this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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There are two types of tankie. They either a) are very good at selectively ignoring what they’re not supposed to see or b) not true believers and are just trolling for the lolz
You forgot the third type: use dialectical materialism to analyze the world and understand what's going on around them instead of using idealist and moral thinking like "markets bad", allowing them to have nuanced understandings of why a revolutionary state would have a stock market.
you're a fucking parody of yourself, and it's fucking hilarious.
So weird, right? It's almost like you have a... a sort of reaction... a knee-jeek reaction maybe... to the concept of a stock market. It's almost like we differ not by ideology but by the fact that one of us is curious enough to research and analyze what appear to be contradictions and understand them in their historical and world systems context and the other is a reactionary.
Yeah, I react to the idea of a capitalist economy being a good idea. Don't fuck with me, tankie, your debate bro bullshit isn't thought out, and you aren't an intellectual. You're a fucking slave with Stockholm.
It's unfortunate that you live in this timeline then, because capitalism is literally the only system that has ever been used to industrialize a country in this timeline. Maybe your issue with reality. You should lodge a complaint.
Also, just so you know, Stockholm Syndrome was made up by a Western liberal to explain how anyone could ever possibly side with their enemy. It's not a real thing. It's a made up concepts with roots in police violence, fascism, and misogyny. Look it up.
a capitalist tankie. what do you call that? a comcap? a capcom? a fascist?
either way, it's somebody that would make the world a better place if you put a bullet in their brain.
I"m very glad you're just an internet warrior. You could do a lot of damage with your lethal combination of ignorance, idealism, moralizing, and hatred.
The USSR had the NEP for a reason. Marx's analysis are quite clear on the role capitalism plays in the development of productive forces in society. In fact, in his assessment, it is capitalism that produces the conditions for communism.
You gotta stop letting vibes run your life. Start going deeper into reality. Learn something
AKA, mental gymnastics.
Unrelated to the discussion, but dismissing dialectical materialism like that is a bit harsh. It is still very prominent in international relations critical theory, for example. I even learned about Marxism and dialectical materialism in my highschool politics class, lol
It takes mental gymnastics to call tankies both dogmatic book worshippers and simultaneously people who can accept a Chinese stock market into their understanding of revolutionary theory.
Nobody ever said tankies are good at theory. It's not complicated: Tankies dogmatically worship the biggest state that calls itself communist and pretend it's doing what the books say.
So much contradiction wrapped up into one simple comment.
They're dogmatic because they pretend that it's aligned with the sacred texts? And you're better than that because you adhere more strictly to the text? Do you see the problem here? In fact, tankies don't judge AES by textual alignment. It is not a requirement that any state that calls itself communist does what the books say.
In fact, it's clearly impossible for them to do so, because the books are theory, which comes before practice. Practice will always be ahead of the published and established theory, but it will always be behind the leading edge of theory which is not established and often not published. That theory is not settled theory. It gets settled through... practice. We are all capable of incorporating a collapse of China into our theory as much as we are capable of incorporating a transition to a more socialist organization into our theory, because our theory is built upon real world experiences, not textual analysis.
But also, how do you account for the tankies' support for the smaller, and even the smallest, state that calls itself communist? Are they worshiping them too? What about when the small states and the big states do it differently and the tankies support both of them? How does that work?
State propaganda is the de facto means by which tankies incorporate new information into theory: People may have their own "learning processes", but ones that contradict the large state either learn to conform better, stop being tankies, or get purged. Thus anyone who has been a tankie for more than a year "settles theory" in a way that is causally determined by state propaganda, i.e. they treat it as dogma.
This means they back the large state no matter what, and other states when the propaganda allows it. And indeed we see that tankies approve of large communist states attacking small ones or engaging in CIA-style political interference.
I am not asking you to adhere to communist texts more closely, I am asking you to see how the process by which you change your mind can causally be traced back to the owners of large Chinese corporations justifying the accumulation of capital.
A bold claim, indeed! Surely you have research to back this up. Maybe you have a really strong theoretical argument that shows how this is inescapable. You wouldn't just open with a totally vibes-based statement and reveal your bias immediately, completely undermining your position, would you?
Oh. I guess not. I guess you just have vibes. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Big words for such a small idea. One could also say that MLs have a shared discourse through which theory is built upon, like literally every other theoretical discipline, and then have quite varied and dynamic debates about how to incorporate empirical evidence from both historical discoveries and the present day movements. Surely we'd be able to find evidence of this.
