a drawing of a person wearing a balaclava and holding a gun with the text “all my homies hate tankies” :3
No gods no masters.
Authoritarians of all kinds fuck off!
Most communists/socialists arent tankies (even if .ml tries really hard to convince everyone otherwise) but identify with hammer and sickle too :(
But fk tankies, I’m with you on that
I love my anarchist comrades and I love my communist comrades. I hate seeing memes like this. May we all be lucky enough to argue in the midst of a real revolution. Until then, focus on the fucking fascists.
Unity above all else. Absolutely. However Tankie rhetoric in good faith or from an agent provocateur is something that needs to be addressed directly. Any power structure without egalitarian praxis is antithetical to the movement. Communism and Anarchism are very similar to the point where there are anarcho communists.
I want to make sure that there is space for us to figure out self governance immediately after the revolution. I don’t want to rely on a nascent “interim” government to hand it down to me.
Peace, Justice, and Anarchy >:3
Anyone who thinks Tankies and anarchists can get along should look up the CNT-FAI, the Ukrainoan Black Army, the Kronstadt Rebellion, and the Korean People’s Association in Manchuria and see what happened when they all worked with tankies. And if anyone wants to see how tankies compare today heres some fucked up shit about the largest ML party in the US.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/14wF1Ti5GT2w5GZmwqvhvk6uH4zUss_a-B2GZ9NZEx74/mobilebasic
https://fashbusters.wordpress.com/2020/12/30/psl-stalked-doxxed-harassed-steven-powers-accuser/
if they’ll help hold a barricade idgaf
And how did that turn out in Spain?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Days
But I agree to an extent, tankies are not our biggest problem rn. Utilitarian alliances are fine. But never forget that they are not fighting for freedom
ive been in action with tankies and they were a pain in the butt, making decisions that affect all of us hierarchically and not sharing info, just expecting us to do whatevever their leaders decide
better than nothing maybe but i wish they were cooler
I’m deep left libertarian, borderline anarchist, but if I have to make a choice between auths- tankies or Nazis- I’ll take tankies every time.
No reason to settle when talking about revolution
What if I told you that’s a false dichotomy and not a choice you will ever have to make?
I remember a time when tankies were just the militant leftists that would literally and physically punch nazis. That was pretty much the only qualification required, anarchist or communist: if you were willing to do violence on a nazi you were the tankie and it didn’t require some stance on NATO geopolitics.
It never meant this. It was a slur against authoritarian “socialists” to start with
I just remember that’s what we called the de-facto bouncers at the bar I used to frequent. Whom I witnessed remove a few nazis. (The bar was not too far from the greyhound station that supplied a frequent supply of tan jumpsuits.) But this was right after Occupy Wall Street, so ancient history.
Perhaps. You can read about the word here
this is interesting. so sometime between the Communist Party of Great Britain and 2017 the word devolved to mean “nazi puncher”, then returned to its roots as describing authoritarian communists? am i getting that right?/gen
i have never seen firsthand that nazi punching usage. i have only know it to describe authoritarian communists
Ugh this type of bullshit infighting within leftist spaces is about as serious as debating your tabletop RPG actions, and sends regular people packing. None of this shit matters. Real people don’t care about it and they have no idea what a tankie is. Feds love this bullshit. We’re losing, we lost, the world is becoming a fascist hellscape but apparently somebody has time to make memes about fighting each other. It’s amazing how that always seems to happen, especially now when you’d think most people could feel unified?
To fix everything people gotta stop being tribalist idiots. Lol!! Maybe try to get murdoch and Koch the memo
disagree i think it’s
a) fun
b) helpful to be aware of the stakes at play. authoritarianism has hurt many people and it does no justice to be quiet about that.
c) something that doesn’t even happen that often anyway so like idc
apparently somebody has time to make memes
A) to be fair, memes are the principal monetization strategy of the internet
B) there is a factory somewhere that is mass producing injection-molded fake dog shit out of plastic and this post is the thing that gets your hackles up about an ineffectual expenditure of time, thought and human capital?
