What's a Tankie?
What's a Tankie?
It’s essentially a pejorative for “communist.” I recommend the Prolewiki article on “Tankies,” as well as Nia Frome’s essay “Tankies.”
For those that want an introduction to Marxism-Leninism, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, check it out!
Incorrect, those are incredibly biased sources.
Tankies are authoritarian communists. There’s more than one flavor of communists. I do love how you guys try to make it seem like you’re the only kind of communists or the “true leftists” out there
The problem with this argument is that you’re looking for some idealistic version of communism without any regard as to it’s actual feasibility. You want communism with western liberal democratic packaging, a communism that explicitly rejects any kind of violence or force against class enemies, afraid of being accused of repression, and that leaves the door wide open for counterrevolutionary forces to seize back control. You want something that works better as protest than as practical implementation. It’s just Eurocommunism for the 21st century. There’s a reason why this kind of communism only exists in the developed western world. It clings onto the notion of western superiority, and regards communists of the global south to be barbaric, authoritarian, and oppressive.
There’s also a reason why this ideology is not the platform of practically any active and actually existing communist party in the world. It’s the communism of idealists who haven’t read theory, or understood theory. It borrows heavily from the “marketplace of ideas” where the opponents of the revolution can be defeated purely by a good argument.