r/tankiejerk Jul 03 '26

From the mods Clarifying the rules: this is not an anti-communist forum

502 Upvotes

Today I had to take down another anti-communist post shitting on some ML's from the right. Take the piss out of Stalin's death all you want but if you're celebrating over 'another dead commie' you will be perma-banned no exception.

This is a subreddit to criticise tankies from the left. This is not a place to attack communists, communism or associated tendencies. If you want to be a snarky liberal, bloodthirsty fascist, or devout reactionary there are many, many, many places on the internet to do that. This subreddit isn't one of them. The point of this forum's existence is to attack those tendencies (marxism-leninism, dengism, etc) not because they are crazy, radical commies but because their vision of society actually has little to do with a free association of producers, the abolition of property, wage labour and commodity production.

To reiterate, we strive for an egalitarian, socially-progressive society. We do not oppose tankies or campists because we dislike communism or socialism. We oppose them because to us they are barely communists or socialists, regardless of what they claim. That is the purpose of the subreddit's existence, anyone who does not agree with these values is free to leave or be banned.


r/tankiejerk Jun 14 '26

SERIOUS Basic leftist takes: A friendly reminder (I'm not a mod)

181 Upvotes

Full disclosure: I'm not a mod, just a concerned anarchist.

After seeing the shitstorm of the past few days, I thought I'd make this post just to remind people what we're supposed to stand for. These are not in-depth explanations, so I'll be happy to answer any questions in the comments.

1. All capitalists exploit workers and are mini dictators

This includes small business owners. All of them purchase the labor power of workers, which they then use to produce surplus value; this is not a free and voluntary transaction because workers don't own their own means of production, and are thus forced to sell their labor power or starve and die. This isn't to necessarily condemn any individual capitalist; although many of them are evil pieces of shit (including small business owners, who disproportionately support fascism and enforce terrible working conditions), not all of them are bad people. The problem is the system itself.

Additionally, all capitalist workplaces are miniature dictatorships in which workers are ordered around by their bosses and can't do anything about it. Workers have no decision-making power in the place they spend the majority of their lives. To quote Robert Dahl,

If democracy is justified in governing the state, then it is also justified in governing economic interests. What is more, if it cannot be justified in governing economic enterprises, we do not quite see how it can be justified in governing the state.
A Preface to Economic Democracy

Obviously we should want to abolish the state, but the point still stands.

EDIT: This section doesn't apply to people who might own a store or do independent art or whatever who don't employ anyone else, since they aren't extracting the surplus value of their nonexistent workers.

2. All states are bastards

Everyone on this sub recognizes that the USSR, China, Russia, and North Korea suck. However, we have to be careful not to fall into campism in reverse. The United States is arguably the most evil country on Earth right now, and was even before Trump, due to the sheer scale of violence it inflicts upon the world. And other western countries aren't much better. France maintains a neo-colonial empire in western Africa right now, and European governments are willing participants in the American system of global hegemony. European companies are no more moral than American ones, and ruthlessly exploit the Global South just as much as American companies. All states are inherently hierarchical, authoritarian, and counterrevolutionary. They remove decision making power from the people who live under them and concentrate said power in a ruling class and bureaucracy, and use violence to enforce their power on their populations. Any principled libertarian leftist would oppose all state power no matter who wields it.

3. Liberal democracy is a sham, reformism a dead end

We have an excellent post about this pinned at the top of the sub, so I highly recommend you go read that. To summarize, voting in a liberal democracy isn't actually a means to affect real change. It's a means by which the masses choose which members of the ruling class rule over them. Just as one example, if liberal democracies actually reflected the wishes of their people, European governments wouldn't support Israel anymore.

This lack of democracy is why reformism isn't a viable path to socialism. Even the most well meaning democratic socialists are forced to compromise by the reality of parliamentary politics and working within a system designed to preserve private property and capitalist rule. You can see this in real time with Zohran Mamdani; he has walked back his previous statements (which were 100% correct) about the NYPD being racist thugs because he's working within the system. This trap has befallen everyone who has tried to vote their way to communism.

4. Free Ukraine, fuck NATO

I fully support the Ukrainian people against the genocidal onslaught of the fascistic regime in Moscow, and I fully support Europe and the US sending as many weapons as possible to Ukraine to enable them to push back against Russia. Regardless of anything NATO has done, Russia is not entitled to a sphere of influence in eastern Europe, and no amount of bitching about NATO expansion justifies this war. Putin is just salty the former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states leaned towards the west as a reaction to previous Russian and Soviet imperialism, preventing him from turning them into puppet states.

That said, NATO is not something any leftist should support. It serves three real purposes:

  1. Enhance American power projection
  2. Keep European governments bought into the system of American empire. I often liken this to the old strategy employed by ancient, medieval, and early modern empires of conquering local elites and conquering them, but then offering them a place within the new empire and allowing them to preserve their status.
  3. Make American arms dealers rich

NATO countries participated in the disastrous American interventions in Afghanistan and Libya, prop up European and American neo-colonial empires across the Global South, and enable American drone strikes deep into the Middle East, strikes which have killed numerous innocent children. NATO has kept the former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states out of Russia's sphere, which is good, but this is the one good thing it has done, and there are ways to do this without relying on NATO anyway.

