I don’t like spending this much time arguing against campism but they just keep talking at me.
Honestly the base concept is fine, we’ve just never seen a working model.
We just don’t really see many governments that are actually for and by the people. Most are closer to an oligarch tribunal that boils down to a slightly distributed dictatorship, then the slap a non-dictatorship name on it and press play.
This reminds me of the book “Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When it’s Gone”.
Benevolent idiot vs malevolent idiot, or as they were historically called: trotskyites and stalinists.
Tankie here. I would agree on the following point – that we are not the same. But, neither are communities where most people are respectful of others’ liberties the same as, or suited to the same kind of rule as, communities where most people are authoritarians. Anarchism doesn’t work among authoritarian populations.
In some places, there isn’t a whole lot of class struggle – I could see anarchism working in those places, but not with most modern people. Those are typically isolated places where people are self-sustaining and disconnected from modern industry, places where states can’t naturally grow on account of the pre-existing lack of class struggle in those areas.
Trotsky was right
Trotsky the person was acceptable, I don’t agree with him, but he was acceptable. Trotskyists… idk, they’ve really embarrassed themselves lately.
I struggle with the term “Tankie”. Who is a Tankie? What makes them a Tankie? What makes them so frustrating? This term feels so vague that it just makes it easy lump all leftists into the term.
As far as I can tell, you’re a leftist if you’re not unpleasant to deal with and you’re a Tankie if I find you unpleasant.
It sounds like some Boogeyman I’ve never seen or spoken to but I’m obligated to dismiss everything they say even tho I’ve never seen one.
The term originally comes from a divide amongst Anglo communists between those who supported the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, and those who were critical. The tankies were the ones who supported “sending in the tanks.” These days it’s a disparaging term for any authoritarian socialists.
The tankies were correct.
https://www.joewrote.com/p/jfk-files-reveal-the-cia-role-in
In 1996, journalist Michael Smith published a book where MI6 officers, a branch of British intelligence, admitted they trained and armed Király’s fighters.8 The officer told Smith:
“We were taking them [fighters] into the mountains and giving them a crash course. I would be told to pick somebody up from a street corner at night in the pouring rain. Graz was our staging point. Then, after we’d trained them — explosives, weapons training — I took them back. We were training the agents for the uprising.”
Nagy admitted such factions were active during his October 28th radio speech.
“The Government condemns the viewpoints according to which the present formidable movement is a counterrevolution [against socialism]. Without doubt, as always happens at times of great popular movements, this movement too was used by criminal elements to compromise it and commit common criminal acts. It is also a fact that reactionary and counterrevolutionary elements had penetrated into the movement with the aim of overthrowing the popular democratic regime.”
Here’s the newly released, un-redacted version. It reads:
The Hungarian Freedom Fighters were Agency sponsored.
The “Agency” in question was, of course, the Central Intelligence Agency. In the context of the JFK assassination, the CIA was suggesting anti-Castro groups meet with Béla Király, likely to replicate the Hungarian uprising in Cuba to oust the communist government.
Undoubtedly, some will downplay this revelation and claim the CIA’s role in the Hungarian Rebellion was minor, insisting it was always a popular movement against Soviet-style communism. As has been since 1956, I’ll be called a tankie for suggesting the American foreign policy establishment was 100% honest and weren’t the pristine Good Guys of History. Oh well. It won’t be the first time and it won’t be the last.
In my opinion, there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the Central Intelligence Agency encouraged, if not instigated, the bloody fighting that swept through Budapest in 1956. I don’t doubt the students and protestors shared Nikita Kruschev’s desire for de-Stalinization. But as that movement went from a demand to readjust the Hungary-Soviet relationship to outright destruction of the Soviet Union’s defensive pact in less than two weeks, there was obviously a secondary, driving force that compelled Nagy to go further. As these documents admit, Béla Király and the broader combative force were supported, trained , and armed by the CIA and MI6; you don’t need to be a genius to figure out who was pushing the Hungarian Uprising to move from civil protest to alignment with Washington D.C.’s geopolitical goals.
