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I use this definition. And it perfectly applies to a wide range of lemmy.ml users and moderators.
That’s a bad definition.
A tankie is simply a ML who supports the use of force to restrict people’s freedoms. It’s named after the Soviets sending tanks into Hungary to stop a popular democratic uprising, but the same applies to China sending tanks into Tiananmen.
They’re basically super statists who value the state over the people.
All leftists are opposed to capitalism, but obvs tankies are a small minority of leftists, so your definition falls apart.
What is a ML ?
Marxism-Leninism.
Lenin was a scholar and developed his own take on Marxism, which has its own understanding of the communist society. Marx wrote very little about what a communist society would look like, but he had an understanding of history as moving towards an end: The classes will fight, over time the result of this fight will lead to them approaching each other, and at the end of this struggle we will reach a classless society. This classless society is the communist society in a traditional Marxist sense.
Lenin figured he'd make a shortcut to get there: Never mind thousands of years of class struggle, let's just put in place a powerful ruling class imposing communism on everyone, designing a classless society from the top down. Which is a bit counter-intuitive, but the Leninist part of Marxism-Leninism basically boils down to trying to figure out what that could look like.
So then you get the Soviet Union, very much founded on the ideas of Marxism-Leninism. Today people who identify as Marxist-Leninist tend to not be the sharpest tools in the shed: Despite insisting that they have studied the texts carefully, a brief interaction with them reveals that they have never read neither Marx nor Lenin. What it boils down to, rather than anything theoretical, is either a longing for some imaginary version of the Soviet Union or a unshakable commitment to lick Putin's ass.
The Soviet Union of course never did become a classless society, so you could argue that the greatest achievement of Marxism-Leninism was to destroy the traditional meaning of communism in a Marxist sense.
Well said. The ML offshoot caused deaths of numerous communists and gave a reason to the red scare, harming the progress of Marxism for decades
I think Lenin missed the part where the powerful ruling class imposing something is the opposite of a classless society.
To be fair, I downloaded Das Kapital once and started reading it, but after just one or two pages in this old German language it was just too difficult to follow so I gave up.
Marx actually did write quite a bit about revolutionary praxis. It's actually what ends up renders his otherwise reasonable stuff about historical materialism down to modernist screed.
Marxist-Lenininist, or Stalinist. Sometimes Maoists are included. It's like a pseudofascist offshoot and later antagonist ideology of Marxism. Historically they've purged communists etc.
Marxist-Leninist.
That's simply incorrect.
No it’s not.
The closest to support for capitalism would market socialism, but that still involves public ownership of the means of production, which is in difference to the defining feature of capitalism, private ownership of the means of production.
not just private ownership, but structures that ensure an increasingly concentrated private ownership by ever fewer people who use that advantage to create a set of rules that further increases the ownership gap
ie a system where the owners of capital get to make the rules
capitalism is antithetical to democracy
It is though. This is what people mean when they say so much of internet leftism is outdated and misinformed.
Treating capitalism as a Boogeyman is outdated. Capital modes of production are a tool which can be wielded by market socialists towards the ultimate goal of post scarcity, classless society, the same as any other other economic structure. Putting dirty words in in a particular historical box is just as dumb as worshipping those words. It's modernist garbage, plain and simple, and all to often this gets manifested as braindead "everything I hate is capitalism."
The goal of socialism is worker control of production. This is often in conflict with capitalism in practice, but is not orthogonal to capitalism in theory. This is a large part of contemporary leftist theory which has developed over the past 50 years, and dismissing it reveals pretty stark amateurism imo
You're playing semantics and the "modes of production" stuff is like the weakest stuff in Marx. Market socialism still means the abolishment of the capitalist class (nowadays "the 0.1%"), therefore, can't be capitalist, the primary distinction after all being class relations, and not mode of production.
There's been a ton of equivocation of capitalism with market economies which is probably where all this is coming from. You can have markets with socialism, you can have markets with capitalism, but you can't have socialism with capitalism.
You’re the first person I’ve ever heard say “internet” leftism is outdated.
I think you’ve just convinced yourself that it is because you don’t agree with it mate.
Yes, it would definitely seem that way if your primary exposure to leftist ideas was leftist internet forums, where leftism is primarily about revolutionary fan service and gatekeeping leftism.
