3mo ago

Tankie Brain

“liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.' Mikhail Bakunin

63 comments

The bottom text comes originally from the new testament and Lenin was aiming the sentiment at upper class people who had passive incomes. He was saying that everyone would have to contribute meaningfully to society instead of just leeching off it like landlords do. He wasn't talking about the disabled, children, or elderly
- But if you don't take the quote out of context, it doesn't support the narrative they're imagining up!

The first one: "Work and starve."

Capitalists tell you to work and starve
- Communists tell you to stop farming and instead produce steel in your backyard, causing tens of millions of your people to starve.
  
  That sure was messed up. Let's not do that again.
  
  It's almost like all the engineers and scientists were killed by Japan during WW2.

Nah you give what you are able and recieve what you need.
- From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
  
  Who decides what a person needs?
  On the face, I think the idea "from each according to their needs, to each according to their ability" sounds reasonable. But if you have ever done any logistics work, then you know it is a childishly simplistic fantasy.
  There is no way you could possibly keep track of the many resources and services that are needed in a modern, complex society and distribute them usefully before the people who need them die of old age (or starvation). As you try to centralize tracking of everything the administrative problems grow exponentially, and never mind building the actual distribution network. No government-managed system could ever keep up with the needs of a growing, changing society.
- Yeah, but ðere are people who cannot give at all, and ð quote from ð Stalinists makes no allowance for ð mentally or physically incapable of labor.
  A society is only as good as how it treats its least able to treat for ðemselves.
  
  I think your keyboard is broken
  
  The current productive apparatus already produces much more than is necessary to take care of everybody's needs. Which means we could do degrowth, egalitarianism, and improve standard of living for everybody at a fraction of our current output. The free market is a kind of planning, its an inefficient one that delivers profits to owners and corporations and stockholders. While creating monumental amounts of waste.
  The means of production are ripe, maybe beyond ripe, but the class of workers has to seize them for mutual benefit.

To be fair. Everyone who is able to work should do its proportional part of work needed for the sustain and improvement of the society they live in.
Keywords:
Able to: as its truest meaning with the understanding that the vast majority of the population can work, one way or the other.
Proportionality in the work should not mean proportionality on the perceived benefits, but it should feel fair for everyone. Including the option to chose different ways of living that may mean different levels of work/benefits, all within reason.
Improvement of society: notice how society is not spelled "billonaire" or "bussiness" or "investors".
- In other words From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, one of the most basic tenets of communism (and anarchism).
- I'd like to add that if someone does something to improve society so everyone can work less, we should respect that. Instead what happens is that people take those labour-hours and instead of refunding it to the worker, ask for more since you're so much more productive now.

i too make broad generalizations based off of misunderstandings and false assumptions

Good time to mention !anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- a.k.a intelligent communism
  
  Or really just internally consistent communism.

Not pictured here: people who study history, political and social history, organizes IRL, cares about democracy, tries to understand and communicate with others the need for revolutionary political, social, democratic, and economic changes while acknowledging the challenges of that necessity
- Lenin is pictured, what are you on about?
  
  It appears you've discovered the flaw in my post
  But since its a misrepresentation of Lenin I'm still right
  
  Oh yeah, he cared about democracy very much, not in a way we would thought.

I agree with the meme, but correct me if I'm wrong: didn't Bakunin himself argue in favour of a work voucher system?
- I don’t think so. I never saw it mentioned in his work.
  edit: hmmm I faintly remeber something about “labour notes” as compensation. His does argue strongly for mutual aid and solidarity. Though I do tend to side more with Kropotkin than Bakunin. (Ignoring the fact their ideologies are 99% similar).
  
  I faintly remember Bakunin's utopian vision from the revolutions podcast and I thought that he didn't really have an answer to the "what-if-someone-doesn't-work-conondrum".
  Yeah, Kropotkin is a little bit more refined and based on science.

The idea of work under socialism is very different to the idea under capitalism. Work becomes a social activities, you do it for your community and you do a lot less as we are working only to support our community and not to net a few billion for the greedy few.
- The idea of work under soviet regime so much beloved by tankies, however, is "do useless and inefficient work that you didn't chose and you don't have any say in, or be thrown in jail" which hits way different

When you’re in front of the MAGA firing squad, take comfort before your last breath that you’re not a “TANKIE.”
- If I get executed by an authoritarian state. You bet you I will be proud I stood up to authoritarians during my life.
  
  I didn’t realize Trump is a Tankie. You’re so off base, you’re not even in the game. You’re fighting the wrong battle, at the wrong time.
- I will

In the political context of where I live, this reminds me of those in the socialist party that are against a Universal Basic Income.

Tankies love Elon now though.
- Do they actually? I know a lot of tankies either implicitly or explicitly support Trump and most seem to worship a capitalist kleptocracy that's pretty much worse than the US economically, but I've never seen one outright declare their love for the poster child of capitalism in particular.

Nailed it!

"Tankie" means supporting Russian invasion into Ukraine, not "a communist"
- Tankie is authoritarian “communism”. Tankies tend to support the brutal regimes of Stalin, Mao, and more recent Russian imperialism such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
  Needless to say these regimes supported by tankies are far from the communism envisioned by people like Marx, which was achieved much more closesly in anarcho-communist revolutions, such as the Ukraine’s anarchist territories and the Paris Commune.
  
  Yep. Left wing + authoritarianism = tankie, right wing + authoritarianism = fascie
  
  I still believe you are needlessly reducing the scope of that word to only communists. Many blood thristy supporters are "tankies", while being fascist, or simply dumb
- Not like North American kids even know what the hell communism is.

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