06-26-2025, 11:19 AM
Bit of a late response but it's an interesting subject, and I'd like to revive some of these threads because for my taste, discussion here is much too focused on current events.
There is, indeed, a bit of a resurgence of this ideology on the fringes of the left. I remember an otherwise perfectly reasonable and pleasant person on another forum I used to frequent, who in the span of months suddenly became a tankie. Suddenly he had extreme views, was impossible to talk to, started using terms like bourgeoisie a lot. He'd obviously read Marx. I believe his case is illustrative of the broader issue. Marxist thinking was groundbreaking and brilliant in many ways. He was one of the most influential thinkers of his time for good reason. If one only reads his theories, and not how the attempts to apply them turned out, it's not surprising that they would sound convincing.
There are many paths a person could take in their readings that would lead them to read his theories before reading about, say, 20th century Russia or China. Maybe then, when they finally do learn the details of communism's disastrous implementations, they would argue "well, nobody's implemented it correctly yet". Read it the other way around (which happens to be what I did), and you might not look upon it so favorably.
All this to say that the order in which we learn things really matters. And I imagine, in some schools, especially the better ones, theory is prioritized. This is for good reason but yeah, it risks a new generation of tankies.
Rest assured, communism is in no way on the table, and I don't expect it will be again anytime soon. Even if a fringe minority of progressives is charmed by Marxist theory, the rest of us do know what's up.
I have more to say, about a possible future where communism may be the correct system, but I'm out of time for now.
There is, indeed, a bit of a resurgence of this ideology on the fringes of the left. I remember an otherwise perfectly reasonable and pleasant person on another forum I used to frequent, who in the span of months suddenly became a tankie. Suddenly he had extreme views, was impossible to talk to, started using terms like bourgeoisie a lot. He'd obviously read Marx. I believe his case is illustrative of the broader issue. Marxist thinking was groundbreaking and brilliant in many ways. He was one of the most influential thinkers of his time for good reason. If one only reads his theories, and not how the attempts to apply them turned out, it's not surprising that they would sound convincing.
There are many paths a person could take in their readings that would lead them to read his theories before reading about, say, 20th century Russia or China. Maybe then, when they finally do learn the details of communism's disastrous implementations, they would argue "well, nobody's implemented it correctly yet". Read it the other way around (which happens to be what I did), and you might not look upon it so favorably.
All this to say that the order in which we learn things really matters. And I imagine, in some schools, especially the better ones, theory is prioritized. This is for good reason but yeah, it risks a new generation of tankies.
Rest assured, communism is in no way on the table, and I don't expect it will be again anytime soon. Even if a fringe minority of progressives is charmed by Marxist theory, the rest of us do know what's up.
I have more to say, about a possible future where communism may be the correct system, but I'm out of time for now.
