I’ve been part of the online left for a while now, part of slrpnk about 2 months, and if there’s one recurring experience that’s both exhausting and revealing, it’s trying to have good-faith discussions with self-identified Marxist-Leninists, the kind often referred to as “tankies.” I use that term here not as a lazy insult nor to dehumanize, but to describe a particular kind of online personality: the ones who dogmatically defend Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and every so-called “existing socialist state” past or present, without room for nuance, critique, or even basic empathy. Not all Marxist-Leninists are like this. But these people, these tankies, show up in every thread, every debate, every conversation about liberation, and somehow it always turns into a predictable mess.
It usually goes like this: I make a statement that critiques authoritarianism or centralized power, and suddenly I’m being accused of parroting CIA talking points, being a liberal in disguise, or not being a “real leftist.” One time, I said “Totalitarianism kills” — a simple, arguably uncontroversial point. What followed was a barrage of replies claiming that the term was invented by Nazis, that Hannah Arendt (who apparently popularized it, I looked it up and it turns out she didn’t) was an anti-semite, and that even using the word is inherently reactionary. When I clarified that I was speaking broadly about state violence and authoritarian mechanisms, the same people just doubled down, twisting my words, inventing claims I never made, and eventually accusing me of being some kind of crypto-fascist. This wasn’t a one-off, it happens constantly.
If you’ve spent any time in these spaces, you know what I’m talking about. The conversations never stays on topic. It always loops back to defending state socialism, reciting quotes from Lenin, minimizing atrocities as “bourgeois propaganda” and dragging anarchism as naive or counter-revolutionary. It’s like they’re playing from a script.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why these interactions feel so uniquely frustrating. And over time, I’ve started noticing recurring patterns in the kind of people who show up this way. Again, a disclaimer here: not everyone who defends Marx or Lenin online falls into these patterns. There are thoughtful, sincere, and principled MLs who engage in real, grounded discussions. But then there are these other types:
- The Theory Maximalist
This person treats political theory like scripture. They’ve read the texts (probably a lot of them) and they approach every conversation like a chance to prove their mastery. Everything becomes about citations, dialectics, and abstract arguments. When faced with real-world contradictions, their default move is to bury it under more theory. They mistake being well-read for being politically mature, and often completely miss the human, relational side of radical politics.
- The Identity Leftist
For this person, being a leftist isn’t about organizing or material change. It’s an identity. They call themselves a Marxist-Leninist the way someone else might call themselves a punk or a metalhead. Defending state socialism becomes a cultural performance. They’re less interested in the complexity of history than in being on the “correct side” of whatever aesthetic battle they’re fighting. Anarchists, to them, represent softness or chaos, and that’s a threat to the image they’ve built for themselves.
- The Terminally Online Subculturalist
This one lives in forums, Discords, or other niche Internet circles. Their entire political world is digital. They’ve likely never been to a union meeting, a mutual aid drive, or a community organizing session. All their knowledge of struggle is mediated through memes and screenshots. They treat ideology like a fandom and conflict like sport. They love the drama, the takedowns, the purity contests. The actual work of liberation? Irrelevant.
- The Alienated Intellectual
This person is often very smart, often very isolated, and clings to ideology as a way of making sense of the world. They’re drawn to strict political systems because it gives them order and meaning in a chaotic life. And while they might not be malicious, they often struggle to engage with disagreement without feeling personally attacked. For them, criticism of Marxism-Leninism can feel like an existential threat, because it destabilizes the fragile structure they’ve built to cope with life.
These types don’t describe everyone, and they’re not meant to be a diagnosis or a dismissal. They’re patterns I’ve noticed. Ways that a political identity can become rigid, defensive, and disconnected from real-world struggle.
