Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
Agreed. There is too much false equivalence of “Tankies” and fascists.
Fascists want to enslave your sisters and daughters and stick your trans friends in psych wards until they “decide” to stop being trans. They’re fine with Blacks wallowing in poverty as second-class citizens and having militarized police on every streetcorner.
“Tankies” (Marxist-Leninists) believe in all the same progressive things other (so-called) Socialists do but have different views on historical figures and foreign policy, something that does not matter a bit in the here and now.
Here is the difference between Fascists and “Tankies”: if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that China was trying to exterminate the Ughyr people through mass execution, 95% of the “Tankies” out there, myself included, would disown China and denounce the genocide (this will not happen, because it isn’t a genocide except in the broadest and most meaningless of terms). If it was proven beyond a doubt that the Holocaust happened (which it more or less has), the majority of Neo-Nazis would still say it was good.
Saying you’d denounce a genocide you deny is happening isn’t accomplishing what you think it is.
People don’t equate “tankies” with “fascists” because you advocate some sort of marxist-inspired system of governance… it’s because denying the suffering of others when it’s politically convenient is absolutely the opening strategy of the fascist playbook.
Also, “Disown China”??? Nothing wrong with liking other countries but the way you guys talk about them is off putting and doesn’t come across as informed or even remotely unbiased.
Being “unbiased” is not a virtue. I am a Marxist. I judge people, governments, and ideas based off of a Marxist framework. That is my bias.
I give China the benefit of the doubt because they are, at least, claiming to be a Marxist state. This on its own puts them above any non-Marxist state.
Isn’t claiming to be a Marxist state while still maintaining power within a small group of people (the inner party, a political version of the bourgeois) worse? By effectively being the same power structure, it allows critics to dismiss Marxist ideals as the same or worse. China is a particularly bad case as they disallow proper freedom of speech, basically castrating the proletariat. This harms perception of Marxism, hurting your case in arguing for it
The Chinese system isn’t perfect but I think questions like these put the cart before the horse. Is the Chinese system set up in such a way that, if bad actors got their way to the top, they would wield an immense amount of power? Yes, definitely. This question is separate from whether or not the people at the top right now are bad actors. And I think, like in any country, it’s a mixed bag; there are oligarchs and business-industry plants and corrupt officials, but there’s also well-meaning bureaucrats (Xi Jinping broadly fits into this category) and ideologically-driven Marxists.
The idea that Xi Jinping is a power-hungry dictator is an overblown trope. He is a fat, old, boring bureaucrat who got into office because he is an agreeable political moderate; a compromise between the ideological Marxist wing of the party and the pro-business Dengist wing.
As we saw in the Soviet Union, unrestricted Freedom of Speech is the downfall of Marxism. Home-grown Liberals are only the first issue; the United States government spends literally billions of dollars propping up anti-government organizations, whether that’s Uyghur terrorist groups, the Falun Gong, Tibetan Independence movements, or “LGBTQ+ Rights” organizations who always seem to spend more time arguing for political liberalization than they do actual LGBTQ+ Rights (and, before you strawman me, I want to make my point here clear: LGBTQ+ Rights are good, but many such organizations in China are funded by foreign actors in order to disrupt Chinese politics. The bad things about them are not their LGBTQ+ Rights advocacy, but their advocacy for other forms of Liberalization that undermine Communism in China. If an LGBTQ+ Rights organization in China calls for the downfall of the CPC, they do not deserve to exist)
Why? I am a socialist democrat and don’t would never support North Korea just because they claim to be a democracy. China is an authoritarian state that does nothing to support socialist ideals.
This is a spectacularly stupid assertion. Like, we’re talking trumpian levels of idiocy here. Y’all tankies really want to make horseshoe theory a thing.
The communist party has engaged in a huge crackdown on labor unions and workers rights in the last 10 years. Words are just words.
Neither is being biased a sin. It’s when your bias allows you to ignore facts that people stop taking you seriously.
undefined> If it was proven beyond a doubt that the Holocaust happened (which it more or less has)
“If”…“more or less”… Tankies are Fascists. You’ve made that clear.
stay mad, nerd
That phrase stuck out for me too, and supports my growing suspicion that the majority of people that claim to be marxists are actually just another group of fascist conspiracy theorists. I hope to be proven wrong.
You could literally prove yourself wrong by exercising just a little intellectual curiosity. Marxism is, at its core, an economic theory based on the idea that democracy has as much a place in the workplace and economy as it does in our political system. If that’s fascist to you, you’re unserious.
Now, if you’re just unwilling to correct or criticize your own beliefs, and you want to conflate Marxism with Stalinism and Tankies, you’re better off just saying so.
Based and materialist take
I see this “based” used now and again. Does it mean something special, or do people not know how to spell biased?
Like another commenter said, the most basic explanation is that it’s the literal opposite of “cringe”.
The more nuanced explanation is that it was a term co-opted from hip-hop, originally used to celebrate pure expressions of individuality, personal style, and/or personal belief. It was quickly appropriated by internet reactionaries to celebrate anti-liberal and anti-left sentiments, often ones that were explicitly unpopular or socially unacceptable. Eventually it kind of entered the mainstream internet culture and was sanitized by ironic re-appropriation to mean “the opposite of cringe, even admirable, but possibly a difficult position to defend for any number of reasons”.
Ughyrs are being genocided rn, but otherwise your points are correct
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