the other vein of pro-russian tankies i’ve seen is that it’s impossible for a once communist country to backslide into fascis. how they square that and russia’s claim that they must destroy Ukraine, a country that was once not just communist, but anarcho-communist, in order to stop their backslide into fascism, i have no idea. perhaps if a person is actually familiar with history and not just a single pro-hegemonic propaganda, they wouldn’t be tankies.
i’ve been developing a theory, more of a hypothesis, really, that tankies, hoteps, white feminists, etc have figured out a part of the puzzle of oppression, and in their anger at waking up to that aspect of their reality, reject all other discourse surrounding the system of oppression that doesn’t mesh with their experienced oppression. this, in many ways, is the root of leftist infighting. everyone sees everyone else’s fight for liberation as a distraction from their own fight for liberation. the trick is, none of them are. they are simply different expressions of how the ruling class controls us.
when a tankie says shit like “the trans issue is a distraction” the are sparking leftist infighting, charitably unknowingly. our trans brothers, sisters, and thembers are our allies in this, and are generally speaking (not universally of course, i don’t want to give the impression anyone is a homogenous group) left as hell. we need them to help us in our fight because they are experienced, battle hardened, and see things the rest of us don’t see because they are tuned in.
the thing is that… yes. the culture wars are distractions. but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight in them. that’s like saying the best response to being bullied in school is to take your beating and tell no one because you’re focused on a bigger issue. that’s a great way to get your legs broke. the answer is to push back against the culture wars and say why we push back, and say that our enemy combatants are distracted from the real war. that they are acting as class traitors from a deep system of manipulation.
tankies don’t realize it, or maybe they do, but they’re conservatives. they seek to maintain a hegemony that oppresses us, the working classes, that has been shown not to work. authoritarian communism is still authoritarianism, and also expresses somewhere between most and all of the features of ur-fascism. it will never save us from our oppression. they also tell on themselves when they say “read theory” and all the books they reference were published before WWII. the world has moved on. we have learned more about our oppressors. they’re leaving out a century of theory when they say to read theory. they are practitioners of the religion of Marxist-Leninism
A lot of people don’t realize they are being manipulated to fight each other instead of dealing with the people who are actually causing the problems, the ones pulling the strings and syphoning off all the wealth for themselves and their friends.
It’s way simpler than this. They simply cannot admit that Lenin, Stalin and Mao just got communism wrong. They refuse to move on from those authoritarian traditions. That’s really it.
Marxism, in general is a very modernist political theory. For most of the 20th century, we extended most modernist ideals beyond that rigid structuralism. Leftism is no exception, but MLMs in general refuse to move past that way of thinking. As you say, it is very similar to the way that modern conservatives seem to hold that early 1900s thinking up as some philosophical ideal.
What people tend not to realize is they don’t support Russia because they think it’s still communist, but because of a combination of campism, accelerationism, and revolutionary defeatism. If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first, otherwise they will just see you as a reactionary and dismiss what you say. I still occasionally get my comments removed from .ml but I’ve been able to get through to people somewhat by leading with an actual understanding of where they’re coming from.
I don’t think it’s fair to categorize it as accelerationist, although definitely campism and critical support (that is, taking a side while remaining critical of it) - like you said, they know and despair that Russia is no longer socialist, they only side with the RF in this conflict as a ‘lesser evil’ than the dominant NATO camp. We saw the US prolong the proxy war (it’s not their soldiers dying) until the they openly threw Ukraine away and negotiated terms with the RF when the war seemed no longer useful (this part usually happens more diplomatically and privately in a proxy war, but it usually happens).
If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first, otherwise they will just see you as a reactionary and dismiss what you say.
Absolutely. The .ml instances are stricter than most and don’t cater to anyone they perceive as ignorant and parroting propaganda in bad faith. From their point of view, it’s just as simple as how most instances would ban conservatives coming in and starting bigoted, ignorant oft-debunked Fox News arguments about racism and transphobia. Why bother platforming it?
Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use. Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.
