The part about it basically being a social hierarchy is so accurate, and such a good analysis of so many movements.
Antifa, Proud Boys, Tankies, Bugaloos... I think the media (left, right, mainstream) takes these movements to seriously... or more seriously than they should. I'm sure there are "true believers" in each of these, but for the most part, I assume its mostly made up of insecure kids, often with that anti-establishment personality.
We had these types in the 80's... vast majority of them outgrow it as they mature. My sister (who happens to be black) was married to a dude that use to be in a skin head gang.
Like you say.... social media gives power to vocal minorities... while all us normies are pretty much silent.
The exception is the Trumpers/Anti-Coviders ... way more of these people than is healthy. I have no explanation for them. I really downplayed the "election is rigged" crowd. I know quite a lot of them in real life and they are all talk. They bitch about it... rant about it... but they aren't out in the streets in mass like the pussy hat crowd was back in 2016-17. Basically they are bluster.
However.... the fact that some significant minority of House of Representatives is willing to entertain this foolishness to vote against ratifying the electoral college vote... that is some scary shit. Very depressing.
Also... the anti-coviders/vacciners... man... they are also frightening... the internet has enabled dumbasses to be fooled into thinking they are smarter than scientists.
I think this comment fundamentally misunderstands the difference between a purely online social/political group like the various tankie permutations and real world groups that rally, protest and commit violence offline. It also conflates organized groups, like Proud Boys, with cause based organizing like "Antifa". The former has a leadership structure, induction, rules, etc wheras the latter is a protest movement against a concept and those who would support it.
In the wake of the J6 hearings it should be much clearer that groups like the Proud Boys were not young and misguided, likely to grow out of their beliefs and behavior, but instead highly coordinated far right organizations with specific plans and execution of those plans. They were not young, most are late 20's through late 40's. Nor were they likely to grow out of the organizations, instead they were recruited in, nobody was a teenager. And they actively coordinated with other similar groups such as the Oathkeepers and 3%ers who all had leading roles in the attempted coup.
I get where you are coming from, and why it might appear that way to you, but honestly the big issues is the media did not take these groups seriously enough, early enough. And they often reported from a 'both sides' approach as though there is an equally troubling/dangerous side to white nationalist terror organizations (that would be tankies if they were a real world issue, which they are not).
Worse, it's happening again. The same tactics that escalated starting in 2017 are happening now, but more effectively and with more participants. Attacks on LGBTQIA events, "white lives matter" protests and groups like neo-Nazi Patriot Front (honestly the closest I can consider to be in the category of misguided younger people) are increasingly emboldened by the lack of significant consequences for the vast majority of those who behaved this way in the past.
Sorry to necro this thread, I really enjoyed the article on tankies and only stumbled onto it yesterday. But with the privilege of an additional year and a half since this comment was made, and with the release of the J6 commission evidence showing just how coordinated, organized and real world many of these groups were and remain, this comment has not aged well.
I am curious if that's something you can see now or not.
"But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow..." - John Lennon
"Among the political right, William F. Buckley Jr, an arch-conservative, wrote approvingly of the song, only to then be rebuked by the far-right John Birch Society's magazine."
"Student radical Hoyland criticised Lennon for continuing to espouse an ideology the Beatles had expressed in "All You Need Is Love" when, in the context of 1968, "In order to change the world we've got to understand what's wrong with the world. And then – destroy it. Ruthlessly."
Before writing a reply, Lennon met with two other students from Keele University at his home in Surrey, on 3 December. Referring to Hoyland's letter, he said that a destructive approach to societal change merely makes way for a destructive ruling power, citing the Russian and French revolutions; he also said that the Far Left's complaints demonstrated their "extremer than thou" snobbery and their inability to form a united movement...
"Another influence on Lennon was his burgeoning relationship with avant-garde artist Yoko Ono and her espousal of sexual politics as an alternative to Maoist doctrine and other hardline philosophies adopted by the political left."
Ironically, Lennon wrote "Power to the People" to try and placate his New Left critics--a song Sanders used in his campaigns! 😅
But before his death in 1980 he was done placating.
Beatles historian MacDonald wrote that by 1994 "Tiananmen Square, the ignominious collapse of Soviet communism, and the fact that most of his radical persecutors of 1968–70 now work in advertising have belatedly served to confirm Lennon's original instincts."
"She describes a process by which people with some justifiable anger against America... slip into a deep and monomaniacal hatred in which America defines evil and anything that opposes America is defined as good."
So, they're the left expression of the same impulse that drove Ayn Rand; [system/nation] hurt me, so it's bad, and the opposite of bad is good, therefor the opposite of [system/nation] is good.
