I remain at the same place, yet to understand how one can be a communist and not authoritarian. And I feel like you’re failing to interrogate whether your concept of authoritarianism is being used with any amount of consistency or if it’s just a club you wield against people who have positions you disagree with for other reasons.
Anarchists are cool, but they’re really only a minority of communists worldwide. Whatever you think “authoritarianism” is (as far as I’m concerned if you believe in having a state at all, then that state will exercise a monopoly on violence and will be repressive) it describes almost every single communist on planet earth. The game of splitting hairs on what does and doesn’t count as a “tankie” achieves nothing but divide a movement that has common cause.
If I’m being forthright, I’ll just go ahead and ask: if anarchists are the only communists, why even have the concept of “tankies” at all? Why not just say you’re pro-anarchist and anti-communist? From my perspective, all that the whole thing of saying that there supposedly are communists who aren’t “tankies” achieves is create two categories:
Then because you can find real examples of the first category, you can find the flaws they have, and compare them to the ideal people in the second category. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe there really are a ton of Marxists out there that figured out the secret to having a perfectly consistent anti-authoritarian ideology that is still distinct from anarchism. If you could let me know who they are, that’d be awesome.
If you disagree that .ml are communist and insist that they’re “tankies” instead, it seems to imply that not all communists are “tankies.” However, every single communist I’m aware of is called a tankie. What does a communist who isn’t a tankie look like? Are there examples of such a thing?
Osama Bin Laden and I happen to have the same position that the end of the USA as a political entity would be a positive thing. I probably also agree with him that breathing and having meals is necessary for survival.
Are either of those propositions made less true by virtue of Osama also believing them?
what is the difference between socialism and communism?