How much anti-"tankie" stuff is feds trying to keep the western left toothless?

Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, North Korea, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.

https://redsails.org/tankies/

Excellent points

It’s impossible to know. It’s like when people ask if the feds are keeping tabs on this website. Like objectively, it would be silly for them to expend any resources on that - we shitpost, we’re very small, and half the users are outside the US anyway. We’re not actually organizing anything here (not a criticism, just an observation), so why even bother. I’ve been here since like day 3 (different accounts) and not once have I seen any calls to actionable, criminal violence.

OTOH, feds have infiltrated Marxist reading groups with like 3 people before. They infiltrate milquetoast demsoc DSA chapters. They’ll get in there and fuck things up that are objectively not even a shadow of a threat. So who knows, hard to figure them out.

Making up “anti-tankie” stuff seems very penny ante, but they feds do that kinda stuff anyway.

When it cones to the internet, everything is being monitored. Maybe not some fed browsing the dunk tank all day but most definitely blanket data collection so they can review all the posts here if something else comes up in the future.
- I like to picture feds browsing dunk tank all day crying
The intelligence agencies are tree-shaped management hierarchies like any other, and those produce an incentive for managers to inflate the scope of their work, so they can get more headcount, so they can look more impressive when trying to be promoted further up the hierarchy. So there's definitely an incentive to pretend we're relevant enough to have dedicated people monitoring.

Also being half outside the US means doesn't mean we're less relevant, it means both the FBI and CIA have a chance to pretend we are.

I think anti-communism is so deeply enmeshed in western culture that to a large degree it perpetuates itself regardless of all the propaganda efforts. And, likely, even the propaganda efforts are the result of ignorant people who have been indoctrinated and are perpetuating their cultural beliefs rather than people who actually know history deliberately hiding it.

Yeah, feds will intervene only when an org presents a real threat for the status quo, and even then they'll have to just destroy couple of key figures

I'm sure that they still coordinate and distribute propaganda, but at this point it's mostly on autopilot
I do think perpetuates itself, but I also do really wonder how much upkeep is required. Like, with how bad shit is, if you could shut down all the think tanks, "news", and copaganda, how long before your average person on the street would be indistinguishable from a hexbear user?
- over a long period of time, little by little, a big part of what ultimately brought me here was progressively losing faith in those and slowly learning how to spot it by myself.
  
  if they turned the propaganda off overnight? disfranchised workers would instantly switch to fighting over the right solution, not whether or not we need one.

I would be surprised to find out they were not doing it but I don't believe the tankie panic is all regime propaganda. "Left" anti-communism has an organic component to it as well, founded in the material interests of those participating.

If you are a comfortable western labour aristocrat enjoying a relatively high standard of living based on the exploitation of workers abroad and sometimes also at home then you have something to lose by a revolutionary chance in the social and economic order. You might feel genuinely appalled by racism, queerphobia or the deliberate destruction of the climate for profit and you might sincerely organise and agitate against these evils but you instinctively understand that revolutionary socialism is bad for you personally and know you have to limit your politics to the soft play area of liberalism as not to threaten your own position.

This is on the money. You're driven by the same urges the bourgeois were in the 1950s to call anybody to their left a commie, but it's 2024 and calling somebody to your left a commie feels hollow (particularly when that's what the Republicans have been calling you and the people you vote for your entire life). Tankie is a "new" way to call somebody a commie and it makes you feel a little bit erudite and nuancey.

https://twitter.com/akoz33/status/1232052025514496002

“Literacy” was always the most basic tool of totalitarian propaganda. If you are not literate you can’t be fed communist propaganda. The most steadfast anti-communist I knew in my childhood was my maternal grandfather who was illiterate. Communist propaganda did not reach him

Being literate is commie propaganda

I haven't read a book since I finished being home schooled at 8 years old and them tankie lies don't reach me

Feds, Right Wing Think Tanks, Dem think tanks (but I repeat myself). There's plenty of fools out there mindlessly repeating talking points without knowing any better, but there's also an obscene amount of groups out there stoking the fires of the consent manufacturing machine that can be traced back to feds or capital.

I usually think bot accusations get thrown around quite carelessly. But there was a "tankie"-bashing reddit post pointed out on here a couple weeks back, and the account was so clearly, objectively a bot (mass posts, all anti-communist, almost all spouting 'tankie', comments very rarely related to the post at all, seemed to respond based on keywords, largely targeted subs that talked about 'maps', account was deleted straight after getting called out), that I've started to wonder.

It clearly must happen to some degree. I don't see why else that bot existed. But the real quantity is probably impossible to estimate nowadays.