A Tankie is anyone who self-identifies as a Tankie.
I don’t apply the term to folks as insult, I’m just acknowledging people who choose to identify as such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
If they have a god damn wiki definition, I’m not sure where you think its vauge. You just literally never looked.
wikipedia, lmao, I could go in there and change the definition, lol.
Hear that? Thats goal posts moving.
You went from no definition, to not liking mine. Instead of clicking on any cited sources, you closed off.
Go ahead, change it, see how well that actually works and how wikipedia is actually moderated.
Yeah, exactly and also if you mention the Gaza genocide on Wikipedia without putting in a billion allegeds then you’ll also be banned, the article you linked even admits the definition has changed throughout history to refer to different things.
It even has a section on how its used on the internet!
Its almost like language isnt static, and has history beyond a one line deffitnition!
You are systematically dismantling your own arguments. “Tankie” is vague because it’s a word for a label and the underlying concept being referred to can be very different when different people say it.
Not all leftists blindly support Russia or China just because they’re anti-western. Tankies seem to ignore all the evil shit Russia does just because they’re not the U.S./E.U/Israel.
Ok but we all agree that the US/Israel is the greatest evil on Earth right? Like sure Russia does bad stuff, but like the US is worse.
They’re both guilty of imperialism on a world wide scale and all the evils that includes, but aside from it’s early days the US has generally been a better neighbour by pointing their evil overseas, Russia has largely been a menace to it’s neighbours in every era of history. I would say that’s the biggest difference.
The point is it’s not a contest, and we should be opposed to it no matter which country is doing it.
Yeah but if your goal is to bring the most good to the world, you’ll get closer to your goal by fighting against the US than you will fighting against Russia.
“Lesser evil!”
“No! Not like that!”
That’s only true if a stronger Russia somehow would be a better country than a strong USA. There’s absolutely FUCK ALL to suggest that’s remotely true.
It also a false dichotomy. You can hate Russias imperialism AND USAs imperialism.
Again, you’re making this into a two-sided contest between two huge turds. I don’t choose either of them. I choose to fight the bad ideas and behaviors they’re known for, at all scales and in all walks of life, regardless of comparisons between them.
Meanwhile, non-tankies blindly ignore the evil shit the west does on a much larger global scale and blindly accept the western narratives about Russia and China just because they’re too propagandized to realize they’re being lied to and misinformed. Not sure who the “blind” ones in this scenario are.
I’ll keep saying this:
One side is a hyper-financialized economy of almost only consumers, which sits at the endpoint of the most global supply chains, devouring on a scale that is devastating the planet, pushing the environmental and human cost of that production on the global south, and who basically only export loans, monopoly priced essential goods, and IPs back to the rest of the world, that feeds their surplus production into an enormous military industrial complex that they use to force this global extraction system on the rest of the world.
While the other “side”, we’ll start with Russia, is an impoverished hellhole place to live in that has been economically gutted, and now has been fighting a war against Ukraine that has been going on for over 12 years, a war that is being used to throw the entire military might of NATO member states against, not to liberate Ukraine, but to try to use the opportunity to fight a proxy war directly against Russia, and the real goal is to bleed out Russia so it submits again to other side and they can put in a new dictator in charge that they can actually control this time. (I, for one, remember the time when Putin was their neoliberal darling.) Supporting Russia is a bit like supporting Saddam, you shouldn’t support Saddam, but you definitely shouldn’t support the US military against Saddam.
And China hasn’t been at war with any other country since the Korean war. I guess China just kinda sits there, menacingly, as they build their productive capacity. And they’re against Taiwan (which literally calls itself the “Republic of China” btw), but I don’t think they do anything at all other than negotiate and respond in kind when the US moves more ships and drones there. Then there’s the Uyghur stuff and the Tibet stuff, which I know there is probably a kernel of truth to, but I think that’s up to people in China to deal with, and definitely won’t be solved by like the US sending aid there, because again, when the imperial core does these things it isn’t actually about the people, it’s about exploiting the problems countries those countries have in order to tear them apart.
