This user is blocking me apparently. I have never interacted with them before and my bluesky usage is honestly really fucking low.
Fed or fascist.
Anyway I don’t think the Black Panthers were the most successful, I’m going to have to give that title to the Gay Liberation Front and the persistence of pride parades as a cultural artifact of their work still existing to this day not only in the US but internationally.
To libs, any Revolution that succeeds is Evil and Tankie. Any Revolution that fails is Le Based Anti-authoritarianism.
The Panthers two broad factions were influenced by Mao’s China and the DPRK, respectively. But because they failed, the Panthers become a historical Rorschach test for liberals to project their (wildly inconsistent) values onto.
So conditioned to failure all they can aspire to is some kind of “beautiful failure”
The idealist yearns for the lion pit
Authoritarianism
National security
Tankies are just Bolsheviks now? So Mao is off the tankie list? Disappointing
I think the thing that makes liberals insidious is how they do the exact same thing as the right, where they will just deny reality through ignorance and spread their false reality.
Liberalism is defined as a capitalist democratic system. Conservatism is defined as the current most dominant and prevalent political system. Right now, Conservatism and Liberalism are only different on the issue of Queer people.
There are conservative liberals and progressive liberals. They both support the capitalist democratic system but differ on social issues.
I’d go a step further and say that in modern parlance “conservative” is more just a euphemism for “the literal worst and most reactionary liberals” than anything. Sometimes it’s a euphemism for “open fascist”, but even a lot of them are still within the generously broad extreme right wing fringe of liberalism, which has happily employed fascists time and again to serve its ends.
There’s also abortion and a few other issues, but of course you’re right that they mostly agree.
The gay queerstion
They are the right. They just constantly try to make themselves look palatable by pretending to give a shit about things like equality and healthcare. That’s why they talk nearly indistinguishably from cons.
Authoritarianism is when the government does stuff and the more stuff it does the more authoritarian it is. If it does a whole lot of stuff, then it’s a dictatorship
No shade to the Panthers but idk if I would consider them the most successful in US history. Surely the CP organizers in the CIO and the broader Popular Front were much more successful.
Still “tankies” though - probably even more so than the Panthers.
The cp organisers in the cio sold out the proletariat to support the US’s war for hegemony over the capitalist bloc in exchange for some table scraps for (primarily white) american workers. And then they got macarthy’d for their troubles. Less successful at building a communist revolution than the panthers imo; they fumbled a potentially revolutionary moment, whereas the panthers did probably the best anyone could hope for in a non-revolutionary period
That’s certainly an interesting way to frame WW2. I’m sure the communists (including those in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, etc.) at the time saw it quite differently. They saw aligning with non-fascist capitalists as a necessary evil to win the war of total enslavement/extermination the Nazi and Japanese empires were waging on the world. Should the CPUSA have opposed the war?
I’d agree the American Communists (and the USSR) fucked up badly after the fact though.
In Vietnam, we (western Allies) helped put the French back in power after the Vietnamese had almost kicked the Japanese out
In China, we backed anti-communists (and to a less extent the communists) while we took Japan (and helped quash communist resistance to the emperor there!), its island colonies and half of Korea (where we also crushed revolution and installed a puppet government). After the war, we continued backing the anti-communists in China, and we continue backing them to this day from our island bases in Japan and Taiwan.
The Soviet Union did repeatedly request western support or alliance against fascism. The directives from Moscow—in the 20s early 30s “social democrats are the left wing of fascism”; from around 33 to Molotov-Ribbentrop “unite with the social democrats and left liberals against fascism”; from 39 to Barbarossa again “social democrats are the left wing of fascism”; and from Barbarossa to the end of the war again “unite with the liberals”—are a large part of why the cpusa took their positions.
The Soviet leadership thought these diplomatic maneuverings were necessary to preserve soviet power. I dont think they were “wrong” in the sense that “if i were in their position without the benefit of like 80 years’ hindsight i’d do better.” But viewed from the present with the benefit of hindsight, imo the molotovribbentrop pact and the calls to unite behind bourgeois governments were bad decisions that ultimately strengthened imperialisms chains. I think the ussr shoulda kept the “fash and socdems and liberals are all bourgeois enemies” stance throughout the whole period instead of zigzagging.
Like to start with, the Nazis were a paper tiger at first, that only grew big because people (French and Brits 1933-38, Soviets 1938-41) got scared and gave it fangs and claws. If the soviets hadnt made the pact with the nazis, they wouldnt have been able to wage their war across europe nearly as well, much less Barbarossa (Barbarossa was largely supplied by stockpiled soviet fuel). They would have sputtered out and fallen on their own, because their economy (like Italy and Japan’s) were in crisis and only held together by plunder, or tried to invade with far, far less resources from no soviet trade.
