pseudo-tankies

I'm not even sure whether this is supposed to be an insult anymore. Is a "tankie" better or worse than a "fake tankie"?

In a thread complaining about leftist infighting, there's a special irony in liberals singing out a leftist who is simultaneously too far left and not far left enough.

Regarding approval rates, all classes were interviewed, including the bourgeoisie. Further, you will not find 100% of people agreeing that the Earth is round, flat-Earthers exist. What should be recognized is that the PRC has some of the highest approval rates in the world, and that that number appears to be increasing over the course of the study. I don't think your argument that there being a non-zero number of Chinese citizens that disapprove of the government doesn't mean the people aren't in charge of it, Chinese citizens aren't a hive-mind nor is the PRC a classless society. Class struggle is very much alive in China.

As for state-ownership, that doesn't mean those in government are the actual owners. That's not how public ownership works, again, the state isn't a class, but an extension, in the PRC's case of the proletariat. Public ownership rests on ownership among all citizens, just because said citizens elect managers and administrators doesn't mean these managers and administrators are the owners. If I am a local manager of a McDonalds store, I'm not the owner, I'm still a proletarian.

I don't consider the state to be equivalent to the people. I do consider the state to be an extension of the ruling class. Further, I see the state the same way Marx did, as purely the repressive elements of government that uphold the ruling class and oppress the other classes, and that once production is all centralized and democratized globally, fully collectivized, there won't be any class and thus no state, but there will be administrators, managers, accountants, etc as there must be in the kind of large-scale and interconnected production that the Marxist conception of communism holds as its basis.

The principle distinction between anarchism and Marxism is in decentralization and horizontalism vs centralization and collectivization. I hold both as socialist, and much prefer the Marxist framework of analysis, but don't really waste much time trying to discredit anarchism or anarchists.

It's a specific type of leftist we have in my country, french communists are a… special breed, let's say.

In the 1980s our communist party bulldozed a migrant worker dormitory because they hated migrants that much. Red MAGA or something. The party recovered from that era, but french communists are still chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism (which is meant to be the redeeming quality of tankies). They do however share with tankies the traits of applying "class first" logic to a lot of conversations, which makes them deathly allergic to intersectionality, and being terminally online and way into infighting. Thus they usually end up booted from actual activist groups, since they tend to hold us back and prevent us from actually getting shit done in the streets.

Hence me calling them pseudo-tankies because it's hard to label them. We just call them tankies here: they're members of a party that supported the crushing of the hungarian uprising with soviet tanks, and is ambiguous about tienanmen (no denying it happened but very alt-history about it), so pro-tanks they are.

I have an easier time getting along with the average online american tankie than with our local communist party's members.

ok let me try and phrase it another way:

regardless of who supposedly owns the firms, who makes the big decisions of how they are to be run? is it the people of china? or is it whoever is in government at the moment?

who makes decisions about the course of the country? is it the people who live there, or do they simply elect someone to make all of those decisions?

It's a specific type of leftist we have in my country, french communists are a… special breed, let's say.

In the 1980s our communist party bulldozed a migrant worker dormitory because they hated migrants that much. Red MAGA or something. The party recovered from that era, but french communists are still chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism (which is meant to be the redeeming quality of tankies). They do however share with tankies the traits of applying "class first" logic to a lot of conversations, which makes them deathly allergic to intersectionality, and being terminally online and way into infighting. Thus they usually end up booted from actual activist groups, since they tend to hold us back and prevent us from actually getting shit done in the streets.

Hence me calling them pseudo-tankies because it's hard to label them. We just call them tankies here: they're members of a party that supported the crushing of the hungarian uprising with soviet tanks, and is ambiguous about tienanmen (no denying it happened but very alt-history about it), so pro-tanks they are.

I have an easier time getting along with the average online american tankie than with our local communist party's members.

It's not only decades of propaganda.

Whether you like it or not, but many countries have suffered enourmosly (genocides, extermination of local language and culture) under the banner of regimes that claimed to represent communist ideals and allegedly aimed to develop a communist society.

I was born in the tail end of the USSR, so I honestly don't really remember it. But from the stories of my parents and relatives, it was trash.

You can't just dismiss the association between the USSR and attempts at achieving communism.

Because the French Revolution didnt permanently damage democracy as a political system.

Ok. Neither did the communist revolutions of the 20th century permanently damage communism as a political system.

And democratic system in one form or another existed for millennia before the French Revolution.

As have anarchist and communistic systems.

The USSR and China under the CCP permanently discredited (without any chance of rehabilitation) communism as legitimate ideology.