Sigh. I hate politics written in crayon. It's so destructive.
Very interesting article! I do disagree with some points made, but overall I think this is a fantastic analysis. I also noticed you focused nearly entirely on Twitter. there are also massive tankie subcultures outside of Twitter that you may want to check out. Of course there are the tankies on Reddit, tumblr, Instagram, the rest, but there is also a small Chan website called Bunkerchan made up of tankie-type refugees from when 8chan closed down. They have a board on their site called “leftypol” (a play on the /pol/ board of 4chan) which does have some anarchists and bordiga-style leftcommunists, but is mostly made up entirely of tankies,
or Marxist-Leninists and Marxist-Leninist-Maoists as they often call themselves. There is even a sub-subculture there orientated around Albanian Marxist-Leninist dictator Enver Hoxha and his bunker building. If you’re interested in diving a bit deeper into tankie culture and seeing just how crazy tankies can be, especially when they have their own isolated site, I suggest you check out bunkerchan and leftypol. They often have holodomor denial threads, Stalin apologia, and PRC support.
You may also be interested in the cryptic Reddit Leftcommunists, who even mock other leftists and call them “leftoids”, having their own enclaves on subreddits like r/marxism_201, r/shitleftoidssay, and r/ultraleft. The leftcommunists are people that Lenin and Stalin called ultra leftists, and the people who even tankies call dogmatic. They WILL mock you if you don’t understand Marxist terms, and their conversations and threads are so cryptic and enigmatic that they you would need to have read all three volumes of capital to understand it all. The leftcoms don’t support Leninist regimes and they denounce existing socialist countries like China. Don’t mistake them for antiauthoritarian democracy-lovers, their pure radicalism would make pol pot blush, and they uphold texts by people like Amedeo Bordiga and Ontaro Damen as if they are holy scriptures. Amedeo Bordiga himself rejected anything short of Revolution, denounced activism and protest as useless, hated parliamentarianism, called Stalin a gravedigger, and proudly labeled himself as antidemocratic. Thankfully, the leftcommunists haven’t had any influence at all since the collapse of the third international.
The left-communists are not authoritarians, just from a ethnographic perspective I think that’s untrue. They are surely revolutionaries, but they see anarchists (particularly insurgent anarchists) as their closest allies due to the shared belief in the need for revolution (although they criticize anarchists for their idealist rather than materialist ideology). Much of their critique of tankies stems from their agreement with reasonable people that red-fascism exists and that these regimes were not going to bring about "true Communism" in the Marxian sense. They seem mostly like a group of esoteric academic/intelligencia types that are devoted to Marx/Orthodox Marxism (and having actually read Kapital I do think they’re correct in much of their analysis of Marx & the nature of Communism but they have no idea how to communicate their ideas to the world and seem aware of that, thus their ridicule of "rube prols").
You seem to be talking about Dutch/German tendency style of leftcoms, I am referring to Italian/Russian tendency. The notion that leftcoms see anarchists as allies is absurd, one realizes this as soon as they read any work on political tactics by a leftcom. You should read Bordiga’s The Democratic Princippe if you want to discover just how authoritarian leftcoms are. I do agree that Leftcoms have a correct interpretation of Marxian value theory and general crisis theory, but their reluctance to talk about notable mainstream economic discussions like ECP and the transformation problem leaves much to be desired when compared to the Marxist-Humanists like Kilman, who refuted the transformation problem, and the Cybersocialists like Cockshott (as well as the parecon fellows like Devine and Albert), who refuted the ECP.
Yeah it's really unfortunate that both schools call themselves leftcoms, which is why I think the Italian variety is sometimes referred to as Bordigism. Also, lumping the Russian leftcoms in with the Italians is a bit inaccurate as Russian leftcoms and council communists are often much more similar to the Germans.
Also, most of the leftcoms I see nowadays - admittedly few and far between and almost exclusively American or British - seem to be pretty open and accepting of the ECP and transformation problem and of the academics you mentioned. As a former leftcom myself (no idea if I'm even still a commie in any meaningful sense of the word) I can tell you that digging into those problems and corresponding solutions was very important to me personally and seemed important to other leftcoms I interacted with or followed online.
Final thought: never thought I'd see someone name drop Bordiga, Cockshott, Kliman, and Devine in a Noah Smith post XD
You're right that there are massive tankie subcultures outside of Twitter. Hell, there's a globe-girdling fraternity-sorority of highly paid people who have been to journalism school and to prestigious universities who deploy constant and tireless efforts to whitewash (or "colorwash" might be a better term) the true nature of the US permanent state and its Washington Consensus-fueled master plan to subjugate the planet's entire population via NATO, the World Bank, the IMF, all of the big business schools and economics programs, a large percentage of the narrative pushed by the mainstream media - and on and on, up to and including comic books and TV commercials. And of course a lot of them have infiltrated the current US government. So I'd take Noah's comforting assertion that the Republic is not in danger with a grain of salt. Those are some twisted f*ckers.
