Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
All well and good, but the term dictatorship here still refers to a situation where the state apparatus has complete control over the means of production, in other words a total centralisation of power. Indeed in Marxism-Leninism the dictatorship takes the form of a vanguard party forming a single party state. Whichever way you look at it, practical power resides with a very small group of individuals.
The contrast with the eventual stateless communist society, in which power would be completely decentralised, is quite striking. It’s not quite clear to me how Marxist-Leninist theory envisioned the transition from one to the other, although it seems to me there was a general feeling that central economic planning and industrialization would fairly quickly lead to the end of scarcity altogether, which in hindsight seems… very optimistic.
If you ask me, the ideals of communism mostly died around the same time as Lenin. Pretty much all communist states that have existed (and currently exist) are mainly interested in maintaining their own power structures rather than actually working their way towards the idealised communist society. Which pretty much just makes them dictatorships in the classical sense.
Yes, Marx and later Lenin argued for complete centralization of power in the hands of the proletariat, and in Lenin’s case, an additional group of well-read proletarians dedicated to leading the revolution.
A common misconception is that a non-ML revolution wouldn’t have a vanguard, Lenin is literally just referring to whoever is the most advanced and leading the revolution. A vanguard may be a group of Anarchists trying to lead the revolution, even if they don’t use Democratic Centralism like Lenin did and advocates for in State and Revolution.
Marx also didn’t believe there would one day be a state and the next it would collapse, same with Lenin. They believed that over time the Material Conditions would lessen the need for a state until it “whithered away” over time. It wouldn’t be a relinquishing of power, but a shrinking.
Complete statelessness would have the same centralized power as Socialism, just without a state. This centralization becomes a decentralization, in that the Proletariat can democratically operate the Means of Production, which they cannot under Capitalism. If this sounds confusing, Marx makes this clear in Critique of the Gotha Programme. You refer to the state as an “other,” distinct from the workers, when it is an extension of them and made up of them in Socialism, according to Marx. There would still be a government, just no means by which one class oppresses another.
Marx was not an Anarchist, who instead believe in free association and networks of mutual aid.
I don’t believe Communism has died. It may seem that way if you see systems as static, and not as ever-changing and evolving along with humanity and technology.