No. They didn't. Only too western liberals who were always hostile to communism would say that. The idea that communism is permanently dead just because capitalists didn't like it is pure "end of history" Neo-liberalist nonsense, and basically ignores the fact that a large chunk of the worlds population still actively feels positively about these revolutionary projects; to say nothing of the people who don't like those particular ones, but still agree with communism in general.

Besides, so called "liberal democracies" have done far more evil than the USSR or Communist China. In fact, they're doing a repeat of the Holocaust as we speak. Does that "permanently (without any chance of rehabilitation) discredit democracy as a legitimate ideology"?

No one in their right mind would want anything to do with communism. It’s like asking for genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression and poverty. No one is going to do that.

Sure, if you're a complete dullard who has mainlined nothing but pure, concentrated cold war propaganda without any thought or consideration, without ever bothering to open a single book on political theory. Everyone else is not that stupid.

And guess what? You have genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression, and poverty now, no communism needed. In fact, communism has almost always been associated with a reduction in those things if you actually check the stats.

And I not saying this in the polemical sense used by pro-crime/pro-corruption Americans

Yes, you are. That is exactly how you are saying it.

The antidote to infighting in my experience is organizing in ideologically diverse spaces. I've organized with liberals and all types of different leftists. It has left me with the perspective that all these people are good people that just want better for the world. It's hard to get angry at them once you know them. Per usual the solution is to touch grass.

Lol. Please present a single example of someone actually holding these views. This is the most obviously nonsense strawman in history, but everyone here will upvote it anyway because it lets them punch left.

Sorry if I don't want to ally with people who constantly talk about killing other leftists (aka all of lemmy.ml).

If your stance is that administration and managers are incompatible with socialism, and that democratically elected representatives are not a genuine form of democracy for the people, then your stance is that Marxism in general isn't socialist to begin with. I think this is more of a semantical argument than a moral or logical one, if I ceded that Marxism isn't socialist by your definition that says nothing about whether or not Marxism is a sound framework and that Marxist "socialism" is something worth pursuing.

Further, I don't see how you could have large-scale society while requiring every decision to be made collectively, so either you're pushing for the small-scale commune model with individual or small cooperative production, or there's something else you agree with that I'm not aware of. Most anarchists recognize "justified" hierarchies of some sort to get around this issue, usually with different models like participatory economics, but I do understand that the maximally horizontalist anarchists do also exist.

As for how decisionmaking is made in the PRC, it depends on the scale. Much of the larger decisions are made centrally at the level of the NPC, but local decisions are often made directly through township councils or regional councils. It works well for its people, which is why it gets such widespread support.

Because the French Revolution didnt permanently damage democracy as a political system.

Ok. Neither did the communist revolutions of the 20th century permanently damage communism as a political system.

And democratic system in one form or another existed for millennia before the French Revolution.

As have anarchist and communistic systems.

The USSR and China under the CCP permanently discredited (without any chance of rehabilitation) communism as legitimate ideology.

No. They didn't. Only too western liberals who were always hostile to communism would say that. The idea that communism is permanently dead just because capitalists didn't like it is pure "end of history" Neo-liberalist nonsense, and basically ignores the fact that a large chunk of the worlds population still actively feels positively about these revolutionary projects; to say nothing of the people who don't like those particular ones, but still agree with communism in general.

Besides, so called "liberal democracies" have done far more evil than the USSR or Communist China. In fact, they're doing a repeat of the Holocaust as we speak. Does that "permanently (without any chance of rehabilitation) discredit democracy as a legitimate ideology"?

No one in their right mind would want anything to do with communism. It’s like asking for genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression and poverty. No one is going to do that.

Sure, if you're a complete dullard who has mainlined nothing but pure, concentrated cold war propaganda without any thought or consideration, without ever bothering to open a single book on political theory. Everyone else is not that stupid.

And guess what? You have genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression, and poverty now, no communism needed. In fact, communism has almost always been associated with a reduction in those things if you actually check the stats.

And I not saying this in the polemical sense used by pro-crime/pro-corruption Americans

Yes, you are. That is exactly how you are saying it.

i did ask who makes the big decisions and decides "the course of the country". i agree that if the entire populace were to decide every minor detail, it would become inoperably slow.

i make a distinction between ceding all power and decisions to a representative every voting cycle (5 years for the NPC?) vs. choosing a delegate who enacts decisions made by the populace, and has decision-making power of their own in the confines of the mandate they were given by the people, and who is directly recallable at any time by a simple majority.

this attemps to give decision-making power to everyone affected by a decision, without giving it to those unaffected and slowing the process down.

whereas the state reduces the power of the individual to a decision of "1, 2, or 3" every 5 years or so, followed by all other decisions being made by their new ruler.

my argument is that the representative model does not give meaningful enough control to the people to consider this "state" an extension of the people.

i would define socialism as public ownership of the means of production. where "public" means "of the people" and ownership means "having meaningful control of".

so in my view, until the people meaningfully control the state or the means of production, it is not socialism.