And of course, we do. There are people who believe the USSR was a better representation of MLism than China is today, and there are people who disagree with that. There are people who believe that neither are good representations but that Cuba has done a better job. There are those who believe MLism needs to be better integrated with decolonial and subaltern theory and those that believe decolonialism needs to transcend MLism (and of course those that believe decolonialism needs to abandon and reject MLism).
Oh look. A basic survey of the variety of positions that are still as yet unresolved within the community of MLism around the globe. Real dogmatic if you ask me! Those dogmatists should really stop being so dogmatic about regurgitating state propaganda from the largest state.
It's almost like you start with your bias and then reason backwards from there. Refusal to condemn entire movements for specific actions becomes approval of the specific actions, thus proving to you that these people are morally inferior and cannot think for themselves.
The reality is that "tankies" accept errors, failures, and "evils" because they are unavoidable as a class of phenomena. Every single movement will have these moments. That movements have these moments are insufficient reasons to abandon the movements. Adherence to an ideological or moral purity test is...
... dogmatic.
Wild! So when Mao said that the revolution needs to embrace class collaboration as a fundamental strategy, he was the owner of a large Chinese corporation justifying the accumulation of capital? Tell me more!
A 15th century Catholic could debate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but not whether Jupiter had moons. Diversity within a walled garden does not remove the walls, and as long as narratives are not in active conflict with the bounds set by the larger state they are tolerated.
If you do not condemn a specific genocide and the specific system that produced it, then you approve of genocide. As long as ML communities systematically support those that approve of genocide and genocidal regimes and condemn those that condemn genocide, ML approves genocide.
I don't think Mao said to create a stock market, chief. Why do you think a stock market where legal entities that can hold capital can trade partial ownership in corporations that own the means of production while employing workers who have no representation within this system (except as petit bourgeois owners of small amounts of capital savings) could reasonably be considered communist?
I don't believe any of the ML movements have been involved in a genocide nor approved a genocide. If you are referring to China not condemning Israel, well, you got me there.
Mao did not say to create a stock market. He said to collaborate with the national bourgeoisie. That's not communism. Under communism, there is no national bourgeoisie to collaborate with. Communism, as a state of existence, is classless.
So China has literally never been communist as a state of existence. China has been led by a communist party. That doesn't mean they have communism. It means they are building communism.
China is going through the capitalist mode of production. Just like every single industrial nation has done. We don't know of any other way to industrialize. One of the functions industrialization needs is the efficient allocation of resources. The stock market is a tool to make that happen. It's also a way to participate in and gather resource flows from imperialist countries in Chinese currency, which has important effects in anti-imperialism at the commanding heights of world economic systems.
You know how we know that China's industrialization process is run by communists and not capitalists? Because the industrial revolution impoverished millions in the West, but in China it lifted 800M out of abject poverty. China is a state with a communist party leading it through the capitalist mode of production to develop the productive forces of the economy. This is pretty straightforward stuff. It's only confusing if you're dogmatic about it and can't figure out why $EVIL_thing is present in a society that purports to be $GOOD_thing. Moral thinking will always confuse things. Abandon moral thinking, and it all makes much more sense
We agree entirely. Anyone who expects China to be good or to try to become good is going to be confused by reality. China will develop according to the material conditions it operates under. Since those conditions are capitalism, it would be foolish moralism to expect them to do the good thing in spite of their structural incentives, so they will remain capitalist indefinitely.
Oh hey you're going to No True Scotsman me. Anyway: Holodomor, Cambodia, Ethiopian Red Terror, Uyghurs.
Holy capitalist realism, batman. Communism has also never been to the moon, are you going to use capitalism to get there too? Neither has it ever solved climate change, are you going to use capitalism to do that too? If all you're going to do is ape capitalism because "it's the one that works", you're just a capitalist with extra steps.
Sadly, we don't know any other way to be a world hegemon other than through capitalist imperialism...
I guess the USA was run by communists too because poverty decreased massively from 1870 to 1970.
Strange, though, the US had a stock market during its industrial revolution, while China is only introducing the stock market after it has already lifted those 800M out of poverty. Somehow China managed to do all that without ever needing a stock market. Almost as if an economy can industrialize perfectly well without one and the reason for adopting a stock market has nothing to do with efficient industrialization...
Anyway, coming back to moralism, I'm sorry, but I do want my society to be good. I understand that a society being good doesn't make sense on its own, that's why anarchocommunism has prefiguration. We need to shape the material conditions to produce good things if we want good things, which we do. Having capital owners pinky swear to make communism real after the next fiscal quarter isn't going to do it.