And here’s the thing that’s always struck me as particularly ironic: Let’s face it, a lot of these people would absolutely hate to be part of real socialist organizing. Because the kind of organizing that builds power, the kind that helps people survive, defend themselves, and grow; it’s messy, emotionally challenging, and full of conflict. It requires flexibility, listening, and compromise. It doesn’t work if everyone’s just quoting dead guys and calling each other traitors. Anarchist or not, actual socialist practice is grounded in real life, not in endless internet warfare.
That’s why this whole cycle feels so tragic. Because behind all the posturing, the purity tests, and the ideological gatekeeping, there’s a legit reason these people ended up here. Of all the ideologies in the world, they chose communism. Why? Probably because they hurt. Because they saw the ugliness of capitalism and wanted something better. Because, at some point, they were moved by the idea that we could live without exploitation.
And somewhere along the way, that desire got calcified into a set of talking points. It got buried under defensiveness and online clout games. The pain turned inward, and now they lash out at anyone who doesn’t match their script. That’s not an excuse. But it is something to hold with empathy.
I don’t write this to mock anyone. I write it because I want us to do better, recognize our differences and hopefully come to a fair conclusion. And Idk, I still believe we can. Ape together strong 💖
Here to remind people not to take online tendency drama seriously. People that post a lot are likely not involved in too much IRL stuff.
I’ve been part of the online left for a while now.
Ya I feel vindicated. I know plently of IRL anarchists with good opinions who do a fuckload of good work, and are out there touching grass instead of posting.
It was irl anarchists who trashed our “tankie” May Day rally for Palestine last year. I wish it was only an online problem.
Yeah I’ve seen IRL anarchists due heinous shit against “tankies.” Flipping tables at events, cop jacketing, doxing, threats of violence, bullying. And all the anarchists who didn’t directly participate just watched and let it happen in each case, before going about their “organizing” of pretty much nothing
Yeah, the anarchists also sucked shit when there was a Palestine march near the DNC in Chicago.
Still, I love the ones at Food Not Bombs and the punks signing folks up for bone marrow donations.
online anarchists be like, Free Palestine!, Slava Ukraine!, and Vote Biden!!!
I hate to tell you but those people exist irl too.
I realise that you joke, but there is a range. Also many leftists start out as just nominal “anarchists” before reading theory and having better opinions. Heck even I started calling myself an anarchist when I discovered anti-imperialism.
I’ve read a lot and I still consider myself an anarchist, at the end of the day it reflects the organizing work that I do and the people I often work with.
To touch on the online/offline anarchist bit, I see all types frankly.
I will routinely run into people who will go on a spree of reading exclusively anarchist authors, the ones they latch on to are often ones that aren’t particularly academically rigorous but are still extremely dogmatic about ‘Stalinists’, (Bookchin is one I see a lot). That then primes them to go into reading all the civil war/WW2 drama and get fired up about how evil the USSR was.
It really feels like the trajectory of a psyop. These days I just point out that Bookchin was both a zionist and not even an anarchist in the end of his life and move on with doing the work.
I even ran into a reading group where I brought up how Bookchin constantly citing Athenian democracy as a positive example of direct democracy always felt bizarre because it was a misogynistic slave state. The counterpoint was that we should be understanding and taking from systems the good parts which worked well and liberated people. My follow up was that’s the intent then we should be doing the same to the good parts and working strategies from the USSR and China as well, rather than entirely writing them off.
Hey me too
both exhausting and revealing, it’s trying to have good-faith discussions with self-identified Marxist-Leninists
If you’re going to talk about being good-faith…
It usually goes like this: I make a statement that critiques authoritarianism or centralized power, and suddenly I’m being accused of parroting CIA talking points, being a liberal in disguise, or not being a “real leftist.”
…then you shouldn’t be dishonest in the next few sentences.
Let’s be real here. This isn’t you “critiquing authoritarianism or centralized power”. What you actually do to provoke this outcome is repeat something about the USSR or China that marxist-leninists have debunked and can prove is literally from the CIA. The only time MLs bring up the CIA is when we can directly tie what you’re saying to them, or to NED, or RFE or whatever.
