edit: this is now closed future comments won’t be counted

I keep seeing this instance is overrun with tankies so hey, lets do an informal survey like I’ve seen on hexbear

respond with YES or NO in the first line of your comment and i’ll tally everything in a couple of days, lets say I’ll try and collect everything on the sunday the 9th (10+gmt sorry)

not sure thisll work, be nice, have fun

  • frippa@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    YES

    Everybody to the left of biden is considered a tankie nowdays, and I’m proud of being to the left of (and opposed to) genocide enablers.

    • Kabe@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Not so. There are many progressives who stand with Marxists on issues like social justice, LGBTQ issues, and Palestine but who do not feel welcome on instances like Hexbear because they also criticize the CCP.

      • frippa@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        And they sometimes get called “tankies” too by people to the right of them. That’s why I both think it’s a useless term (if everybody is a tankie, then nobody is) and why I think I fall in the definition (as most leftists do, I’ve seen pretty mild social democrats being called “tankies” by liberals)

        Plus ultimately these blanket descriptions are pretty useless IMO, you’ll find extremely heated debates between “tankies” themselves on many topics, there’s no consensus, and there are many different ideologies “tankies” subscribe to. It would be like saying that Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Greens are all the same thing. We could call them “dronies” maybe.

        • Kabe@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Oh, I agree - calling people Tankies/Liberals/Dronies, especially ad hominem, is reductive and generally unhelpful.

            • Kabe@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              ML people often tend not to apply ‘liberal’ correctly either, so it goes both ways.

              • davel@lemmy.ml
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                6 months ago

                Actually we do tend to apply “liberal” correctly.

                It is liberals themselves who tend to not have even a Wikipedia-level understanding of liberalismtheir own ideology!—or of socialism. And that’s how a centrist liberal like Bernie Sanders can get away with calling himself a socialist despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, because Burgerlanders don’t know their asses from their elbows politically thanks to over a century of red scares and cold wars, which are still ongoing[1][2].

                • Kabe@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  Hang on, so you’re telling me you guys lump social liberals in with classical liberals and neoliberals? That’s definitely not common, but then I suppose if you’re a communist then it kinda makes sense.

                  Also, while I wouldn’t call Sanders a socialist either, he is not a centrist by any standard measure. I presume you don’t consider anyone a leftist if they don’t advocate for collective ownership and a centrally planned economy?

  • MY_ANUS_IS_BLEEDING@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    NO

    I’m pro-socialism and heavily regulated capitalism.

    All that far left Marxist Communist crap is for people who like to pretend that it doesn’t fail every single time.

    • rando895@lemmygrad.ml
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      6 months ago

      According to this community absolutely yes, but no in reality.

      Just as an aside to add a fact to your statement: Marxism is a process that has been used to critique capitalism, as anyone who is intellectually honest should do. For example: if someone says "socialism doesn’t work " someone who is a Marxist might ask “okay, historically is this true?” And they would see that several socialist experiments have struggled. Then, as anyone who cares to understand would ask, they might say “okay then what happened to cause this?”. And in many cases you will see that Western Imperialism has sought to destroy these movements through various methods including assassinations, and funding groups like the Mujahideen.

      Damn. Well, then someone left might say 'well that’s Capitalisms fault". At which point it might be justified to call them a tankie. Someone else might conclude" hmm, Capitalist states do not want socialist states to succeed, therefore a socialist state should expect aggressive action from capitalist states. Thus, ONE of the problems with past socialist experiments has been their inability to withstand these external threats." Someone who doesn’t critique anything might say “SEE COMMUNISM NEVER WORKS!”

      TLDR; One of the key aspects of Marxism/Socialism/Communism is the criticism of past, current, and future political economic systems (capitalism, feudalism, socialism etc). Anyone who ignores this hasn’t read much, and should consider whether what they are consuming is state propaganda.

    • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      You cannot be pro-Socialism and pro-Capitalism at the same time, unless you are purely using Capitalism temporarily.

      What part of Marxism “fails every single time?” Is this just vibes?

  • half_built_pyramids@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    No.

