Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
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.