Your realize how dumb “building the revolutionary party” sounds right? Building a party is an agreement to participate in the party system and in American democracy. You’re still trying to work within a system that by your admission you believe is broken beyond any ability to reprsent the will and needs of the people. So I ask again; Why did you bother to vote, and what methods are you going to use to effect the changes you want to see in society? Because right now, what I’m hearing from you is simply a rationalization of a hypocritical decision to convince others not to participate in changing the system from within, and bemoaning the system while refusing to (by your own admission) do anything that actually pushes the changes you want to see…
No? Political parties are not necessarily attached to the US government. Revolutionary parties may or may not participate in elections, but winning seats is never the purpose if they choose to do so. The point is to get people to join, to advertise the party platform. A revolutionary party is a group of organized and trained cadre, not necessarily a group trying to win seats in the government.
I’m honestly baffled at how you interpreted what I said. By no means am I advocating building up a political party to win seats in the US government, I am advocating building up a revolutionary organization of working class people trained as professional revolutionaries.
Do you think the Communist Party of China was somehow not a political party because they won power through revolution, rather than election? That’s not what makes an organization a party or not.
To repeat: I want to build the revolutionary party, educate the broader working class, and prepare for the moment when the capitalist class is weak and can no longer govern, siezing the moment to help the working class take power. That’s it. No more, and no less than that. Not only do I express that I want this, but I actively work for it.
Do you think the Communist Party of China was somehow not a political party because they won power through revolution, rather than election?
From the Wikipedia page for the CCP.
In 1921, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao founded the CCP with the help of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and Far Eastern Bureau of the Communist International. Although the CCP aligned with the Kuomintang (KMT) during its initial years, the rise of the KMT’s right-wing under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and subsequent massacres of tens of thousands of CCP members resulted in a split and a prolonged civil war between the CCP and KMT.
So no, the CCP was initially setup to participate in the existing system of government and then starting working outside of the system while keeping the name.
I don’t think the CCP is the paragon of benevolent democracy that we should strive for in the US, just my opinion though, interesting that you fell back to them as a defense in a thread about functional democracies.
I’m honestly baffled at how you interpreted what I said.
Let me break it down for you then.
You openly admit to voting and working with the Democracy in the US. By your own statments about trying to make a change, you admit that you see voting as an essential part of pushing the changes you want to see in society. At the same time, you proudly admitting to throwing in with the lot of tankies that are pushing people not to vote, stating that voting is useless and we aren’t in a functional democracy. That gap between what you believe/do, and what you are telling other people to believe/do is called hypocrisy.
Per Merriam Webster : Hypocrisy is the behavior of claiming to have moral standards, beliefs, or virtues that one does not actually possess, or acting in direct contradiction to one’s stated words.
You dress up this attempt to sandbag an election and errode the foundation of democracy, voting, with some BS about the Black Panthers and Marxism, but you don’t actually believe any of it, you just want people to not vote, period. You want people to stop advocation for themselves, or make decisions about how they are governed…
The CPC allied militarily with the KMT against imperialist Japan. Absolutely nothing you cited indicates that the CPC at any point intended on working within the existing system. This is basic history. The CPC is a democratic organization set up along the lines of socialist democracy, but that’s a conversation for another day, the point is that they never at any point intended on winning power within the existing system. From the very outset, they declared it necessary to overthrow the bourgeoisie through revolution.
I also never once said I see voting as essential. I see it as potentially useful if a socialist candidate is running, but am under no illusions that they will ever win, nor am I under any illusions that they would even be able to do anything if they won. There is absolutely no gap between what I believe and what I do.
Again, I’ll restate, so that hopefully it will finally sink-in:
I want to build the revolutionary party, educate the broader working class, and prepare for the moment when the capitalist class is weak and can no longer govern, siezing the moment to help the working class take power. That’s it. No more, and no less than that. Not only do I express that I want this, but I actively work for it.
At no point is voting ever necessary for this process. The extent to which voting is useful is the extent to which it can serve as advertisement for people to join the revolutionary party, not for the revolutionary party to gain power electorally. Whether people vote for the revolutionary party or not has little to no impact on the ability for the revolutionary party to take power in the course of revolution.
Do you genuinely not understand this, or are you just trolling at this point? I’m being genuine here. You’re so confidently incorrect that it’s concerning.
