Dialectical Tankie

[dialecticaltankie]

haven't managed to progress further in theory as of late

That being said, no matter what happens I haven't dropped my political views

Forever loyal to the international proletariat

[dialecticaltankie]

Despite that as a Marxist I find the world to be rooted in materialist philosophy, but I also know that much of the philosophy I uphold wouldn't exist without a deep love for people and the desire to be a good person. Marxism isn't a moralism, but in many ways it necessitates you have care and a drive to realize the oppression of the working class and do work to further liberate them. Without the internal, possibly "selfish" drive to push forward, then I'd not be a Marxist in that regard.

[dialecticaltankie]

Thinking about various Marxist orgs I've come across - all with their own problems (if they aren't revisionist or social democrats they have poor organization skills and or problematic leaders) but I noticed there isn't a single one for Leftcoms that's of any prominence. To that same extent, the only group that aren't in America that I know of are Maoists paramilitary groups of Philippines, Peru, and India Do Leftcoms genuinely provide nothing?

[dialecticaltankie]

"Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy." - Mao Zedong

[dialecticaltankie]

The USSR was great and it's fall came with revisionism and Khrushchev and not with Stalin

[dialecticaltankie]

There is frustration knowing that the exploitation of women and children are linked to the development of private property and capital and it's why we're seeing heavy amounts of misogynistic rhetoric online as well as how common it's becoming for internet celebrities to be caught for their predatory behavior, but because it's such a stretch for people to go "because of capitalism" and anti-Soviet rhetoric as well as "Engels revised/corrupted Marx" with other counterrevolutionary thought, all I get in return is how we should support sex-workers even though when they aren't onlyfans model labor aristocrats perpetuating patriarchal fantasies of rape they're impoverished women who have no other choice if not victims of human trafficking. But yeah whatever "it's an artform" fuck off.

[dialecticaltankie]

[dialecticaltankie]

I love how everyone calls Marx a racist for saying the N word like liberals weren't slave-owners or tolerated slavery and anarchists weren't anti-semites

[last-tarrasque]

hi! i have a question about maoism/mao in general. is it not true that the "great leap forwards" and his cultural revolution was terrible for the general population? im chinese and my mother, grandparents, and great-grandparents all went through a famine at the time, and my mother is extremely anti-communist for that reason.

was mao a good person? what part of his plan failed, or did it fail at all? and what is there to say about the millions of lives lost—was that a result of his oppressive regime? were the red guards a part of the package of "maoism?"

sorry if this is too much, ty!

Hi, great question.

The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution

I don't like contradicting/arguing with the recounted lived experiences of people, especially with cases like this, since I know literally nothing about your grandparents and their experiences. Whatever your grandparents experienced was probably real. That being said, China is a huge country and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution where experimental times. All over the country people had different experiences for a number of different reasons. Both events had significant errors attached to them and major failures, but the idea of massive deaths or Mao committing genocide is enterally fictious. The popular number of 16.5 million dead in the Great Leap Forward didn't come about until after Mao's death, released by Deng during his anti-socialist campaign as an attack against Mao and Chinses Socialism. No solid method has ever been released attached to this method. Meanwhile CIA backed American numbers can go as high as 30 million using methods which are about as reliable as pulling numbers from a hat.

On the whole living standers rose sharply during the Mao period, especially during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, as well as other key metrics like life expectancy, agricultural output and total population. The Great Leap Forward eradicated the feudal relations which had been heaped on the back of the Chinese people for over 1000 years, saw the mass voluntary collectivization of agriculture and the creation of the communes all over China, the rapid growth of industrialized agriculture and light and heavy industry and the narrowing of inequalities between the cities and countryside.

The Cultural Revolution, or by its full name, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, saw continued and intensified positive economic and human outcomes even by liberal standards (minus massive corporate profits) and even liberals are forced to concede that ending practices like foot binding was pretty cool. The GPCR was mainly aimed at wiping away capitalist and feudal customs (such as foot binding, the Confucian (patriarchal) family system, superstition, etc.) as well as combat the growing trend of capitalist roaders in the party. In this regard the GPCR was very successful.

Both of these events, while portrayed in western media as evil and authoritarian, where broadly popular and based on the will of the masses, not some "authoritarian" state out of 1984.

If you are interested in stats and figures in more detail, this work is a good place to start.

That being said, historical debates like this are not very useful if we simply reduce them to "Mao bad/no actually Mao good." This is the dominant trend online, debates on if Stalin or Mao was good or bad backed up by hasty Wikipedia searches and an endless torrent of childish insults from both participants.

The reason revolutionaries and revolutionaries in formation must uphold Chairman Mao is because of his useful contributions to Marxism and because of the lesions we can learn from the struggle he led, such as the importance of two line struggle and the mass line.

[dialecticaltankie]

I've continued to be frustrated with the amount of liberalism in the left - this could be either liberals themselves co-opting the phrases and title of "leftist" online or also in conjunction with conservatives always conflating liberals with leftists. Liberals are just as much of an enemy as conservatives because the philosophy allows them to stay in power - tolerance.

[dialecticaltankie]

1. You're not part of the left in the first place, stop pretending.

2. I'm not going to get into every facet of how fascism is explicitly anti-communist, but if you think liberalism as an ideology of slave owners is somehow superior to an ideology of people who suppressed and killed nazis, landlords, and brought millions out of poverty, this is why you aren't on the left.

