud.com/detona-1/parentimix
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

shut the fuck up tankie

you shut the fuck up kulak

Stalin was the problem of the soviet union

soviet union was mostly good, parenti is p cool, anarchists and actual tankies need to chill the fuck out. also Khrushchev Lied. The Evidence That Every “Revelation” of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “Secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False

stop larping tankie

IS 3 is trash and you are a moron for liking it

except killing most of the members of his own party, destroying every form of democracy, forcing the collectivization of the land causing a disastrous famine and killed trotsky

Is collectivization necessarily wrong? don't all socialists believe in seizing the means of production and that entails taking someones private property

One of the few points which I disagree upon with Cockshott (the other major one being neo-Athenian democracy - his critique of pure soviet democracy is correct, but I don't see it as entirely unsalveagable).

We can't call everything which we like "socialist". That's how we got to the "socialism is when the state does stuff" meme and keep reinforcing it (I've seen newfags ask "USSR socialist when you like it and state capitalist when you don't? Which is it, Holla Forums?" get shut down when they kind of had a point, although it's not as if we're a hive mind like Holla Forums).

The Soviet Union made huge advances both in technology advances and living standards, no doubt and perhaps more so than any other country in history given the time-frame and circumstances, but it bore all the distinctions of what leftcoms and anarchists identify as state capitalism.

If we want to advance socialism, we need to be unrelentingly coherent and straightforward. A good start would be settling this question once and for all and finding ways to encourage people to take both newfags and Holla Forumsyps seriously in explaining stuff to them.

But the Great Leap Forward was objectively a real success, that lengthened the Chinese lifespan by TWENTY YEARS.

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Trotsky was against democracy as well. Democratic reforms are a luxury of peacetime and there was a war against imperialism that needed to be fought. Also Trotsky deserved what he got.

collectivization is a good thing but stalin instead of respecting the will of the farmers and slowling down the process forced it, deporting an incalculable number of people and provoking a destructive famine

Mao is the only political leader in history to double the life expectancy of a country in 10 years.

So then your problem isn't with collectivization but merely that Stalin did it too quickly or something? Because any socialist leader was eventually going to seize all private property

I thought this was a mainstream view here? I don't particularly like MLs, but I can appreciate what the Bolsheviks accomplished despite incredible odds.

Comrades Stallman and Wales are the only ones who have actually achieved communism though.

The SU's social democratic tailing of the capitalist economies never actually abolished any of the main features of capitalism. Simply swapping out the capitalist for the bureaucrat doesn't fundamentally change anything about the way production is organised. Also, from the way the industrial bosses reacted to the actual implementation of full computerised economic planning, we can safely say that the Soviet model didn't point the way toward the abolition of capitalism either.

There might be some sense in which Cockshott's statement about building features into a definition is valid - as in the case where bourgeois apologists attempt to build democracy into the definition of capitalism. However, the singular importance of democracy to socialism isn't mere wordplay - talk of proletarian administration without robust democratic control is laughable. It's literally the logical endpoint of social democracy. And it will dissolve back into unfettered capitalism like social democracy did historically. The rest of Towards a New Socialism spends quite a bit of effort attempting to figure out methods for managing actual democratic control over production.

And I frown upon the claim that the 'socialist' states are worth defending because of their amazing economic performance. Aside from the fact that it's not particularly impressive to state that the transition from an agrarian peasant economy to a modern industrial economy, it also ignores the human cost that those amazing production figures came at - which is a porky as fuck thing to do.


Stalin was merely representative of the Soviet bureaucracy. Blaming him specifically for Soviet woes is idealist.


Oh you poor sweet summer child. But seriously, the only way we're going to settle this question once and for all is to develop and start getting successes with a better praxis than they have. Comrades Stallman and Wales have shown us the way, but it is up to us to highlight the communist nature of their unconscious praxis and bring it into the realm of material production.

Seriously fellas, statements like this are not impressive. It's like saying "I doubled my money!" when you started with a nickel.


anime-posting nazbols have no right to call others pathetic

It wasn't socialism though, and for some it was definitely a hell hole. Those sentenced to camp life in the gulags were more or less slaves, and you could be sentenced there under the pretenses of sabotage or parasitism because you weren't working hard enough. To call this system that maintained not just commodity relations but class relations a socialist state is to take away all meaning of the word and reduce it to "the government doing stuff"

In the 50's "tankie" was a term used by anti-revisionists to criticize Khrushevites who supported the USSRs military intervention of the Hungarian Revolution. Today most MLs support that intervention, but tankie has gone on to be a general term for MLs and Maoists. Some people use it as a slur, I say it all the time as a shorthand for anti-revisionists, I never mean any harm by it, but some anons really sperg out about it. Anyway, I like Parenti a lot, but not all criticisms of the USSR are anti-communist propaganda, and not everyone who uses the term tankie is ad homing. Also, Leftcoms are mostly right about State Capitalism and the "social democracy with guns" meme is pretty much 100% true fam.

