The first thing we need to do here is kill a common misunderstanding across the radical left: “Tankie” and “Marxist / Marxist-Leninist / Marxist-Leninist-Maoist” are not synonyms. Anyone who uses them this way either:

A) Does not understand what “tankie” means.



B) Understands what it means and is trying to get out of the horrible association that comes with it.



C) Is a liberal who got wind of the term and is misusing it to slander socialists.

So… what the heck is a “tankie” anyway? The term originates from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956. Following dissent among Hungarian socialists against the local communist party, which had tremendously mismanaged the economy, the Soviet Union rolled in tanks to quell the uprising. The CPGB had sent one of their members down to observe the situation, and against party orders, he reported on it in the CPGB’s newspaper. Those who supported Soviet imperialism against the Hungarians were dubbed “tankies”.

Today the term is used to refer to self-proclaimed Marixsts / Marxist-Leninists / Marxist-Leninist-Maoists with a particularly dogmatic and nationalistic set of politics. When we say “nationalistic” firstly, we do not mean the nationalism that many admirable ML/MLMs, and even anarchists, have operated on, and used to motivate the people to overthrow colonial forces. For whatever anarchist criticisms one may have, these nationalists are nationalists in the sense of a national question of self-determination, not nationalists in the sense of a rigid, dogmatic state, which is the nationalism we do refer to.

Tankies are marked not only by their use of Marxist jargon, but by rigid devotion to non-Western powers, uncritical a priori support of opponents to the West and to Zionism, use of historical negation to rehabilitate dead Marxist-Leninist leaders (I’ve discussed this elsewhere), the use of revisionist Marxism to justify certain actions by “actually existing socialism”, reducing internationalism to geopolitcs, (and consequent to that, fetishistic Orientalism), and by use of strict & hierarchical cadre structures that leave no room for dissent within the party, in contrast to the principled interpersonal political struggles that go on within any decent communist organization.

In other words, these are Marxists in name only. They excuse imperialism, police brutality, and ethnic cleansing, funnily enough for the same reason a liberal might excuse a member of the Democrats for doing the same thing: “It’s OK when we do it”. On the surface, the tankies seem like something we could dismiss. After all, the far-left here in the West is pretty small, and of that grouping, the tankies are a small section. And there’s some truth to that, as they stand no chance at a general election, let alone forming a large enough party to enact revolution. However, there’s a larger problem at play here. Even if we generously set aside their total lack of concern for human dignity and historical accuracy, they are capable of mobilizing organizations. They can ideologically mold the working class away from principled socialist struggle, and instead push them into useless A-to-Z marches. In short, they mold them into semi-communists.

Anti-capitalist, yes. But anti-capitalists with no real political education, no critical thinking regarding the party line, and no sense of practice. We see this already in the PSL & WWP, along with the adventurous white Maoists in the US like Red Guards Austin, who want to jump the gun and start guerrilla activity. Furthermore, anti-capitalists with no sense of post-revolutionary imagination. How many of us have encountered a self-proclaimed Marxist who has said they want to work in a police station or a Gulag after the revolution? How is it that these so-called “revolutionaries” cannot even imagine a world absent the trappings of the current one, and instead want to live in the power of the current one with a red dye job?

It is here we must reiterate that there is a meaningful distinction between tankies and principled M/ML/MLMs, who in one way or another we might consider allies in the right circumstances. The late Fred Hampton Sr., one of the most noble revolutionaries this country ever produced, could not in good faith be called a tankie. A Maoist, yes, but a man who understood theory & practice, a man who did not instinctively side with any self-proclaimed enemy of the United States, and who understood the value of political education. Let us take an even more controversial example, and note Che Guevara. A Marxist-Leninist, certainly, and an admirer of Stalin, but by no stretch of the imagination incapable of critiquing the Soviet project, even under Stalin. These men were not tankies. They were Marxist-Leninists. There are other examples, but if we focus on this, we will be here all day, and so for the sake of brevity, these two examples have been given.

The tankies are, in short, cult-like LARPers. They do the communist movement no good whatsoever (just ask the RCP). Any decent human being will see their Katyn massacre denial, their instinctive defense of China & North Korea against all critique (valid or otherwise), and other horrifying takes as good reason to stay away from communism. Don’t be a tankie. Be a comrade. Go read Marx & Lenin if you feel so inclined to use their names. And form a halfway decent party for God’s sake.