Except it isn’t my primary exposure?
My views largely predate the Internet.
Like I said, keep telling yourself you must be right.
I guess there's this American sense of capitalism as an ideological commitment to letting the forces of the marketplace run wild, and that once you regulate the markets it's not capitalism any more. That's laissez-faire though - there are other forms of capitalism as well. In the broadest sense capitalism basically boils down to having a market economy, which a lot of leftists are in favour of.
No, capitalism basically boils down to private ownership of the means of production.
A market economy is a market economy, hence market socialism. Market economies have existed for thousands of years, capitalism for a few hundred.
State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial (i.e. for-profit) economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises.
You should read up on social democracy.
Soc Dem was co-opted by right wingers, just the same as they stole the word Libertarian from us.
Soc Dems today are not leftist, Dem Socs are where the leftist part went.
And the People's Front of Judea needs to fuck right off, what a bunch of traitorous scum
Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.
That sentence is objectively retarded.
In Finland, the social democrats are leftists only in right wing rhetoric. Their actual politics are definitely still inside capitalism and not actually leftist. One could consider them centrists in a way
Scandinavian countries are not leftist.
They're some of the most left leaning of Western countries, but they're not actually on the left side of the spectrum, they're just less right.
Yes historically Soc Dems were part of the left, that leftist element is now referred to as Democratic Socialism.
Soc Dems still sought to do away with capitalism by transitioning to socialism, they just wanted to approach it through gradual change of the system.
The clearest split between right wing and left wing is the belief in capitalism.
Of all the random things people downvote, I find this to be the most fascinating.
Not only are you correct, but you're so obviously correct as well. There's the old Jewish joke with "two Jews, three opinions" - that certainly holds true for leftists as well. Even more than the bootlickers I'm getting tired of the people who are so goddamn sure they've figured it all out.
They don't oppose capitalism (example Russia & China). It's closer to a support for authoritarianism (usually anti-USA, but even there shifts towards more authoritarian leadership receive support)
It's not that they don't oppose capitalism so much that they'll ignore any sense of ideological consistency on their quixotic quest to make sure that everyone knows America is Bad.
If you oppose America, you must be good, it doesn't matter if you're a genocidal kleptocracy or a genuine fascist. Internally this is rationalized by viewing America as the most dominant and powerful force for capitalism in the world, it doesn't matter if other, even worse capitalists tear it down because the American empire must fall for socialism to rise.
And it's not like that particular thought is wrong, in a vacuum. America has proven time and time again that it will break any moral barrier to attack anyone even suspected of being a socialist, it's just so evidentally self defeating you have to wonder if there are any true believers at all or if they're all sockpuppets run from a Russian speaking basement somewhere.
The vibe is exactly like the astroturf shit that flooded reddit in 2016. Endless criticism of Democrats in the US, while never mentioning US conservatives for some odd reason. That's why I get from the "Jor Biden really bad, genocide! Don't vote for him, vote 3rd party!" They come to US left/democrat/liberal spaces and try to convince people to not vote for Biden, but where are the efforts to convince people to not vote for Trump? And then this "you say everyone is a russian bot lol!!" thing is also exactly what the shills on reddit did.
Spot on. Whatever that's called, that sounds like much/most of the hexbear and ml instances.
Sadly, you're right. More to the point there are many examples of the US knocking down anything or anyone even suspected of threatening capitalists. Whether that's unions within the US, governments leaning too socialist (yet being democracies), or whatever else. I know you know this; I just felt like venting.
When they all come out with new talking points about the same time, all bearing remarkable similarity, and coinciding with notable (geo)political events, and brigading certain posts, it sure makes you go, "hmm."
I don't think it's about capitalism/socialism/communism at all for a lot of them at this point. They have a fairly simple ideology: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And their enemy happens to be their own government.
its still part of Russian geoplitical strategy - shifts to the right are self-destructive and help USA's enemies
during the 80's, USA pushed the USSR's allies in South America to adopt more conservative governments as a means of destroying them from the inside, and today Russia is attempting to employ the same strategy against USA
I've literally never once seen any of these people mention a single thing about economic philosophy. It's simply shit talking the west and defending the Chinese and Russian governments at all costs. I think the whole "communism" aspect is little more than a smokescreen.
Your definition is bad.