And to hold up my end, yes, I voted third party in 2024.
I’ll admit that “essential” was part of my paraphrasing. Regardless, you voted, you saw a benefit in voting, you saw it worth your time to register and show up (or mail in) to vote. You said “I already explained, to signal to the ruling and working classes that socialism is necessary. Ideally, a socialist party would get enough votes to drive up membership.”
Why would you throw in with the tankie scumfucks that are actively trying to suppress people from voting to signal membership and increase visibility in the same way you did?
For all intents and purposes, I belong to the “tankie” group. I believe in the actuality and necessity of revolution, and I support existing socialist states. Those that argue against voting in any capacity as it legitimizes the system, vs. those like myself that see it as occasionally tactically useful in advertising parties, disagree on immediate tactics, not long-term strategy. We both agree that revolution is necessary, and that the US is not a democratic country where voting can get us what we need and want.
I am not being hypocritical in any capacity, here. I do not believe that reformism is a viable approach. I believe that revolution is necessary. The minor distinctions on how I view participation in bourgeois elections is overshadowed by my emphatic agreement that in any case, the Democrats and Republicans are both enemies of the working class that cannot be worked with, as they both serve billionaires and billionaires alone. We live in an imperialist country, we cannot ally with them against foreign imperialists the way those fighting anti-colonial struggles can (temporarily).
I am dedicated to building socialism, and this means I am dedicated to helping the people take power for the people. I encourage you to take up similar dedication to our fellow workers.
For all intents and purposes, I belong to the “tankie” group.
If I were you, I would do my best to distance myself from that kind of association.
From the Wikipedia page for tankie.
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof.
Being pro communist in the US, or Socialist or Anarchist is not the same as being a Tankie. Tankie is not a shorthand for “political stance further left than a progressive democract.” It specifically refers to knuckle-dragging mouthpieces that spout that “western democracy has failed” while conveniently having a non-stance on how to actually do something about it. It’s not an ideology or a group that will lead to reform, it is mere a cabal of internet trolls trying to sandbag anything that has to do with the actual process of democracy.
The fact that you can string together more than 3 words and you’ve been around here for more than a few months really leads me to believe that you should put your efforts elsewhere rather than throw in with tankies.
I disagree with your analysis of what a tankie is, and who is labeled one. We both absolutely agree that there is a group of people with a similar set of beliefs that almost always get called “tankies” by people who disagree with them. The underlying commonality among the crowd labled “tankie” in common lingo is the consistent support for what are referred to as “actually existing socialist states,” namely the People’s Republic of China, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and the Republic of Cuba.
Nobody in the English-speaking world comes to support these countries blindly. To varying degrees, each is dragged through the mud and slandered by our education systems, legacy media, thought leaders, Hollywood, and more. Most that do support them tend to be Marxist-Leninists, but not everyone that supports them is an ML. Likewise, someone can claim to be a Marxist, but as long as they do not support these countries, they are celebrated by western institutions as compatible left.
Tankies absolutely have a plan to achieve socialism. It’s the same as the one I expressed, building up a political party of workers, agitate and propagandize among the working class so as to educate them politically, and prepare for the crisis of capitalism. I am not an exception to the tankie rule as someone who can “string together 3 words,” (an understatement, really, I’m aware that I’m a yapper, and I’m even planning another effort post that will continue to push for socialist organizing I’m just more patient than most.
Unfortunately, the Marxist left in the west is horribly disorganized, and I realize that I’m in the minority as someone who is organized. Putting theory to practice helps sharpen our knowledge, and makes it easier to talk to people when you’ve been flipped off, yelled at, laughed at, and intimidated by police thugs in real life. Online interactions pale in comparison to that, they just devolve far more quickly into pointless name-slinging.
The utility of identifying tankies by who we support is because it works both ways. You likely do not support those countries, while I do. You may think them regressive and reactionary, I think them progressive and revolutionary. This is a definite grouping of people, one that nearly always gets labeled a “tankie,” without needing to get into each and every person’s personal impressions of what tankies are like.
If I disagreed in what your opinion of a nazi was, would that change who the nazis are?
Tankie is pretty explicitly described in the same manner as the Wikipedia page in just about every reference I could find.
Like I said, you should really distance yourself from the term. It doesn’t paint you, or your goals in a good light. At best, trying to make the label fit the movement has caused you to compromise your methods to garner a little bit of support from a small group reknowned for being toxic little pissants.
