This drivel has no rhyme or reason, it does not attempt to make a point nor does it attempt to answer the question it tries (but fails) to ask: what exactly did you want to know about tankies? A monkey with a typewriter could have typed up something more profound than whatever this piece is supposed to be.
It’s structured like an article, which shows the author at least understands the concept of narration to some level, yet it amounts to little more than a collection of pulverized thoughts the author had, whose crumbs he set out to collect and blow on a sheet of paper to lay this mess of a first draft down. Yes, this article is on the level of a pasta necklace made by my 4 year old niece; but my niece, at least, understands the basics of gluing things together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.
We have finished the article with the grandiose, but petulant question of “What is a tankie?” and have not come close to an answer. Perhaps that is to be expected from “libertarian communists”, who must feel that rubbing their brain cells together to produce a coherent thought sustained over 5 seconds is asking too much work of them!
If we had the inclination, we could easily take down that rag in fewer words than it took for them to write it. But we will focus on the most egregious bullshit the author has consciously decided to put down on paper. Truly, the only solace we find from this whole experience is that at least no tree was harmed in the printing of this vintage collection of a boomer’s glimpses of a thought.
We must first call out that the author seems greatly preoccupied by the danger of the USSR, a full 27 years after it was illegally dissolved – a time span so long, many communists today were not born while the USSR existed!
After a brief etymological explanation of the word “tankie” (and not a definition, as the title suggested), we get to hear about Trotskyists for some reason. We deign not venture to think why Trotskyists are important in this piece, especially deserving to be placed in the second section near the top of the article, lest we lose some neurons in the attempt and reluctantly reach the writing prowess of the author.
Thus to the question “Are all Tankies Marxist-Leninists?”, the author fails to come up with an answer. Literally. It’s not in there. He mumbles something about Trotskyists and then moves on to the next section.
Too bad. We were on the verge of our seat hoping for the answer.
The author then repeats this sorry excuse of a process three times, hoping to get different results. We can only be thankful he did not choose chemistry as his field of expertise, fearing for the safety of his neighbours.
Are Marxist-Leninists tankies? Are Leninists tankies? Is my dog a tankie? Is my neighbour a tankie? How to contact the CIA? Youths making too much noise. How to get a gun? Is it legal to conceal carry?
Our apologies, we mistakenly printed out the author’s Google searches.
Inspired by a flash of lucidity and remembering that he should not focus solely on white Marxists lest he be accused of racism, the author suddenly remembers the Black Panther party existed and devotes a section to them.
Realising the feat of misunderstanding both Huey Newton and Socialism in one country, the author still manages to pit them both against each other (the link between Newton and the USSR’s policies is never explained).
We are not hoping to teach the author new tricks, but to clarify: in this cherry-picked passage from Newton, he is not standing against socialism in one country. He is in fact arriving at the same conclusion. Socialism in one country meant to achieve socialism in the USSR first before exporting revolution – per the author’s own writing in this article, the USSR still had an international spirit in parallel to that policy.
Likewise, in the excerpt the author quotes from Newton: “We found that in order to be Internationalists we had to be also Nationalists, or at least acknowledge nationhood”. More concerning than the author’s poor reading comprehension is that synthesising and extracting the main ideas of a text is a high school level skill.
Newton is not saying he’s not a nationalist or he hates nations; he’s saying internationalism and nationalism are not contradictory, that you can be both, and that you have to be both in the age of imperialism.
Truthfully, it’s difficult to dissect this quote from Newton as the author never makes it clear why exactly they quoted it. Like most self-important academics who believe they’ve reached a higher state of consciousness because they call themselves communists (but the whi- we mean right kind of communist) and have tried reading some philosophy once, the author thinks that he can just copy and paste text here and there on Microsoft Word and that constitutes an argument.
And once again, the author ends this section without an answer to the question. Are the Black Panthers tankies, Mike, or are you just too much of a spineless coward to stand behind your beliefs and actually come out with them?
If there is anything to applaud in this result of a grade school homework assignment, it must surely be the rabid hatred against the USSR the author manages to downplay (the word “USSR” appears 22 times!)
The author then accomplishes the feat of misunderstanding anti-imperialism despite quoting Lenin. He also strawmans anti-imperialists, which begs the question: are you for imperial intervention, Mike? You seem to dislike Libya judging from the opening paragraph.
Since the author cherry-picks quotes to “support” his point (in the same way a moldy and chipped plank of wood will support the entire weight of my car), we feel allowed to cherry-pick the actual meaning of this quote.
Of course, before we do that, we all understand that Marxism is not a collection of loosely-connected quotes but a comprehensive, maybe even holistic body of works that must be understood through their overall ideas, which are highly abstract, and not through the specific examples writers give to illustrate said ideas.
