I like how you didn’t even remotely attempt to answer the question

Personally, I kept reading and that’s where it lead me.

Same reason I’m an anarchist 🙂

Basic knowledge of material analysis, class consciousness and reading sources besides r*ddit

Buddy come the fuck on, the pinned post on this community is literally a start-to-finish group reading of Anarchist FAQ, which is >1000 pages in print and contains citations to hundreds of other pieces of anarchist literature. And I know you have Marxist-Leninists who don’t do the reading either. We also have engineers who don’t do the reading because turns out, that’s just a thing that happens in groups where you’re expected to do a lot of reading: you get people who want to be there but won’t or can’t do the reading.

Anyways, how about a pop quiz - What side were the “tankies” whom you so detest, on during the Apartheid?

Anti-apartheid, which is why we’re speaking. That doesn’t mean you’re immune to possibly criticism. Same goes double for fellow anarchists.

Also, since you originally posted a picture of Mao referencing his treatment of landlords: I don’t oppose the violence against landlords. I oppose the retention of a State to do so.

Im a tankie because i want there to be clean water anywhere on earth in the future. We have less than 50 years to overthrow capitalism before the earth is a depleted cinder.

See this is why I’m an anarchist and not a state socialist. Like I’m not “squishy” about violence, but I don’t think that the state is an optimal or even suboptimal-but-certifiably-good way to liberate the masses. States are just not practical for what anarchists want to achieve.

Marxist Lenninist revolution has worked in the past. 2 out of 3 post WW2 superpowers arose from it.

That would be a scathing indictment of anarchism if that was the result of an anarchist revolution. I’m not interested in building “big” “powerful” societies; I want to build networks of consensual, decentralized, sustainable, free communities. Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists have different metrics for success.

What is your timeline for creating this consensual, decentralized, sustainable, free community and how does it compare to the timeline on ecological collapse?

ASAP. In the here and now. Don’t mistake anarchism for moderation or flippancy. I am honestly not sure if worldwide anarchism can be realized faster than the climate crisis, but in my view it has the best shot out of all the existing plans.

When an already extant “big powerful society” such as the US comes to knock you over what do you propose to do about it that won’t require you to establish a disciplined military of your own?

IMO in the here and now, part of anarchist praxis needs to be organizing defensive militas, frankly in a way that aesthetically might resemble a military, but is in practice informed by anarchist principles and goals. Anarchists need to wage actual war against the bourgeoisie and world governments. Frankly, we need our ideas to be more widespread and accepted by the masses, i.e. numbers — a reality that, in my view, equally affects all communist struggles, and no ideology can overcome. IMO, militias should be formed for specific purposes, disbanded as soon as their mission is complete, and only exist subject to the people they claim to defend.

How do people actually fall into the “Tankie” mindset?

Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community?

How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?

How exactly does “So choosing to stop believing western propaganda rags and CIA psyops to answer your question” answer any of these three questions? Like it’s ridiculous to think that {rejecting CIA propaganda} => {immortal science of Marxism-Leninism}, i.e. people can and do reasonably disagree with Marxist-Leninists and other state socialists out of an organic theoretical and practical desire to do things differently.

Also, western leftists have a problem swallowing CIA and pro-Western propaganda (myself included, something I’m trying to unlearn) — including western “tankies”.

liberal trolling

Go through my comment history. 95% of my comment history is screaming at liberals for being fucking liberals 😮‍💨

Sorry if I’m being curt but you came into our space and started being a jerk to people, and now you’re all surprised Pikachu face that we’re being less than polite back. If you want to actually have a productive discussion then great, but you’re just not doing that right now.

Yeah but I don’t have to support the existence of the state even in the rare moment it does good things. For example, just because the serial killer down the street kills a landlord doesn’t mean I have to support the serial killer or serial killers in general, in particular any of the other people killed by the serial killer.

I’m curious (in a genuine, friendly way) what you read that led you to anarchism over Marxism-Leninism. Was it a theoretical text that reverberated particularly well with you, historical texts that you felt made anarchism a more justifiable position than MLism, something else entirely?

Two things:

1. I am autistic with severe trust issues. Not to imply that autistic ==> anarchist, but IMO I “inherited” a great deal of skepticism and distrust from growing up autistic in AmeriKKKa, where basically every interaction is lies all day every day, and systems are optimally designed to maximize capitalist oppression. And frankly, I am not looking for new masters since I already hate the masters I have. So it’s going to be very difficult to rationally convince me that any state is worth supporting, even one that labels itself a dictatorship of the proletariat, or even (especially!) groups that claim to agree with me.

2. Statistically speaking, anarchism has helped me navigate the world and predict to sufficient accuracy how things are gonna go down in the fields where it applies. If you told me that MLism has statistically helped you like anarchism has helped you, I’d believe you because we all have different experiences, and I guess that’s just how the dice rolled.

The need to disassemble and then reform your military inbetween each action doesn’t strike you as an extreme limitation?

It is, but I think it’s a necessary one. But also, I do want to be a bit more concrete about what constitutes an “action”. I’m really thinking that “liberation of region X” is an example of an action, so it is possible to have militias standing for many years. Honestly…no, I really don’t want to see militias lasting any longer or getting any bigger. And that is a feature, not a bug.

Seems like your just feeding shelter cats to coyotes.

I mean I’ve never gone to war before, but can’t we train people to be “generically” good at fighting so that we can form and reform units in finite time? I.e., how to use firearms, basic urban and wilderness survival, basic tactics, and how to be part of a unit? Because yeah, it would be a bad move to just throw complete rookies into battle with no training.

Yeah they look similar to outsiders, but it is my view that they aren’t internally similar, and that we can absolutely find fundamental differences in the outcomes of marxist and anarchist projects.

As a couple of poster here are already demonstrating, they discover that western nations have lied about communist nations, but they don’t learn the more fundamental lesson that they shouldn’t trust everything a nation says. So instead of adopting a nuanced view, they just counter believing everything a western nation says with rejecting everything a western nation says and instead believing everything a communist nation says.

Too often these criticism’s of “tankies” involve calling questioning blatant cold war lies as tankie behavior and very often i get accused of being a tankie by both liberals and “anarchists” because i oppose the democrats its far past time to retire the word.

Implying your literature is not also a thousand page zine 😆 like that’s not even an insult

Im a tankie because i want there to be clean water anywhere on earth in the future. We have less than 50 years to overthrow capitalism before the earth is a depleted cinder. Marxist Lenninist revolution has worked in the past. 2 out of 3 post WW2 superpowers arose from it. Anarchist success stories include… Rojava? For a while? If you ignore all the US support and how it fell apart without that. By the time the US is weak enough that it can be destroyed without the need for regimented party and military structures it will simply be much to late.

It’s also quite telling that you squishily back away from “the tiananmen square massacre” but then gesture vaguely at some other unspecified crime. Parenti called what you have an unfalsifiable orthodoxy.