Well, that comment by nutomic is certainly unfortunate, but I don’t think that’s exactly what people are thinking when they complain about tankies. The Soviet Union banning homosexuality is certainly also unfortunate, but it’s not different from what every other country on Earth was doing in the 20th century. It’s not reasonable to expect communist countries to get social issues right on the first try and attach their failure to do so to their economic organization. My country also banned homosexuality, for the record, and we absolutely were not communists.
It also just happens that most LGBT people I know, by a landslide, are marxists, because it’s the logical consequence of applying to capitalism the same questioning that allows breaking free of the cisheteronorm. Sometimes economics and gender/sexuality intersect in interesting ways, and to an extent attempting to stomp out marxist ideology also often inadvertely makes the place hostile to LGBT people.
You can argue that “tankie” only refers to toxic, LGBTphobic marxists such as nutomic right here, and I mean, fair. But I’m complaining about the Lemmy community being incessantly hostile to people and communities that are outside of a very narrow worldview that you can really only find in terminally online people. 99% of the usage I have seen of the word “tankie” on Lemmy has been for this, It is keeping people out of the norm away from this platform and, as seen with the way so many users harassed drag, for good reason.
It’s not reasonable to expect communist countries to get social issues right on the first try and attach their failure to do so to their economic organization.
Drag doesn’t attach it to their economics. Drag attaches it to their beaurocracy. The USSR put too much power in the hands of the government. Anarchists wouldn’t have made being gay illegal. Drag’s complaint with tankies isn’t about economics, it’s about big vs small government.
It also seems to drag that even neoliberals have managed a tiny amount of personal growth over the last hundred years. Nutomic hasn’t. He’s a dinosaur. Drag sees a trend that marxist-leninists haven’t changed much in the last 50 years. The way they defend modern Russia, sometimes it feels like they haven’t noticed the Berlin Wall fell. We need a communist theory for the 21st century, not the 19th.
Let this be my last reply in this thread because I don’t feel like spamming my comment history with this, and also I kinda regret bringing the word tankie to this conversation (it was 2 am and I was quite literally just rambling about my discomfort with this platform. I wouldn’t done it if I had had a fresher mind). I also don’t want to leave drag on read, and I hope that drag doesn’t see this as me being hostile.
Drag sees a trend that marxist-leninists haven’t changed much in the last 50 years
I am going to put into question that drag actually sees this. Marxism in particular has been wildly propagandized against since WWII for mostly geopolitical reasons, and these testaments about marxists being assholes often comes from “Someone told me that someone told them that etc”, or from “I once saw one (1) marxist be an asshole so all of marxism should be tossed away”. That said, being marxist does of course not shield you from being an asshole or having biases. But modern marxist literature is often very intersectional and very critical of the way we conceive our relationship to society and identity, and scholars on LGBT-specific issues often use marxist methodologies as well.
This is not to say that marxism itself has always been devoid of biases etc, it hasn’t, but as a product of how culture in the 19th and 20th century has evolved, it reasonably can’t. This affects all schools of thought across the entire political spectrum, not just marxism, but this is often weaponized against marxism in particular, I wonder why.
I am not going to justify Nutomic’s very transphobic assertion nor am I going to claim that it is a lone exception to the norm. What I am going to claim is, however, that this kind of “the only axis of discrimination that matters is class, all other issues are burgeois diversions” thought, as common as it is, flies in the face not only of serious modern marxism proponents, but also the groundwork that it has laid out for a lot of other liberation movements. So it’s not that Nutomic is a marxist and therefore a transphobe, it’s more like Nutomic is a marxist and a transphobe, and he should be called out for being a transphobe, not for being a marxist. Same as if a fat person is an asshole; they should be called out for being an asshole, not fat. Same as if a black person is violent; they should be called for being violent, but not for being black. Or, god forbid, same if an alleged troll uses neopronouns; the crime there is trolling, not having a neopronoun, and these should not be conflated.
However, my complaint in my first comment, and if y’all don’t care about my wall of text let this be my TL;DR, I hate how Lemmy keeps labeling literally everyone to the left of Biden a “tankie”. Maybe the slur does have a proper usage for red-themed bigots, but I can’t possibly be a tankie and therefore shill Russia or China, or even somehow support Trump (???), for ideologies as extremist as: Thinking that I should be able to afford a home without rotting away at an office.
The word “tankie” here is being thrown around like the word “feminazi” used to be used. Mysoginists used to insist in a distinction between “actual serious feminists” and “feminazis who want all men to die”, but in practice, any woman that so much as wanted to have a live outside the kitchen was already called a feminazi by tons and tons of angry men. On Lemmy, supporting literally, and I mean literally any policy to improve people’s lives past basic social democracy (sometimes not even this) already gets you put in the tankie zone. And THAT’s what making me, and as a matter of facts others, increasingly uncomfortable on this platform.
Drag would like to make one distinction relevant to your comment. Marxist-Leninists aren’t Marxists. They have many points of disagreement. Most notably, Marxists believe in a worldwide revolution, while MLs believe in communism in one country. Drag has no problem with Marxists. Only with MLs.
Marxism-Leninism was created by Stalin. Drag thinks he did a bad job interpreting Marx’s ideas. Drag only has a problem with Stalinists. Drag is a communist. Drag gets along with syndicalists, mutualists, demsocs, soulists, even georgists. Drag can name many variants of communism drag has no problem with. Drag has a problem with Stalinists.
