Come one come all to the Lemmy-verse! It's nice and cozy here, we do have some "bad parts of town" but you can do an instance block and not deal with them lol
Hopefully .world will serve as a quarantine instance for all the cringe-ass former redditors who love strawmen and reductionism and lame as fuck sayings like "tankie triad" and "narwhal bacon"
In my book, it isn't "tankie" until they are the kind who claim all the authoritarian regimes that were never democratic to be "communist".
You can't have communism without democracy, that's the whole deal, it's in the freaking name, community.
Claiming to be "communist" when your regime is authoritarian is like claiming to make soup without liquids.
You can replace water with other stuff like broth, or even beer and wine, to make soup. But you need a liquid to make soup. That's soup's whole deal. Without a liquid as the base, or if you take out all the liquid after doing it, whatever you are doing, whatever you call it, it ain't soup.
For example, portable soup may have "soup" in the name, but it isn't soup. It's dehydrated food. It may have been soup once, but it isn't soup.
The thing is, AES states are democratic. They usually don't have competing liberal parties like Western countries, but instead a more comprehensive form based on electing delegates. For example, the USSR functioned like this:
Further, the "point" of Communism isn't Democracy to begin with. Communism is a prediction, not a perfect society created in a lab, of what will necessarily happen as humanity develops. Marx predicted humanity will move towards a fully publicly owned and planned economy with democratic control because industry gets larger and more complex over time. I think if you take away that Communism is based on analysis and not on some Utopia, you take away the reason why Communism makes sense to begin with.
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical. It is commonly used by anti-authoritarian leftists, including anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists, democratic socialists, and reformists to criticise Leninism, although the term has seen increasing use by liberal and right‐wing factions as well.