I didn’t catch that one. Maybe it was a hobby project of some rando patriotic nerd, or perhaps a proof of concept.

It is for sure a psyop. The CIA often pushed ultras and contrarian anarchists just for this reason. Now a days it is cheap heat but marks still go for it.

It's fitting how I see this thread immediately after coming from an Instagram post with this meme:

The comments are what you'd expect, including people accusing "tankies" of being "functionally right-wing" 🤮🤮🤮🤮

Sectarianism is a poison that I can't see as anything such. I feel like it perks up from people wanting to have a clique with a "kewl" aesthetic instead of upholding genuine leftist principles.

I have gotten to a point where I, an anarcho-communist, have just started calling myself a "communist" more than an "anarcho-communist" or "anarchist" alone because I don't want people to think that I have beef with Marxists. I only want to kiss them actually crush

Sometimes, I even just say "leftist" to be even more broad, but it might be a mistake because even succdems apply that term to themselves somewhat often, so once again: 🤮🤮🤮🤮

At the end of the day, when I'm more concerned about capitalists, fascists, imperialists, reactionaries, etc. trying to crush this world, I functionally don't have much time to bicker over the means of achieving communism that much, even though I have my own opinions about that subject.

The only word that isn’t poisoned is communism. The libs will never co-opt that; the brain worms run too deep. They have taken left, leftism, socialism, anarchism...you know what must be done.

Idk I think it's a natural consequence of people getting whipped up over NATO, war with russia and cold war with China.

In order to bring a nation to support the burdens incident to maintaining great military establishments, it is necessary to create an emotional state akin to war psychology. There must be the portrayal of an external menace or of internal conditions rendered intolerable by the unjust restraints of foreign nations. This involves the development to a high degree of the nation-hero nation-villain ideology and the arousing of the population to a sense of the duty of sacrifice.

John Foster Dulles in "War, peace and change" p90

If you don't support the hero-nation, you're part of the villain-nation and will be addressed as such.

villain nation gang

The anti-"tankie" stuff is proof that bourgeoisification theory is correct: privileged workers are bourgeoisified by the superprofits extracted from imperialized nations, they will contort themselves into ideological pretzels to protect their material interests against global communism.

Fortunately, the worsening material conditions caused by the decline of empire are de-bourgeoisifying the workers. The discourse is changing.

This is why I do a lot of posting in Liberistan.

While the reactionaries in the state undoubtedly relish in the timidity of the left and might contribute to it, the liberalism comes from a left that has never tried to seriously confront the forces of the bourgeoisie. Instead the they sit submerged in their own ideology of pacifism and reformism.

They can believe whatever they want if they never have to use it to change the world.

The US has always hated anything left-wing. They were asking people to condemn the Russian Revolution of 1905 years before the CIA or FBI came into existence.

I've seen a lot of anarchists get called tankies even.

At some point it'll stop being a pejorative as it's normalized and used more and more. Maybe even become a sort of playful term like "commie" has become these days.

Then some new pejorative for leftists will become prevalent, and the cycle repeats until we have a revolution)

until we have a revolution

Using the word tankie in 2024 is like using the word hipster in 2014. You're like 5 years behind the zeitgeist and probably a dork.

I don't think it's feds, I think it's just the brainworms one develops after 100 years of cold war propaganda. "Sure, capitalism is literally killing us all, but 1984 animal farm means there can be nothing positive to learn from the USSR or China (who aren't even communist actually)"

A good chunk, but thankfully when you pull a word too much eventually it loses power, but such concepts are lost on libs who are in the 'believe their own bullshit despite reality' stage.

in addition to the people saying they are definetly watching and might just be influencing it, we gotta remember anti-'tankie' propaganda is very ubiquitous. a lot of people are probably anticommunist by default.

fedposting : Why blame the feds when anti-communist propaganda and the American attitude of condescension and need to bully is so prevalent amongst the internet nerds.

less than we all think. liberalism is a disease and very contagious and the people producing this are doing so for ideological reasons

also funny thing: one time i saw an anarchist criticize stalin because "he oppressed trotsky" like ill remember that on my deathbed wild stuff

Trotsky's narcissistic injury and its consequences

The world wide web was largely left leaning academic types. Then it was made more accessible to everyone. All the backwards ass people flooded in. I'm sure the establishment loves the poorly educated. They did have some tense moments around 2011.

It's pretty much all libs and ultras. The feds don't need to do anything re: this discourse except provide material support to libs and ultras and material hindrance to communists.

Online leftism is a hiearchical power struggle to bully the group you don't like and cement yourself as the only good leftists, who fucking cares.