However, I’ll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed. In fact, before the war, socialist parties across Europe came together and, seeing the possibility of the war on the horizon, agreed that in the event of such a war they would work together against their own governments. Once the war actually started, however, “socialists” in Britain, France, and Germany all fell in line behind their government in support of their own side in the imperialist war. They either succumbed to pressure or sought to advance their own positions as careerists and opportunists. Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.
Whether revolutionary defeatism is generally applicable is another question, but it is sort of our, “null hypothesis,” you might say. But more important are the underlying ideas that support revolutionary defeatism. We don’t just agree with it because Lenin said it, but because it tracks with our own analysis, which is based on class and realpolitik. Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, “but this time, it’s different,” and more often than not, they’re wrong.
Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don’t really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all. If you want to speak our language, then you have to frame your arguments in terms of the benefit to the common people.
Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use.
That’s not a response to the criticism, just a dismissal of it based on who it originated from. I personally think it’s a valid criticism of many who consider themselves marxist-leninists, and I am not a trotskyist. People I’ve spoken with in the past have had a tendency to dogmatically subscribe to a campist mindset in total disregard for the particulars of any given situation, and for how much shit MLs give liberals for practicing lesser-evilism, many sure seem to love their own version of it.
Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.
It’s far more prevalent than you’re giving it credit for, and in my experience many MLs’ understanding of revolutionary defeatism tends to boil down to accelerationism when questioned.
However, I’ll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed.
Indisputable suggests it’s largely undisputed now, which you must know is absolutely not the case. I am currently disputing it. There is no significant historical pattern of countries that faced a military defeat becoming socialist or even having better revolutionary conditions afterwards.
Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.
Starting a civil war while the country is in the middle of an imperialist war is not an example of revolutionary defeatism working. If Russia had been defeated in their imperialist war and then had a socialist revolution that would be an example, but even then one example is not a pattern.
Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, “but this time, it’s different,” and more often than not, they’re wrong.
I agree completely, but this is just an argument for being anti-imperialist and anti-war, not an argument for revolutionary defeatism.
Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don’t really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all.
Those sorts of arguments don’t have any traction with me either, I’m an anarchist. I don’t believe I have made any such arguments, unless you conflate collective self-determination with national sovereignty.
That’s not a response to the criticism, just a dismissal of it based on who it originated from.
many MLs’ understanding of revolutionary defeatism tends to boil down to accelerationism
If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first,
It seems kind of contradictory to talk about “trying to understand our position in good faith first” before criticizing it, and then characterizing it in critical terms that we don’t use. If you want to “understand a position in good faith first” then you should describe that position in a way that the people who hold it would find fair and agreeable - and then you can tear into it all you want. It seems that you don’t actually want to understand our position or explain it, but rather just jump into criticizing it.
If you actually followed your own (good) advice, the form of your argument should look like:
Here’s a neutral description of what they say:
And here’s my critical view of what that position actually amounts to, and the reasons why I see it that way:
The issue I take with you using the terms “campism” and “accelerationism” is that they belong in the second part, but you’ve presented them as being in the first.
Indisputable suggests it’s largely undisputed now, which you must know is absolutely not the case. I am currently disputing it. There is no significant historical pattern of countries that faced a military defeat becoming socialist or even having better revolutionary conditions afterwards.
What you’re describing is not revolutionary defeatism, it is accelerationism. I have to withdraw my props for only learning the term without actually understanding what it means. You’re not really disputing it, you’re disputing a completely different concept that you’ve incorrectly labelled.
Revolutionary defeatism is not the descriptive belief that a country facing a military defeat will always or even generally become socialist, rather, it is the proscriptive tactic that, when both sides of a conflict are roughly equally enemies of the people, socialists should primarily oppose their own country’s side, with the aim of turning it into a revolution/civil war, taking advantage of the difficulties faced by the state.
Starting a civil war while the country is in the middle of an imperialist war is not an example of revolutionary defeatism working.
That is literally what revolutionary defeatism is. Again, you demonstrate that you don’t understand the concept. Turning the imperialist war into a civil war was Lenin’s very explicitly stated goal.
Your own Wikipedia link explains this:
“Workers would gain more from their own nations’ defeats, he argued, if the war could be turned into civil war and then international revolution.”
