Used to mean someone who would support sending in tanks to crush capitalist rallies like in Hungary (which most people who get labelled “tankies” these days obviously don’t), but nowadays it’s just an anti-communist term for anyone that supports any socialist revolution that has successfully built a socialist nation.
All states are inherently “authoritarian” and enforce certain principles over others. What matters is if those principles materially prioritize workers over capitalists, which socialist states do.
You can’t create a stateless, classless communist society from capitalism without a transitional socialist state that breaks the monopoly on force and propaganda that capitalist states have — specially in a world ruled by capitalist superpowers like the US which constantly coups and invades non-capitalist states. Thinking otherwise is just delusional and utopian.
No non-capitalist state will survive in the modern world if they don’t sufficiently get rid of propaganda and deal with capitalist funded insurgencies, which capitalist states will label as “authoritarian”; they’d immediately be coup’d and overthrown by imperial core countries otherwise, as many socialist states have (Chile, Libya, etc).
And regardless, socialist states are a massive improvement over capitalist states when it comes to “authoritarianism” anyway, same as most other metrics. The US has 0.8% of its population in prison for example, while China has 0.1%. Similar stats on most metrics for the USSR vs USA; socialist Russia’s human rights were also far better than capitalist Russia’s, obviously.
Used to mean someone who would support sending in tanks to crush capitalist rallies like in Hungary (which most people who get labelled “tankies” these days obviously don’t), but nowadays it’s just an anti-communist term for anyone that supports any socialist revolution that has successfully built a socialist nation.
Nah, its not anticommunism. Its anti authoritarianisnm
All states are inherently “authoritarian” and enforce certain principles over others. What matters is if those principles materially prioritize workers over capitalists, which socialist states do.
You can’t create a stateless, classless communist society from capitalism without a transitional socialist state that breaks the monopoly on force and propaganda that capitalist states have — specially in a world ruled by capitalist superpowers like the US which constantly coups and invades non-capitalist states. Thinking otherwise is just delusional and utopian.
No non-capitalist state will survive in the modern world if they don’t sufficiently get rid of propaganda and deal with capitalist funded insurgencies, which capitalist states will label as “authoritarian”; they’d immediately be coup’d and overthrown by imperial core countries otherwise, as many socialist states have (Chile, Libya, etc).
And regardless, socialist states are a massive improvement over capitalist states when it comes to “authoritarianism” anyway, same as most other metrics. The US has 0.8% of its population in prison for example, while China has 0.1%. Similar stats on most metrics for the USSR vs USA; socialist Russia’s human rights were also far better than capitalist Russia’s, obviously.