this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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I have known Marxists, and they didn't self-ascribe the term "tankie" to mean "Marxist." In fact the ones I've known would bristle at the suggestion.
Clarify the difference, then, because whenever anyone seems to do so they end up just clarifying a tiny minority of western orthodox Marxists as "real Marxists" and the billions of practicing Marxists as "tankies."
No country has made it to a Communist mode of production yet, only Socialist, and all countries use violence to perpetuate their systems. By that metric, anyone who supports any Socialist country is a tankie. No, China isn't perfrct, but it's much better than western countries on average. You only seem to accept perfection as valid.
Just quoting myself here because yeah dude, all countries are guilty of this and it makes me ill. Just because I was born into a specific country doesn't mean I have some fucking grand allegiance to it. The US is categorically the worst and most despotic country on the planet and it's where I'm from, no argument. I'm from the tippy top of the worst of the worst. Sorry, not sorry, I don't really have a voice in any of it.
Am I, or am I the only one here dreaming of anything outside of what already exists? Like I said, we have a different opinion on centralization versus decentralization and I don't think that's going to change, and that deeply impacts how we both view these issues. You'll just have to accept that when you say "centralize with democatic controls so no one can take advantage" to me that's Utopian thinking. (Because once it's centralized and a bad actor somehow does take over, then you can't decentralize it quickly.) That's acting like you already have the perfect solution. That's not critiquing the status quo. Sure China is better than the West, but that doesn't mean China can't be better than it is now. And dear God, I hope that for China, because the West sure ain't up to the charge of leading the world through climate change and mass extinction.