the irony of having "tankies dni" next to the antifa logo when the antifascist action was started as a campaign by the KPD (communist party of germany) in 1932

I seriously dont understand people's definitions of tankie? Originally it was meant to be a slur for people who supported the use of tanks against the population i.e. in the GDR in 1953 (which is obv. completely indefensible)? But then people also use it to mean "communist" in general? anyone who sympathizes with the USSR or Cuba or China or something? A Stalinist or Maoist? a Leninist? are Trotskyists and Luxemburgists tankies? I don't understand where people draw their line lmao

@lizzy i use tankie to describe any authoritarian commie

@lucy aha and what is authoritarian to you

@lucy let me guess, anyone the CIA doesn't like and puts out propaganda against?

@lizzy tankie is the modern slur against communists

@lizzy wrong guess

@lizzy someone who seeks to increase governmental power over people's lives

@lizzy@social.vlhl.dev if you support hiererchies of any kind you're a tankie >_>

@greycat my mom is a tankie because she told me to go to bed

@lucy @lizzy https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

@chjara @lizzy your point being?

@lucy @lizzy authoritarianism is a meaningless framework

@chjara @lizzy nah

@lucy @lizzy ok

@chjara @lizzy marxism is a meaningless framework btw marx is the og detached privileged rich college kid archetype smh.

@lucy @chjara *jeopardy sound* uhhh- "what is a textbook example of an ad hominem?"

@lucy @lizzy meaningless framework that has been the only ideological framework which has historically functioned to establish lasting socialist societies
also what a privilege it is to be exiled from several different countries for your political activities

@chjara @lizzy I don't want socialism. I want people to let me the fuck be.

@lizzy i tend to parse it as those groups who are stuck inside some classical communism paradigm and fail to understand any liberation struggle outside of it

@lucy @chjara @lizzy how about libertarian socialism then

@chjara @lucy @lizzy I lean anarchist and even then Marx is extremely important and part of the basic class dynamic that goes into understanding work and hierarchies. You don't have to be a "tankie" (my feelings about the term are complicated) to like Marx

@mia @chjara @lizzy sign me up

@mia @lucy @lizzy a thing that exists and has real world impact

@chjara @mia @lizzy not with that attitude

@chjara @lucy @lizzy you authoritarians can ignore the fact every fucking time anarchists exists near you so called state socialists they try to purge us like happened under Stalin (Stalinists killing anarchists during Spanish civil war) and Lenin too (purge of Ukrainian and Russian anarchists). There is no sense in unity with you if we don't agree on comprehensive justice aka no hierarchies and no ruling classes but you want to establish yourselves as a ruling class and that's why Bolshevik takeover was a counter-revolution to free soviets.

@lizzy Well just because there is no black and white and no completely clear line doesn't mean the whole concept is useless.

For me tankies are mostly people who justify mao causing the famine with the biggest death toll in human histories and lefties who say we need a strong leader and strict hierarchies to have any success.

@chjara @mia @lucy @lizzy yeah real world impact of USRR was state capitalist dictatorship and new ruling class of bureaucrats being established all power to the vanguard party

@ildottore @chjara @lucy @lizzy Marx said some things that are pretty interesting Marxist concepts went on to inspire anarchists

@chjara @lizzy @lucy we would be much better of if your reactionary school of thought never existed

@trans_caracal @chjara @lucy i heavily disagree with how the soviets handled kronstadt or gdr 1953, and I side with CNT/FAI in the spanish civil war. tho makhno was a war lord, sorry.
that doesn't mean I hate every single thing the soviets did. they lifted a lot of people out of hunger and poverty and industrialized a completely underdeveloped country, brought literacy and education, greatly advanced science and technology, and defeated fascism.