Edit : this guy explicitly extols the virtues of North Korea and defends their humans rights record. Fuck those goals, and fuck anyone who thinks that is a good system to emulate.
Your realize how dumb “building the revolutionary party” sounds right? Building a party is an agreement to participate in the party system and in American democracy. You’re still trying to work within a system that by your admission you believe is broken beyond any ability to reprsent the will and needs of the people. So I ask again; Why did you bother to vote, and what methods are you going to use to effect the changes you want to see in society? Because right now, what I’m hearing from you is simply a rationalization of a hypocritical decision to convince others not to participate in changing the system from within, and bemoaning the system while refusing to (by your own admission) do anything that actually pushes the changes you want to see…
…And that is some tankie bullshit.
No? Political parties are not necessarily attached to the US government. Revolutionary parties may or may not participate in elections, but winning seats is never the purpose if they choose to do so. The point is to get people to join, to advertise the party platform. A revolutionary party is a group of organized and trained cadre, not necessarily a group trying to win seats in the government.
I’m honestly baffled at how you interpreted what I said. By no means am I advocating building up a political party to win seats in the US government, I am advocating building up a revolutionary organization of working class people trained as professional revolutionaries.
Do you think the Communist Party of China was somehow not a political party because they won power through revolution, rather than election? That’s not what makes an organization a party or not.
To repeat: I want to build the revolutionary party, educate the broader working class, and prepare for the moment when the capitalist class is weak and can no longer govern, siezing the moment to help the working class take power. That’s it. No more, and no less than that. Not only do I express that I want this, but I actively work for it.
From the Wikipedia page for the CCP.
So no, the CCP was initially setup to participate in the existing system of government and then starting working outside of the system while keeping the name.
I don’t think the CCP is the paragon of benevolent democracy that we should strive for in the US, just my opinion though, interesting that you fell back to them as a defense in a thread about functional democracies.
Let me break it down for you then.
You openly admit to voting and working with the Democracy in the US. By your own statments about trying to make a change, you admit that you see voting as an essential part of pushing the changes you want to see in society. At the same time, you proudly admitting to throwing in with the lot of tankies that are pushing people not to vote, stating that voting is useless and we aren’t in a functional democracy. That gap between what you believe/do, and what you are telling other people to believe/do is called hypocrisy.
Per Merriam Webster : Hypocrisy is the behavior of claiming to have moral standards, beliefs, or virtues that one does not actually possess, or acting in direct contradiction to one’s stated words.
You dress up this attempt to sandbag an election and errode the foundation of democracy, voting, with some BS about the Black Panthers and Marxism, but you don’t actually believe any of it, you just want people to not vote, period. You want people to stop advocation for themselves, or make decisions about how they are governed…
…And that is some tankie bullshit.
The CPC allied militarily with the KMT against imperialist Japan. Absolutely nothing you cited indicates that the CPC at any point intended on working within the existing system. This is basic history. The CPC is a democratic organization set up along the lines of socialist democracy, but that’s a conversation for another day, the point is that they never at any point intended on winning power within the existing system. From the very outset, they declared it necessary to overthrow the bourgeoisie through revolution.
I also never once said I see voting as essential. I see it as potentially useful if a socialist candidate is running, but am under no illusions that they will ever win, nor am I under any illusions that they would even be able to do anything if they won. There is absolutely no gap between what I believe and what I do.
Again, I’ll restate, so that hopefully it will finally sink-in:
I want to build the revolutionary party, educate the broader working class, and prepare for the moment when the capitalist class is weak and can no longer govern, siezing the moment to help the working class take power. That’s it. No more, and no less than that. Not only do I express that I want this, but I actively work for it.
At no point is voting ever necessary for this process. The extent to which voting is useful is the extent to which it can serve as advertisement for people to join the revolutionary party, not for the revolutionary party to gain power electorally. Whether people vote for the revolutionary party or not has little to no impact on the ability for the revolutionary party to take power in the course of revolution.
Do you genuinely not understand this, or are you just trolling at this point? I’m being genuine here. You’re so confidently incorrect that it’s concerning.
I’ll admit that “essential” was part of my paraphrasing. Regardless, you voted, you saw a benefit in voting, you saw it worth your time to register and show up (or mail in) to vote. You said “I already explained, to signal to the ruling and working classes that socialism is necessary. Ideally, a socialist party would get enough votes to drive up membership.”