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Nah I didn't say that was the life of every citizen, but to disregard it's existence and that it's essentially a class institution is just intellectually dishonest. Again, you can say that the USSR improved living standards for most but that says nothing of it's socialist content

But the USSR was definitely inspired by Marx, Engels and Lenin just because it didn't perfectly meet the definition of socialism is not a reason to say its not socialism. For example say someone identifies as a marxist and they believe in the LTV and historical materialism, but they think marxs theory needs to subdivide capitalism into late and early capitalism. Do you say "welp, he didnt perfectly follow marx, i guess hes not a 'true' marxist" or do you say close enough. Hell analytical marxists dont even believe in the LTV and their considered marxist.

Same thing for the soviet union, this really is not to say it was good or truely classless although a ML would say socialism is a transitional phase and therefore isnt classless anyway till u get to communism.

To classify the SU as somehow 'not socialist' is idealist and not good historical materialism. Its better to say it was socialist, but not the only kind of socialism

Who it was inspired by really doesn't mean anything in the end. By Marx and Engle's own criteria the country wasn't socialist, and no amount of sugar coating or pretending otherwise will say that. We can't just define socialism by somebodies good intentions

This isn't a matter of state ideology, it's a matter of material conditions, and whether the USSR could be called Socialist even though it retained many of the social relations of a Capitalist society.

And Charlie Manson was inspired by the Beatles. What's your point?

Actually that's an awesome reason to say that? That's the main reason people say things are or aren't things - on the basis of whether they fit the definitions we have for them.

That would depend on what conclusion they intend to draw from that analysis. 'Marxism' isn't really set in stone as a rigid set of beliefs, it's a method of analysing society. 'Socialism', on the other hand, has a pretty clear definition that the USSR simply doesn't meet.

Lots of people are still popularly considered Marxists despite jettisoning important parts of the method for bad reasons. Tankies are a good example of this.

But it wasn't socialist. It didn't meet any of the key features. The USSR acted exactly like what it was: an imperialist social democratic state. It would make more sense to say that 'it was social democracy, but not the only kind of social democracy'.

*change that

MLs have their share of problems
first of course is larping
idol worshiping needs to stop, no more heads of marxism and all that shit
Stalin was right about economic policies in general and his Economic Problems is a must read, but he was not some Father of the People
he needs to be held responsible for the cult of personality, because he may not have actively encouraged it, but he was not actively opposed to it either
and in the end he fucked up, because party was his responsibility
and it was party that killed the Soviet Union
and this fact is still not addressed in ML theory
state power parallelism between party and the system of soviets needs to be theoretically resolved
MLs feel uneasy about the fact that party needs to go as soon as socialist economy is mature enough
and this is a real problem
in case of SU 50s was the time to get rid of the party
ww2 war was won, afterwar rebuilding was complete, nuke was ready

also my personal experience with ML orgs convinced me that diamat is unscientific cancer
there's always this faggot in every serious ML org, like a fucking shaman of the tribe, the Priest of Dialectics upholding org's traditions and responsible for Philosophical Development of the Party
and great amount of time is wasted on philosophical circlejerking around dialectics, great many articles published about diamat and whatnot that have no practical or theoretical worth WHATSOEVER
and more so dialectics are used in party debates as an argument
this is just pure fucking cancer, it's like arguing with christian clergyman about politics

MLs need to accept that dialectics are vague philosophical gibberish
Dialectics of Nature done more harm to marxist movement than any other book
Marx in Capital used formal logic
but diamat cultists will cling to every dual relationship as a proof of their religion and will argue that duality of value is a proof that Marx used diamat in his analysis of value
fucking retards

This is literally the first remotely correct thing I've ever seen someone post under that flag.

