Modern times in the west it means anyone left of AOC.
the other vein of pro-russian tankies i’ve seen is that it’s impossible for a once communist country to backslide into fascis.
the constant liberal need
I’m not going to assume that they’re paid actors in some secret conspiracy who don’t really believe a word of what they’re saying
I’m glad you don’t, but that’s not what I saw.
Besides, you already stated that if someone looks like a lib you’re gonna call it a lib “even if they deny the label”, and that’s what I mean about these personal attacks.
I already explained the distinction
can’t provide a single example of
You can have your distinction but I’m not making one. I’m not operating under that framework you setup. I’m saying something one thing and you’re trying to shoehorn in the conversation into some other thing.
If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first, otherwise they will just see you as a reactionary and dismiss what you say.
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use.
Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.
However, I’ll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed.
Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.
Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, “but this time, it’s different,” and more often than not, they’re wrong.
Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don’t really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all.
That’s not a response to the criticism, just a dismissal of it based on who it originated from.many MLs’ understanding of revolutionary defeatism tends to boil down to accelerationismIf you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first,
Indisputable suggests it’s largely undisputed now, which you must know is absolutely not the case. I am currently disputing it. There is no significant historical pattern of countries that faced a military defeat becoming socialist or even having better revolutionary conditions afterwards.
Starting a civil war while the country is in the middle of an imperialist war is not an example of revolutionary defeatism working.
If Russia had been defeated in their imperialist war and then had a socialist revolution that would be an example, but even then one example is not a pattern.
Calling someone a liberal is not the same as accusing them of acting in bad faith
For anyone following along, the original claim was, “I don’t understand the constant liberal need to assume everyone who disagrees with you is acting in bad faith,” and they responded “I see the same behavior with tankies,”
the US
Also, right now US is not the country that’s launching drones to blow up the civilian houses in the city I live in
someone who believes in unconditionally and indefinitely supporting the democratic party
and the extrapolation of their own stated beliefs into the most uncharitable possible interpretation.
What would it take for you to not support them? Say, for example, they were actively arming a genocide, would that do it?
How long then, should we continue supporting them
You can play coy all you want but my assumptions are entirely reasonable based on what you’ve said.
they completely reject that we hold our stated beliefs at all and assign us completely different beliefs based on whatever they make up
The irony is palpable.
So you won’t put a single condition on your support and you won’t give a time or plan of action that will ever lead to you not supporting them.
while not giving them the support they would need to reach that point
You again, have yet to respond to that example or acknowledge it’s obvious validity.
The condition on my support is them being the least bad choice with enough support to win.
You know nothing about me. I support them every single time their campaign is viable.
equate me with a fascist because… what exactly?
extrapolate that ability to identify ideologues to justify your ideological speculation of me
This circular, dead end argumentation
Just like Richard Spencer denies being a fascist, you may deny being an unwitting accessory to the deliberate disorganization of the left, but that is an arbitrary distinction. In practice, you are helping to undermine leftist unity with emotionally charged splintering. I’m not accusing you of not believing what you say, but what you believe fits the definition of “malicious psyop”.
Originally, it meant people who supported the soviet union’s use of tanks to crush uprisings.
60% of the economy being owned by the people exclusively for the benefit of the people isn’t communist?
Saying, “As long as they’re the lesser evil” means that there is literally no limit on how evil the could be and still win your support.
They don’t reach the point of being viable unless people support them even when they aren’t viable yet.
No, it has nothing to do with “my” ability to identify ideologues, it’s about the validity of assigning labels to people even if the person rejects the label.
This “red line” nonsense is strategically stupid
in practice, identical to someone intentionally trying to fracture the left.
If you and the person you’re assigning labels to disagree, and you determine your assignments to be more valid than theirs, that is definitively based on your ability to identify ideologues.
Thats interesting, and kinda goes against the point of a modlog in the firstplace
Does an instance’s local copy of the log keep the actions?
Why do you assume everyone arguing with you is a liberal?
It’s strategically the only approach that makes any logical sense whatsoever.
“Unity” around ineffective tactics, I really think you should consider calling that “liberal tankie unity.”
Therefore, you cannot oppose the idea of assigning labels to people that they reject on principle, though you may argue that it’s only valid in certain situations.
Red line makes zero strategic sense, it’s childish and simple minded.
Correct. The fact that you can identify one fascist does not validate all your label assignments. Your conclusions are not valid.
I explain the logic here.
Notice how the Republicans don’t do that shit and keep winning?
Yes, and it is deeply flawed logic because it rests on an analogy which is fundamentally unrelated to electoral strategy. There is no “refuse and both parties get nothing” mechanism in elections. You have a choice between a 99-1 split and a 100-0 split, and rejecting the 99-1 split guarantees you the 100-0.
Are you high? They absolutely constantly do exactly that which is exactly why they win.
I can’t even count the number of people I know personally who hated Trump, but voted for him anyway because they viewed the Democrats as the greater evil.
