Remember kids, Tankies wants to undermine democracy - same as facists.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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I mean, I tend to interpret 'tankie' to be people who support Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat or similar ideas. Basically, the idea that in order to institute communism you should aim to take power and force everyone to comply with your new state through violence against dissenting parts of the populace.
Personally, my reading of Marx and Engels is a descriptive one rather than a proscriptive one. If the forces of workers haven't spontaneously risen to throw off their chains and seize the means of production, I don't think you can force it. The victory of communism is one of human autonomy that comes as a natural result of capitalism's unsustainability. That's not the same thing as systematic reform, but it's not the same thing as attempting to impose the change on the populace either.
I don't think it can happen until the workers are sufficiently pushed into a corner and decide to do it themselves.
That's just Marxism. That idea started with Marx, not Lenin. He even talks about it in the Communist Manifesto, saying:
Not even mentioning his Critique of the Gotha Programme where he talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition from capitalism to communism extensively. It's okay to not be a Marxist, but it's just factually incorrect to claim that the dictatorship of the proletariat isn't integral to Marx's understanding of the transition to communism.
Marx and Engels made the fundamental mistake of conflating violence with authority. They were correct to say that revolution must be violent, and from their mistake assumed it must also establish authority. In the last 150 years, we have seen many examples of anarchic violence across the world. Marx's assumption is no longer relevant except as an item of historical interest. It is not core to those parts of Marxian theory which are worth bringing into the analyses of the 21st century.