Now that the author understands what examples are, let’s look at Lenin.
From the get-go he misunderstands anti-imperialism: to misunderstand several of one’s own arguments in a single page is a feat so rare, it almost deserves a medal.
Nobody is giving “unconditional support to the ruling class in any country aligned against the US.” Marxist-Leninists, however, understand that whatever these oogabooga scary non-white countries have going for them is they are stable and people live much better lives in this system than they would under a NATO war and puppet state. In a time when Mike had the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq to look at, that he would say this boggles the mind.
Is Mike confused every time he sees people protesting against a US invasion of Iran? Does he go about his life not understanding about the concept of war? Frankly, we shudder to imagine the bubble this man must live in to have such a childish, naive view of geopolitics in the 21st century.
Or perhaps his mind still thinks it is 1961. We aren’t sure either way.
Yes. But this has nothing to do with tankies. Next question.
The CPI-M consists of millions of members working under a post-caste, multicultural comprador capitalist State. Mike consists of one guy who was given access to the Internet on his 30th birthday and it all went downhill from there.
On the Communist Party of Japan, nobody thinks they’re actually communist. Hence why they are so popular in a far-right nationalist island State. You are welcome for this quick math lesson, Mike.
There is also a certain irony we have to point out in a “libertarian communist” lecturing communists about revisionism!
You are a snake. You do not get to run a hit piece on Marxism-Leninism and its millions more adherents today than your Nintendo Labo of an ideology has ever produced and then shield yourself from criticism by saying “oh but you should totally work with MLs though :D”
In WW2, you would have been a collaborator. In the USSR, you would have given up your neighbours to the NKVD unprompted (after which they would have told you to shut up and go home, because after the archives were opened in the 90s, we found out >90% of all “poor innocent persecuted victims” were actually criminals – something you wouldn’t know if, like Mike, you’d been living in a cave where nothing bad can ever hurt you for the past 50 years).
Because despite all your posturing, you stand for absolutely nothing except some feel-good vibes of “libertarian communism”: you get to do nothing except tell people that they are not doing things the right way, and that strokes your ego.
It’s literally the opposite, what Newton says from the point of nations not existing because of imperialism is an argument that could be used to defend socialism in one country
This drivel has no rhyme or reason, it does not attempt to make a point nor does it attempt to answer the question it tries (but fails) to ask: what exactly did you want to know about tankies? A monkey with a typewriter could have typed up something more profound than whatever this piece is supposed to be.
It’s structured like an article, which shows the author at least understands the concept of narration to some level, yet it amounts to little more than a collection of pulverized thoughts the author had, whose crumbs he set out to collect and blow on a sheet of paper to lay this mess of a first draft down. Yes, this article is on the level of a pasta necklace made by my 4 year old niece; but my niece, at least, understands the basics of gluing things together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.
We have finished the article with the grandiose, but petulant question of “What is a tankie?” and have not come close to an answer. Perhaps that is to be expected from “libertarian communists”, who must feel that rubbing their brain cells together to produce a coherent thought sustained over 5 seconds is asking too much work of them!
If we had the inclination, we could easily take down that rag in fewer words than it took for them to write it. But we will focus on the most egregious bullshit the author has consciously decided to put down on paper. Truly, the only solace we find from this whole experience is that at least no tree was harmed in the printing of this vintage collection of a boomer’s glimpses of a thought.
We must first call out that the author seems greatly preoccupied by the danger of the USSR, a full 27 years after it was illegally dissolved – a time span so long, many communists today were not born while the USSR existed!
After a brief etymological explanation of the word “tankie” (and not a definition, as the title suggested), we get to hear about Trotskyists for some reason. We deign not venture to think why Trotskyists are important in this piece, especially deserving to be placed in the second section near the top of the article, lest we lose some neurons in the attempt and reluctantly reach the writing prowess of the author.
Thus to the question “Are all Tankies Marxist-Leninists?”, the author fails to come up with an answer. Literally. It’s not in there. He mumbles something about Trotskyists and then moves on to the next section.
Too bad. We were on the verge of our seat hoping for the answer.
The author then repeats this sorry excuse of a process three times, hoping to get different results. We can only be thankful he did not choose chemistry as his field of expertise, fearing for the safety of his neighbours.
Are Marxist-Leninists tankies? Are Leninists tankies? Is my dog a tankie? Is my neighbour a tankie? How to contact the CIA? Youths making too much noise. How to get a gun? Is it legal to conceal carry?
Our apologies, we mistakenly printed out the author’s Google searches.
Inspired by a flash of lucidity and remembering that he should not focus solely on white Marxists lest he be accused of racism, the author suddenly remembers the Black Panther party existed and devotes a section to them.