Keep coping.
ITT: libs
You’re speaking about socialism. Communism can’t be authoritarian.
That’s a hidden No True Scotsman fallacy. The primary superpowers which have historically claimed to be communist were or are authoritarian. Does that mean that they weren’t communist from a purely Marxist perspective? Perhaps, but if the people actually doing the supposed communist revolutions are consistently founding authoritarian states, then it doesn’t matter what you say communism is, or even what Marx said communism is. You should be decrying that those states are misrepresenting what communism is supposed to be. Call them out specifically for not being communist. Don’t fall back on claiming that the person you’re talking to just doesn’t know what communism is. The fact is that saying “I’m a communist” means siding with the people most visible in the world who say “I’m a communist”, unless you specifically distance yourself from those others in some meaningful way, and those others are Soviet Russia and the PRC under the CPC, both totally authoritarian states throughout the majority of their existence.
No, they weren’t communist by their own claims. They were social dictatorship looking to bring about the conditions for communism.
By precisely the same logic, the USA isn’t truly capitalist, as there’s no free market! Federal regulations hinder a true capitalist utopia, and so the USA is just a republic trying to establish the conditions of true capitalism. That’s bullshit and you know it. Tell any card-carrying member of the Communist Party of China that they aren’t communist, and let me know how that goes for you.
They will tell you what I said.
Regardless of the system, it will always have PEOPLE running it. It will always be fucked.
Based on history, Anarchism appears to be the system most immune to human corruption, to the point where George Orwell (of 1984 and Animal Farm fame) traveled to Spain to fight for the Anarchist society that had formed there (where he got shot in the neck, and while recovering was then hunted by tankies that betrayed the Anarchists, requiring him to quickly flee).
Except that the range of human behaviors is largely determined by the system. A better system allows for better behaviors.
I prefer Stakeholder Socialism.
If you value any economic system above democracy, you’ll end up being authoritarian no matter what your preferred system is.
You call this a democracy? The entire system is built to extract wealth from the working class
Call what democracy? I didn’t post about any place in particular. But no, the US is not a healthy democracy if that’s what you are getting at.
Yeah, but “democracy” looks exactly like western liberal democracy, right? Multiple parties and uses some European country as an example? All third world countries are dictatorships and should bow down to the superior ways of their white overlords? Or they just don’t know what real democracy looks like and they’re misled by Islam or something? Real democracy is a racist as fuck country like Finland, that has de-industrialized, has an economy of basically only consumers, exports nothing and imports everything from the global south that carries the social and environmental burden of actually producing everything? Democratic socialism seems to only be for the imperial core, the rest of the world is just too backwards to understand it, I guess.
(These are rhetorical questions, I know it’s not what you sound like, but it’s what it seems like all of you people are implying with pretend civility.)
If you don’t both-sides the genocide of Palestinians or the war on Iran, by bringing up that they aren’t democratic systems of government so that somehow makes them deserve getting bombed more than if they were. (If you do, then I just don’t have to talk to you.) If you can believe that, than you do actually believe that the struggle against imperialism matters more than the ideals of democracy.
How do you justify democracy when people are voting for life to be worse instead of better, even to the point of undermining the democratic process itself? Sure we could argue at some point democracy had the effect of improving living conditions but should we expect that to be true forever in all circumstances?
I dont believe that democracy is valuable as an end unto itself, it is a tool that should serve its people and if it stops doing that we shouldn’t be dogmatic about it. Authoritarian systems certainly arent the way, and I would guess what we need doesnt even have a name yet.
Democracy works, the problem is we don’t have a true democracy. We have corporate capitalist democracy. It’s a system that makes most people think it’s democracy — but it’s not.
Democracy and capitalism can not exist in the same stratosphere if democracy is to succeed.
The conditions under which democracy works are well understood.
You need a populace educated on how the society and government works at least in its broad strokes. That education should also instill a preference for democracy and describe the pitfalls of other systems.