@trans_caracal @lucy @lizzy tell that to all the 3rd world liberation movements who were helped by the USSR to kick out their colonizers while western leftists were (and are) complaining about tankies and stalin

@lizzy @chjara @lucy this could been done without imperialism, colonialism and statism but soviet state killed all alternatives to their rule

@chjara @lucy @lizzy yes I will be still complaining about Stalin and Lenin cuz they were horrible

@chjara @lizzy @lucy if you want to glorify reactionary imperialist, colonialist statesmen you have nothing to do with liberation

@trans_caracal @lucy @lizzy rapidly industrializing a gigantic country and lifting the living standards of millions within years and even beating the nazis in the meantime, unforgivable crimes

@lizzy asking socialists to define their moral and ideological framework is JUST begging for a hellthread 😭😭

@chjara @lucy @lizzy that doesn't make USRR oppression irrelevant tho economy was based on bosses exercising power over workers who were ruled by a state elite there was no rule from below, statist projects had disastrous consequences due to high modernism read Seeing Like a State again all of this could have been done without harm that hierarchy brings and it could have been done much better than USRR becouse class systems and states aren't about lifting lower class from poverty or some shit

@trans_caracal @chjara @lucy I don't think that the mainstream marxist approach of a mass party movement would have worked in russia at that time because they weren't industrialized and had a really low literacy rate. try teaching complex anarchist theory to someone who can't read while reactionary forces are trying to put the czar back in place. additionally, they were literally in a war with like 7 different countries at that time that needed to be ended as quickly as possible. a lot of people say that they should have waited for a revolution in a more developed and industrialized country like germany but ultimately german communism didn't end up going anywhere. that's why the adaptation of marxism to russia's conditions at that time (i.e. a vanguard party) seems like a good choice to me - unlike germany, they actually got a successful revolution done.
I do agree that they should have allowed a less top-down approach in cities where there the proletariat clearly demonstrated the necessary education to organize, i.e. kronstadt etc. and given them autonomy.

@lizzy congratulations on entering the shortlist for Fedi’s Strongest Hellthreader (it’s a very competitive sport)

@lizzy @chjara @lucy nu uh soviet councils were widespread Lenin centralized power because he thought rule of the elite is better than rule of the people

@tisanae @lizzy
What is "classical communism"? Marx and Engels may be good to understand labour and capital relations, they do not provide the best frameworks to understand global warming or indigenous rebellions.
You can just pick the right tools to analyze the problems at hand without immediately jumping to revisionism you know?

@lizzy @chjara @lucy "illiterate" people need to be ruled by good authoritarians the pinnacle of tankie theory

@trans_caracal @lucy @lizzy there was rule from below though, it was a dictatorship of the working class with regular elections to all levels of government and a party organized through democratic centralism
also, class isn't something you can abolish, class exists as long as the relations of production which create it exist, so as long as the bourgeoisie exist - both expropriated national bourgeoisie with strong connections and international bourgeoisie who wishes to see the destruction of socialism - there is class, and there thus needs to be class dictatorship to keep the exploiting classes in check

@trans_caracal @lucy @lizzy pretty much the first thing socialists did in any historical revolution is massive literacy campaigns

@mia @chjara @lucy @lizzy
I want to offer an ad-hominem as a counter argument
Vaush with glasses and hipster …

@dagda @mia @lucy @lizzy please CW vaush

@trans_caracal @chjara @lucy @lizzy yes, the soviets killed the anti-soviets who happened to be anarchists, what of it? Isn't it just more proof that the lack of a state makes anarchists immensely vulnerable to just being killed?

@FiringSquadsEnjoyer @chjara @lucy @lizzy no it was too much state constituted by fucking Stalin

@chjara @lucy @lizzy and this is problematic because modern schooling is authoritarian also your bias against oral culture is also problematic. It is as rich as written word. Some anarchists and communists didn't even learn to read but they learned from someone reading for them. And if you deprive people of ability to rule themselves they will not learn it causing dependence of authoritarities. Shaddab Rahemtulla makes a gold point writing:

"By elevating the written letter over the oral word, Engineer takes the richness and intellectual sophistication of orality and demotes it to illiteracy, and therefore as something that is necessarily negative, lacking. What makes Engineer’s modernist bent towards the written letter even more problematic, particularly in the Indian context where illiteracy is high, is that the traditions and testimonies of the downtrodden are rarely written down, but rather rooted in the oral, the folkloric. Thus, the task of liberation theology, as a theology that is in critical conversation with the oppressed, is to unearth and safeguard these much maligned traditions. For example, a principal project of Dalit Theology, which seeks to empower the so-called Untouchables in an oppressive, caste-based society, is to reclaim Dalit culture and history, embedded in oral media like songs, folk stories, and myths."