I’m literally not going to read any further into this post because it’s not being written with honesty or good-faith.
I did just notice it ends with “Ape Together Strong”. Based on that I’m going to assume this isn’t actually an anarchist, but a finance-bro provocateur. Probably one of those libertarians that have been working to coopt anarchism for years. Anyone writing screeds this long after just 2 months is sus, especially when the screed is structured like a ChatGPT output.
Anyone writing screeds this long after just 2 months is sus, especially when the screed is structured like a ChatGPT output.
One time, I said “Totalitarianism kills” — a simple, arguably uncontroversial point.
The — test is undefeated.
:( I learned how to ctrl + shift + u + 2014 —not for nothing— only for it to become associated with ChatGPT. I guess all I can do now is make sure my rants are so incredibly based and idiosyncratic that LibGPT could not have possibly generated them.
Wait is the long dash associated with AI slop? I actually use it a lot
Ooooooooo I totally missed that. You’re right though, no human being uses that character it’s literally written by AI. For me it’s the numbered structure and paragraph lengths that just scream chatgpt.
19·1 day agoIt’s in unicode because people use it.
As funkystuff said, u2014. I’ve used it a bit.
I’ve been part of the online left for a while now
Where I stopped reading
I’ve been in this game for years
its made me an animal
—
A human definitely wrote this.
They’ve read the texts (probably a lot of them) and they approach every conversation like a chance to prove their mastery.
I like how much anticommunism boils down to “I don’t want to read anything that isn’t novels for babies”. Nothing makes me distrust someone more than them telling me to not read books they haven’t even read themselves. They’re on par with young earth creationists.
It’s so fucking arrogant. I’ve said this before: smarter people than us working in worse conditions carried out successful revolutions and had the God damn courtesy of writing a lot of it down. If a bunch of illiterate peasants can figure shit out when it isn’t even written in their language, it wouldn’t kill you to read some essays or listen to an audio book of denser material.
And there are plenty of easy-to-understand novels for babies and leftists. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton. Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Fucking Homage to Catalonia by Orwell has some material in it and is non-fiction. You don’t have to memorize all three volumes of Capital.
But no. That’s too much to ask for. Much better to call people names because they know Hungary’s color revolution was an op by the CIA.
Even if it’s something I disagree with, I think people should read it to understand why it’s stupid. My shelf has plenty of anarchist and liberal books that I just read critically to understand how my position differs. I’ve read Ayn Rand and Qanon shit just to understand my enemy. I never see this with anticommunists. They’re so militantly incurious toward the thing they hate the most. If you’ve actually read Marx and come away from it an anticommunist then that’s at least an interesting critique to interrogate, but none of these goobers have.
Somewhere along the line anti-intellectualism became such a strong cultural force that people are actively proud of constantly making up their ideology on the go, as opposed to being a nerd and building up your understanding of the world based on thorough reasoning and evidence.
We have such poor political education in general because political theory is treated like the necronomicon. If people read the wrong books, next thing you know they’ll be reanimating the dead. All of the foundational shit is off-limits so people just wing it, and when they begin to converge on the conclusions reached by Marxist revolutionaries over a century ago, there is a desperate search to find some fundamental distinction.
Ignoring the theory is like trying to constantly reinvent the wheel after each generation.
Marx and Lenin hold up well, along with a bazillion other socialist writers. There are times when I come to my “own” conclusions about stuff, only to find out Lenin has already written about it.
In 2017, I set out to write a collection of catty asides making fun of Karl Kautsky, only to realize that I’d been beaten to the punch by a full century
Being proud of it is so wild to me. I would be ashamed.
I lost so much respect towards my anarchist coworker as a consequence of this. When I came in I was an uncultured leftist and I took their criticism of “authority” and “totalitarianism” seriously as if they knew what they were talking about, but after some basic reading it’s obvious that when they criticise “totalitarian” systems they do it from a place of parroting lib points against Actually Existing Socialism, not from actual study of the material conditions and the historical progress of these countries.