How do Tankies tend to square the circle with regards to intra-communist-regime-wars? Like, do they support the Soviets or Chinese in Cambodia? Support Vietnam or a China in that war?
PSL and Worker's World are both Trotskyist parties, believe it or not. However, being Marcyist, they have more positive views of what is known as "AES", "Actually Existing Socialism", than most other Trotskyists - although most trots would support the USSR over the US, viewing it as a deformed worker's state and not capitalist. There was the fringe group of "neither Washington nor Moscow", however.
Tankies, also (sadly) known as a nice chunk of the Latin American Left.
Seriously, on some countries their political position are as strong or stronger as that of the libertarians in America.
That makes me a bit skeptical about the idea of tankies as would-be Bernie fans. Perhaps they've always been there but never have a megaphone until now.
More like disillusioned had-been Bernie fans. And, I know Noah was careful to distinguish between tankies and other leftists, but they're hardly the only anti-establishment very online political faction who radicalized in reaction to that 2016 loss.
It seems that tankies are more attached to states than to policy and theory. Some will claim any criticism of Marxist or Leninist theory to be "revisionism" in which "revisionism" is a code word for "against the revolution." In addition, most tankies I've talked to are kids from my high school that, when they talk about socialism, don't really go into detail and instead go off of cheap one-liners by Twitter users. Something else that tankies always resort to is whataboutism. For example, if I criticize the prison systems and suppression of people in the USSR and USSR-backed states like East Germany and Ethiopia, they will point to the U.S. prison system and say that I can't criticize any others.
I am a Titoist who despises U.S. imperialism, but even I know that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Any socialist who is against self-determination for all people as working-class members is not a socialist.
"What these pejoratives accomplish, as Noah Smith is well aware, is the ability to inoculate the mainstream herd from the wrong think of anyone to whom that label has been applied. That way they never have to engage the argument or the evidence that gets laid out contradicting the official imperial line; as long as they can convince enough people to accept their pejorative as legitimate, they have a magical phrase they can utter to dispel any anti-imperialist argument which appears anywhere in the information ecosystem.
This is a major part of an imperial narrative manager’s job these days: smearing anti-imperialists and critical thinkers as untrustworthy. The debate is never to be engaged and counter-arguments are never to be made; why engage in a debate you will probably lose when you can simply explain to everyone why nobody should listen to the other side?"
The reality is that there's always going to be an empire of some kind and it's a matter of choosing which empire you want. And don't think the CCP isn't an empire... it absolutely is.
And she got it right, as usual. These guys are so disingenuous that it defies description and logic. Anyone who has studied world history - preferably from a non-America-centric angle - knows that a LOT of what gets taught to Americans (and drummed over and over into their heads) is propaganda. Literally NOBODY on the left with any significant following, platform, or traction is arguing that the USA should become the USSR. I've never seen a single person in good faith defending ALL of Stalin's actions. What I HAVE seen are leftists like myself get called terms of abuse like "tankie" when I point out the USA's massive and ever growing body count and the new anti-Russia and anti-China propaganda campaigns that Yasha Levine was talking about in the Substack entry that drew the ire of this apologist-for-atrocities-of-empire Noah Twitter nobody that is simply seeking more shares and follows (duh).
For those people actually interested in accurate accounts of what's REALLY going on in the West regarding China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela, I direct you to this interview/conversation between Pepe Escobar and Michael Hudson. I also suggest the second link which is an interview given by Chas Freeman. It's like hmmmm....who do I look to to learn about the world and see what's really going on, some Twitter character or experts and PhDs.
" Literally NOBODY on the left with any significant following, platform, or traction is arguing that the USA should become the USSR. " That's Noah's friggin' point! He states that the tankies that are so loud on Twitter have almost ZERO presence IRL. He states that they are NOT the same as anarchists or other leftists. Please read the article again.
Well, yeah except that a lot of intellectuals nowadays are in the tank for the neoliberal, Washington consensus juggernaut. The Program has its official academin imprimaturs now.
The attitude here seems to be, let's see what new group of extremists on one side or the other is going to try to outcool us by defending some off the wall notion. The problem is that that implies that our cool "normie" consensus is based on some kind of healthy, sustainable approach to managing the world's economy (since we're in charge of that, right?) and making the world safe for "free enterprise" and democracy. Except that when you look below the surface it's really slash, bomb, kill, overthrow, torture and then put a slick cool spin on it.
