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Reading the comments, it really does feel that most tankies are demagogues and roleplayers.
Most of them are larpers, yeah. Majority are white rich middle-aged men or teenagers with too much money.
It’s weird, huh? I would have expected them to be people hanging by a thread, with nothing to lose, homeless or nearly there…but tankies seem to be angrier than these examples of people and seem to tend to be better off than average. 🙃
It’s usually caused by guilt and shame of being rich. But refusing to give up their riches.
I mean, their most well-known online figurehead is Hasan, who lives in a mansion and dresses in thousand-dollar clothing and wears expensive jewellery
Copying what I wrote in this thread:
For anybody wondering why anticommunists would spew fatuous bullshit like this, I’ll explain:
The reason that anticommunists accused us and continue to accuse us of being upper-class hypocrites is that it makes them look like the good guys. Most of them do not want the vile stigma that comes with hating the proletariat, thus they make up this brainless stereotype that we’re rich, and therefore an attack on us is not an attack on the proletariat at all.
It is not as though anticommunists reach these conclusions by carefully surveying communist parties, strikers, or antifascist activists. It’s a stereotype that anticommunists make up.
How do you attack Black Lives Matter without looking like a white supremacist? Easy, you pretend that Black Lives Matter is the whitest movement of all time and ignore all evidence to the contrary. Here’s another one: feminism? All feminists are men, so bashing feminism isn’t misogynist. Or how about my favorite: Jewish anti-Zionists? All anti-Zionist Jews are gentiles. Boom, now you can attack them and not care about their explanations on why Zionism is unhealthy for Jews. Enjoy!
I think that speaks less to the lack of time to “find communism” and more to how deeply embedded anti-communism is in the west. On the face of it as a very basic ideological premise, the idea of pooling and sharing resources, some form of democratic leadership, community, treating each other fairly, are all rather intuitive on a small scale and fall in line with the human tendency toward forming social bonds. Granted, this does not alone mean communism in the formal political definition, but it’s already pretty close in spirit. But when people are constantly being told that this is somehow impossible to do beyond a friend group or whatever, because “something something humanity is bad and corrupted and every time it’s been tried it was a disaster”, they’re going to have a harder time embracing it as a formal political theory and practice.
It gets weirder too when you think about how many in the west are already taught the value of “democracy”, but then the actual form of it they get is not a people’s democracy. Which I’m sure is very confusing. Democratic leadership of a kind does make sense, but not when it’s for rich people. But if people are thinking democracy = rich get richer and that’s all it can ever be, they might be driven toward fascism more so, figuring democracy just “doesn’t work.” Or they end up in the liberal thinking, which goes something like “democracy works, but people are flawed, so we just have to keep improving [this system I don’t realize is broken] through small tweaks over time.”
In other words, what I’m arguing here is the embedded anti-communism makes it harder to organically find one’s way to communist thought and sympathizing. So then, yeah, if you have time and inclination to go read through theory, that can help break through it. But that probably wouldn’t matter as much if people were not being told everything even close to communism is evil or won’t work.