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this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Anyone that uses the term "Tankie" unironically to refer to people to the left of them and the Democratic party are not a part of the left.
It's always helpful to identify the liberals that are getting "scratched" though.
It's the good old Red Scare but using the word "tankie" instead of "commie" and the people doing it now are just as devoid of ethics and hard right as the Macarthists were.
It's a self report on the level of people who use dog whistles so loud they are foghorns. Just a word or two in the right context and you know you can ignore everything else you've read by them in the last 30 seconds.
Tankie is when they correlate the industrial growth of USSR as success when every other nation transitioning into a bourgeoise republic had similar growth
Tankie is when they pick and choose traits of Stalin and refuse the facts of his authoritarianism
Tankie is when they ignore the lack of progress in communism in USSR after Lenin died
Tankie is when they make excuses for the failures of USSR by pining them all in the west
The differences being that the USSR uplifted everyone equally and not just a capitalist few; and that it developed without abusing imperialism and unequal exchange against the global south (and actually contributed the most to emancipatory movements and was key in the decolonisation of the 20th century and as a reference for worker movements in the west to push for further rights).
Tankie is when they reject the big-man understanding of history and instead analyze the material and historical conditions of a particular era.
Tankie is when they point to the doubling of life expectancy in the Soviet Union and the only case of industrialisation of a country in history together with China that happened since the 20th century, excluding subsidised US colonies such as South Korea or Japan.
Tankie is when you understand that an imperfect but emancipatory movement which surmounted extreme odds, is desirable over the continuation of imperialism
USSR rather than conducting imperialism instead used gulags as methods to develop the east, and it had used the development of previous white russian factories to continue industrialisation, this only sped up with factors present in Stalinist Russia which many others in the communist party opposed due to the damage it had caused
The nature of authoritarian rule essentially purged any opposing socialist whether in majority or minority, which makes him and the regime authoritarian. You just refused it without analysis, instead labelling it big man theory
This is not the only case, and would be the only case if you do not include ww1 and post-ww2, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Egypt, Siam all had similar improvements, not just South Korea or Japan, and South Korea didn't even have improvements until far later, seriously? You used these nations to argue?
Tankie is when they say 'good enough' as essentially ruin their own revolution over the fear that the west will ruin them first, how is communism in one country working out for you?
Sorry, but that's already been disproven. The gulag system at its peak had fewer people imprisoned than the US currently does. And at its peak, it represented less than 5% of the total production of the country. This lasted for a total of less than 5 years between late 30s and early 40s. The Soviet Union simply factually did NOT develop with forced labor, and saying otherwise is just proof of ignorance (or willful deception). For further details on this, feel free to check up the data on the book "Farm to Factory" by Robert C. Allen. Really not escaping the "swallowing the State Department propaganda" accusations.
"The CPSU purged every opposition. That's why immediately after his death, the opposite faction which was within the party proceeded to do de-Stalinization instead of continuing with the prior tendency that was solidified in the party". New documents released these past few years regarding the Moscow trials prove that there WAS a trotskyist/anarchist/SR/fascist/kulak plot to murder Stalin and to eliminate socialism, there's extensive, sourced discussion in the ongoing series of podcast episodes "the Stalin eras" in the podcast "Proles Pod".
If you use US State Department as your source of information for the living conditions of the country, then yes.
If you use actual metrics such as union membership rates, life expectancy, literacy rates, rates of high education, women in the workplace, crime statistics, poverty rates, inequality rates, industrialisation rates, lack of imperialism and unequal exchange, consumption of art and literature, collective sport activities, access to housing, access to healthcare, retirement age, working conditions, and a myriad more; and actually compare with historically similar countries in the region (Kazakhstan + Uzbekistan vs Afghanistan + Pakistan; Cuba vs Haiti; China vs Indonesia; Russia vs Argentina in the sense that they had very similar levels of development pre-revolution), you may find out that actually-existing socialism is extremely beneficial both for its inhabitants and for the global south.
Thanks. It's exhausting having to debunk all of the lies from the red scare over and over and over again.
Prison Labor camps in 2025 with the largest prison population on the planet: "normal"
Gulags over half a century ago that ended long before Jim Craw laws did: "Ah, that's a scary sounding name!"
What if I use the term 'tankie' unironically to refer to people to the right of me?
Probably some light mockery.