Republicans don’t fool around with red lines, they dutifully act in lockstep to secure wins
The left has been shouting about red lines for decades,
I got immediately banned from .ml for using the word tankie, but then I got banned from Europe feddit for reporting someone who called me dum
That’s literally exactly how my example works. You chose between $1 and $0.
if you spend any time around actual Republicans, you’ll hear them complaining about “RINOs” who don’t meet their standards
Assuming you aren’t a deliberate bad actor
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i. e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital;[43] the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Even if it wanted to be as bad as the US
Republicans winning is the “no one gets anything” outcome of a breakdown of negotiations between the democratic party and their voters.
Nothing you say is ever actually backed up by the facts, you’re just regurgitating the “conventional wisdom” that the ruling class your tankie friends online told you to get you to fall in line and not cause any trouble by doing things that are actually effective.
Ah yes, the very serious and rational leftist belief that fascists are better than liberals
Ftfy
in my analogy, liberals offer us $1 while fascists offer us $0
“No U,” truly the height of liberal discourse.
Yes, and by rejecting the $99-1 offer in favor of the $100-0 offer, you have expressed your belief that the $0 was better than $1. By rejecting the liberal candidate, you admit that the fascist is preferable.
I don’t want the Republicans to win, but if disciplining the Democratic party or building an alternative to it causes that outcome, it is an acceptable risk.
people still reject $1 offers. It’s not really a difficult concept to grasp.
Exactly. Fascism was an acceptable bargaining chip. That’s the difference between you tankies and actual leftists: we care about people, and try to avoid subjecting our fellow people to fascism as a gambit.
Yes. Game theory experiments have a different set of conditions and consequences than elections. They refuse because that doesn’t cost them anything. They leave the exchange neutral.
If you were actually a leftist like you say, you would understand the material conditions that gave rise to Trump and the fact that the democratic party is never going to address those conditions (at least without significant, genuine pressure).
It’s just guarantees fascism at a slightly slower pace.
The only ones advocating a strategy that has any possibility of averting fascism are us “tankies.”
rather than taking an approach that could potentially save them.
As a “leftist,” you ought to understand how fucked we are regardless of who’s in charge at the moment, and that the capitalists aren’t going to come down from on high to save us.
Not getting a dollar you could’ve gotten is no different from losing a dollar you could’ve avoided losing
A vote for Democrats is a vote for more time to prepare a functional progressive movement.
while building the material capability to apply significant political pressure.
Categorically false. Arithmetically, psychologically, just plain incorrect. Maybe if you’re a gambling addict, but in the general population we generally find losses are felt much more strongly than equivalent gains.You’re just making up poorly constructed psychological experiments, claiming what those hypothetical results would be, and extrapolating that to national politics.You haven’t supported any of your divisive nonsense with anything more than your say-so.
There are people in this thread that support Russia.
Or at least are busy telling people they’re not actually that bad.
People whoSupport modern russia and/or are opposed to Ukraine Deny that the Uyghurs were mistreated by china Think the DRPK is a nice place to live right now.
Most Marxists do not uncritically support Russia, though opposition to the Nationalists like Azov in Ukraine is something common on the Left, and believe Russia’s anti-US stance is beneficial for the Global South (see the string of African liberation movements in the past few years).
Most Marxists can agree that the Uyghur people have been placed in re-education camps, but most do not believe they are being systemically murdered en masse like many people report.
Most Marxists think the DPRK is doing surprisingly well for a country under extreme embargoes and was subject to more tons of bombs than the pacific front in World War II, not that it would be preferable to live there than in a highly developed country free from those problems.
People who know their views are reprehensible to most reasonable people, so aren’t willing to outright say what they believe, but will still argue the point.
He’s not in discussions in good faith, he refuses to question his own beliefs and he only pushes his own beliefs onto others.
Translation.
Translation
And then when OP gives him an inch in good faith he takes the whole inch and pushes OP to “not call people tankies”
even though he’s exactly the kind of person OP is calling out.
There are more examples of him being disingenuous,
then pushing his own agenda on others.
I’m sure people can find those in other thread
And with that I think I’ve made my point to the people will listen.
Yeah, out of “supports Russia” and “are communist” there are indeed people who support some of those two things
yeah, between supporting russia and being communist some people fit your definitionNo one supports russia what are you on about?
Sounds like projection on your part.
Again, no. You can’t address what he said, so you’re making up your own strawman.
What, specifically, are you accusing him of doing wrong? Sounds like you just don’t like him disagreeing with you.
OP has explicitly said otherwise, but you’ve already established you feel entitled to tell people their own opinions.
Any actual examples though?
Uhuh. Still seems like you’re the one arguing in bad faith.
You have indeed demonstrated that your were arguing in bad faith from the start and that you’re just salty someone disagreed with you.
Ad hominem
Yes, because OP gave him the benefit of doubt because OP thought he’s not a bad actor.
But not that it matter because the second part of your one-liner goes back to Ad hominem.
Besides the one I mentioned?
Well there’s also the one where he’s pushed about being critical of Russia’s actions he deflects to America being worse.
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