{"id":43283,"date":"2024-07-01T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-01T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.redpepper.org.uk\/?p=43283"},"modified":"2024-07-01T11:15:52","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T10:15:52","slug":"key-words-tankie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.redpepper.org.uk\/key-words\/key-words-tankie\/","title":{"rendered":"Key words: Tankie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The epithet \u2018tankie\u2019 began as an insult from one group of communists to another. It was coined by those in the Communist Party of Great Britain who opposed the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact tanks in 1968 against those who supported it. They weren\u2019t alone. The suppression of the \u2018Prague Spring\u2019 outraged many communists, and many parties \u2013 including one of the biggest, the Italian PCI, which officially condemned an invasion directed at a communist party that spoke of \u2018socialism with a human face\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Tankie\u2019 being used on the internet half a century later as a blanket term for \u2018Marxist\u2019 is an example of the trivialisation of political language. It is akin to the use by Labour Party staffers of \u2018Trot<\/a>\u2019 to mean, in their words, \u2018anyone to the left of Gordon [Brown]\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond these particularly dumb uses, \u2018tankie\u2019 has come to mean something quite specific, interchangeable with \u2018campist<\/a>\u2019 (whose origins are in the Stalin-era definition of a \u2018socialist camp\u2019 and an \u2018imperialist camp\u2019). Campism, or tankiehood, is generally reducible to a willingness not just to take a pacifist or \u2018plague on both your houses\u2019 position on certain international disputes, but to openly and enthusiastically side with whichever camp is in opposition to the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This can lead to apologism at best and enthusiasm at worst for violent capitalist rulers, from Muamar Ghaddafi to Bashar al-Assad<\/a> to Vladimir Putin. However, this sort of tankiehood tends to have a focus on imperialism and \u2018racial capitalism\u2019, with roots much more in Maoism or 1970s \u2018third worldism\u2019 than in the pro-Soviet trends of west European communist parties. It can be seen in the online cult of once-forgotten books such as J Sakai\u2019s vituperative Maoist history of the American white working class, Settlers<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is tempting to simply condemn the tankie, though excessive emphasis can be placed on what are, in truth, small groups of keyboard warriors in (mainly US) university halls of residence. Leaders who have frequently co-operated with the American \u2018wars on terror\u2019, such as Assad, Putin or Xi Jinping, have been improbably reimagined as part of an \u2018axis of resistance\u2019 on those few occasions when their goals happened to clash with those of the USA. There are undoubtedly people so myopic that they can see occupation and imperialism for what it is in, say, Palestine, but not in, say, Ukraine<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet there are elements in tankie thought that are not all utterly stupid. A left that has known nothing but defeat for 40 years knows almost nothing of real historical left-wing projects of state-building, and of actually holding and defending territory, preferring moralistic retrospective condemnation. The online tankies, however, can tell you all about Thomas Sankara<\/a>\u2019s Burkina Faso or the Communist Party of India (Marxist)\u2019s Kerala<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tankies have some admirable qualities \u2014 a trenchant opposition to Euro-American power, an interest in real social experiments, a refusal to condemn \u2018both sides\u2019 in conflicts in which one side is obviously the stronger. The best of them will grow up in time into good, thoughtful socialists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Further reading<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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