Honestly how can you hope to reconcile the power of the party with the power of the soviets when they're fundamentally opposed to each other? They're essentially two separate power structures contrasting each other

just no. Someone needs to take Harveys course on reading capital, the youtube lectures are online here:

youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0A7FFF28B99C1303

and this is a real problem in case of SU 50s was the time to get rid of the party

Like it wasn't the height of the cold war with imperialist encirclement? like America/the west wouldn't invade? Did you seriously expect the SU to unilaterally disarm in the fucking 1950s cold war? you can't disarm the proletarian state while porky is still alive and kicking

soundcloud.com/detona-1/parentimix

you could just say "faggot"

go back to Holla Forums

i don't take orders from faggots

All you guys saying the USSR = social democracy are retarded, genuine social democrats have nothing in common with Stalinism, hell even at the height of the Swedish welfare state in the 1970s, only something like 10% of all industry was nationalized.

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Nobody said the 'official' social democrats were any good at their jobs. Also are you counting the amount of the economy under state control during wartime with that 10% figure?

Yes, I agree that MLs are much more successful at building Social Democracy then Social Democrats are, but I think it's mostly because of the guns, and the DoTPs they form using said guns.

Party leadership must abolish party
it must be a conscious decision of highly determined marxists first of all and not some petty politicians-bureaucrats


just yes

great leap of logic there
why should Supreme Soviet suddenly disarm itself?
it was party that pursued policy of peaceful coexistence
it was party that pursued policy of decentralization
it was party that pursued market reforms

Supreme Soviet couldn't possibly done worse
socialist economic system had some inertia
it took three decades to ruin it completely
Supreme Soviet is a far more flexible organ than Party, there could've been actual resistance

That's kind of hoping the government abolishes itself though. Doesn't seem realistic at all

and what is realistic?

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That's my bad, I meant to ask if 10% was really the maximum amount of state control achieved by any social democratic country, even in wartime. I thought it would have been pretty obvious that I wasn't asking about Sweden specifically.

Maybe not having one party dominate the soviets, and actually operate them like Mahkno did where the parties could observe and participate but the workers and peasants decided things

first of all, fuck peasants
peasant based agriculture in general is a fucking dead weight of humanity, artifact of the feudal past

industrial farming makes our task so much more easier, no more butthurt peasants to collectivize

fuck off with your marketplace of ideas
until planned economy has enough inertia, party domination is necessary

soviets would've never done what Stalin did
they would've stuck to the NEP and got raped by Great Depression and krauts

Party domination gets in the way of a fully planned economy - it takes economic power away from them and they sabotage it.

In my opinion the party must become the state, merge with it. You are right that there should be more theory about it. MLs always complain about Kruschev revisionism but never actually want to address as to why a bunch of careerists took control of the entire country. You can't simultaneously say "Stalin did nothing wrong" but then complain about his successors since he groomed them for power and while he was complaining about them, he never gave a shit about replacing them.

However I have my doubts that you can just abolish the party like that (if this is what you implying), especially in terms of ideological leadership. You'd have to politisize state institutions to overtake ideological leadership and give them vanguard character. The best option would have been to merge party and state by 1960 but keep party mechanics in power where have proven themselves useful.

Lmao, this is true. In my opinion this guy often is an absolute autist and you can never talk daily politics with him but he also gets worshiped by the entire chapter as some sort of great chairman which everybody approaches for reference because the guy has perfected to make himself appear like a great, well-sourced academic


That's not what we believe though. We don't see working towards a dichotomy between state and population, we want the state to become all-encompassing so the population literally becomes the state, therefore the state eventually ceases to be as it can't be described as dislodged from every single economic allocation anymore.

To understand ML, you must let go of remaining liberal and centrist perception of legal relations.

(Different tankie poster btw)

t. Karl 'The Kraut Renegade' Kautsky

Yes, the USSR had many great achievements, but this was nothing but the result of capitalist development in a semi-feudal backwater. Marx himself explained how capitalism was way better than everything we've had before, there is no contradiction to speak of in saying that the USSR was not socialist but still good.

Eh, I'd prefer the term 'historically progressive' over 'good'. 'Good' sounds like we want some part of that in the future, which we abso-fucking-lutely should not.

I can acknowledge and respect the achievements of the USSR, but anyone thinking it's a blueprint for achieving socialism in the 21st century needs to get their head checked. The Soviet Union serves as a reminder to the Left on what NOT to do in order to achieve global socialist revolution.

You would think the abject failure of it and every other state that followed its model would communicate this point well enough but apparently not.

You are right, historically progressive is a more accurate term. Only diehard reactionaries actually dare to say that imperial russia was better than the soviet union.

Don't blame Engels for other peoples' retardation.