It also becomes very obvious, viewing western diplomatic records, that they had no real intention of intervening unless it looked like the soviets were winning and they needed to step in to prevent the spread of communism. Thats why they kept to Africa and Italy at first, despite Stalin’s repeated requests for them to open a second front against the Germans.
As Stalin stops making those requests as much or as desperately, is when they actually sent boots on the ground, bc if they didnt, the soviets would have occupied all of Germany and at minimum Greece, Italy and France would have communist revolutions. Stalin, for his part, honouring his alliance with the bourgeois states, called for the french, greek and italian communists to abandon their revolution and join with the liberal government. The greeks refused; and British soldiers shot them.
My view is that neither of these alliances (except the lendlease) benefited the USSR or the world in the long run, and they were fully unnecessary for the USSR (or other communist movements) to win the war (again, except possibly the lendlease, but even that is debated by the people that study it). The soviets would have been better served to take a strong “revolution” stance from like 1935 and support domestic armed resistance to fascism from 1939 onwards than to sell oil and other raw materials to the nazis.
But again, if I were there in Moscow in august 1939 or June 1941 or whenever with limited information idk what i’d think
Wrt CPUSA they should have at minimum absolutely opposed any annexationist goals and pushed for greater economic and military support for both the ussr and to armed resistance to fascism (and should have pushed this support to be entirely rather than only partially free), including anticolonial resistance to the vichy french government in their colonies. They should have used strikes, protests, etc, to push the USA to do more, or expose the gaps between their rhetoric of liberation and policy of domination to agitate and pull more into the movement. Instead they wholeheartedly ate up and supported the governments propaganda about the US being a force for good and actively opposed workers’ job actions in favour of supporting the war effort and kickstarting the modern military industrial complex and giving the US global hegemony and a fig leaf of democracy.
But viewed from the present with the benefit of hindsight, imo the molotovribbentrop pact and the calls to unite behind bourgeois governments were bad decisions that ultimately strengthened imperialisms chains
The Soviet Union started industrializing in 1929 with the first 5-year plan, and since that moment until the Great Patriotic War, the country grew at astonishing rates of 10-15% GDP per year through industrial output. Every single year they could get of truce was absolutely necessary to fight the industrialized fascist monster in the west. Delaying the war by whichever means possible was the correct decision with all the hindsight in the world, and it may very well have saved Europe from Fascism
And without Soviet oil and other materials, the nazis wouldnt have been in nearly as strong a position in 1940, much less 1941. They gained much more from the pact than the soviets. Without it, their invasion would have faltered much sooner bc the war wasnt just delayed it was made worse and harder.
The german war machine was actively supplied and german communists handed over, their eastern border could be left underguarded while they attacked west and the entire international communist movement was directed to suspend antifascist propaganda, etcetc instead of spending two years supporting polish, czechoslovak, french, italian, etc, resistances to fascism.
This made the reorientation back to antifascism in 41 difficult and less effective, bc many of the most committed and principaled antifascists had left their parties in disgust over endorsing MR.
USSR didn’t expect France to fold so quickly and assumed that the war on the Western Front would be long and costly.
If the soviets hadnt made the pact with the nazis, they wouldnt have been able to wage their war across europe nearly as well, much less Barbarossa (Barbarossa was largely supplied by stockpiled soviet fuel). They would have sputtered out and fallen on their own, because their economy (like Italy and Japan’s) were in crisis and only held together by plunder, or tried to invade with far, far less resources from no soviet trade.
If the Soviets haven’t made the pact, then they would’ve run a very real risk of fighting a two front war with Germany and Japan. The Soviets were already at war with Japan when the nonaggression pact was signed between the Soviet Union and Germany. Similarly, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Japan right before Operation Barbarossa, which once again saved the Soviet Union from fighting a two front war.
I don’t think it’s a miscalculation at all for the Soviet Union to do everything in its power to prevent the opening of two fronts at the opposite ends of the country.
The issue is that (again with hindsight), the “expand into the ussr” faction of japanese leadership had already been solidly defeated by 1939 by the “expand in China” and “expand in SEA” factions, so there was no possibility of the border skirmishes expanding to a full second front. And Japan already running into overextension problems and the limits of their production by 41. So again, while I get why the soviets made the choices they did at the time, with hindsight it seems like the wrong choice imo
I’ve never heard of Black Panthers advocating for Violence against the working class to enforce political dogma so calling them Tankies is a stretch.
fuck yeah love too have no idea what words mean
If the black panther party weren’t tankies, the term is truly meaningless. They were explicitly, openly Marxist-Leninist, an ideology you may know as “Stalinism”.
The Panthers were pretty explicitly pro-China, pro-Vietnam, and pro-DPRK. That alone is enough for them to be smeared as “tankies” by Western so-called leftists.
