this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Communist philosophy has a lot of really useful analytical tools. It describes and criticizes society, especially capitalist society, in a very sharp and insightful way. People should read and learn it because it's interesting, useful stuff that is easily applied to modern politics.
Communist philosophy also calls for a (typically violent) revolution involving an authoritarian transition to get rid of capitalist society and usher in the future collective state. When a violent revolution is being called for in (mostly) functional democracies, that should usher in some skepticism from a normal, reasonable person.
The tankies reallllllly seem to like the violence, though, and are extremely supportive of any state that claims to be communist regardless of what atrocities that state commits along the way. They will be intensely defensive against any criticism (criticisms like "maybe Stalin shouldn't have starved millions of people to death through incompetence and genocidal inclinations", "maybe Mao shouldn't have wiped out all the doctors and artists", "maybe Putin shouldn't be allowed to try and annex Ukraine", etc.).
At some point, it becomes hard to properly separate these supposedly "authoritarian left" types from the "authoritarian right" fascists. Political compasses are stupid anyway.
It's a political torus. Walk of one end and you end up in the other
Tankies aren't the only ones who call for revolution tbf. There are revolutionary anarchists as well. "Tankie" has usually been used to describe auth-lefties in particular.
This is a reductionist explanation. The initial modern movement of socialists debated a lot on whether to support reform or revolution. Marx argued in favor of an authoritarian revolution after the failure of the Commune of Paris, but near the end of his life, he thought it was more sensible to seek out power through democratic means in societies with a liberal political framework, such as Britain. At this point, socialdemocratic parties still hadn't renounced to socialism - they just wanted to achieve it after democratically reaching power.
Through the start of the 20th century, there's a heavy rupture in the socialist movement when socialdemocratic parties begin moving away from the goal of actually achieving socialism, just at the USSR is born. This divide wider as the Cold War progresses, but we can still find a few important reformists who are aiming for a democratic form of socialism, such as Attlee in Britain and the French and Italian Communist Parties, although these two are, unfortunately, too loyal to the Soviet Union for their own good. As we enter the 21st century, socialist parties, for the most part, only want to tweak a few things about capitalism, but we can also find supporters of democratic socialism in the eurocommunist parties and the Communist Party of Japan. On the other fence, authoritarians who denominally support socialism, typically called tankies, tend to support the actions of whatever self-denominated communist regimes exist, such as China, and reject participation in liberal democracy.
When your group is so left wing that all your real big arguments are against the radical side of your ideology rather than the other side! Somewhere there's a fiscal conservative arguing against a guy screaming about anarcho-capitalism on parler or something.
"Fiscal conservative" is a nonsense term anyway, I suspect. It doesn't really mean anything. I'd venture nearly everyone who uses it is either philosophically confused or else is a genuine conservative that thinks if they say "small government" enough it will cover their genuine desire to crush civil rights of people outside of their tribe.
The smallest and most efficient government possible that delivers the services of the government is what nearly everyone wants. The only people who don't want this are the fascists who want the biggest and strongest government possible in order to bully everyone else.
Gotcha, labels of different ideologies are meaningless to you because you prefer to bucket everyone in them because it makes it easier for you to deal with emotionally, got that one? Not that I don't agree with you, I'm here to after all.
Labels are incredibly useful, but only if they're definable. I don't think "fiscal conservative" has a coherent definition.
That's fair, I don't think the US has had a strong class of RoI conservatives in a long time. Now "fiscal conservative" means more someone who has classically voted Republican but not because of religiosity or because they hate LGBT people. At this point you can't even point to a good reason, beyond a feeling like they want to be taxed less.
If you aren't making somewhere north of half a mil a year, or don't have capital gains (15-50% tax on millions of dollars of inheritance really sucks to worry about), voting conservative might as well be cutting of your nose to spite your face.