"Tankie" does not come from Tiananmen Square, that is a common misconception. The term "tankie" is 33 years older than the Tiananmen Square massacre.

It originated to describe people who supported the 1956 Soviet Union military intervention in Hungary. Stalin sent in a bunch of T-35 tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution. He was successful, and thousands of people died in the process.

Ever since then, "tankie" has been used as a derogatory term against Stalinists, Marxist-Leninists, communists, and leftists in general.

Basically far-left

we need a better topological geometry for these concepts, especially for these wacky edgecase fuckers like tankies. yeah, far left, like, you stand here, I'm going to move to your left until I've come around on the other side of the planet far far far far away left.

imho the vast majority of them are ccp click patriots waiting for the taiwan invasion to kick off.

Hehe, somebody was way ahead of you there...

To be fair, tanks seem to be a favored tool of these oppressive regimes. I'm personally not against communism, they have some good ideas like universal child care, guaranteed jobs, and housing (even though the latter may be considered sub-par by some). The problem comes when these fucking authoritarian cheerleaders come out and say communist governments were never oppressive.

Except you'd not get that healthcare and the rest if you didn't pay people off.

In theory it might seem fine, but in reality it was just a dictatorship, and quite a brutal one too.

Except you’d not get that healthcare and the rest if you didn’t pay people off.

eh docs and nurses are pretty fucking cool but don't work for free. of course you're going to pay people off, they need wages ffs

Communism = no currency. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of knowledge regarding communism in here. A bit of an echo chamber. It's funny how so many can hate something so much without actually knowing what it is they're hating. Ha.

The framing of separating the "authoritarian left" from the actual left is basically accurate.

Why is "Far Left" marked as a trademark?

Because of intellectual propriety.

Did you intend "intellectual property"?

Regardless, I understand the meaning of the symbol, but not its applicability to the context.

Having the trademark on far left never made sense to me either, really undermines the whole thing. the plot is also missing axis.

I took a stab at fixing it, will add coordinates once i can find my graphing calculator

To be honest, I am not perceiving the modifications as an improvement.

The original cleverly shows, quite simply, that the authoritarian left develops from reaction, that is, regresion toward the right, within leftism.

It also exposes as misconception that leftism generally is authoritarian.

...I'd prefer a single payer system where no one went without. Broke my nose while living in the UK and was impressed with their no bullshit system.

you can have democratic socialism of many flavors without going full on communism, and you'll never get to communism from here, abjectly shittified capitalism. I'd prefer denmark over...well, where has communism worked?

Like, I respect the medical professionals Cuba produces but would never want to live there.

cleverly shows

debatable, it's just horseshoe theory, but with a trademarked pick-me spur of leftists

I did update my plot though, it needed more text

It also exposes as misconception that leftism generally is authoritarian.

I really don't see how it does that, the original doesn't even have authoritarianism indicated, it's vibes based

Tankies and rightists are both authoritarian, whereas leftism is anti-authoritarian.

Horseshoe theory inaccurately conflates authoritarian leftism with generally all leftism.

"Authoritarian" as is commonly used often conflates people trying to abolish class domination with those working to uphold it. It flattens very different forms of power by treating coercion that arises in a revolutionary context, where entrenched elites are unlikely to give up their position voluntarily, as equivalent to the everyday normalized coercion that sustains capitalist rule.

Liberal democracies enforce property relations through police, courts, and prisons, yet this use of authority is typically treated as neutral or simply how society works. Challenges to that order are then singled out as specifically authoritarian.

Framing politics around "authoritarian versus anti-authoritarian" also allows capitalist domination in general to pass as freedom while collapsing the entire radical left into a caricature, for example by dismissing it all as "tankie."

As an anarchist, I want to see class society abolished altogether, not endlessly managed or reformed. Every social order exercises authority, the real question is whose interests are being served by that authority.

We break capitalist domination by expanding consciousness that both liberal capitalism and state capitalism are authoritarian systems that rob the working class.

Every state generates a class antagonism. Every state protects its oppression by a narrative about the ruling class serving the interests of the working class.

A distinction may be found between those whose power is justified by an intention to abolish class versus those relying on other justifications of power, but all are incapable of delivering liberation. A people may be liberated only by rejecting the narrative. The distinction ultimately is superficial. Once authoritarian communists consolidate power, they dismantle every current in society that is authentically liberatory, because they cannot endure the challenge.

I agree that all states reproduce domination and justify it through ideology, but framing liberation primarily as a matter of expanding consciousness is overly deterministic in its own way.

Capitalist domination is enforced through material institutions that constrain people regardless of what they believe. Rejecting the narrative is necessary I don't think it's sufficient to actually end the system.

Treating all authority as equivalent, or differences as superficial, flattens real differences in how power is exercised and contested. It does so without meaningfully explaining how domination is actually dismantled.

Communist governments will often suppress liberatory currents, that outcome follows from centralized power reproducing itself. However, that is also contextualized by capitalist governments attempting to undermine them. There's not some inevitable law that makes all revolutionary struggle collapse into the same form, which is what the'authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian' lens implies.

Overemphasizing the distinction among different justifications of power plays into the myth that certain consolidations of power are a path toward liberation. We should critically examine the differences while also remaining aware of the commonalities.

Ultimately, rejection of all authority is essential, even if not sufficient, for emancipation. Thus, it is constructive to propagate the understanding that authoritarian leftism is in many ways quite similar to rightism.

Saying authoritarian leftism is 'quite similar' to rightism collapses historically and materially different projects into a moral equivalence that explains very little about how power is produced, resisted or dismantled.

Rejecting all authority is an essential commitment that we do agree on. However, if that rejection erases distinctions in context, structure and antagonism then it becomes less a tool for emancipation and more a shorthand that discourages serious analysis of how domination actually operates and how it might be undone.