People, there is such a thing as socialism and there is such a person as Marx, and neither one nor the other leads to Stalinism or Nazism. Get over that shit, please. Read a little Marx, for Christ's sake. Hey, he can even be very entertaining at times.
Yes, exactly - bomb, kill, sanction, coup, embargo any country that isn't toeing the line of western private finance (notably the author of this Substack works for one of the biggest oligarchs in existence).
Noah was an assistant professor at Stony Brook and got his own PhD in 2012. I'm guessing his education was heavy immersion in Modern Monetary Theory with a few classes or books devoted to Marx, mostly in a denigrating fashion or doing to his work what Noah is attempting to do to the anti-war faction of the left, and for which Johnstone calls him out. Namely, sidelining and refusing to listen to/consider arguments in good faith because they don't align with the fundamental tenets of MMT, and we're calling out the US government and "defense" department's role in acting as mob enforcer for the 0.01%. No surprise, then, that as an employee of Michael Bloomberg's, Noah is very much trying to be on the forefront of driving whatever portion of "the left" over whom he may have some influence in the direction of the former (as opposed to antiwar latter) of the two narratives mentioned in the tweet that this whole circle jerk is based on. China ain't playing the West's game the way the western 0.01% want them to, the 0.01% control the government, the mainstream media, the MIC so they are using every single one of them to prod or denounce China according to skewed realities and to indoctrinate Americans into buying and repeating their version of the narrative.
I'm sure you've read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" - I wonder if Noah has, and if not, why. LOL, no, actually I don't.
I'm not surprised to hear all that about you, Mr. Smith.
Sure I've read _Hitman_ and also _The World Bank - A Never-Ending Coup d'Etat_ (http://www.cadtm.org/The-World-Bank-a-never-ending-coup-d-etat), which I can recommend and which will be appearing soon in a new and updated edition (which I am now involved in editing, or I'd write more). Every day I realize a little more just how broad, deep and tentacular the effort to metaprogram us all really is, and it's only going to get broader, deeper and and more tentacular, and more clever, and its song even more irresistible as the slow-motion collapse continues. So please keep on keeping on, and keep that wax in your ears.
"If Gillis is right, then the emergence of tankies is one result of the failure of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Bernie’s whole sales pitch was “political revolution”, and when it became clear on Tuesday, March 3 that a political revolution wasn’t happening anytime soon"
Quick note: I think Gillis attributes the emergence of neo-Tankies to the failure of the Sanders '16 campaign ("five years ago"), which was also more of a drawn out process with quixotic fantasia ("here's how Bernie can still win!"), culminating of course in the horror of Nov '16, which would have been a very favorable environment for the emergence of new radical views and a commitment to the US as the geopolitical villain.
Tankies are poisonous for the left. They should drop their intense hatred of the United States and join the good folks at the DSA in their endless struggle to hijack the Democratic Party. Bernie lost twice, which means there's nowhere to go but up.
Politics in the USA are fucked up. Here in spain everyone who considers themselves as a leftist, except anarchists, support lenin as an icon of revolution. Not the same with stalin though.
We don't care that much about blacks, trans, gays etc, we focus on the working class (Although lately, due to american politics, these thoughts about minorities have come to spain). We leftists in spain, even the social democrats, don't like capitalism.
The situation is better in some parts of europe such as greece, where the KKE is strong.
The part about it basically being a social hierarchy is so accurate, and such a good analysis of so many movements.
Antifa, Proud Boys, Tankies, Bugaloos... I think the media (left, right, mainstream) takes these movements to seriously... or more seriously than they should. I'm sure there are "true believers" in each of these, but for the most part, I assume its mostly made up of insecure kids, often with that anti-establishment personality.
We had these types in the 80's... vast majority of them outgrow it as they mature. My sister (who happens to be black) was married to a dude that use to be in a skin head gang.
Like you say.... social media gives power to vocal minorities... while all us normies are pretty much silent.
The exception is the Trumpers/Anti-Coviders ... way more of these people than is healthy. I have no explanation for them. I really downplayed the "election is rigged" crowd. I know quite a lot of them in real life and they are all talk. They bitch about it... rant about it... but they aren't out in the streets in mass like the pussy hat crowd was back in 2016-17. Basically they are bluster.
However.... the fact that some significant minority of House of Representatives is willing to entertain this foolishness to vote against ratifying the electoral college vote... that is some scary shit. Very depressing.
Also... the anti-coviders/vacciners... man... they are also frightening... the internet has enabled dumbasses to be fooled into thinking they are smarter than scientists.