An independent media system to keep the voter base reasonably informed.
Systems in place to prevent corruption.
Every single one of these have been eroded over 1-2 generations by crony capitalism to enable wealth accumulation.
I would not say that democracy in the US is a reasonable example of what democracy can look like. It is what happens when democracy is being deliberately sabotaged.
You also need a fully open and transparent government, any information being classified top secret or anything of the sort means you cannot have a democracy. No secrets can be allowed, ever. And really the only way to reasonably guarantee stuff like that is to make officials surrender all privacy related rights for life, just permanent publicly open insight into every aspect of your life, past, present, and future if you want to pursue office. I’d argue for attaching 24/7 live streamed cameras to them during their time in office as well. Obviously this would only currently work for rich countries with obscene military expenditures, like the US, but if the big guys were to do it then it would eventually be safe enough for the rest of them.
Democracy works
Citation needed
Amerikkkan politician in the gif, lmao.
…Judge Judy? She’s not a politician. She’s barely political at all. She hasn’t even been a real judge since 1996.
Sorry I don’t watch slop I couldn’t know about that. I’m sure she’s very close to the real thing.
There has never been a democracy, so we don’t know if it works or not. Democracy is an ideal state. We all live under a dictatorship of capital.
I mean small bits of democracy exist everywhere. Charity groups often work as a democracy. The youth organization I was in as a kid operated as a great democracy.
There are little democratic groups all over the world working just fine. It’s the large scale corporate hellscape that keeps it from working for us as a whole.
Idealist philosophy is the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. Just totally decouple your goals from actual reality, and make zero plans on how to get there, then critique movements that fail to measure up to your pie in the sky. You see, actually achieving things is secondary to these people, what REALLY MATTERS is looking like a good person when you’re doing it. “They don’t want power, they just want to endlessly critique power.”
The ruling class has put in place a system that is impossible to change without doing horrible, violent, and socially unacceptable things, that is why it’s so stable.
I really wished we lived in this world where convincing people of your ideas was enough to bring systemic change, it just won’t for some things.
Pointing out the flaws in some democracies is not a great argument when every other system is so clearly inferior. To answer your question, democracy requires a culture that supports it. It won’t work everywhere and it doesn’t work overnight.
How do you justify democracy when people are voting for life to be worse instead of better
How are you determining “better” and “worse”? In most cases, there’s no way of knowing what is “better” or “worse” sub species aeterinatis, because most government decisions are not optimizing a single parameter, and are instead making a judgement call by choosing one of multiple options from a Pareto frontier. With democracy, the people get what the majority of people want. Majority rule is better than minority rule.
Bourgeois democracy is minority rule tho, I want a democracy where money doesn’t have a voice
There’s a big difference between the ideal democracy and the bastardization of a democratic process we have in America, much like how Marx’s vision of communism is hugely different from any actual communist implementation. I personally don’t believe that any one governing/socioeconomic system taken in a vacuum is the right answer, they all seem to rely on humans being fundamentally good-natured but it just isn’t true for much of the humans attracted to positions of power.
an ideal democracy would be a democracy where the people have power, as opposed to one where money rules. such is the case in the fake ‘democracies’ under capitalism. it’s not just america and it’s nothing to do with humans needing to be ‘good natured’.
The problem is “the people” in a democracy literally just amounts to “the majority”, and would thus favor the average and the interests thereof over the interests of underprivileged minorities. Can we count on the average person to be concerned about the well being of those who lack the collective power they enjoy? As of now, I would say definitely not.
i don’t think that rich people are inherently better any respecting the rights of minorities.
the current system demonstrably does not protect minorities either.
also the current system actively manufactures consent through media ownership and economic coercion. capital owners play a major role in that process.
what looks like majority opinion is often manufactured preference serving capital. a democracy where people had actual material security and genuine information might produce very different majorities.
When the dollar can vote you no longer have a democracy.
