After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
“Tankie” is just a pejorative for Marxist, I came to Marxism from anarchism precisely because I read and comprehend it. The assumption that people support socialism in real life because we don’t understand theory is deeply chauvanistic, and just serves as a way to mischaracterize those you disagree with to avoid having a conversation.
Marxist does not mean tankie. You can be a Marxist and a tankie, or you can be Marxist and not a tankie.
It’s just a pejorative for Marxist in practice. Everyone has their own version of what a “tankie” is and what a “true Marxist” is in their heads, but invariably tankie is levied most against those who uphold socialist projects as they exist in real life as legitimate.
No it’s not. I would also consider myself an ideological Marxist, but I am no tankie.
A tankie is someone who claims to value leftist ends of any kind (including Marxism-Leninism) but supports or defends authoritarianism, classism, stratification, or any of the inequitable historical socio-economic paradigms. Vanguardism is not meant to be perpetual, it is a means borne of desperation with the aim of a fundamentally opposite ends. It is not the ends itself, as it is a form of extreme rightism, but one specifically meant to be transient.
This doesn’t actually apply to the vast majority it’s applied to, though. Functionally, it’s a strawman with the characteristics you’ve described, applied to shut down conversation from those supporting socialist states.
This is a misframing of vanguardism. Vanguardism is transient, but it’s by no means extreme rightism. All it means is that the most politically advanced of the revolutionary class should formally organize and prepare for revolution, a concept Marx himself participated in.