@trans_caracal @chjara @lucy the soviets were literally the basis of government in the soviet union, that's where it has its name from.

but look at what happened in germany 1918 where councils got established but the socialist leadership failed to seize state power? state power was seized by reactionary forces, the revolution was brutally beaten down by SPD and Freikorps (a paramilitary that would later become Hitler's SS), the SPD established their own government and purged the councils. the state ultimately needs to coexist with the councils to protect them and probably to manage some central matters too.

@trans_caracal @lucy @lizzy holy shit literacy is authoritarian

@trans_caracal @chjara @lucy @lizzy
during the spanish civil war anarchists were in a united front with reactionary bourgeois forces to defeat USSR influence btw, just a historical fact, Stalins views on anarchism were still kinda reddit.
As far as Lenin goes it's truly remarkable that he didn't integrate the anarchists who literally wanted to blow him up in terrorist attacks, while several other anarchists were allowed to just be left alone just fine

@chjara @lucy @lizzy I said school is authoritarian and anti-orality is problematic if you cared to read it

@trans_caracal @lucy @lizzy i said communists want people to be literate and you said that's problematic and authoritarian

@lucy @mia @chjara @lizzy
https://www.ca-ira.net/verlag/johannes-agnoli-gesammelte-werke/
there you go

@dagda @chjara @lucy @lizzy of course as far as they didn't prove to be danger to the Soviet state right?

@chjara @lucy @trans_caracal I'm not anti-orality but I don't think it can replace literacy

@lizzy @chjara @lucy no ja jebie ideologiczne klapki na oczach idę robić coś ciekawszego

@blauertee this is one of the best replies I've gotten because it goes into detail instead of defining one buzzword using another buzzword. genuinely thank you

@trans_caracal @chjara @lucy @lizzy Before the internet, literacy was anti-orality. Nowadays, I'm not so sure: half the oral tradition I'm familiar with, I've learned via the written word. (And that's learned by participation, not learned by reading what some anthropologist has written.)

@blauertee @lizzy
Maos famines were in fact not the biggest famines in history, that would be colonial early-capitalist famines like in India.
As far as leadership goes strong leadership is highly successfull in mass agitation, so it needs to be treated like a tool that demands counter-balancing and shouldn't result in excessive personality cults. Hierachies are just a form of organization, they can be good or bad depending on how they are implemented and controlled.

@trans_caracal @chjara @lucy @lizzy most revolutions in fact don't allow you to blow up the people partaking in it you know?

@lucy @chjara @lizzy

A Lucy W on the wild, about time.

@chjara @lizzy

I prefer to call them commie scum, commietards or red fertilizer.

@sally @chjara @lucy @lizzy
perfectly valid take, however bourgeois liberalism is less "leave me alone" than well-implemented socialism. Many socialist systems were less bureaucratic and ideologically nagging than modern liberal capitalism

@sally @chjara @lizzy red fertilizer is a new one for me

@sally @chjara @lucy @lizzy cabin in the woods post-sending afficionado soon

@dagda @chjara @lucy @lizzy

They all have one thing in common, enforce any form of authority through law under threat of violence to ensure you depend of the state for everything (food, water shelter, defense). I say curbstomp them, it's about time we get rid of degenerates trying step on the general public, regardless of what politic cause they claim to be shielding behind.

@dagda @chjara @lizzy

Coined by myself, you're welcome.

@dagda @chjara @lucy @lizzy

It's all a man needs.

@sally @chjara @lucy @lizzy in russia state planning was very successfull with broad strokes modernization (electricity, telephone, energy, steel, etc.) and less so with some specific productive items (like the small nails example that gets frequently presented as one of the non-sensical aspects of the incentive economy of the UdSSR).
I think you should just delegate the productive task to the smallest possible scope of responsibility, so a village f.ex. could just handle it's productive tasks without much state intervention, while national tasks like telecomms are handled on larger scopes.
Also you need agitation for revolutions, but post-revolutionary ideological top-down influence on the masses is dumb, let people alone as much as possible.
Centralized authority on violence is in fact the most successfull civilizational model of keeping violence the lowest, as laid out by Hegel and Thomas Hobbes. People doing all their self-defense through a personal shotgun was somewhat successful maybe in early US-history but not everyone is an adventurer and it gets romaticized a lot tbh

@dagda @lizzy congrats you hereby comply with my definition of tankie.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
(You can sort by death toll)

@dagda @lizzy I know you didn't justify anything (strictly speaking) you didn't say we *need* hierarchies etc. This was a joke don't take it personally. I strongly disagree with what you said, but I'm not gonna try to discuss such things on a platform like mastodon in a few hundred characters.

