Back when I was still an anarchist I had a dream about commandeering a tank and using it to dispel a group of neo-Nazis. I relayed this dream to a liberal[1] I knew, who called my behavior in the dream “tankie”. I thought but didn’t say, “What, so would you have preferred me to just do nothing and let those neo-Nazis go around chanting hate slogans and intimidating immigrants?”
That interaction was pretty formative for me, I think, because after that I pretty much stopped taking the word “tankie” seriously whenever I heard it; because if an anarchist in a dream, breaking the law and acting in an individual capacity to dispel full-on “blood and soil” neo-Nazis, could be called a “tankie” by someone who isn’t even a revolutionary leftist; then surely anyone can be called a tankie by anyone else for any reason. All that “tankie” really seems to mean is “leftist who Does Stuff” — because leaving a mark on the world means pushing your hand into the clay, applying force, one might even say — gasp! — imposing authority. “Have these gentlemen ever seen a” yadda yadda yadda. I also once heard someone else say “better to do no wrong than do something right” to describe the sort of thinking that leads people to call other people “tankies”: it’s a very Christian sort of mindset, you know, just one of a series of words for “leftist I don’t like”.
Now personally, I call leftists I don’t like “yahoos”, and the truth is that every single leftist on the planet is at least a little yahooish: you’re a yahoo if you support China too much; you’re also a yahoo if you support China too little; and I’m a yahoo for not knowing what the right amount of support for China is, even though I am not and will never be in any sort of position where my opinion on China will even remotely matter to the historical development of our planet; and my actual contribution to The Revolution™ will only ever be a very China-unrelated microscopic drop in the bucket.
As for how I abandoned anarchism, which some might say is when I “truly became a tankie”: it just made an intuitive sort of sense to me that history is a series of forces being metaphorically “persistence-hunted” by other forces. So learning about dialectics and historical materialism and whatnot didn’t really feel like abandoning anarchism so much as it felt like a new understanding of strategy, that anarchism / abolition of the state / communism as a historical force is not yet strong enough to win, but it can become strong enough if the currently stronger forces get to duke it out first and become tired enough for abolition of the state to persistence-hunt. Which means that my goal as an actor however small in the historical process should be to hasten that battle.
A liberal as in someone who’s neither an anarchist nor ML nor in any way a revolutionary leftist; someone with complete faith in the electoral system who’d “Vote Blue No Matter Who”; you get the picture. ↩︎
Back when I was still an anarchist I had a dream about commandeering a tank and using it to dispel a group of neo-Nazis. I relayed this dream to a liberal[1] I knew, who called my behavior in the dream “tankie”. I thought but didn’t say, “What, so would you have preferred me to just do nothing and let those neo-Nazis go around chanting hate slogans and intimidating immigrants?”
That interaction was pretty formative for me, I think, because after that I pretty much stopped taking the word “tankie” seriously whenever I heard it; because if an anarchist in a dream, breaking the law and acting in an individual capacity to dispel full-on “blood and soil” neo-Nazis, could be called a “tankie” by someone who isn’t even a revolutionary leftist; then surely anyone can be called a tankie by anyone else for any reason. All that “tankie” really seems to mean is “leftist who Does Stuff” — because leaving a mark on the world means pushing your hand into the clay, applying force, one might even say — gasp! — imposing authority. “Have these gentlemen ever seen a” yadda yadda yadda. I also once heard someone else say “better to do no wrong than do something right” to describe the sort of thinking that leads people to call other people “tankies”: it’s a very Christian sort of mindset, you know, just one of a series of words for “leftist I don’t like”.
Now personally, I call leftists I don’t like “yahoos”, and the truth is that every single leftist on the planet is at least a little yahooish: you’re a yahoo if you support China too much; you’re also a yahoo if you support China too little; and I’m a yahoo for not knowing what the right amount of support for China is, even though I am not and will never be in any sort of position where my opinion on China will even remotely matter to the historical development of our planet; and my actual contribution to The Revolution™ will only ever be a very China-unrelated microscopic drop in the bucket.
As for how I abandoned anarchism, which some might say is when I “truly became a tankie”: it just made an intuitive sort of sense to me that history is a series of forces being metaphorically “persistence-hunted” by other forces. So learning about dialectics and historical materialism and whatnot didn’t really feel like abandoning anarchism so much as it felt like a new understanding of strategy, that anarchism / abolition of the state / communism as a historical force is not yet strong enough to win, but it can become strong enough if the currently stronger forces get to duke it out first and become tired enough for abolition of the state to persistence-hunt. Which means that my goal as an actor however small in the historical process should be to hasten that battle.
A liberal as in someone who’s neither an anarchist nor ML nor in any way a revolutionary leftist; someone with complete faith in the electoral system who’d “Vote Blue No Matter Who”; you get the picture. ↩︎