Anyway... Happy New Year.
You too!
Yep, the crazies are out in force in America, and tankies are just one tiny corner of it. Have you read Invisible Bridge?
No... is it available as an Audible? I have so many credits there.
Yep. Start with Nixonland, then Invisible Bridge, then Reaganland
I think this comment fundamentally misunderstands the difference between a purely online social/political group like the various tankie permutations and real world groups that rally, protest and commit violence offline. It also conflates organized groups, like Proud Boys, with cause based organizing like "Antifa". The former has a leadership structure, induction, rules, etc wheras the latter is a protest movement against a concept and those who would support it.
In the wake of the J6 hearings it should be much clearer that groups like the Proud Boys were not young and misguided, likely to grow out of their beliefs and behavior, but instead highly coordinated far right organizations with specific plans and execution of those plans. They were not young, most are late 20's through late 40's. Nor were they likely to grow out of the organizations, instead they were recruited in, nobody was a teenager. And they actively coordinated with other similar groups such as the Oathkeepers and 3%ers who all had leading roles in the attempted coup.
I get where you are coming from, and why it might appear that way to you, but honestly the big issues is the media did not take these groups seriously enough, early enough. And they often reported from a 'both sides' approach as though there is an equally troubling/dangerous side to white nationalist terror organizations (that would be tankies if they were a real world issue, which they are not).
Worse, it's happening again. The same tactics that escalated starting in 2017 are happening now, but more effectively and with more participants. Attacks on LGBTQIA events, "white lives matter" protests and groups like neo-Nazi Patriot Front (honestly the closest I can consider to be in the category of misguided younger people) are increasingly emboldened by the lack of significant consequences for the vast majority of those who behaved this way in the past.
Sorry to necro this thread, I really enjoyed the article on tankies and only stumbled onto it yesterday. But with the privilege of an additional year and a half since this comment was made, and with the release of the J6 commission evidence showing just how coordinated, organized and real world many of these groups were and remain, this comment has not aged well.
I am curious if that's something you can see now or not.
"But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow..." - John Lennon
"Among the political right, William F. Buckley Jr, an arch-conservative, wrote approvingly of the song, only to then be rebuked by the far-right John Birch Society's magazine."
"Student radical Hoyland criticised Lennon for continuing to espouse an ideology the Beatles had expressed in "All You Need Is Love" when, in the context of 1968, "In order to change the world we've got to understand what's wrong with the world. And then – destroy it. Ruthlessly."
Before writing a reply, Lennon met with two other students from Keele University at his home in Surrey, on 3 December. Referring to Hoyland's letter, he said that a destructive approach to societal change merely makes way for a destructive ruling power, citing the Russian and French revolutions; he also said that the Far Left's complaints demonstrated their "extremer than thou" snobbery and their inability to form a united movement...
"Another influence on Lennon was his burgeoning relationship with avant-garde artist Yoko Ono and her espousal of sexual politics as an alternative to Maoist doctrine and other hardline philosophies adopted by the political left."
Ahh...the good old days....
Ironically, Lennon wrote "Power to the People" to try and placate his New Left critics--a song Sanders used in his campaigns! 😅
But before his death in 1980 he was done placating.
Beatles historian MacDonald wrote that by 1994 "Tiananmen Square, the ignominious collapse of Soviet communism, and the fact that most of his radical persecutors of 1968–70 now work in advertising have belatedly served to confirm Lennon's original instincts."
Very interesting history!
Yeah, "extremer than thou snobbery" really sums up a lot of Twitter, doesn't it? 😅😅😅 And the Left still can't get it's act together and unite.
What are we going to do with that Left, eh? Damn, its a good thing our acts together and were united.
"She describes a process by which people with some justifiable anger against America... slip into a deep and monomaniacal hatred in which America defines evil and anything that opposes America is defined as good."
So, they're the left expression of the same impulse that drove Ayn Rand; [system/nation] hurt me, so it's bad, and the opposite of bad is good, therefor the opposite of [system/nation] is good.
Sigh. I hate politics written in crayon. It's so destructive.
