I hear people complain about tankies more frequently than I encounter them lol
I know they exist but so many of them have been banned/blocked/defederated from that at this point that I think we just need to move on and stop letting them live rent free in our heads.
They still show up on this community every once in a while to peddle their propaganda, especially on pictures about the Soviets. I generally permaban them if they say anything suss or that veers into outright genocide denial.
Bad historical facts hurt their ideology but let's not pretend like other ideologies don't do the same...
Maybe if people use less ideology and more critical thinking, we would have higher quality discourse on issues that actually matter for working peasants.
What's depicted here in the picture actually is a problem facing communism even today: after the revolution failed during the 20s, with no industrialised nations joining up, communism became basically a tragic religion and ideology for the de-facto Russian imperialist state. They had to do some social democratic and socialist policies to justify it to themselves and the people, but in the end, it was about expanding markets and control of resources through expansion, and extracting value from their populace to reinvest into that project of growth of national capital, and trade on the world market. Engels even warned of that phenomenon in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" and Marx made clear what developments would be important for a society developing towards communism in "The Critique of the Gotha Programme", and doing away with the law of value was on top of the necessities.
Communism has to be reborn, and tankies have to accept the Soviet Union and China failed at it, and ideology won't bring it about, but only material action and analysis.
Nah, one side is just tankies and the other is just capitalist dogs. Mental gymnastics for denying stuff vs mental gymnastics for normalizing stuff. Best we can do with our minds, no place left for critical thinking.