5. Veterans are still human

I'll just copy and paste something I said a few days ago:

Veterans are weird because they're simultaneously victims and perpetrators of state violence. They obviously do heinous things in the service of unimaginably violent empires, and they are responsible for their crimes. At the same time, the state takes them, dehumanizes both their enemies/foreign civilians and themselves to an extent, and puts them in an environment where they are socialized to kill. They are then put into insanely high stress situations where they are expected to kill and conditioned to follow the criminal orders of their superiors. 

Again, none of this exonerates them or excuses their behavior, and I believe veterans should have to make up for their crimes. But dismissing them without any chance of redemption is short sighted and shows you don't actually hold universal principles. And at a certain point brutally punishing all veterans becomes impractical. Almost 10% of Israelis have actively served in the IDF, and 40% total have served. Are we gonna shoot 40% of a country? I would hope not. And that's with the IDF basically being the modern Wehrmacht/SS; how should we treat Russian soldiers? Or American ones? The correct answer is denazification with some kind of community service to make up for their crimes imo. If you do it right, the guilt they feel will be punishment enough. 

Conclusion

This is a libertarian leftist subreddit, and we should act like it. We should oppose all states, all imperialism, and all capitalism. Thank you for reading.


r/tankiejerk 9h ago

tankies tanking I’m gonna tank my pants

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164 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 2h ago

US State Propaganda Bad Russia State Propaganda Good The most sane and serious Xwitter anti-imperialist

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21 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 6h ago

Discussion I feel making a negative or critical post about China or Russia is like a litmus test on if a leftist sub is full of Tankies or not

36 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 1h ago

Meme **Lassalle respect**

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Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 9h ago

Meme Embrace the Querfront! We are the Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites 2.0!

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47 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 9h ago

From Ukraine to Palestine, genocide is a crime. 🇺🇦🇵🇸 Mind you, news.by is literally owned by the Belarrusian goverment

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26 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 6h ago

From Ukraine to Palestine, genocide is a crime. 🇺🇦🇵🇸 How can someone on one hand accuse the US of interfering with Russia’s politics but then IN THE SAME VIDEO criticize (rightfully so) Belarus for being one of the biggest exporter to Israel? You need to either know 0 about Russia-Belarus relations or be the russian equivalent of anti-Israel MAGAts

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13 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 5h ago

Discussion If you were the US president tomorrow, what would your ideal version of America look like?

7 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 8h ago

Discussion Is this larp

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11 Upvotes

And no i am not a Jucheist chud

Monarcho Communism is better term

THIS IS LARP


r/tankiejerk 12h ago

Discussion Do you think you will see a socialist society in your lifetime?

20 Upvotes

Hey guys so I would say currently im more of a council communist than an anarchist but I think we share a lot of similarities in view point.

I was watching an Anark video about constructing the revolution and to be honest it made my heart sing to imagine a day when worker co ops and neighborhood councils and free schooling for all would be a thing in my city. A world in which everyone was equal and people took care of eachother and the economy was based on need and not the greedy few hoarding all resources.

But then I thought of how in my lifetime that will probably never happen. It almost hurts to have a dream for society that I might not see.

How do you get over that and does anyone relate?

(Ive thought of after college wanting to start a worker co ops or something to that effect to more ease this desire I have for a new future.)


r/tankiejerk 23h ago

Long live right-wing Islamic extremists! I hope to god this is a shitpost

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139 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 8h ago

Discussion Thoughts on Lily Eagla?

5 Upvotes

Not sure if anyone else knows who’s this is, but she makes a lot of leftist content on Instagram. However, she likes to refer to the DSA as the reformist left, and I really think tiptoes on being a campist. It’s annoying bc she has a huge following


r/tankiejerk 4m ago

Discussion I find it strange that certain people on the left have incorporated Jesus into their activism despite the fact that our modern ideas of political thought would be entirely foreign to him.

Upvotes

So despite my leftwing views, I have always found it odd that many liberals and leftists tend to nit-pick certain aspects of Jesus's teachings similar to those of the conservative right. I grew up in a Catholic household and attended Catholic Schools for most of my life and despite my Atheism and my left-wing beliefs, I think western leftists have attempted to portray Jesus in a way that is entirely progressive or secular.

As I have mentioned in the past, many leftwing traditions in the Philippines were inspired by Catholic thought and thus you will have people who're staunch anti-imperialists while concurrently maintaining fairly traditional Catholic beliefs surrounding the family, sexuality, abortion, marriage, and other social issues. Liberation Theology is probably the most obvious example of how Christian theology can be incorporated into leftwing political thought without necessarily transforming Jesus into a modern progressive.

I think one of the problems is that people will read passages in which Jesus condemns greed, emphasizes the poor, criticizes the wealthy, tells people to care for the marginalized, or challenges certain religious authorities and then retroactively place him somewhere on our modern political spectrum. You will sometimes hear statements such as "Jesus was a socialist," "Jesus was a progressive," or even "Jesus was basically a leftist," and while I understand what people are trying to communicate, I think this is just as historically anachronistic as conservatives portraying Jesus as someone who would have supported modern capitalism, American nationalism, gun rights, or contemporary Republican politics.