-- Steve
Hey Noah,
Very interesting article! I do disagree with some points made, but overall I think this is a fantastic analysis. I also noticed you focused nearly entirely on Twitter. there are also massive tankie subcultures outside of Twitter that you may want to check out. Of course there are the tankies on Reddit, tumblr, Instagram, the rest, but there is also a small Chan website called Bunkerchan made up of tankie-type refugees from when 8chan closed down. They have a board on their site called “leftypol” (a play on the /pol/ board of 4chan) which does have some anarchists and bordiga-style leftcommunists, but is mostly made up entirely of tankies,
or Marxist-Leninists and Marxist-Leninist-Maoists as they often call themselves. There is even a sub-subculture there orientated around Albanian Marxist-Leninist dictator Enver Hoxha and his bunker building. If you’re interested in diving a bit deeper into tankie culture and seeing just how crazy tankies can be, especially when they have their own isolated site, I suggest you check out bunkerchan and leftypol. They often have holodomor denial threads, Stalin apologia, and PRC support.
https://bunkerchan.xyz/leftypol/
(Side note, there was recently a controversy among the mod team, leaving some users to leave bunkerchan and go to https://leftypol.org/leftypol/)
You may also be interested in the cryptic Reddit Leftcommunists, who even mock other leftists and call them “leftoids”, having their own enclaves on subreddits like r/marxism_201, r/shitleftoidssay, and r/ultraleft. The leftcommunists are people that Lenin and Stalin called ultra leftists, and the people who even tankies call dogmatic. They WILL mock you if you don’t understand Marxist terms, and their conversations and threads are so cryptic and enigmatic that they you would need to have read all three volumes of capital to understand it all. The leftcoms don’t support Leninist regimes and they denounce existing socialist countries like China. Don’t mistake them for antiauthoritarian democracy-lovers, their pure radicalism would make pol pot blush, and they uphold texts by people like Amedeo Bordiga and Ontaro Damen as if they are holy scriptures. Amedeo Bordiga himself rejected anything short of Revolution, denounced activism and protest as useless, hated parliamentarianism, called Stalin a gravedigger, and proudly labeled himself as antidemocratic. Thankfully, the leftcommunists haven’t had any influence at all since the collapse of the third international.
The left-communists are not authoritarians, just from a ethnographic perspective I think that’s untrue. They are surely revolutionaries, but they see anarchists (particularly insurgent anarchists) as their closest allies due to the shared belief in the need for revolution (although they criticize anarchists for their idealist rather than materialist ideology). Much of their critique of tankies stems from their agreement with reasonable people that red-fascism exists and that these regimes were not going to bring about "true Communism" in the Marxian sense. They seem mostly like a group of esoteric academic/intelligencia types that are devoted to Marx/Orthodox Marxism (and having actually read Kapital I do think they’re correct in much of their analysis of Marx & the nature of Communism but they have no idea how to communicate their ideas to the world and seem aware of that, thus their ridicule of "rube prols").
You seem to be talking about Dutch/German tendency style of leftcoms, I am referring to Italian/Russian tendency. The notion that leftcoms see anarchists as allies is absurd, one realizes this as soon as they read any work on political tactics by a leftcom. You should read Bordiga’s The Democratic Princippe if you want to discover just how authoritarian leftcoms are. I do agree that Leftcoms have a correct interpretation of Marxian value theory and general crisis theory, but their reluctance to talk about notable mainstream economic discussions like ECP and the transformation problem leaves much to be desired when compared to the Marxist-Humanists like Kilman, who refuted the transformation problem, and the Cybersocialists like Cockshott (as well as the parecon fellows like Devine and Albert), who refuted the ECP.
Yeah it's really unfortunate that both schools call themselves leftcoms, which is why I think the Italian variety is sometimes referred to as Bordigism. Also, lumping the Russian leftcoms in with the Italians is a bit inaccurate as Russian leftcoms and council communists are often much more similar to the Germans.
Also, most of the leftcoms I see nowadays - admittedly few and far between and almost exclusively American or British - seem to be pretty open and accepting of the ECP and transformation problem and of the academics you mentioned. As a former leftcom myself (no idea if I'm even still a commie in any meaningful sense of the word) I can tell you that digging into those problems and corresponding solutions was very important to me personally and seemed important to other leftcoms I interacted with or followed online.
Final thought: never thought I'd see someone name drop Bordiga, Cockshott, Kliman, and Devine in a Noah Smith post XD
You're right that there are massive tankie subcultures outside of Twitter. Hell, there's a globe-girdling fraternity-sorority of highly paid people who have been to journalism school and to prestigious universities who deploy constant and tireless efforts to whitewash (or "colorwash" might be a better term) the true nature of the US permanent state and its Washington Consensus-fueled master plan to subjugate the planet's entire population via NATO, the World Bank, the IMF, all of the big business schools and economics programs, a large percentage of the narrative pushed by the mainstream media - and on and on, up to and including comic books and TV commercials. And of course a lot of them have infiltrated the current US government. So I'd take Noah's comforting assertion that the Republic is not in danger with a grain of salt. Those are some twisted f*ckers.
Erm tankies are people who **denounce** the United States. Noah said the Republic's not in danger **from tankies**.