Thanks a lot, now I’m just thinking about the fake dog shit factory.
Calling tankies leftist is a stretch
yknow what feds love? hierarchical organisations, where they just gotta assassinate or compromise the leader to make it fall appart or coopt the entire organisation.
but real talk discussions like this are valuable for voicing real criticism against harmful “leftist” ideologies and through that developing our own views more wholistically. and this is important. you cant only criticise fascists, neo-liberals, and fudalists, or you might miss out on the underlying criticisms and will reproduce their flaws because of that. and while tankies might be able to do similar work as anarchists in the here and now, they are still flawed and this will only get worse, the more power they get. this discussion is important to any real person, who because of it wont fall for the lie of authoritarianism or might even escape it.
and this world is turning fascist but tankies are cheering on half of them. you know what sends regular people packing? support for china, the soviet union, and north korea. authoritarianism takes the credibility away from libratory struggles.
also its just good to vent frustrations sonetimes…
actually it is the exact opposite. Feds love decentralized organizing that is completely ineffectual. Why do you think anarchist thought is essentially entirely an american project that is never snubbed out? If you actually challenged power you’d be assassinated. See: long history of US agitators that were actually merc’d by the US govt as a direct result of them actually challenging power.
What is the symbol in the back, behind the person?
Looks like the warhammer 40k chaos star
lmao i had no idea. i hope its not some cringe shit
Its used by a lot. In your case (anarchism) its the symbol for anarcho-nihilism. Originates from a Michael Moorcock book series
Digging the anti-corporate vibes of a Games Workshop Chaos Star.
The chaos star comes from before Warhammer. It comes from the Elric of Malniboné books by Michael Moorcock (unfortunate last name lol). The symbol has been adopted by anarcho-nihilists, which is the context for this usage
His star is actually different.
The Moorcock star is 8 outwards arrows with radial symmetry (not very chaotic to have symmetry but we’ll get to that)
Games Workshop (whose early writers were largely anarchist and heavily inspired by Moorcock) added a circle to the symbol, with the arrows escaping the bounds (like in the anarchy A). They’re also often, but not always, asymmetrical. Also, sometimes it’s not! Sometimes it’s just Moorcock’s! Chaos, bitch! There’s specific meaning behind a lot of the differences but it’s not relevant.
That’s the Games Workshop Chaos Star. Period. It even has similar arrowhead design to the arrow heads used directly on the figures.
For reference, this is a particularly complicated Warhammer Chaos Star:
Note in particular the lines on the outside of the circle, in between the main 8 arrows.
Anarchists aren’t the only ones that use the star btw:
Which is why I downvoted this shit, as it happens. Real anarchists aren’t ripping off corporate symbols to beef with Marxists in 2025.
Not the smart ones, anyways. There’s plenty of black fascists running around, red fascists are going to have to take a number.
That all said, I haven’t read a lot of Moorcock, compared to way too much Warhammer. If you’re saying they got their variations from Moorcock too I’ll believe you.
Anarcho-nihilists and insurrectionary anarchists are the ones typically using the symbol, and they don’t usually care if its the Moorcock one or the Games Workshop one. Won’t deny, yeah this one’s the Games Workshop version. But I also think its basically arguing semantics whether they’re using the Moorcock one, an anarcho-nihilist one, or a GW one. Whether its the GW one or not is sorta irrelevant (I was just trying to provide some history and context, won’t deny I missed the circle which does make it the GW version), as its clearly being used in an anarchist context. All I was saying was Moorcock is credited with the original, and Games Workshop were directly inspired by Moorcock and also used it. However I do not feel its fair to equate op or anyone that uses the symbol to fascists. Yes some use the chaos star but it is a very specific and niche version of it.
