But I thought tankie (and not just authoritarian or some other word) meant leftists (specifically communists) that are pro-authoritarianism. I’ve seen people often saying that tankies aren’t leftists but to me it just seems like they are, but just the shit kind. Would be a lot nicer not to share even the vague space of “leftism” with them but I think there’s not much to be done about that.
Nah, people who support authoritarianism can’t be leftists or communists by definition. Marx defined communism as stateless. There’s no such thing as a communist who supports the state.
The stateless communism is the end state and I think many authoritarian communists still (at least claim to) believe and want that, but they are fine with authoritarianism of one sort or another while building towards that end goal. Marxism-Leninism is like that I believe.
There’s a lot of currents of communism and leftism that are fine with authoritarianism as a “temporary necessity” or some other justification like that. I think both Marx and Engels wrote about that.
I feel like left-wing is similar sort of vague grouping as right-wing that it incorporates both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian views and ideologies.
But their actual plan for the socialist state “withering way” amounts to pixie tears and fairy dust. People who theoretically want leftism but have no plan of action to achieve it are just liberals.
Marxism-Leninism isn’t about authoritarianism, the idea of a vanguard party composed of intellectual revolutionaries that guides the broader people to revolution, isn’t authoritarian in and out of itself, as much as anticommunist leftists try to smear it. It’s about understanding the usefulness of centralization and coalition in a wide front that shows unity in action. That doesn’t go against democracy.
What a ridiculous and reductionist thing to say. Marx and Engles strongly and frequently criticized anarchists, instead taking the position that after the revolution, the state would need to be maintained under a “dictatorship of the proletariat” at least until the social conditions that created it had been changed, at which point it would gradually “wither away.” Of course the end goal is a stateless society, but it’s plain as day in his writings and his opposition to anarchists that he believed it was necessary to use the state to achieve the necessary conditions for that end goal. Regardless of what you think of it, that’s just a historical fact.