How do Tankies tend to square the circle with regards to intra-communist-regime-wars? Like, do they support the Soviets or Chinese in Cambodia? Support Vietnam or a China in that war?
I don't know if I have more or less authority saying this, but @HotTankie is probably my favorite schtick account.
Workers World and The Party for Socialism and LIberation are tankies (although they try to hide it) and deliberately try to attract POC, gay, trans.
Brown-red alliances and sympathies go back decades, to the Strasserites in the Nazi Party, and before that too.
Seriously researched and informative article about it.
https://ravingsofaradicalvagabond.noblogs.org/
PSL and Worker's World are both Trotskyist parties, believe it or not. However, being Marcyist, they have more positive views of what is known as "AES", "Actually Existing Socialism", than most other Trotskyists - although most trots would support the USSR over the US, viewing it as a deformed worker's state and not capitalist. There was the fringe group of "neither Washington nor Moscow", however.
Well, I was purged from PSL in 2008 and they sure seem like tankies to me.
(I was walking away from them anyway.)
Just because they're trots doesn't mean they're not tankies!
Noah explicitly stated trots are NOT tankies
PSL and Workers World definitely are tankies but started out as Trotskyists. They changed over time.
Hmm.
Michael Huemer effectively sums up the communist tankie worldview:
https://fakenous.net/?p=327
Thank you for the primer on tankies. Was not familiar with that term before.
Tankies, also (sadly) known as a nice chunk of the Latin American Left.
Seriously, on some countries their political position are as strong or stronger as that of the libertarians in America.
That makes me a bit skeptical about the idea of tankies as would-be Bernie fans. Perhaps they've always been there but never have a megaphone until now.
More like disillusioned had-been Bernie fans. And, I know Noah was careful to distinguish between tankies and other leftists, but they're hardly the only anti-establishment very online political faction who radicalized in reaction to that 2016 loss.
It seems that tankies are more attached to states than to policy and theory. Some will claim any criticism of Marxist or Leninist theory to be "revisionism" in which "revisionism" is a code word for "against the revolution." In addition, most tankies I've talked to are kids from my high school that, when they talk about socialism, don't really go into detail and instead go off of cheap one-liners by Twitter users. Something else that tankies always resort to is whataboutism. For example, if I criticize the prison systems and suppression of people in the USSR and USSR-backed states like East Germany and Ethiopia, they will point to the U.S. prison system and say that I can't criticize any others.
I am a Titoist who despises U.S. imperialism, but even I know that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Any socialist who is against self-determination for all people as working-class members is not a socialist.
Hi folks. Caitlin Johnstone sent me: https://consortiumnews.com/2021/04/06/tankie-other-popular-terms-of-narrative-control/
"What these pejoratives accomplish, as Noah Smith is well aware, is the ability to inoculate the mainstream herd from the wrong think of anyone to whom that label has been applied. That way they never have to engage the argument or the evidence that gets laid out contradicting the official imperial line; as long as they can convince enough people to accept their pejorative as legitimate, they have a magical phrase they can utter to dispel any anti-imperialist argument which appears anywhere in the information ecosystem.
This is a major part of an imperial narrative manager’s job these days: smearing anti-imperialists and critical thinkers as untrustworthy. The debate is never to be engaged and counter-arguments are never to be made; why engage in a debate you will probably lose when you can simply explain to everyone why nobody should listen to the other side?"
The reality is that there's always going to be an empire of some kind and it's a matter of choosing which empire you want. And don't think the CCP isn't an empire... it absolutely is.
And she got it right, as usual. These guys are so disingenuous that it defies description and logic. Anyone who has studied world history - preferably from a non-America-centric angle - knows that a LOT of what gets taught to Americans (and drummed over and over into their heads) is propaganda. Literally NOBODY on the left with any significant following, platform, or traction is arguing that the USA should become the USSR. I've never seen a single person in good faith defending ALL of Stalin's actions. What I HAVE seen are leftists like myself get called terms of abuse like "tankie" when I point out the USA's massive and ever growing body count and the new anti-Russia and anti-China propaganda campaigns that Yasha Levine was talking about in the Substack entry that drew the ire of this apologist-for-atrocities-of-empire Noah Twitter nobody that is simply seeking more shares and follows (duh).