Much of what needed to be achieved within the first few years simply did not occur. There was no way to avoid foreign intervention or the failure of the German revolution, for example. Neither was it possible to avoid the backwardness of Russian capitalism or the devastation of the Great War. If it serves as a reminder, it's one that says "men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please".


Abject failures are understandable but the utopian confidence that history won't be fucking you in the ass the entire time is not.

Do you guys have to grasp for every semantic straw no matter how ridiculous? Can we not call the French Revolution "good" because the language police will sperg out about how it was merely "progressive within its historical context"?

The bourgeois western propaganda of the last decades has managed that you get shunned by even mildly calling something related to socialism "good". Look how much OP had to cuck himself to even enable a discussion with the resident Anarchists, "Left"coms and Bookchinfags here and yet he got still shit flinged at him like hurr durr tankie.

Hey now, I'm not one of those children that would claim that any part of the Soviet experience was avoidable. I recognise perfectly well that the shit the bureaucracy pulled (I hate the insistence that everything was Stalin's doing, he had an entire faction of the Bolshevik party behind him during the post-Lenin interregnum) was pretty much the only real choice they had. My problem is simply with the idea that any of it was actually socialist. I think Marxists just need to seriously re-examine what a socialist economy would actually look like, and what actual economic infrastructure would be necessary for it to be run remotely like Marx describes in Gotha.


Oh my god shut up you gigantic fucking baby, it wasn't good. Good is the wrong fucking word for what happened.

Get the fuck over yourself. We don't hate on the USSR because porky told us to. We do it because Marx told us what socialism is, and any remotely fucking reasonable analysis of the USSR shows that it doesn't remotely fit the fucking definition.

Fuck you're whiny, there's some fuckin' signal-to-noise ratio, get over it

what is it with right-wingers and cucking?

Why? Socialism reached its zenith under the USSR. Since it ended the prospect of socialism has been utterly crushed and discredited by imperialist nations, acting as if it was inevitable when the mere existence of the USSR kept imperialism in check for decades and smashed reactionaries.

The USSR was not socialist though.

this is your brain on tankie

It was ruled by a communist party pursuing socialism through a planned economy, supporting state atheism, internationalism and equality, so I think it was.

Endless bickering about "state capitalism" is pointless, because it's not clearly defined where capitalism ends and socialism begins by relying on analysing bureaucracy.

There was still wage-labor, commodity-production, and distinct classes. This tells us already that if the USSR was socialist, it was only in the very early stages of it and never got much further.

However, there are two points I would highlight that show the USSR wasn't even developing early socialism. First is a near total lack of workplace democracy. It mostly only existed on paper. Secondly, the USSR was not a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. The party was not made up of members of the working class, they were not subject to recall at any time and their pay was not kept to an average worker's pay. A true vanguard party is a natural organ of the working class, while what the USSR was was simply a dictatorship of a disconnected, bureaucratic parasite.

In short, the USSR was not socialist. Maybe if the revisionists didn't take over then then socialism would've been achieved.

would you at least read marx? fuck what does any of that have to doing with abolishing the value form?

abolishing the value form simply was not possible in the USSR. that is an end goal that even today is nowhere near
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm

So what needs to happen for us to be able to abolish the value form?

Also, why the fuck are we, as marxists, ever asking any other fucking political question?

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good work on ignoring the rest of the thread to drop that truth bomb there fuckwit

okay so…the material conditions were not correct for socialism. that doesn't move the goalpost to consider the ussr socialist, it just means they weren't. it was literally social democracy.

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Parenti is based as fuck but what do you think about his talks on "cultural capitalism" OP? (like "Rambo and swarthy hordes"). Sounds like sjw cultural revolution mumbo jumbo to me.

fuck off with that 'communism is unknowable' bullshit, treating communism as some mystical far-off never-to-be-realised ideal is what landed us the fucking tankie problem in the first place

"tankies" are the only communists to have achieved anything and advanced the proletarian cause in the last 100 years

no

we need urban integrated polyculture so we need people to farm until we can get robots that can handle spacial awareness and not just rows of the same thing

monoculture farming is one of the main cause of global warming, atmospheric carbon, disease, plague and pestilence worldwide

the only reason we don't polyculture is because you cant drive tractors in a food forest

significant part of the incomes of soviet workers was in kind rather than money wages
existence of vanguard party =/= classes.
Also there was a quota system that made it so certain numbers of each profession were represented in government (miners, factory workers, women, etc.)