Liberals aren't leftists you fucking larpers

[dialecticaltankie]

I've continued to be frustrated with the amount of liberalism in the left - this could be either liberals themselves co-opting the phrases and title of "leftist" online or also in conjunction with conservatives always conflating liberals with leftists. Liberals are just as much of an enemy as conservatives because the philosophy allows them to stay in power - tolerance.

[dialecticaltankie]

Leftist "Infighting"

Electoral Politics in America is a liberal democracy and engaging with liberal democracy is not revolutionary. It is an action to decide how the bourgeois class gets to remain in power. Now the problem isn't simply it's lack of a revolutionary character, but instead the defense for it. The revisionists, opportunists, and or democratic socialists see the liberal party, democrats, as the best choice or better option. Showing that they truly don't care about uprooting class division or ripping out the parasite of the bourgeois class, but instead wishing to tolerate their own conditions. They don't aim for proletarian dictatorship, the abolishment of private property, they seek the wealth of the labor aristocrat or even the petite bourgeois. Labor aristocrat referring to a type of proletariat that has accumulated enough wealth to support capitalism and defend it and or be anti-communist.

It is simply another, more diluted, form of anti-communism. Where they see the system as unfair, but have a disdain for violence or "authoritarian" regimes. This is liberalism. Seeking peace and remaining calm in relation to the state instead of agitating it and seeking to seize its power. It is the problem of the democratic socialist, they associate themselves with the anti-revolutionary, with the liberals, the zionists, and like any classic capitalist apologetic or lazy communist they simply refer to to the slow withering away of a state and the inevitability of revolution. "we no longer know what socialism is, or how to get there, but it remains the goal." - Deng Xiaoping Many argue, this is to spread about the ideas of socialism and make americans more comfortable, but this is an impractical step in praxis. It seeks out the masses from an alienated perspective, they do not go to the working class, factories, grocery stores, they do no social investigation but instead present themselves on the news or a live stream. Meaning there is no direct connection with the masses. They can't get in touch with the people's qualms and grievances, in turn, they never are able to spread their propaganda more evenly. Even if the opportunist, the 'liberal-marxist', is able to spread amongst the people they only feed their own fetishized marxism. In doing so, when the common people speak of socialism in general, they still see it as flawed or refer to more peaceful and less radical forms of it. They still see communism as unrealistic. The only thought that has spread isn't marxism but instead liberalism and social democracy. They don't go to the advanced masses but instead the advanced masses come to them, and by presenting a more liberal marxism, only cause those same ones to dilute their own grievances and disdain. Though, the ruling ideas of today originate in the ruling classes still In reference to these criticisms, many will avoid it by saying it is leftist infighting, but they fail to recognize what that actually means. Infighting is not the same when you are fighting one who supports imperialism, it's not infighting if you're a liberal. "Political power is found in the barrel of a gun." - Mao Zedong https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/common_liberal.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch11.htm

[dialecticaltankie]

I love Lenin so much From "How Kautsky Turned Marx Into A Common Liberal"

"In actual fact, it is obvious that Kautsky is writing in a country where the police forbid people to laugh “in crowds,” otherwise Kautsky would have been killed by ridicule."

[dialecticaltankie]

There are too many anti-science leftists who focus on uplifting the voices of the oppressed while never thinking cohesively about it. A black friend of mine was defending her white boyfriend because he was getting called a nazi for disagreeing with a black anarchist. (this wasn't said by the person of opposition ofc) When she was defending him, she was told that she hated her own race and she's antiblack and that her boyfriend needs to unpack his whiteness. It's completely ignorant of the fact that a black person isn't automatically more knowledgeable on an issue just because they have the experience of being black - there are many black conservatives and being black doesn't automatically make them more correct because they're in an oppressed circle. It's practically the infantilization of black people and other oppressed groups and saying that the other knows more about the issues at hand because they're someone who is trying to be supportive of such. It is completely counterproductive and there is no driving force for change except for a liberal and postmodernist sense of uplifting voices. This isn't to defend a conservative audience who spread anti-racist rhetoric, the tolerance of racism via a vague idea of free-speech is almost identical to these prior concepts of freedom and power, it is just in a different attitude. It is to say that leftists who actually want to make change and know more are getting no where if they don't take the time to see groups, even those they sympathize with and like, may be flawed if not completely counterrevolutionary (Thomas Sankara, The Black Panthers, Angela Davis)

[dialecticaltankie]

My understanding of contradiction: Everything has a contradictory nature to it. Something more complex is in economies, workers and business owners, serfs and lords, slaves and masters. Everything needs a contradiction in order to be something. With this, we find that there are contradictions even in the specifics of our own classes. The proletariat arises with contradictions, those for and those against capitalist systems, in-party fighting is contradiction, class in fighting is contradiction. The only way to reconcile these contradictions is by studying the contradictions of others and ourselves.

[dialecticaltankie]

Third-worldists are very confusing to me and remain to be that way It's like,,, since the "whitetariat" is a labor aristocrat and can't be part of the vanguard it's fine that you work at lockheed martin and blackrock. I understand certain sentiments, like how is a proletarian dictatorship going to function if it is a majority white dictatorship and thereby may not be truly representative of the struggle which is why the closest America had to a vanguard was the Black Panthers, but I digress that it is something deliberating disarming - it's larping

[dialecticaltankie]

I must maintain a level of dialectics in my mind even when making statements on morality as a means of making sure I don't befall to idealism, but at many moments I find that there are insurrectionary tendencies in my moral sphere