If Russia had been defeated in their imperialist war and then had a socialist revolution that would be an example, but even then one example is not a pattern.
Again, that’s accelerationism, not revolutionary defeatism.
I don’t know where you picked up this idea that revolutionary defeatism just means accelerationism, but it’s certainly not from reading theory. If you want to practice what you preach and make a good faith attempt to understand it, Lenin spells out the concept very clearly here
This recent thread is pretty insightful on lemmygrad.ml’s position. Their own users repeatedly emphasize that they are critical of the RF, which shouldn’t be a surprise given that it’s a capitalist country with plenty of reactionary domestic policies. (OP didn’t get banned)
Literally the very first comment in that thread I see is the instance admin speaking in support of russia for no other reason than it being opposed to the US.
Just like I said, “critical support”. They’re clear that it’s a capitalist “dictatorship of the owning class” (like other liberal-democracies) and that they’re critical of their domestic policies. If NATO were no longer as powerful as it is now, then they’d move on to calling for the Russian Federation’s fall, but it’s clear which of the two is a more imminent threat to countries around the globe. It’s like voting for Democrats over Republicans in the US election – they’ve both proven themselves to be terrible but voting for the lesser evil might be pragmatically effective, and voting third party or boycotting is debatably an idealistic waste of effort.
As someone else mentioned, this is a campist approach to geopolitics.
the US
I wouldn’t limit “the imperial core” to the US, but basically, yes.
Scrolling through the thread, the keyword in “critical support” seems to be more “support” and less “critical”.
Also, right now US is not the country that’s launching drones to blow up the civilian houses in the city I live in, which, somehow, seems to be presented as a “humanitarian” move in that thread. So you might want to rethink how much evil you can allow your “lesser evil” to be.
Somehow they even support modern russia which is as far from communism as it’s possible to be without being US
Their reasoning is that its anti-us imperialism, despite russia being pretty imperialistic itself.
Ah, the classic “only western countries can be imperialist”
Don’t forget that only US Capitalism is the root of moneys evils
It’s not a classic because no one says that. Japan did it for sixty years, until it was made a vassal of the US, which it still is today[1][2].
the other vein of pro-russian tankies i’ve seen is that it’s impossible for a once communist country to backslide into fascis. how they square that and russia’s claim that they must destroy Ukraine, a country that was once not just communist, but anarcho-communist, in order to stop their backslide into fascism, i have no idea. perhaps if a person is actually familiar with history and not just a single pro-hegemonic propaganda, they wouldn’t be tankies.
i’ve been developing a theory, more of a hypothesis, really, that tankies, hoteps, white feminists, etc have figured out a part of the puzzle of oppression, and in their anger at waking up to that aspect of their reality, reject all other discourse surrounding the system of oppression that doesn’t mesh with their experienced oppression. this, in many ways, is the root of leftist infighting. everyone sees everyone else’s fight for liberation as a distraction from their own fight for liberation. the trick is, none of them are. they are simply different expressions of how the ruling class controls us.
when a tankie says shit like “the trans issue is a distraction” the are sparking leftist infighting, charitably unknowingly. our trans brothers, sisters, and thembers are our allies in this, and are generally speaking (not universally of course, i don’t want to give the impression anyone is a homogenous group) left as hell. we need them to help us in our fight because they are experienced, battle hardened, and see things the rest of us don’t see because they are tuned in.
the thing is that… yes. the culture wars are distractions. but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight in them. that’s like saying the best response to being bullied in school is to take your beating and tell no one because you’re focused on a bigger issue. that’s a great way to get your legs broke. the answer is to push back against the culture wars and say why we push back, and say that our enemy combatants are distracted from the real war. that they are acting as class traitors from a deep system of manipulation.
tankies don’t realize it, or maybe they do, but they’re conservatives. they seek to maintain a hegemony that oppresses us, the working classes, that has been shown not to work. authoritarian communism is still authoritarianism, and also expresses somewhere between most and all of the features of ur-fascism. it will never save us from our oppression. they also tell on themselves when they say “read theory” and all the books they reference were published before WWII. the world has moved on. we have learned more about our oppressors. they’re leaving out a century of theory when they say to read theory. they are practitioners of the religion of Marxist-Leninism
A lot of people don’t realize they are being manipulated to fight each other instead of dealing with the people who are actually causing the problems, the ones pulling the strings and syphoning off all the wealth for themselves and their friends.