Internal contradictions are akshually totally good and not evidence of ideological impurity!
It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.
"Ideological purity" first off, isn't really a thing in Marxism-Leninism, because Marxism-Leninism explicitly calls for adapting policies to specific material conditions. To the extent that people have tried to pursue an "ideologically pure" version of it, it generally hasn't worked so well. The Great Leap Forward, for example.
Now, one would think that China learning from its past mistakes and adapting policy in such a way that 700 million people get lifted out of extreme poverty would be seen as a good thing. And one would think that if someone didn't see this move as a good thing, then they must prefer China's pre-reform policies when they didn't have billionaires and a stock market. Yet somehow, y'all seem to just blindly hate China regardless of what kind of policy they implement.
It kinda seems like what we are dealing with is an anticommunist ideological framework that can transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence, a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
As an anarchist, I dont hate China specifically, I just hate states in general. So as long as the chinese state doesnt implement policies to abolish itself, I will always have something to critize.
You understand that if China were to do that today, it would immediately be vassalized, neoliberalized, and plundered by the imperial core, just as the dissolved Soviet states were 35 years ago, right? That life expectancies would plummet and poverty would become rampant?
Until imperialism (“the highest stage of capitalism”) is dismantled, socialist states are necessary. Basically, nearly everyone has to reach socialism before anyone can reach communism, because capitalism, as long as it continues to exist, will never stop trying to expand. You can’t wish your way immediately to the end-goal. You will surely fail.
Well, the funny thing about that is that Chinese state has actually done that. Or Mao did, anyway.
See, Mao feared that the government was going to follow the same reformist path as the USSR, so he issued a series of declarations saying that the government had been infiltrated by bourgeois elements, that the people of China had a "right to rebel," and finally calling on them to "Bombard the Headquarters."
These declarations created a period of violence and disorder known as the Cultural Revolution, where independent, student-led militias known as Red Guards formed and started fighting whoever they suspected of being counter-revolutionary. With no command structure, they often wound up fighting each other, when they weren't committing atrocities.
Ironically, all this did was discredit this approach and convince a lot of people of the necessity of the reforms they were meant to prevent, and of the central government.
Of course, there were another time in Chinese history where China lacked a strong central government. After the fall of the Qing, there was no central government at all. This is generally referred to as the warlord period, and it sucked so bad that the communists and nationalists put aside their differences to try to end it. Unfortunately, China remained largely decentralized, which allowed the much smaller but more centralized nation of Japan to invade and kill tens of millions of people.
If you don't read theory/study history, it's easy to just rail against authority and centralization from an idealist perspective, but if you actually study China's history and conditions, you'll find reasons for every path they've chosen.
You are talking as if the choices made are the only reasonable ones regarding the things that previously happened.
They largely were. If you disagree it would be extremely interesting to get your analysis of each major turning point in modern Chinese history (from the fall of the Qing through the cultural revolution and the modern reform period) and explain what the better choices that should have been made are given the material conditions and constraints of the times.
Yes?
At least your honest that you're driven by a hate of concepts instead of a curiosity driven by compassion.
Being against states is compassion. Because there is nothing compassionate in police action, centralization of power and borders.
Nothing compassionate? Really? You can't see any way that conditions could necessitate a police force? For example, a population of hundreds of millions of deeply traumatized people that commit acts of violence against each other as a symptom of their trauma which then perpetuates the trauma and threatens to subsume all of society in an arms race of psychopathy? You think you couldn't organize a police force to manage that situation from a position of compassion?
How about the compassion of borders? Without borders, your people can't justify defense against violent incursion from entire countries organized around sociopathic violence by deeply traumatized people. Those people won't even share resources with you if you don't have borders. You don't see a reason to potentially participate in that system from a position of compassion?
I'm sure your world is so much easier having a purity test like that, but it's not useful in solving the problem of sociopathic self destructive world systems.
I love that your standard is ideological purity! It's like you're a textbook case of what not to do.
How about kind of afraid it might be impossible to hold out against imperialist capitalism without some degree of nasty repressive shit.
Skill issue.
What about the ones that turn off their mind and start regurgitating unrelated talking points?
I feel like that's just a subset of type A.
There are a lot of ways to be "good" at ignoring what you are not supposed to see. Turning your brain off is a pathway to many abilities some consider unnatural.