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Reading the comments, it really does feel that most tankies are demagogues and roleplayers.
Most of them are larpers, yeah. Majority are white rich middle-aged men or teenagers with too much money.
It’s weird, huh? I would have expected them to be people hanging by a thread, with nothing to lose, homeless or nearly there…but tankies seem to be angrier than these examples of people and seem to tend to be better off than average. 🙃
It’s usually caused by guilt and shame of being rich. But refusing to give up their riches.
I mean, their most well-known online figurehead is Hasan, who lives in a mansion and dresses in thousand-dollar clothing and wears expensive jewellery
Copying what I wrote in this thread:
For anybody wondering why anticommunists would spew fatuous bullshit like this, I’ll explain:
The reason that anticommunists accused us and continue to accuse us of being upper-class hypocrites is that it makes them look like the good guys. Most of them do not want the vile stigma that comes with hating the proletariat, thus they make up this brainless stereotype that we’re rich, and therefore an attack on us is not an attack on the proletariat at all.
It is not as though anticommunists reach these conclusions by carefully surveying communist parties, strikers, or antifascist activists. It’s a stereotype that anticommunists make up.
How do you attack Black Lives Matter without looking like a white supremacist? Easy, you pretend that Black Lives Matter is the whitest movement of all time and ignore all evidence to the contrary. Here’s another one: feminism? All feminists are men, so bashing feminism isn’t misogynist. Or how about my favorite: Jewish anti-Zionists? All anti-Zionist Jews are gentiles. Boom, now you can attack them and not care about their explanations on why Zionism is unhealthy for Jews. Enjoy!
What in the holy cognitive dissonance are these mofos talking about
When I do scientific observation: “it really does feel in the heart of the vibes”
the way that most of these people behave and fixate on streamers like Hasan makes me think that most of the anticommunists are just part of the competing audience of liberal streamers like Destiny or Vaush and projecting their own experiences
Their only relationship to “tankies” is a…social democrat streamer? Sounds about white.
I have barely ever even heard of Hasan before, much less watched any of that user’s content… doing a brief search, I see that he was a guest on Bad Hasbara, and it’s fine that he has a problem with Herzlianism, but otherwise I really just don’t care about his content. The only communist channels on YouTube that repeatedly interest me are Hakim and Bes D. Marx, and even then I only engage with their content sporadically. That is not to say that I dislike every other other communist channel (like Asatar Bair, who has some fine videos), only that overall the communist scene on YouTube rarely interests me.
I agree mostly. I watch mainly the finnishbolshevik and anti-empire files.
“Tankies are white rich men!” proceeds to name a turkish dude
funnily the content creators that despise Hasan are as white as yoghurt.
dusts off calipers
let me get out my European physiognomy chart so I can explain the prejudices at play here:
lol this is awesome i love how russians are just straight up bad in every category
Russophobia has been the favorite pastime of Westerners for centuries. Why learn about a culture when you can just demonize it endlessly instead?
Europeans had learned a lot about Native American, African, Indian and Asian cultures and used this knowledge to subjugate them.
russians are just straight up bad in every category
Idk
an abundance of:
Bees
Sounds like a flawless victory.
Average Muscovite.
The Turk lusts for Vienna.
In some ways these guys aren’t wrong. Its just a question of scale. People who are really strapped for cash don’t have the time or inclination to read political theory. It took years of being relatively secure till I became politically literate and a large part of that was the big payout I got during covid.
I spent 9 years homeless and not once did I think “maybe communism would make the world better.” I was too busy trying to figure out where I was going to sleep and eat. Living pay cheque to pay cheque is much the same.
Its easy to be a liberal when you don’t have the mind space to really let the contradictions pile up. When you are working 2 jobs and having to choose between a good nights sleep or groceries its easy to see the problems of capitalism but its hard to think of the solutions.
If you don’t have the time to really study history its easy to go along with the idea that you can vote for things to get better.
I think that speaks less to the lack of time to “find communism” and more to how deeply embedded anti-communism is in the west. On the face of it as a very basic ideological premise, the idea of pooling and sharing resources, some form of democratic leadership, community, treating each other fairly, are all rather intuitive on a small scale and fall in line with the human tendency toward forming social bonds. Granted, this does not alone mean communism in the formal political definition, but it’s already pretty close in spirit. But when people are constantly being told that this is somehow impossible to do beyond a friend group or whatever, because “something something humanity is bad and corrupted and every time it’s been tried it was a disaster”, they’re going to have a harder time embracing it as a formal political theory and practice.
It gets weirder too when you think about how many in the west are already taught the value of “democracy”, but then the actual form of it they get is not a people’s democracy. Which I’m sure is very confusing. Democratic leadership of a kind does make sense, but not when it’s for rich people. But if people are thinking democracy = rich get richer and that’s all it can ever be, they might be driven toward fascism more so, figuring democracy just “doesn’t work.” Or they end up in the liberal thinking, which goes something like “democracy works, but people are flawed, so we just have to keep improving [this system I don’t realize is broken] through small tweaks over time.”
In other words, what I’m arguing here is the embedded anti-communism makes it harder to organically find one’s way to communist thought and sympathizing. So then, yeah, if you have time and inclination to go read through theory, that can help break through it. But that probably wouldn’t matter as much if people were not being told everything even close to communism is evil or won’t work.
I see your point—people in acute crisis aren’t posting political invectives—but I have a feeling that your definition of “relatively secure” is still far and away from being a trust fund brat, which is what these critics are imagining.
My hypothesis is that most Western communists are downwardly-mobile adult children with middle-class parents, because they have enough security to stay out of acute crisis while remaining bitter about their promised future evaporating as they approach it.
your definition of “relatively secure” is still far and away from being a trust fund brat,
That’s what I mean by “a matter of scale.”
My hypothesis is that most Western communists are downwardly-mobile adult children with middle-class parents
Ahh the “New poor.” I suppose the younger new poor would get to parachute into poverty slowly and get time to consider what is happening to them. They also would sound more upper class to the old poor because many of them will be educated even if their education doesn’t get them jobs. There is probably a lot more people like that than like me the “old poor” who gained a bit of security.
It’ll go one of two ways though. Blaming the system itself for incentivizing poverty, or blaming immigrants or women for stealing the job you feel that you deserve.
We’re rich? Could have fucking fooled me.
The goat with another banger, yes the vast majority of “tankies” are white rich men who live in countries that have never ever had communist revolution! The communist revolutions all throughout the world mustve been made by white rich men!
All the rich white people I’ve met are too busy rationalizing their own privilege and explaining away others’ resentment of them to even think about fighting the power or dismantling capitalism.
Edit: changed “rice” to “rich.”
I can’t tell whether that’s a typo or not.
Oops
I’m a poor, working class transsexual woman in my 20s. The combination of these factors is expressly why I’m a communist in the first place. The exploitation of my labor at the hands of capitalists combined with the complete disinterest of liberal politics to support my class interests is quite literally what drove me further and further Left until I got to this point.
“Commies are just privileged” is such garbage and comes almost entirely from cishet white liberal men in the West trying to project their own privilege onto us so they can feel smug and superior.
Accusations are LARPing are nothing more than capitalist realism.
They’ll be calling us larpers even as we assemble the councils and start construction on the greenhouses, trains and solar fields
Ok so le evul cpu, vuvuzela and north korea (everyone is an actor there, except for juchenecro magic head-shaman) are all white rich middle aged men and teenagers? Got it.
Can’t blame them for not going outside and talking to, you know, people organising and stuff
Not sure the point. Being a rich white middle aged man doesn’t really invalidate my politics.