@blauertee @lizzy
>Mastodon
who's gonna tell him?

@dagda @blauertee neither me nor @blauertee are on mastodon. the instance I'm on is running akkoma and has its character limit configured to be 10000. mastodon doesn't let you configure it by the way, it hardcodes a maximum of 500 and you have to change the source code to bump it up. mastodon has quite a few of these questionable limitations that seemingly try to mimic twitter.

@chjara@akko.wtf @lucy@netzsphaere.xyz @lizzy@social.vlhl.dev can we stop doing this like its fine if you wanna jack a smarter person’s argument i do it all the time but can we at least still repeat ourselves instead of linking entire essays to people? like extract the point he’s making, try to put it into your own words and then apply it to whatever convo youre having

@dagda @chjara @sally @lucy @lizzy classical liberalism under a monarchy framework 🔥

@arcana @chjara @sally @dagda @lucy @lizzy queen arcana

@dagda @lizzy

@blauertee fuck outta here, tourist.

@dagda @chjara @lucy @lizzy peep the badge socialist special forces, socialist politicians, socialist generals, socialist cops 🔥🔥🔥

@lizzy @chjara @lucy they protected them so hard they lost relevance as power was concentrated in the party and central goverment this is not communism the state was not abolished. You don't need a state to defend a revolution the only thing this proves that history proves is that state as a institution will purge the councils when their power is threatened because every state is about concentration of power in the hands of elite ruling class even at its most democratic.

@trans_caracal @dagda @lucy @lizzy let's say somehow a large territory declares itself an anarchist commune whatever with no state or hierarchical structures whatsoever. the population is as a whole largely revolutionary and committed to the defense of this project. okay. NATO vows to destroy you and bombs statr dropping, what do you do. how do you coordinate the defense and industry to supply it. how do you ensure enemy forces aren't working to destroy it from inside either with no internal repressive apparatus

@chjara @dagda @lucy @lizzy militias subordinate to popular power is the answer here I don't militaries beholden to politicians

@chjara @dagda @lizzy @lucy read articles I pinned for clarity, goodbye I don't need to waste here cuz you are clearly biased and I can't force you to have any progressive politics

@blauertee @lizzy Waow I did it fellas
My pfp (Dagda from SMT) with ru…

@sally @dagda @lizzy you're mean.

@dagda @lizzy Well im on a mastodon instance, so there was nothing factually wrong with me not wanting to discuss complex topics on mastodon 😇

@blauertee @lizzy earlier you were talking about Mastodon as a platform, which kinda confused me as Fediverse doesn't really have platforms but rather thousands of independant server racks sending stuff somewhere, including non-Mastodon servers.
But by knowing the concept of instances you already have a pretty decent understanding of the network so no issues there

@dagda @lizzy hahaha I actually thought about whether someone is gonna knit pick the word platform and complain about me using it for atleast 30sec. Then I thought a stage is a platform, as in giving someone a platform and it's okay to use it in that context and not as in platform capitalism 😅

@lizzy @dagda guess I gotta type "on activity pub based microblogging services" from now on, which will definitely encourage me to switch to some instance with a much higher character limit.

@blauertee @dagda or you can just say "fedi"

@blauertee @lizzy I have an alt on a Mastodon server and they just changed the number for maximum characters by hand. It's possible in Mastodon, as well as Glitch-soc if you want a similar user experience without the strict limit

@blauertee @lizzy
calling anti imperialism a weird lefty cult and saying radfem is a terf thing in your bio, least obvious closet hitlerite pretending to be left wing lmao

@lizzy @dagda Hmm yeah maybe it's not quite the same though. I use different clients for Lemmy and peer tube and interact with the content there differently from what I do here with tusky on my phone.

@blauertee @dagda lemmy is activitypub based, but they kinda abuse activitypub in very weird ways...

@chjara @lizzy you're a pinko chjara

@FiringSquadsEnjoyer @blauertee @lizzy >closet hitlerite

after giving it a glance I don't think he's in the closet about it bestie