[dude with glasses in a communist t-shirt, arguing]
I'm the only leftist here, your opinions are TRASH

[dude holding a theory book on smug, arguing]
Read theory you losers, you're all WRONG

[dude in an anarchist hoodie, arguing]
Nuh-uh, I'm the only leftist here, you're SHITLIBS

[the three dudes are now caught in a cartoon fight, glasses gone flying, punches everywhere, while a firing squad of nazis are targeting them with rifles]

[a confused nazi asks]
Why… why are they still arguing?

Infighting | The Bad Website

Infighting - A comic on The Bad Website

The Bad Website (thebad.website)

My point is that being "anti-authoritarian" is meaningless unless you qualify that with how you wish to get rid of the state and class, as until you do, there will always be one class in control of the state that oppresses the rest. "Authoritarianism" as a thing does not exist, what exists is differences in how much a state exerts its authority, and that depends on which class is in control and which circumstances it is responding to.

As an example, both Nazi Germany and modern Germany are capitalist, bourgeois states. Modern Germany doesn't need to exert its authority as much as Nazi Germany because the Nazis came to power in economic crisis, where private ownership itself was in danger. Modern Germany is just as willing to use its authority as it has the same class character, but only does so to the extent it needs to, like crushing protestors for Palestine.

The antidote to infighting in my experience is organizing in ideologically diverse spaces.

You are saying (correctly) that we need to organize in ways that appeal to more median voters, moderates, liberals and even conservatives around much broader initiatives that appeal to more populist ideas like wealth inequality, social programs to help poor neighborhoods, rebuilding infrastructure and creating more livable communities.

But people who read this are going to translate it as:

"They're saying I should reach out to the Green/Primitivist Anarchists I banned from my discord server" or "Maybe we should include the Orthodox Marxist–Leninists even though we hate them"

Or even worse: "HOW DARE HE SUGGEST I COMPROMISE WITH MY OPPRESSORS I WILL RIP THROATS OUT"

We all have to live next to each other even if we get the best policy results and I think everyone on either side forgets this. This isn't centerism, this is understanding that we have to rebuild together even if we don't share objective realities, we have no choice in the matter. I think too many people get stuck in their algorithmic ideology bubbles and think "the revolution/race war is coming, and everything will be great after."

Nobody is coming. Nobody is going to make it better. There is no secret cabal or underground movement, there will be no socialist revolution. What we see is what we get and if we want it better, we need to get a LOT better about getting our shitty emotions under control, learning to socialize and using our energy wisely.

My point is that being “anti-authoritarian” is meaningless unless

That seems to be your new point and again I don't care to argue what a "true about authoritarian" is. If you think me wanting the ss to have been executed after the Holocaust disqualifies me as anti authoritarian you're welcome to think that, I don't respect your opinion in that case. That was the conversation where you entered.

My point has been consistent throughout, a state wielding its power is authoritarian, but that can be a good thing. Labeling oneself as "anti-authoritarian" is usually a thought-terminating cliché to oppose socialists that support the use of the state against the bourgeoisie.

The PRC generally follows the latter model you describe. Recall elections are possible, and there are different "rungs" that are directly accountable to lower rungs. Politicians have to work their way up the rungs in order to increase their scope of decisionmaking, if they break that trust they fall back down the ladder. Part of Xi Jinping's campaign that brought him immense popularity among the people was purging of opportunists that held comfortable positions throughout the 90s and 2000s.

Going back to the "rung" model, there are townships, county, provincial, and central governments. Townships are the lowest level and most direct, and each county is made up of many townships, each province many counties, and all provinces under central. This direct line from bottom to top means the legitimacy at the top is laddered upward, while allowing those who have proven themselves to operate from the top back downward. Their legitimacy and accountability is maintained through that unbroken chain.

i would define socialism as public ownership of the means of production. where “public” means “of the people” and ownership means “having meaningful control of”.

I would say that, based on my previous paragraphs and answers, the PRC absolutely qualifies. I think if we are merely disagreeing about vibes, then we are abstracting away from the material base in a way that is counter-productive to discussion.

I’m saying it because I’ve seen them make the same argument, as I have done myself, in different ways.

Then maybe you didn't read the conversation