Well, that comment by nutomic is certainly unfortunate, but I don’t think that’s exactly what people are thinking when they complain about tankies. The Soviet Union banning homosexuality is certainly also unfortunate, but it’s not different from what every other country on Earth was doing in the 20th century. It’s not reasonable to expect communist countries to get social issues right on the first try and attach their failure to do so to their economic organization. My country also banned homosexuality, for the record, and we absolutely were not communists.
It also just happens that most LGBT people I know, by a landslide, are marxists, because it’s the logical consequence of applying to capitalism the same questioning that allows breaking free of the cisheteronorm. Sometimes economics and gender/sexuality intersect in interesting ways, and to an extent attempting to stomp out marxist ideology also often inadvertely makes the place hostile to LGBT people.
You can argue that “tankie” only refers to toxic, LGBTphobic marxists such as nutomic right here, and I mean, fair. But I’m complaining about the Lemmy community being incessantly hostile to people and communities that are outside of a very narrow worldview that you can really only find in terminally online people. 99% of the usage I have seen of the word “tankie” on Lemmy has been for this, It is keeping people out of the norm away from this platform and, as seen with the way so many users harassed drag, for good reason.
Drag doesn’t attach it to their economics. Drag attaches it to their beaurocracy. The USSR put too much power in the hands of the government. Anarchists wouldn’t have made being gay illegal. Drag’s complaint with tankies isn’t about economics, it’s about big vs small government.
It also seems to drag that even neoliberals have managed a tiny amount of personal growth over the last hundred years. Nutomic hasn’t. He’s a dinosaur. Drag sees a trend that marxist-leninists haven’t changed much in the last 50 years. The way they defend modern Russia, sometimes it feels like they haven’t noticed the Berlin Wall fell. We need a communist theory for the 21st century, not the 19th.
Let this be my last reply in this thread because I don’t feel like spamming my comment history with this, and also I kinda regret bringing the word tankie to this conversation (it was 2 am and I was quite literally just rambling about my discomfort with this platform. I wouldn’t done it if I had had a fresher mind). I also don’t want to leave drag on read, and I hope that drag doesn’t see this as me being hostile.
I am going to put into question that drag actually sees this. Marxism in particular has been wildly propagandized against since WWII for mostly geopolitical reasons, and these testaments about marxists being assholes often comes from “Someone told me that someone told them that etc”, or from “I once saw one (1) marxist be an asshole so all of marxism should be tossed away”. That said, being marxist does of course not shield you from being an asshole or having biases. But modern marxist literature is often very intersectional and very critical of the way we conceive our relationship to society and identity, and scholars on LGBT-specific issues often use marxist methodologies as well.
This is not to say that marxism itself has always been devoid of biases etc, it hasn’t, but as a product of how culture in the 19th and 20th century has evolved, it reasonably can’t. This affects all schools of thought across the entire political spectrum, not just marxism, but this is often weaponized against marxism in particular, I wonder why.
I am not going to justify Nutomic’s very transphobic assertion nor am I going to claim that it is a lone exception to the norm. What I am going to claim is, however, that this kind of “the only axis of discrimination that matters is class, all other issues are burgeois diversions” thought, as common as it is, flies in the face not only of serious modern marxism proponents, but also the groundwork that it has laid out for a lot of other liberation movements. So it’s not that Nutomic is a marxist and therefore a transphobe, it’s more like Nutomic is a marxist and a transphobe, and he should be called out for being a transphobe, not for being a marxist. Same as if a fat person is an asshole; they should be called out for being an asshole, not fat. Same as if a black person is violent; they should be called for being violent, but not for being black. Or, god forbid, same if an alleged troll uses neopronouns; the crime there is trolling, not having a neopronoun, and these should not be conflated.
However, my complaint in my first comment, and if y’all don’t care about my wall of text let this be my TL;DR, I hate how Lemmy keeps labeling literally everyone to the left of Biden a “tankie”. Maybe the slur does have a proper usage for red-themed bigots, but I can’t possibly be a tankie and therefore shill Russia or China, or even somehow support Trump (???), for ideologies as extremist as: Thinking that I should be able to afford a home without rotting away at an office.
The word “tankie” here is being thrown around like the word “feminazi” used to be used. Mysoginists used to insist in a distinction between “actual serious feminists” and “feminazis who want all men to die”, but in practice, any woman that so much as wanted to have a live outside the kitchen was already called a feminazi by tons and tons of angry men. On Lemmy, supporting literally, and I mean literally any policy to improve people’s lives past basic social democracy (sometimes not even this) already gets you put in the tankie zone. And THAT’s what making me, and as a matter of facts others, increasingly uncomfortable on this platform.
Drag would like to make one distinction relevant to your comment. Marxist-Leninists aren’t Marxists. They have many points of disagreement. Most notably, Marxists believe in a worldwide revolution, while MLs believe in communism in one country. Drag has no problem with Marxists. Only with MLs.
Marxism-Leninism was created by Stalin. Drag thinks he did a bad job interpreting Marx’s ideas. Drag only has a problem with Stalinists. Drag is a communist. Drag gets along with syndicalists, mutualists, demsocs, soulists, even georgists. Drag can name many variants of communism drag has no problem with. Drag has a problem with Stalinists.