For those people actually interested in accurate accounts of what's REALLY going on in the West regarding China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela, I direct you to this interview/conversation between Pepe Escobar and Michael Hudson. I also suggest the second link which is an interview given by Chas Freeman. It's like hmmmm....who do I look to to learn about the world and see what's really going on, some Twitter character or experts and PhDs.
https://michael-hudson.com/2021/03/what-flavour-oligarchy/
https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/03/the-origins-of-a-distinguished-diplomatic-career-and-the-u-s-china-fight-for-primacy-bpr-interviews-ambassador-chas-freeman/
" Literally NOBODY on the left with any significant following, platform, or traction is arguing that the USA should become the USSR. " That's Noah's friggin' point! He states that the tankies that are so loud on Twitter have almost ZERO presence IRL. He states that they are NOT the same as anarchists or other leftists. Please read the article again.
Well, yeah except that a lot of intellectuals nowadays are in the tank for the neoliberal, Washington consensus juggernaut. The Program has its official academin imprimaturs now.
The attitude here seems to be, let's see what new group of extremists on one side or the other is going to try to outcool us by defending some off the wall notion. The problem is that that implies that our cool "normie" consensus is based on some kind of healthy, sustainable approach to managing the world's economy (since we're in charge of that, right?) and making the world safe for "free enterprise" and democracy. Except that when you look below the surface it's really slash, bomb, kill, overthrow, torture and then put a slick cool spin on it.
People, there is such a thing as socialism and there is such a person as Marx, and neither one nor the other leads to Stalinism or Nazism. Get over that shit, please. Read a little Marx, for Christ's sake. Hey, he can even be very entertaining at times.
Yes, exactly - bomb, kill, sanction, coup, embargo any country that isn't toeing the line of western private finance (notably the author of this Substack works for one of the biggest oligarchs in existence).
Noah was an assistant professor at Stony Brook and got his own PhD in 2012. I'm guessing his education was heavy immersion in Modern Monetary Theory with a few classes or books devoted to Marx, mostly in a denigrating fashion or doing to his work what Noah is attempting to do to the anti-war faction of the left, and for which Johnstone calls him out. Namely, sidelining and refusing to listen to/consider arguments in good faith because they don't align with the fundamental tenets of MMT, and we're calling out the US government and "defense" department's role in acting as mob enforcer for the 0.01%. No surprise, then, that as an employee of Michael Bloomberg's, Noah is very much trying to be on the forefront of driving whatever portion of "the left" over whom he may have some influence in the direction of the former (as opposed to antiwar latter) of the two narratives mentioned in the tweet that this whole circle jerk is based on. China ain't playing the West's game the way the western 0.01% want them to, the 0.01% control the government, the mainstream media, the MIC so they are using every single one of them to prod or denounce China according to skewed realities and to indoctrinate Americans into buying and repeating their version of the narrative.
I'm sure you've read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" - I wonder if Noah has, and if not, why. LOL, no, actually I don't.
I'm not surprised to hear all that about you, Mr. Smith.
Sure I've read _Hitman_ and also _The World Bank - A Never-Ending Coup d'Etat_ (http://www.cadtm.org/The-World-Bank-a-never-ending-coup-d-etat), which I can recommend and which will be appearing soon in a new and updated edition (which I am now involved in editing, or I'd write more). Every day I realize a little more just how broad, deep and tentacular the effort to metaprogram us all really is, and it's only going to get broader, deeper and and more tentacular, and more clever, and its song even more irresistible as the slow-motion collapse continues. So please keep on keeping on, and keep that wax in your ears.
"If Gillis is right, then the emergence of tankies is one result of the failure of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Bernie’s whole sales pitch was “political revolution”, and when it became clear on Tuesday, March 3 that a political revolution wasn’t happening anytime soon"
Quick note: I think Gillis attributes the emergence of neo-Tankies to the failure of the Sanders '16 campaign ("five years ago"), which was also more of a drawn out process with quixotic fantasia ("here's how Bernie can still win!"), culminating of course in the horror of Nov '16, which would have been a very favorable environment for the emergence of new radical views and a commitment to the US as the geopolitical villain.
True.
Its the same the whole world over,
It the poor wat gets the blame
And the rich wat gets the gravy
Ain't it all a bloody shame!"
Tankies are poisonous for the left. They should drop their intense hatred of the United States and join the good folks at the DSA in their endless struggle to hijack the Democratic Party. Bernie lost twice, which means there's nowhere to go but up.
The DSA are tankies. Look at their support for the Cuba regime on Twitter.
I think that's sort of the joke.
Politics in the USA are fucked up. Here in spain everyone who considers themselves as a leftist, except anarchists, support lenin as an icon of revolution. Not the same with stalin though.
We don't care that much about blacks, trans, gays etc, we focus on the working class (Although lately, due to american politics, these thoughts about minorities have come to spain). We leftists in spain, even the social democrats, don't like capitalism.
The situation is better in some parts of europe such as greece, where the KKE is strong.