this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Not what I said, tankies still exist, their ideology is still a bad one that relies heavily on centralized authoritarianism, but we're currently in a situation that the populist political movement that has gained so much traction in the current moment heavily leans toward fascism with capitalist authoritarianism as opposed to when tankies were much more common during the Cold War at the height of the Soviet Union's geopolitical power enfo.
As to why leftists do spend so much time fighting against the tankies, it's that most present day leftists do not want to let an authoritarian ideology gain any kind of foot hold in the more anarchist/anti-authoritarian leftist movements of our time. The geopolitical question of our era is Authoritarianism vs Democracy.
I know you didn't say it, I'm saying there's basically nobody in the left who supports authoritarianism. There's an effort in many leftist communities to conflate Marxism-Leninism with authoritarianism in a sort of anti-communist leftism. There are plenty of Marxist-Leninists, but would you call them authoritarian? What about the organization of government in worker-elected soviets is authoritarian?
Marxism-Leninism inherent to the ideology requires a centralized authority to seize control of the means of production on behalf of the proletariat and establish a one party state and has no plans to actually distribute that power back to the people. They are authoritarians and simply shift the totalitarian power from the totalitarian capitalist few in control of the means of production to a new totalitarian communist state in control of the means of production. That's authoritarianism dresses up as a benevolent dictatorship.
The ideas of worker led industries where leadership is elected is a great idea and many implementations of worker coops and worker run corporations in the day have worked quite well, but centralized economic planning like what we saw in the days of the soviet union throughout the Cold War ended up failing quite spectacularly on multiple occasions.
I could go on a whole tangent on worker owned and led coops, and ideas on how to leverage the responsiveness of a free market with the incentive systems focused on solving distribution rather than maximizing profit, but that's veering into a tangentially related essay instead of staying on topic about tankies and authoritarianism.
False. What's your source on this? Even in attempts like the USSR, most of the agricultural land was worked through collectively owned Kolkhoz. And in the starts of the USSR, many Marxist-Leninists like Trotsky or Kollontai argued for increasing protagonism of unions in the decision-making power of the state. Furthermore, Marxist-Leninists believe the power should fundamentally reside collectively and democratically in worker-councils or soviets. The existence of a state isn't antithetical with democracy, and the state making collective decisions based on elected soviet representatives isn't authoritarian, but a very high form of democracy.
Again, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of history and of Marxism-Leninism. You seem to believe that Marxist-Leninists want to impose a purely top-down structure, but that's nothing further from the truth. The concept of the "vanguard party" isn't a benevolent dictatorship, it's an organization of Marxist intellectual elites that continuously engages with the people, and translates their demands into Marxist language and policy. The leadership in many industries in the USSR was elected by the unions, not imposed top-down from a bureaucracy of party members. The existence of a central economic plan isn't antithetical to democracy, on the contrary it can catalyze the will of the majority into concrete economic policy instead of leaving it to the independent desires of cooperatives that may or may not align with that of the majority. As for central planning "failing spectacularly on multiple occasions", again I'm going to need sources. The USSR's economy steadily grew at a very fast pace from 1920 to 1980s, with a minor hiccup in growth in the last decade of its existence, and the only time with big shortages being perestroika, when liberalizations took place and markets were allowed.
But why do you think markets are a better mechanism? The lack of a central planning doesn't automatically mean democracy, it means just that independent actors do whatever they can. Economic planning is extremely mature as a science nowadays and we see it with (sadly evil) examples like Walmart or Amazon, and with modern computational power we could truly bring wonders to the world if we planned our economies as collectively and democratically as possible.