Elections are not democratic because the candidates are always elites of some form. Even with universal sufferage and an egalitarian society there will always be a selection bias towards people who want power and people who are good at winning elections (but not necessarily good at governing). A real democracy would have election by lottery to ensure every segment of the population was represented. This hasn’t ever existed because past governments who elected by lottery (e.g. Ancient Athens) had only a small percentage of society represented as citizens.
After I found out about Lottery Democracy, everything clicked into place. I can finally have a true political goal that I can actually see working. Easy to convince people too, if people just watched the Lottery Democracy video from Spectacles.
I’ll check it out, thanks. I always just think about the way my academic department is organized as an example. There’s a rotating chair, and nobody wants to do it because it’s a bunch of bureacratic bullshit, but people do their time and then go back to getting actual work done. This is how politics should be.
Let me know when you come up with a way to force people to accept an unpopular system without an authoritarian regime.
Tankies: ackshually, the term “authoritarian” is not narrowly defined and therefore has no meaning! Checkmate libs1
Democracy is akshually authoritarian because there are laws.
Natural laws? Sounds like authoritarianism.
Freedom is slavery.
and yet neither can actually discuss Marx and shit for real
If you think communism on a large scale doesn’t have to be authoritarian, you haven’t looked enough at history and how humans work.
It is people who continue to claim that humanity must be authoritarian are the ones who have no idea of how humans work and are ignorant of history.
This is such a cringe-inducing post. Like …
We humans have lived the alternative for tens of thousands of years.
Yeah in fucking caves and clay huts. In absolute poverty without security, safe food supply, healthcare and rights. If some dude wanted something you own and was stronger than you, he’d beat you up and then take it. What a glorious time to be alive.
I had some half-finished text here, but I considered it unnecessary to argue with someone on lemmy about communism, so I deleted it and stopped.
Lol keep exposing how little you know of humanity’s history.
like it is barely manageable to maintain farming collectives which is relatively small scale but anything past that is bound to endless ugly mutations into something unfair and cruel.
Yeah, because it only takes a few detractors to completely ruin the system.
you don’t even need detractors to mess things up - the hierarchies and privileges form naturally over time - some are better performers and eventually they get more pull while others fall behind
In every story what post apocalyptic society survives? Communist. Every post apocalyptic society that leads to hellish dystopia? Capitalist. Prove me wrong.
So you’re saying that communism only exists as a literary fantasy?
Dune. Turns out feudalism was what made it out of the machine apocalypse and ensuing Butlerian Jihad. Feudalism with nukes.
you know anything can happen in fiction? you can plausible write a post-apocalyptic capitalist society as well.
Snowcrash is an example.
Ok.
Every post-apocalyptic society we can point to is fictional. After all, we’ve never actually experienced an apocalypse on that scale.
But just off the top of my head, The Book of Eli depicts a post-apocalyptic society that has largely devolved into anarchy, with power concentrated in the hands of warlords and whoever can enforce their will through violence.
Cyborg presents a similar picture: societal collapse, competing factions, and survival through force.
Then there’s Mad Max, where civilization has collapsed into violent competition over increasingly scarce resources, with whoever controls the necessities of life holding the power.
But I’d also venture to say that many of the post-apocalyptic societies people point to as examples of socialism are actually post-scarcity societies, or at least societies in which scarcity has been resolved to some degree. When the necessities of life are readily available, the incentive to hoard resources and compete for basic survival diminishes. That creates the conditions for people to organize society around collective needs rather than individual accumulation.
In other words, what people identify as socialism in these fictional settings may actually be the result of a fundamental change in the material conditions of society.
The interesting question isn’t whether people are naturally selfish or naturally cooperative. It’s how the conditions people live under influence which behaviors become necessary for survival. When resources are scarce and institutions collapse, people may turn to violence and self-preservation. When their basic needs are reliably met, cooperation and collective ownership become much more practical.
Of course, neither outcome is inevitable. Scarcity doesn’t automatically produce anarchy, and abundance doesn’t automatically produce socialism. But the material conditions of a society have a tremendous influence on the political and economic systems that can realistically emerge.
