Tankie doesn’t really mean anything to me anymore. Even self-proclaimed tankies often have trouble defining it in a way that is consistent among leftist groups.
A tankie is anyone to the left of whoever is using the pejorative. Usually because they expressed a critique of imperialism, or aren’t sufficiently racist towards the Chinese.
This seems to be how I see it used most. I usually stick to calling people tankies when they walk around explicitly talking about how proud they are to be one.
Anyone you see self identifying as a tankie is just fucking around because of how meaningless the term is. If you want to insult a Marxist try directly engaging with whatever it is they’re saying that annoys you. You might even learn something along the way.
I was under the impression it was the intersection of the venn diagram of communists and imperialists, as long as imperialist means imperialist (defined as using economic, military, diplomatic and cultural power to influence countries around you in a way that is beneficial to you, and may be either beneficial, inconsequential or detrimental to them) and not just “western and capitalist”
That’s generally a disagreement over what “Imperialism” even means. “Anti-Imperialists” are talking about Lenin’s identification of modern Monopoly Capitalism as it brutally expropriates wealth from the Global South through outsourcing and debt traps with the IMF, like Coke and the Columbian death squads.
Tankie doesn’t really mean anything to me anymore. Even self-proclaimed tankies often have trouble defining it in a way that is consistent among leftist groups.
A tankie is anyone to the left of whoever is using the pejorative. Usually because they expressed a critique of imperialism, or aren’t sufficiently racist towards the Chinese.
This seems to be how I see it used most. I usually stick to calling people tankies when they walk around explicitly talking about how proud they are to be one.
Anyone you see self identifying as a tankie is just fucking around because of how meaningless the term is. If you want to insult a Marxist try directly engaging with whatever it is they’re saying that annoys you. You might even learn something along the way.
Knowing Marxists, we also will never shut up lol
Yeah I’m a tankie
generally it vaguely means “communists” as well as “anti-imperialists”, with the caveat that left communists are excluded as a separate thing
I was under the impression it was the intersection of the venn diagram of communists and imperialists, as long as imperialist means imperialist (defined as using economic, military, diplomatic and cultural power to influence countries around you in a way that is beneficial to you, and may be either beneficial, inconsequential or detrimental to them) and not just “western and capitalist”
That’s generally a disagreement over what “Imperialism” even means. “Anti-Imperialists” are talking about Lenin’s identification of modern Monopoly Capitalism as it brutally expropriates wealth from the Global South through outsourcing and debt traps with the IMF, like Coke and the Columbian death squads.