I also don’t think its a good idea to just give up the symbol because a couple irrelevant basement dwelling fascists try to use a niche version of the chaos star. I’m tired of leftists just letting fascists take symbols away without a fight. I don’t see Marxists dropping the hammer and sickle cause NazBols use it.
Lastly, anarchists are certainly beefing with tankies. And they are going to use their symbols to do it. Chaos star included because it is an anarchist symbol whether you agree with its use or not. I have it on my punk jacket, I am a very clear anarchist, and I very much have beef with tankies because I see them as fascists with a red coat of paint.
Should I work with Marxist-Leninists?
If you’re organising at work or around housing issues, the people you work with are not going to all have the same politics at you, and your opinions on the July 1918 uprising of Left Socialist Revolutionaries after their expulsion from the Bolshevik government are not relevant to that situation. Yes, really, no-one gives a shit. You’re relating to each other as workers in that situation, not as representatives of a political niche, at least we hope not.
[…]
If there are real political and organisational disagreements, it’s better to be open about them than gloss over them, and retain some independence.
A former roommate of mine had a hysterical emotional breakdown, and spent the following 2 months convincing everyone we both knew that I was mentally unstable to the point of needing to be institutionalized…
… because I laughed in his face when he described Hu Jintao being very publically arrested at a mass televised CCP conference… as ‘being put into witness protection due to a threat on his life’.
…
You see, the problem with Tankies is that they’re astoundingly insecure, extremely manipulative, and fully believe in any means justifying their ends.
Tankie roommates: Not even once.
While I do genuinely feel sorry that this roommate of yours behaved in such awful and shitty way, my point was about the larger communities as a whole. Especially now that there are openly fascist people in power in the US and in a lot of other countries, I believe it’s even more important to be united. Or at least, as I quoted before, know where the differences lie.
That doesn’t mean being supportive of wrong behaviors and/or people of course. Being critical of wrongdoing is an essential skill. But in my opinion one can’t be as critical when generalizing about such large groups
I’ll continue to trust Tankies as much as the historical record indicates Anarchists should.
Which is 0, less than 0, some negative amount.
If you know of any historical revolutionary movements involving a distinct and significant amount of Anarchists that did not include Tankies betraying and/or murdering all their Anarchist ‘allies’, please let me know.
EDIT: Here, I can ‘read more theory, noob’ too
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-tankies-and-the-left-unity-scam
I may not be an Anarchist, but i’m sure saving that link. Thanks.
tankie colloquially refers to communists who deluded themselves into thinking authoritarianism can breed anything other than opression and that to give power to the people, you first got to take it away from the people.
its not impossible to work with tankies on low stake joined causes but with their usually hierarchical and authoritarian organising structures (that they even try to spread) they still make for shitty partners.
their idelology is misguided and harmful. i hope they all eventually learn and become anarchists. power to the people
tankie colloquially refers to communists who deluded themselves into thinking authoritarianism can breed anything other than opression and that to give power to the people, you first got to take it away from the people.
That is probably the most on point description.
Yep just keep punching left 😮💨
"First they came for the **socialists**, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." —Martin NiemöllerTankies. Not leftists. Tankies specifically.
Isn’t tankie just a pejorative for socialist?
Tankie is a pejorative for anyone to the left of Netanyahu.
isn’t it ironic how the quote you cited is exactly what happens every single time MLs take power? you’re only antifascists until it’s time to criticize red fascism
i deffo hate some tankies, in the same way that i deffo hate some vegetarian/vegans when they actively chase people away for seemingly no reason. sometimes though i do feel like i see more blind hate for entire communities than actual worthwhile discussion.
i guess the problem could really just come down to your definition of “tankie”. to some folks it’s a very specific kind of obvious troll, and to others it’s just anyone on an .ml instance.
and not to turn it into a “lesser evil” discussion, but between .world and .ml, i definitely know which which meme community i’m hanging out in. i’ve yet to have a single bad interaction with anyone in .ml communities, but i also don’t talk politics in fucken marxist/leninist spaces either. YMMV hahahah