“No miss stevens I dont want to read the great gatsby!!!”
i did read that and it was boring and not that deep
Oh it wasn’t a judgement of that book, more like that the anti-theory rhetoric brings up that mental image.
huh. i was a liked reading kid and the canon of american school literature mostly beat that out of me.
same lol
Totalitarianism is when someone suggests I read a book and the more books they suggest the more totalitarianist it is.
Everything becomes… dialectics
I disagree.
An upvote or downvote doesn’t work here, I need a vote that goes in an orthogonal direction to express what this exchange has produced.
It’s always in private, defederated instances that paragraphs upon paragraphs of unsubstantiated, contradictory drivel are written for almost the sole purpose of applause.
I just finished reading the dispossessed and it’s amazing that a work of fiction is kinder and more nuanced than people’s badly edited screeds against this or that faction.
I am perhaps overly sectarian but LeGuin is off limits for criticism
I don’t know what anarchists like this expect when the only hill they choose to die on (i.e. denouncement of basic authority utilized by leftists) is orthogonal to socialism and beneficial to capitalism.
I have no time for people who allocate outrage to working class achievements and ceaselessly ignore or celebrate their, arguably indirect and less centralized, oppression by capitalists.
I want to work with anarchists more than any other communist I know IRL - but when right out of the gates its just fearmongering about totalitarianism/authoritarianism, which apparently somehow isn’t a historic cornerstone of capitalist empires, what is there to even say. And that is the entire point - whoever invented these terms and associated them with working class organization sowed division for centuries at this point.
Independent study of working class history is all that is needed to heal this divide - but the western propaganda is infinitely more accessible.
for centuries
only half a century. you can thank the antisemite Hannah Arendt and the new left for this flattening ‘authoritarian’ nonsense
lmao there’s a zionist in the linked thread complaining that their fellow leftists don’t take the Frankfurt School seriously
I just don’t know what to tell people who refuse to internalize the very basic historical pattern that when the empire loses the argument, they just fucking kill you. It’s not even history, we see it happening right now, but there are still too many people who want to stick their heads in the sand and imagine that a refusal to form the very basic organs of revolutionary defense and cohesion -just a fucking cell membrane- equates somehow to moral superiority, and that moral superiority is somehow an acceptable substitute for fire superiority when the death machine comes clawing your way.
It feels like a form of denial. A lot of people I know just cannot accept how dark the history of empire gets and escape into the sanitized version of history where you can just shame your oppressor into stepping down from power - or worse, preferring to become a dog of empire.
That quote about how revolutionaries who are easy to kill and take no precautions either don’t really believe what they say or have a subconscious death wish.
Western
MarxismLeftism, the Fetish for Purity and Defeat/Martyrdom
imagine describing yourself as part of the online left
absolute loser material no matter the tendency. im not reading the rest i know enough
I haven’t read Marx’s Capital but I’ve got the marks of capital all over my body. Checkmate Theory Maximalists!
I find liberal effortposting so funny. The way they’re always so incredibly vibes based and light on evidence, the way they subtly hint on having no clue what they’re talking about every other sentence.
They could just read Tankies from Red Sails and see every single one of these points debunked ahead of time. They’re fighting a strawman and the strawman is still beating them.
It’s interesting how a lot of the above revolves around stuff like “rigid”, implying the writer is mistaking “principled” with some sort of black&white thinking. Which tbh the argumenter seems to engage in quite a bit and not realize it at all.
Is “every accusation is projection” kind of true for everything that people who are right of tankies say? Starts to look to me like it often is.
Every single one of the archetypes they listed (except the theory maximalist) has a direct mirror in the attitude they’re displaying against ‘tankies’. FFS, they even name punks as a group whose political identity is limited to identity and not action! They are actively engaging in a meaningless internet slapfight (well so am I but I’m based and they’re cringe so it’s cool when I do it) then call their interlocutors terminally online subculturalists! Like come on!
