Makes sense, and thank you for the clarification!

They’re between 20 and ~40 years old, and about 25 people in total in my close circles

Actually, most of the people who’d normally be described as tankies (Stalinists, Marxist-Leninists, CPUSA members, other flavors of communist that want to seize state power and use it against the capitalist class) that I’ve met are some variety of queer themselves. In my organizing circles usually the queer folks outnumber the few token cis-het people, so again, it could just be that my IRL circles don’t represent the norm.

For context, I’m usually organizing at the local level. I know that things suck at the national level in a lot of orgs like IWW and CPUSA, there’s toxic leadership in there that have seized power in order to keep their own positions and are really ruining the image and functioning of both orgs. Yeah, CPUSA leadership might suck, but your local communists that you might write off as tankies might actually be really caring people.

I’m sure it’ll be hilarious when I explain to my co-organizers that the Stalinist in our group isn’t a tankie because they support LGBTQ+ rights

Maybe this is just an online thing? IRL I hang out with quite a few Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and other folks who’d usually get categorized as tankies and I don’t think I’ve heard them be bigoted towards queer people during the years I’ve known them. I’m also openly queer so it’s not like I’m just an “ally” saying that they don’t see bigotry happening just because they ignore it.

These same folks are also organizing most of the pride events around here and running volunteer security for protests and drag shows, so I’d have a hard time believing that they’re secretly bigoted while spending a lot of their time, money, and taking personal risks to foster a queer community and keep it safe.

Okay, I just finished up reading Anti-Duhring after a few months and that’s kind of a misrepresentation. Things had to be centralized in order to wield effective power against the bourgeoisie. The whole “The Bolsheviks betrayed the revolution” thing is also a bit off, since IIRC the biggest difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was that the Bolsheviks believed that collaboration with the economic ruling class was futile and worked against winning the class war.

Y’all… without some sort of “authoritarian” element, how can the working class enforce its will upon the ruling class? I want the working class to be in charge and for the means of production (factories and shit like that) to be owned by the workers who use those machines for the benefit of themselves and the rest of the working class. We aren’t gonna get those factories, land, etc without being “authoritarian” and dictating terms to our oppressors. And since we can’t peacefully force these oligarchs to give up their assets we’ll have to use force, and force means that we really need tanks and people who are more militaristically minded.

Maybe instead of shitting on “tankies” maybe understand that they’re working towards the same goal of the empowerment of the working class, and try to ally with them? You might not agree with their ideology but if we can work together towards a better future for the working class, then why shit on them?

Idk. Maybe this is too nuanced for a community that seems to be focused on dunking on “tankies” (I’m still not really sure what that exactly means, I’d appreciate comments with people’s personal definition of what they consider a “tankie”), but I genuinely think we’d be better off trying to reconcile and work together.

It’s going to continue to be a problem for moderators, because people genuinely want the death of billionaires and CEOs. Every for-profit platform is going to ban calling for the deaths of CEOs, because the owners of the company don’t want that kind of speech around.

This is why decentralized pseudo-platforms like the Fediverse are so important, so people can make their actual thoughts, feelings and desires known, and speak to each other about it. When Luigi capped Thompson, we all got this amazing moment where our pain hurt and rage were validated through knowing we weren’t alone in our desire to kill the ruling class. That’s genuinely dangerous to people like Thompson.

I’m far left (anarcho-syndicalist) and I say vote. It’s not that hard and buys us more time to do our organizing and try to build out unions and mutual aid networks while fascism is at least growing more slowly.