It’s way simpler than this. They simply cannot admit that Lenin, Stalin and Mao just got communism wrong. They refuse to move on from those authoritarian traditions. That’s really it.
Marxism, in general is a very modernist political theory. For most of the 20th century, we extended most modernist ideals beyond that rigid structuralism. Leftism is no exception, but MLMs in general refuse to move past that way of thinking. As you say, it is very similar to the way that modern conservatives seem to hold that early 1900s thinking up as some philosophical ideal.
You haven’t seen that because literally no one says or believes this. It’s entirely your own invention, a blatant strawman.
As I always say, “If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.”
Didn’t read anything after that because you started with such a blatant lie.
What people tend not to realize is they don’t support Russia because they think it’s still communist, but because of a combination of campism, accelerationism, and revolutionary defeatism. If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first, otherwise they will just see you as a reactionary and dismiss what you say. I still occasionally get my comments removed from .ml but I’ve been able to get through to people somewhat by leading with an actual understanding of where they’re coming from.
I don’t think it’s fair to categorize it as accelerationist, although definitely campism and critical support (that is, taking a side while remaining critical of it) - like you said, they know and despair that Russia is no longer socialist, they only side with the RF in this conflict as a ‘lesser evil’ than the dominant NATO camp. We saw the US prolong the proxy war (it’s not their soldiers dying) until the they openly threw Ukraine away and negotiated terms with the RF when the war seemed no longer useful (this part usually happens more diplomatically and privately in a proxy war, but it usually happens).
Absolutely. The .ml instances are stricter than most and don’t cater to anyone they perceive as ignorant and parroting propaganda in bad faith. From their point of view, it’s just as simple as how most instances would ban conservatives coming in and starting bigoted, ignorant oft-debunked Fox News arguments about racism and transphobia. Why bother platforming it?
Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use. Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.
However, I’ll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed. In fact, before the war, socialist parties across Europe came together and, seeing the possibility of the war on the horizon, agreed that in the event of such a war they would work together against their own governments. Once the war actually started, however, “socialists” in Britain, France, and Germany all fell in line behind their government in support of their own side in the imperialist war. They either succumbed to pressure or sought to advance their own positions as careerists and opportunists. Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.
Whether revolutionary defeatism is generally applicable is another question, but it is sort of our, “null hypothesis,” you might say. But more important are the underlying ideas that support revolutionary defeatism. We don’t just agree with it because Lenin said it, but because it tracks with our own analysis, which is based on class and realpolitik. Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, “but this time, it’s different,” and more often than not, they’re wrong.
Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don’t really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all. If you want to speak our language, then you have to frame your arguments in terms of the benefit to the common people.
That’s not a response to the criticism, just a dismissal of it based on who it originated from. I personally think it’s a valid criticism of many who consider themselves marxist-leninists, and I am not a trotskyist. People I’ve spoken with in the past have had a tendency to dogmatically subscribe to a campist mindset in total disregard for the particulars of any given situation, and for how much shit MLs give liberals for practicing lesser-evilism, many sure seem to love their own version of it.
It’s far more prevalent than you’re giving it credit for, and in my experience many MLs’ understanding of revolutionary defeatism tends to boil down to accelerationism when questioned.
Indisputable suggests it’s largely undisputed now, which you must know is absolutely not the case. I am currently disputing it. There is no significant historical pattern of countries that faced a military defeat becoming socialist or even having better revolutionary conditions afterwards.
Starting a civil war while the country is in the middle of an imperialist war is not an example of revolutionary defeatism working. If Russia had been defeated in their imperialist war and then had a socialist revolution that would be an example, but even then one example is not a pattern.
I agree completely, but this is just an argument for being anti-imperialist and anti-war, not an argument for revolutionary defeatism.