“Black and white, rigid thinking is when you’ve reached the same conclusions as a bunch of other people through examining evidence and discussion. And the more cohesive the opinions of your group after discussion, the more black and white is your thought. If your group doesn’t consist of incessant bickering over the smallest ideological differences, your group is a dictatorship and brainwashed”.
I honestly think that’s the thought process of many people who consider themselves anarchists (not of most actual anarchists). Mainly, “I’ve reached my own conclusions by myself and only argue with people to change THEIR mind, not to learn, and so I’m an isolated pocket of pure, unadulterated ideology”.
—
AI slop detected
The fact that i enjoy using - in my own writing makes me worry people are gonna think im a commie bot
This shit is so dumb. I’m an anarcommie, coming from anarchism because while I mostly agree with anarchism, I understand it’s not fuckin happening without a large degree of state direction and revolution lol. It’s not hard to figure out.
I don’t know why these dumb fuckin nerds think that everyone can simply stop existing in capitalist society one day and that’s that. Makes no fuckin sense.
This is just pure plagiarism (/j)
I would be curious to see what their “good ML” looks like comparitively to their “bad ML”. At least they were that charitable and tried to make it clear that they weren’t trying to generalize…but like I never see these debate pervert tankies really? Where are they
Much like wars, liberals are open to discussion with all of the marxists except the ones who currently exist.
Edit: seriously though, the answer to your question is that OOP is eating from the trashcan of ideology. Go to threads from when we initially federated, this one is a perfect example
My reading of that thread is that when people are talking in good faith, even if they’re critical, usually the Hexbears will be nice in kind and explain where we’re coming from and what we believe. As soon as the other side starts speaking in libspeak about authoritarianism, Chyna bad, etc that’s when the PPB starts flying.
From the OOP’s perspective, they don’t differentiate from the good faith talk and the Chy-na bad talk. It’s all equally good and leftist. So when the Hexbears reply to “tinyman square 5000000 dead” with a derisive and flippant answer, OOP would see that as bad faith.
It’s like how if we were in a pro-Palestine demonstration and I’ve been around the block a few times, and someone who’s holding a phone in front of their face, recording everything, starts asking people how they feel about Hamas SA’ing people in October 7th. To someone who isn’t clued in, that might look like a fair question and an important thing to ask. To me, it’s immediately recognizable as Zionist concern trolling, so in this situation I would probably be extremely uncharitable to this person to the point that it might be alienating to someone who isn’t familiar with the reason why I’d engage in that way. They might think I’m the troll.
So what happens is, because there’s a hegemonic ideological filter through which OOP sees discourse like the thread I linked, in their mind it’s the “Tankies” who behave like trolls, because they are sensitive to the rhetorical tactics that cause them a great deal of cognitive dissonance, moreso than the rhetorical tactics of the liberals which don’t even register to them.
Great analysis!
For example this part
“They mistake being well-read for being politically mature, and often completely miss the human, relational side of radical politics.”
the point where being a lib really begins to show is: “human, relational side of radical politics”. It’s idealistic and unclear.
All and all the whole seemingly not bashing anyone set of caricatures is imo genuinely very reactionary.
*Edited for clarity (I hope, am eepy)
This article is the most deeply crackerfied shit I’ve read. “Your politics are boring as fuck” I project, while I unironically say having fun and hanging out with your friends is actual true politics. Literally defames movements by saying that serving “the cause” is a waste of time, a great way to demotivate and make fun of the people who actually sacrifice their lives to move forward a working class agenda. This person is deeply unserious
This piece of trash lives in my head rent free, unfortunately, so I had to share it somewhere. I hate it SO MUCH for all the reasons you describe. So self indulgent and shallow.
Be glad they’re only in your head, I have to deal with crackers like this all the time in [unspecified but still deeply segregated southern city with white people calling themselves anarchists that just find ways to annoy and sexually assault each other]
