this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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Thanks, I was more commenting on the difference between instances and painted a flattened picture of tankies. I'm aware that tankies are willing to criticize Stalin and shouldn't have made such a stupid joke.
That said, you might guess from my instance that I disagree with the notion your quoting. When tankies say how bourgeois states are bad I agree because states in general are bad to varying degrees and in different ways but all states are authoritarian. For me, socialist state is an oxymoron and neither Lenin nor Stalin substantially worked towards a free, stateless society. That's what Bakunin predicted in his exchange with Marx, Kropotkin warned Lenin about, Goldman criticized after Kronstadt, ...
Kropotkin started a school of thought that describes stateless, egalitarian societies. Recent authors like Graeber, Gelderloos and J. C. Scott follow this tradition. The reason that it is difficult to find recent examples is that both bourgeois and bolshevik states work together to smash anti-state movements like the Makhnovshchina or the anarchosyndicalists in Spain, or more recently Rojava and the Zapatistas.
If they were, they wouldn't be tankies... Communists can critic Stalin, tankies cannot.
"Tankie" is just a pejorative for communist, like "commie" or "pinko." There isn't a subsection of communist thought called "tankie," the fictional "tankie" is a strawman ready-made to be flung at communists to turn valid and reasoned arguments into caricature.
You're assuming the Marxist theory of the state is the same as the anarchist, which is wrong. Marxists care more about class, anarchists care more about hierarchy. A stateless society for Marxists is a fully collectivized and planned, classless economy, while for anarchists it usually looks something more like full horizontalism and petite bourgeois cooperatives at scale. Bakunin was wrong, in the end.
Class is hierarchy...
Not exactly. A manager is not a distinct class from a worker, class is related to ownership of the means of production. Administration in communist society isn't a class distinct from the rest of the working class, but is merely a position within the broader production in society.
Over time, as technology advances and the division of labor fades, this will likely also become shared responsibility, but such a time would be late-stage communism.
So a CEO is working class because they get salary while a stakeholder who owns like a fraction of 1% and has nothing to say is a capitalist? The binary class system of Marx' time has nothing to do with modern times.
Also: I always hear Marxists refer to "socialist states" as if non of them ever reached statelessness. I wonder why.