In defense of Tankyism

There is a good joke that the Slovenian Philosopher (and, if I am not mistaken, current persona non grata) Slavoj Zizek would often tell, where, when asked where the Balkans begin, a person from Austria would point east to Hungary, the Hungarian South to Slovenia, the Slovene to Bosnia, the Bosnian to Serbia, Serbia to Albania, and so on and so on, until at last you reach the geographic end of Europe in Greece, and they point you northward back to where you began your journey.

There is much the same going on with the Tankies in Leftist circles, where, in this imaginary ideological journey, you may begin with the liberal progressives and ask them where Tankyism begins, and then they direct you to those wild-eyed socialist talking about things likes “eating the rich” and “wealth redistribution”. You go to one of these fellows, and they say that they are “Democratic Socialists”, and not the dreaded Tankies, they want Socialism, of course, but they want to do it within the confines of the system, and they are definitely not those nutters that seem to think we need the blood of the rich to flow like so many rivulets down the street, and directs you to them. You go to one of these folks, and you find that they are not Tankies either, because yes, they want revolution, and yes, they are Socialists, but they are not Authoritarian, they are Anti-Authoritarian Socialists, they are Libertarian Socialists, they are Anarchists, and they are of a different breed than those Authoritarian bootlicker tankies, and they may even tell you where to start on your journey to find the beginning of Tankydom- the Trotskyists, who worships the man that butchered all those innocent sailors in Kronstadt. The Trots, upon being told that they are Tankies, will probably look offended, disgusted even, and tell you that Tankies are those Stalinists yonder- the so called Marxist Leninists. The Maoist may tell you that it is the Hoxhaists, and the Hoxhaist the Marxist Leninist apologist for China, and these folks may point you to the folks that defend Assad, or take this or that position, and you will find yourself in a similar situation as our fellow looking for the Balkans, led about the nose but still unable to locate one of those dreaded Tankie.

The title of this essay is perhaps a misnomer then, for my contention is that there are no such things as Tankies, it is a term to signal disaffiliation, to present yourself as one of the respectable and serious socialists, not the crazy wild kind that is embodied in the Tankie. Therefore, a defense of Tankyism is a bit akin to defending the doctrines of the Witches of Salem, or of defending Pokemonic Satanism, there is no point in defending what doesn’t exist against their fevered critics- you should defend the victims of such moral panics, of course, but why go the extra length of defending its non-existent ideology?

Yet, there is merit in the Tankie attitude, in so far as this imaginary Tankie is someone opposed to the respectable kind of Socialism, this polite Socialism which you can take home to your mother- in so far as Tankyism is a signal for something “out of the pail” for the bourgeois. This attitude is one which rejects the bourgeois respectability and bourgeois intellectual acknowledgment that the respectable socialist seeks- and which the respectable socialist tries to earn by, to paraphrasing Lenin, defanging Marx to the point where he can be reduced to some fairly nice and palatable, if commonplace, moral axioms the bourgeois can swallow without choking, and diluting him further with more respectable theories to make up for all the sharp, revolutionary edges. Therefore, by breaking free of this asinine attempt to become the sort of Socialist that left-curious sectors of the Bildungsbuergertum may be won over to and vote for come election time, the sort of “Socialist” who can discuss Marx conception of the ontological status of the Revolutionary Subject and the epistemic privileged of the working class, but offer no more than to tell you to hold your nose and vote Biden come November. Tankyism sharpens the edge of theory by refusing to prettify it for the bourgeois, to finally put it back into the use as a weapon of the proletarian against the bourgeois class!

Thus, the supposed “Tankie” faults of refusing (and it is perhaps an excessive refusal) to accept the usual bourgeois tales of the disasters of Socialism at it actually exists, a refusal to accept the numbers that come out of the Victims of Communism Memorial about the death count that is caused by Marxism as it exists, their willingness to look back upon the bugabears that bourgeois use to frighten their children into behaving, Chairman Mao or Joesph Stalin or Vladimir Lenin, and openly admit admiration for their historical achievement and their theoretical advances, to look beyond what decent, respectable people tell us where we ought to limit ourselves and what parameters we socialists should be allowed to play if they are to take us seriously. Ultimately, it is about what actually wins over Working Class Power and let the bourgeois fear us for it. This then, is the essence of what a Tankie is, one that refuses to be limited by parameters imposed upon the left by their enemies, and, indeed, an identification with the enemies and their toadies’ dis-identification.

Here, many “Tankies” fall into error, for in identifying with the bourgeois’ dis-identification, they are, like the “respectable socialists”, still tying themselves to the bourgeois. Thus, where the bourgeois lies and tells us that Assad is an evil man, possibly the devil birth upon the earth, this breed of Tankie, then, turn around and say “Assad is the perfect man, the Lion of Damascus and an angel amongst men”, where the bourgeois will lie about the People’s Republic of China, and say that it is an authoritarian hellhole where everyone is being oppressed all the time, and the more salacious the stories of Oriental despotism, the truer it is, the Tankie just inverts that and say that China is a worker’s paradise and the CPC can do no wrong at all, and not only that, but China will be the savior of mankind when that magical year of 2049 is reached. That is to say, in their contrarianism, they still tie themselves to the bourgeois’ paradigm just as much as your slavish “respectable, non-Tankie Socialist”.

Many of these supposed “Tankies” are, of course, no comrades, they are, to their marrow, revisionist, obnoxious in how much they mirror the bourgeois in their obsession with China, if to opposite ends; therefore, they are not Communists, nor are they comrades. However, to paraphrase and adapt a line of Lenin’s with respect to the Leftcoms, they are the price we must pay for the sin of the “real” in front of the reflection- they are the price for the much larger portion of the “left”, the opportunism of the respectable Socialist types, who can talk a good game about worker’s power, economic democracy, and whatever phrasemongering they hope sounds radical enough to attract the downwardly mobile scions of the bourgeois- a defanged rebellion against a system they are all too aware is no longer working for them or almost everybody, but too cowardly to think about seriously challenging it. The sort of Socialist that can on the one hand denounce US Imperialism for its venality and cruelty, and still sign open letters pleading for the US to do Humanitarian Interventionism. A Socialism that tells us to put aside sectarian differences, and then go on to sneer at other socialists for being this or that (it is indeed odd that the folks that decry the folly of leftist sectarianism and the need for a big tent, also are among the first to proudly declare how much they hate the tankies). You can find amongst them the so called “Marxist” and so called “Anarchist” who can do no more than tell you that Communism, Anarchism, Socialism is coming in the future, but for now, all you need to do is vote Blue, Bernie preferably, but Biden if push comes to shove.