https://discuss.online/post/29250428/18869440

I thought I’d try my hand at explaining why this meme fundamentally misunderstands communist theory and that I’d better move it here after I posted it, because the people on that community sure love downvoting and/or removing any good point made against the tankie dogma.

Oh, and remember to always lead by challenging tankies’ attempts to portray themselves as the ingroup of communism and any critics as the outgroup. That’s a tactic they love using, they construct their opinions as the absolute communist truth, and brand any opposing opinion as liberal and capitalist, while also strawmanning it. If you open by criticising their communist credentials, they can’t dismiss you as a liberal and pretend they’re arguing in good faith.

  • PugJesus@piefed.socialEnglish
    18·
    4 days ago

    It’s particularly funny since Marx urged participation in elections, even in states where he did not think change would come electorally, precisely because he recognized that there are few better ways to get an accounting of the people who are both behind you and are willing to perform the bare minimum of action to support your ideals.

    For that matter, Marx considered that it may be possible for some bourgeois democracies to achieve a workers’ democracy via elections - though that was never his main area of focus, considering, probably correctly, that direct action was more relevant in the vast majority of cases.

    That’s not even getting into questions of harm reduction.

    Also particularly gruesome to cite Ancient Greek philosophy in opposition to democracy, since such opposition was generally from explicitly aristocratic grounds. But I guess that clicks with vanguardist oligarch-wannabes.

    • Best_Jeanist@discuss.onlineBannedOPEnglish
      6·
      4 days ago

      Wow, thank you for that information about Marx. For anyone else in the thread, here’s the source:

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/01/indifferentism.htm

      It cannot be denied that if the apostles of political indifferentism were to express themselves with such clarity, the working class would make short shrift of them and would resent being insulted by these doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen, who are so stupid or so naive as to attempt to deny to the working class any real means of struggle.

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm

      The relationship of the revolutionary workers’ party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it cooperates with them against the party which they aim to overthrow; it opposes them wherever they wish to secure their own position.

      the workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organization of the workers’ party, both secret and open, and alongside the official democrats, and the League must aim to make every one of its communes a center and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence.

      • PugJesus@piefed.socialEnglish
        6·
        4 days ago

        I was thinking, specifically, from that same address to the Communist League:

        Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.

        • Best_Jeanist@discuss.onlineBannedOPEnglish
          5·
          4 days ago

          That’s a good one, but I fear tankies might misuse the immediately following quote for evil:

          They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.

          In 2016, the USA’s Green party took enough votes in swing states that had those votes been for the Democrats instead, Clinton would have won.

          In December 2018, two reports commissioned by the US Senate found that the Internet Research Agency boosted Stein’s candidacy through social media posts, targeting African-American voters in particular.

          So, Russia intentionally conned black people into voting for the “workers” party and it lead to a fascist becoming president. Marx might have underestimated the danger on that one.

          • PugJesus@piefed.socialEnglish
            4·
            4 days ago

            I like to think that the threats of the imperial presidency and the necessity of a united front in that case, there being only one presidential position, would be recognized by Marx. He does, after all, qualify that the gains of such an operation outweigh the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body. Especially considering his praise of Abraham Lincoln, who was not even the most radical candidate in 1864.

            Even if one took that as a universal injunction, it necessarily only dismisses reformism, not the necessity of harm reduction in the face of the total capture of the state apparatus, or at least the capture of the most influential parts of it. It would, I think, be much more applicable to those voting third party for reps - not that the any US third parties actually put in an effort to run serious candidates for the fucking legislature.

            Tankies will twist anything to their own fuckwit uses, of course. Red fash, like their brownshirt brethren, play with words because words mean nothing to them.