Why would you throw in with the tankie scumfucks that are actively trying to suppress people from voting to signal membership and increase visibility in the same way you did?
…That’s some tankie bullshit right there.
For all intents and purposes, I belong to the “tankie” group. I believe in the actuality and necessity of revolution, and I support existing socialist states. Those that argue against voting in any capacity as it legitimizes the system, vs. those like myself that see it as occasionally tactically useful in advertising parties, disagree on immediate tactics, not long-term strategy. We both agree that revolution is necessary, and that the US is not a democratic country where voting can get us what we need and want.
I am not being hypocritical in any capacity, here. I do not believe that reformism is a viable approach. I believe that revolution is necessary. The minor distinctions on how I view participation in bourgeois elections is overshadowed by my emphatic agreement that in any case, the Democrats and Republicans are both enemies of the working class that cannot be worked with, as they both serve billionaires and billionaires alone. We live in an imperialist country, we cannot ally with them against foreign imperialists the way those fighting anti-colonial struggles can (temporarily).
I am dedicated to building socialism, and this means I am dedicated to helping the people take power for the people. I encourage you to take up similar dedication to our fellow workers.
If I were you, I would do my best to distance myself from that kind of association.
From the Wikipedia page for tankie.
Being pro communist in the US, or Socialist or Anarchist is not the same as being a Tankie. Tankie is not a shorthand for “political stance further left than a progressive democract.” It specifically refers to knuckle-dragging mouthpieces that spout that “western democracy has failed” while conveniently having a non-stance on how to actually do something about it. It’s not an ideology or a group that will lead to reform, it is mere a cabal of internet trolls trying to sandbag anything that has to do with the actual process of democracy.
The fact that you can string together more than 3 words and you’ve been around here for more than a few months really leads me to believe that you should put your efforts elsewhere rather than throw in with tankies.
I disagree with your analysis of what a tankie is, and who is labeled one. We both absolutely agree that there is a group of people with a similar set of beliefs that almost always get called “tankies” by people who disagree with them. The underlying commonality among the crowd labled “tankie” in common lingo is the consistent support for what are referred to as “actually existing socialist states,” namely the People’s Republic of China, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and the Republic of Cuba.
Nobody in the English-speaking world comes to support these countries blindly. To varying degrees, each is dragged through the mud and slandered by our education systems, legacy media, thought leaders, Hollywood, and more. Most that do support them tend to be Marxist-Leninists, but not everyone that supports them is an ML. Likewise, someone can claim to be a Marxist, but as long as they do not support these countries, they are celebrated by western institutions as compatible left.
Tankies absolutely have a plan to achieve socialism. It’s the same as the one I expressed, building up a political party of workers, agitate and propagandize among the working class so as to educate them politically, and prepare for the crisis of capitalism. I am not an exception to the tankie rule as someone who can “string together 3 words,” (an understatement, really, I’m aware that I’m a yapper, and I’m even planning another effort post that will continue to push for socialist organizing I’m just more patient than most.
Unfortunately, the Marxist left in the west is horribly disorganized, and I realize that I’m in the minority as someone who is organized. Putting theory to practice helps sharpen our knowledge, and makes it easier to talk to people when you’ve been flipped off, yelled at, laughed at, and intimidated by police thugs in real life. Online interactions pale in comparison to that, they just devolve far more quickly into pointless name-slinging.
The utility of identifying tankies by who we support is because it works both ways. You likely do not support those countries, while I do. You may think them regressive and reactionary, I think them progressive and revolutionary. This is a definite grouping of people, one that nearly always gets labeled a “tankie,” without needing to get into each and every person’s personal impressions of what tankies are like.
If I disagreed in what your opinion of a nazi was, would that change who the nazis are?
Tankie is pretty explicitly described in the same manner as the Wikipedia page in just about every reference I could find.
Like I said, you should really distance yourself from the term. It doesn’t paint you, or your goals in a good light. At best, trying to make the label fit the movement has caused you to compromise your methods to garner a little bit of support from a small group reknowned for being toxic little pissants.
Edit : this guy explicitly extols the virtues of North Korea and defends their humans rights record. Fuck those goals, and fuck anyone who thinks that is a good system to emulate.