Those sorts of arguments don’t have any traction with me either, I’m an anarchist. I don’t believe I have made any such arguments, unless you conflate collective self-determination with national sovereignty.
It seems kind of contradictory to talk about “trying to understand our position in good faith first” before criticizing it, and then characterizing it in critical terms that we don’t use. If you want to “understand a position in good faith first” then you should describe that position in a way that the people who hold it would find fair and agreeable - and then you can tear into it all you want. It seems that you don’t actually want to understand our position or explain it, but rather just jump into criticizing it.
If you actually followed your own (good) advice, the form of your argument should look like:
Here’s a neutral description of what they say:
And here’s my critical view of what that position actually amounts to, and the reasons why I see it that way:
The issue I take with you using the terms “campism” and “accelerationism” is that they belong in the second part, but you’ve presented them as being in the first.
What you’re describing is not revolutionary defeatism, it is accelerationism. I have to withdraw my props for only learning the term without actually understanding what it means. You’re not really disputing it, you’re disputing a completely different concept that you’ve incorrectly labelled.
Revolutionary defeatism is not the descriptive belief that a country facing a military defeat will always or even generally become socialist, rather, it is the proscriptive tactic that, when both sides of a conflict are roughly equally enemies of the people, socialists should primarily oppose their own country’s side, with the aim of turning it into a revolution/civil war, taking advantage of the difficulties faced by the state.
That is literally what revolutionary defeatism is. Again, you demonstrate that you don’t understand the concept. Turning the imperialist war into a civil war was Lenin’s very explicitly stated goal.
Your own Wikipedia link explains this:
“Workers would gain more from their own nations’ defeats, he argued, if the war could be turned into civil war and then international revolution.”
Again, that’s accelerationism, not revolutionary defeatism.
I don’t know where you picked up this idea that revolutionary defeatism just means accelerationism, but it’s certainly not from reading theory. If you want to practice what you preach and make a good faith attempt to understand it, Lenin spells out the concept very clearly here
A non .ml user arguing in good faith? That’s as rare as it is welcome!
Also, I think you forgot anti-Americanism and anti imperialism in your list.
I really haven’t seen that? A while ago I looked into HexBear’s opinion on it and it wasn’t good.
Check out this thread, there really isn’t any Putin worship in these spaces.
https://hexbear.net/post/148426?scrollToComments=false
In this one some of the top comments are hoping Putin gets shot in the face. https://hexbear.net/post/3270551
shhhh! They haven’t finished building their strawman
Plenty of examples from .ml. Not sure how one 3 year old thread disproves it?
I gave you two links, one which is much newer.
I’m looking at this community you linked I’m not sure I can see how you’re proving that “tankies” admire the modern Russian government.
The part where they ban people for being critical of it?
This recent thread is pretty insightful on lemmygrad.ml’s position. Their own users repeatedly emphasize that they are critical of the RF, which shouldn’t be a surprise given that it’s a capitalist country with plenty of reactionary domestic policies. (OP didn’t get banned)
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7374513?sort=Top
Literally the very first comment in that thread I see is the instance admin speaking in support of russia for no other reason than it being opposed to the US.
Just like I said, “critical support”. They’re clear that it’s a capitalist “dictatorship of the owning class” (like other liberal-democracies) and that they’re critical of their domestic policies. If NATO were no longer as powerful as it is now, then they’d move on to calling for the Russian Federation’s fall, but it’s clear which of the two is a more imminent threat to countries around the globe. It’s like voting for Democrats over Republicans in the US election – they’ve both proven themselves to be terrible but voting for the lesser evil might be pragmatically effective, and voting third party or boycotting is debatably an idealistic waste of effort.
As someone else mentioned, this is a campist approach to geopolitics.
I wouldn’t limit “the imperial core” to the US, but basically, yes.
Scrolling through the thread, the keyword in “critical support” seems to be more “support” and less “critical”.
Also, right now US is not the country that’s launching drones to blow up the civilian houses in the city I live in, which, somehow, seems to be presented as a “humanitarian” move in that thread. So you might want to rethink how much evil you can allow your “lesser evil” to be.
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