I’m not one to post often. I’m not really one to rant to strangers online often, even. But, after migrating from r*ddit to lemmy, I’ve had this on my mind and this seemed like the place to vent.
I see discourse about tankies constantly on Lemmy. This struck me as odd. Why are these so called tankies such a threat? Why do I see people calling themselves left-wing and attacking tankies more voraciously than neoliberals and, sometimes, even fascists?
I think I know the answer, just as well as most people who will read this. These are the Zizeks of the world: people who do indeed think in a left-wing oriented way, but fail to recognise that they’re also Western to the core and the biases that come with that.
I sincerely care about this much less than the actual reason I’m making this post. That is: why don’t these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies? I mean, do these people not see that Ukraine winning the war is a boon to the US, regardless of who is “right” in that conflict? Many other such cases, but I think I’ve made my point, or, rather, my confusion, clear.
That’s it. That’s the post.
I think another factor here, especially considering a certain tendency of Libs who think they’re leftist, is that bourgeois democracy actually works okay for them. Not great, bad enough in fact that it makes anti-capitalism appealing, but they still enjoy a relatively decent amount of social stability and pedestrian civil liberties. Even if we push all the BS propaganda aside, they probably wouldn’t enjoy either of those things as much in a developing world AES state.
A stable, secure, prosperous capitalist state doesn’t really care if you want to engage in some cute grassroots leftist organizing, community gardens and DIY punk spaces aren’t really a serious material threat to them. They enjoy a degree of freedom and even some passing social acceptance because they’re ultimately seen as a well meaning if misguided subculture within the broader bourgeois liberal society. They dislike “Tankies”, partially because they believe (correctly or not) that life in an AES state unpleasant and also a serious ML Party would be an actual threat to the bourgeois liberal state which could in turn result in a crackdown on them.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. This is something I consider myself, seeing as I live a somewhat okay life and things like revolution and civil war would certainly destabilise that. But I don’t know if most people would have this level of self awareness; at least, not on a conscious level. I think the libs you are referring to would not be able to articulate fully that the status quo benefits them and that is enough to warrant their support. No, what bothers me, I think, is that there is no such recognition, only proclamations of submission to greater ideals, such as democracy, freedom and, of course, the very recent and not nearly far-reaching enough LGBTQ rights. In this sense, I almost find fascists more tolerable, because they at least seem self aware and honest about their intentions (when talking to each other, at least).
I see them articulate this sentiment a lot, I’ve seen a lot of “well at least America is a democracy”, “I can go to the White House and hold a sign saying ‘fuck Biden’ unlike with Xi in red fash China”, “at least we don’t eat rats”. Their insistence on believing even the most ludicrous accusations about socialist states is also a demonstration that they want to be convinced the US is better, because it is better for them and the lifestyle they want to lead.
and adding on to this with in my mind a more critical point, said capitalist state not only doesn’t care, but actively benefits from it and has its own arms (both capitalist and intelligence/state) to push it and manipulate it. Anti-capitalism can be sold as a product, made into a consumer identity, alienated from and scrubbed of its content where needed, and reify itself back into capitalist consumerism. An obvious example is the Che shirt phenomenon. Or all those hot topic type shops that sell anarchist or ACAB shirts.
The internet is great at doing this, through funneling anti-capitalist trends into and making and consuming ‘anti-capitalist content’ and engaging in ‘anti-capitalist communities’ hosted on ad-supported data-mining social media sites and apps, etc. It railroads expression of “anti-capitalism” into impactless entertainment and cathartic sloganeering which still generates private profit and continues the cycling of capital; all while being able to track and contain and siphon off anti-capitalists and adjacent into status-quo reinforcing pools; and in cases isolate and crush those who differ from these trends, both on a macro scale and on a narrower and even individual scale when “known quantities” change or go dark or what have you (google was originally funded by the CIA to help them identify and track mass informational trends of humanity).
It happens online and in the real world — an extremely sharp example of this contradiction around the subsumption and reification of anti-establishment politics in the real world is that the original Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson were extremely radical and explicitly movement-building for larger structural change. Then rose a Liberal Black Lives Matter Organization as an institution completely separate from the original movement, and financed by all kinds of sketchy donations and billionaire and state dept NGO support, while being explicitly less militant, more liberal and reformist and palatable in its actions and goals, while maintaining some rhetoric around topics that instigated protests but alienated from and scrubbed of the root causes and their solutions. The original protest leaders were vehemently critical of this, and while the media shifted into drumming up facades-of-empty-support and hand-wringing rage and terror on either ‘wing’ of the corporate-party media landscape of this newly-centered Liberal institutional organization BLM; the original protest leaders were disappeared and murdered including being found shot to death in a burning car with no suspects named by the police to this day.
It’s part of the long legacy of the “Agreeable Left” campaigns that the CIA and FBI worked tirelessly on during the original red scare era; including them financing and publishing anarchist anti-communist literature to disrupt communists among the well known COINTELPRO programs and their ilk.
The only reason life in AES is difficult historically is due to imperialist war and sanctions, and those revolutions happening in already poor countries.
If there were a revolution in the imperial core, there would be nobody to wage sanction wars against them and they would start with all of the world’s wealth at their fingertips.
A communist revolution wouldn’t even be bad for them, but they can’t see it because of their chauvinism. They deep down believe that developing poor AES are that way because communism made them poor, which is ahistorical and really just an excuse to obfuscate their own nation’s colonialism and wealth extraction.
GOOD post, comrade