Realising the feat of misunderstanding both Huey Newton and Socialism in one country, the author still manages to pit them both against each other (the link between Newton and the USSR’s policies is never explained).
We are not hoping to teach the author new tricks, but to clarify: in this cherry-picked passage from Newton, he is not standing against socialism in one country. He is in fact arriving at the same conclusion. Socialism in one country meant to achieve socialism in the USSR first before exporting revolution – per the author’s own writing in this article, the USSR still had an international spirit in parallel to that policy.
Likewise, in the excerpt the author quotes from Newton: “We found that in order to be Internationalists we had to be also Nationalists, or at least acknowledge nationhood”. More concerning than the author’s poor reading comprehension is that synthesising and extracting the main ideas of a text is a high school level skill.
Newton is not saying he’s not a nationalist or he hates nations; he’s saying internationalism and nationalism are not contradictory, that you can be both, and that you have to be both in the age of imperialism.
Truthfully, it’s difficult to dissect this quote from Newton as the author never makes it clear why exactly they quoted it. Like most self-important academics who believe they’ve reached a higher state of consciousness because they call themselves communists (but the whi- we mean right kind of communist) and have tried reading some philosophy once, the author thinks that he can just copy and paste text here and there on Microsoft Word and that constitutes an argument.
And once again, the author ends this section without an answer to the question. Are the Black Panthers tankies, Mike, or are you just too much of a spineless coward to stand behind your beliefs and actually come out with them?
If there is anything to applaud in this result of a grade school homework assignment, it must surely be the rabid hatred against the USSR the author manages to downplay (the word “USSR” appears 22 times!)
The author then accomplishes the feat of misunderstanding anti-imperialism despite quoting Lenin. He also strawmans anti-imperialists, which begs the question: are you for imperial intervention, Mike? You seem to dislike Libya judging from the opening paragraph.
Since the author cherry-picks quotes to “support” his point (in the same way a moldy and chipped plank of wood will support the entire weight of my car), we feel allowed to cherry-pick the actual meaning of this quote.
Of course, before we do that, we all understand that Marxism is not a collection of loosely-connected quotes but a comprehensive, maybe even holistic body of works that must be understood through their overall ideas, which are highly abstract, and not through the specific examples writers give to illustrate said ideas.
Now that the author understands what examples are, let’s look at Lenin.
From the get-go he misunderstands anti-imperialism: to misunderstand several of one’s own arguments in a single page is a feat so rare, it almost deserves a medal.
Nobody is giving “unconditional support to the ruling class in any country aligned against the US.” Marxist-Leninists, however, understand that whatever these oogabooga scary non-white countries have going for them is they are stable and people live much better lives in this system than they would under a NATO war and puppet state. In a time when Mike had the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq to look at, that he would say this boggles the mind.
Is Mike confused every time he sees people protesting against a US invasion of Iran? Does he go about his life not understanding about the concept of war? Frankly, we shudder to imagine the bubble this man must live in to have such a childish, naive view of geopolitics in the 21st century.
Or perhaps his mind still thinks it is 1961. We aren’t sure either way.
Yes. But this has nothing to do with tankies. Next question.
The CPI-M consists of millions of members working under a post-caste, multicultural comprador capitalist State. Mike consists of one guy who was given access to the Internet on his 30th birthday and it all went downhill from there.
On the Communist Party of Japan, nobody thinks they’re actually communist. Hence why they are so popular in a far-right nationalist island State. You are welcome for this quick math lesson, Mike.
There is also a certain irony we have to point out in a “libertarian communist” lecturing communists about revisionism!
You are a snake. You do not get to run a hit piece on Marxism-Leninism and its millions more adherents today than your Nintendo Labo of an ideology has ever produced and then shield yourself from criticism by saying “oh but you should totally work with MLs though :D”
In WW2, you would have been a collaborator. In the USSR, you would have given up your neighbours to the NKVD unprompted (after which they would have told you to shut up and go home, because after the archives were opened in the 90s, we found out >90% of all “poor innocent persecuted victims” were actually criminals – something you wouldn’t know if, like Mike, you’d been living in a cave where nothing bad can ever hurt you for the past 50 years).
Because despite all your posturing, you stand for absolutely nothing except some feel-good vibes of “libertarian communism”: you get to do nothing except tell people that they are not doing things the right way, and that strokes your ego.
Sooo, it seems he still is butthurt about the SR’s lol
Excellent write-up
Really love this, y’alls witty writing was awesome to read
That Huey Newton quote does not refute “socialism in one country” in any capacity, let alone “firmly” as they say.
It’s literally the opposite, what Newton says from the point of nations not existing because of imperialism is an argument that could be used to defend socialism in one country
Very much enjoyed this breakdown with my hungover sunday coffee thank you
lol you’re welcome
This was cathartic to read
This breakdown was a pleasure to read