    Granted, I’m not on lemmy.ml either.

    Maybe just yes or no isn’t enough either. Maybe have someone post a picture of tanks in tienniemen square to prove they aren’t a tanker.

  • A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl
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    6 months ago

    No

    Oppression is oppression independent of the ideological basis, people who support oppressive governments based on a loose ideological basis deserve the worse.

  • Floey@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    YES

    At least if we go off the Lemmy definition. I don’t self identify.

  • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    This is a dumb question. That’s like asking TERFs if they self-identify as bigots. They’re going to respond that no, of course they aren’t, they’re just gender realists (or gender critical, or whatever).

  • Fondots@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I’m not from this instance, so probably not totally relevant to this poll, that said

    NO, I’m not a tankie.

    I think, however, it’s worth considering that a lot of people that could be considered tankies probably wouldn’t apply the term to themselves, and that could skew the results of your poll. First of all, tankie is sort of a pejorative term, and many wouldn’t want to apply it to themselves for that reason alone. Secondly a lot of people just may not consider themselves to be a tankie, and genuinely do not recognize their own tankieness.

    I don’t think I’m the guy to come up with a definitive checklist of what does or does not make someone a tankie, but for the sake of getting the conversation going (and feel free to disagree with me here, I welcome the discussion) I think two of the biggest hallmarks of being a tankie are

    1. Communism- not all communists are tankies, but all tankies at least claim to subscribe to some sort of communist ideology.

    2. Authoritarianism- tankies either are authoritarians themselves, or are willing to support or overlook authoritarians as long as they see them as being in some way opposed to “the west”/capitalism/etc.

    I think the authoritarianism aspect is going to trip some people up trying to answer this truthfully. A lot of authoritarians probably wouldn’t consider themselves authoritarians, most people like to think they’re standing for freedom, justice, liberty, equality, etc. even if their actual actions tell another story. Don’t get me wrong, there are people out there who are openly authoritarian and proud of it, but a lot of authoritarians are a little brainwashed to the point they’ve lost sight of what they’re actually supporting (take a look at the MAGA crowd, they think they’re about free speech and anti-censorship but want to keep books they don’t like out of libraries, they think they’re about small government but want to regulate what kind of medical care you can get, they think they stand for law and order but also proudly proclaim that they are all domestic terrorists and have a convicted felon as their poster boy)

    And politics are messy, full of moral grey areas and times where you have to choose between the lesser of two evils, make uncomfortable alliances, difficult choices, and kick some cans further down the road to deal with later while you tackle the current crisis. It’s not always easy or feasible to draw a crisp line in the sand and say “we will not ally with/support/turn a blind eye to these authoritarian regimes,” sometimes you have to play a little bit of the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” game if you want to actually make any progress against that enemy, or you may have to prioritize and deal with something else before you deal with them. There is a whole lot of grey area to explore about when, why, how, how long, and how much you can support or ignore them before you’re advancing their cause as much or more than your own.

    I think there’s probably some tankies who have been taken for a ride on the propaganda wagon and don’t truly realize how authoritarian they are, and there’s others who have justified it, thinking that they’re only going to be/support authoritarians temporarily to achieve a specific goal and will pivot away from that later, but have gone too far or keep moving the goalposts.

    Couple last thoughts from me.

    There can always be bad actors who are falsely claiming to be (or not to be) tankies for their own purposes. Not really much you can do about that.

    Personally, a lot of the criticism I’ve seen about tankies here has been directed towards the mods and admins, not necessarily the rank average users.

  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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    6 months ago

    Yes, although I personally prefer “central planning enthusiast”.

    I think we’re approaching the point where the word gets taken back by the community it was used to malign, if not there already. "

    • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      Marxists and Anarchists share 90% of views, they just disagree on the presence of a government. The natural enemies of both Marxists and Anarchists are liberals and fascists.

  • Lad@reddthat.com
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    6 months ago

    No. I’m a non-tendency leftist. But I disagree with tankies being labelled as “fascists”. They’re not. They’re just Marxist-Leninists/Stalinists and I find their views pretty consistent with orthodox ML-ism.