I tried explaining my problems with tankies without calling them tankies. In fact, I used their own terminology to describe my disagreement with them. It, uh… well it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
George Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war on the side of the Marxists. His army was betrayed by the Marxist-Leninists. After that experience, he wrote 1984, in which a totalitarian government uses “newspeak” to suppress dissent by suppressing the very ideas that people are capable of communicating. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marxist-Leninists describe their disagreements in terms that turn criticism of them into gibberish. I think it’s exactly what Orwell was writing about based on his experiences.
What? No, it’s specifically Anarchists who want to speed run straight to communism. Marxists want to seize the state and guide it through a transitional stage (often called Socialism), which will end in the withering away of the state, and thus lead to Communism.
This was the whole nature of the split in the First International between Marx and Proudhoun.
To your point about Orwell, bringing up 1984 doesn’t make a ton of sense here, as that’s a book that is much more about fascism. Case in point, Immanuel Goldstein, the avatar of everything that Oceania opposes, is a man with a Jewish name.
Animal Farm, meanwhile, comes from Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War, where he was largely embedded with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). The POUM were more ideology diverse than history gives them credit for, but was largely composed of what we would today consider Trotskyists.
That experience, coupled with his experience as a journalist during WW2, unable to publish his trotskyist influenced criticisms of the USSR due to wartime state repression, ultimately lead him to write Animal Farm.
The Stalin analogue pig is named Napoleon in large part due to debates between MLs and Trotskyists about the nature of world historical revolutions, since their only point of comparison was France, which ended up with Napoleon in charge. Was Stalin a Napoleon of Socialism? Was that a necessary phase in these sorts of revolutionary processes? Things like that are what Animal Farm is gesturing towards.
All of that aside though. I think it’s needlessly limiting to lop yourself off into an ideological box and say “Only my pet socialist experiment is the Real one!”
As Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, etc. Whatever our ideological convictions, we all have the same ultimate goal, and are apart of the same broad tradition.
I have stark disagreements with my Anarchist friends, but they’re still my comrades, and I still respect many things about their commitment to direct action, and will defend their political projects, current and historic, to the hilt. Our struggle is ultimately the same, and we have much to learn from one another.
And that is why tankies cream their panties for dictators with imperialist ideas. Got it.
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I made an edit to my original post that is relevant to your comment here.
But in brief, as someone you might consider one of these “Stalinists” I have no interest in gatekeeping Anarchists. We are a part of the same broad political tradition, and the ultimate end goal we seek to achieve is the same.
I have a great respect for my fellow socialists of other tendencies, be they Anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists, etc. And consider their struggles to be my struggle as well, and I make common cause with people I disagree with in my own organizing all of the time, despite our ideological disagreements.
Editing your comment to add 7 paragraphs after it’s already been argued with is very bad manners. I’m going to delete my comment because after you’ve inserted 7 paragraphs of rebuttal before it, I’m sure it’s no longer relevant or persuasive.
I agree that it’s bad manners. I accidentally hit reply before I was done. Idk what to tell you, shit happens.
But That’s why I summarized. But it’s deeply immature of you to look for any excuse to not engage with someone who is disagreeing with you in good faith.