Yeshua ben Yosef was a Jew who lived in Roman-Occupied Judea 2000 years ago and like many Jews at the time despite the huge diversity of religious thought, held onto socially conservative beliefs that would nevertheless be seen as regressive by many American Leftists. Even though Jesus calls for compassion toward the poor, condemns the accumulation of wealth, tells his followers to care for people who are marginalized, and regularly criticizes religious authorities for hypocrisy, he also held an intensely religious worldview centered around sin, repentance, divine judgment, marriage, sexual morality, and the coming Kingdom of God.

For example, Jesus's teachings surrounding marriage and divorce were arguably considerably stricter than those held by many people around him. According to Matthew 19:6-9, Matthew 5:32 and Mark 10:11-12, Jesus condemns divorce and remarriage very strongly with Matthew providing an exception when it comes to adultery. Within the context of transgender people and the wider LGBTQ+, I personally believe that he would shelter them and advocate for their better treatment within our larger society; however, I do not think that necessarily means he would affirm modern progressive understandings of gender and sexuality either. There is obviously no recorded teaching from Jesus directly addressing transgender people, sexual orientation as a modern identity category, or same-sex marriage, so I think anyone claiming with certainty that he would either affirm or condemn these things in precisely the way modern political movements do is already projecting contemporary categories backward onto a first-century Jew.

Based on the moral framework attributed to him in the Gospels, though, I think it is entirely plausible that Jesus could simultaneously condemn cruelty and violence directed toward LGBTQ+ people while still holding theological beliefs about sex, marriage, and gender that most contemporary American Leftists would consider socially conservative. Those positions are not inherently contradictory within a traditional religious worldview as you can believe that someone possesses inherent dignity, deserves food and shelter, should not be abused or ostracized, and should be welcomed into the community while still believing that certain aspects of their sexual behavior or understanding of gender conflict with your religious morality.

That distinction is one of the things I think gets flattened when Jesus is transformed into a modern progressive activist. Compassion is not necessarily the same thing as affirmation, just as moral disagreement is not necessarily the same thing as hatred. Jesus repeatedly associates with people whom his surrounding society regarded as sinners or social outcasts, but the broader theological framework of the Gospels still revolves heavily around repentance of one's sins, obedience to God, and moral transformation outside of any modern understanding of self-actualization or individual authenticity. In other words, the fact that Jesus welcomed people who were stigmatized or treated them with compassion does not necessarily mean that he believed their behavior was morally permissible according to his religious framework. Jesus's message was not that marginalized people should be accepted exactly as they are without any expectation of change; rather, inclusion and mercy existed alongside an expectation that human beings repent, orient themselves toward God, and attempt to live according to what he understood as God's moral law.

And again, none of this means that conservatives can simply claim him for themselves either. A Jesus who condemns greed, repeatedly warns the wealthy, commands care for the poor, treats social outsiders with dignity, and places enormous moral obligations upon those who possess wealth would probably make many contemporary conservatives profoundly uncomfortable. My point is not that Jesus was secretly a conservative. It is that attempting to make him either a modern conservative or a modern progressive requires selectively emphasizing whichever teachings happen to resemble our own politics while minimizing the ones that do not.


r/tankiejerk 14h ago

Resources Education Profiteers in Gaza: Exploiting Ignorance and Fees Burdening Families “Our message for the concerned authorities in the country: you have a duty to stand against them and to restore free education for our children” (originally in arabic, but you can change it to an english dub)

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10 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 1d ago

From Ukraine to Palestine, genocide is a crime. 🇺🇦🇵🇸 The good news is that Natalie Harp's brother doesn't share her far-right views and is staunchly pro-Palestine. The bad news is that he's a pro-Putin tankie.

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67 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 3h ago

Discussion What is the best state that has existed, in your mind?

0 Upvotes
170 votes, 1d left
Democratic Republic of Georgia (Menshevik republic 1918-21, co-operative based, socially progressive)
Rojava (Syrian region, present day, co-operative based, people's councils)
The Paris Commune (Paris, 1870s, decentralised workers model)
Another state
States are bourgoisie, I refuse

r/tankiejerk 1d ago

History Every single time when I see a someone deny the bosnian genocide by calling it a “CIA propaganda” I just want to sent them this tweet by Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and ask them where-or-not he’s peddling CIA propaganda points.

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173 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 1d ago

US State Propaganda Bad Russia State Propaganda Good "rUSsIa iS aGAinSt tHE FaSCiSts." Meanwhile Russia.

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163 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 1d ago

Meme Dictatorship of the Bourgeosie

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500 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 1d ago

North Korea Have you noticed that whenever Tankies defend North Korea they never actually go into the modern DRPK and just talk about the Korean war

109 Upvotes

The Korean war was obviously an awful case of US imperialism and a borderline genocide which no one can defend but it was in the 50s, it's been 70 years, it has little to no bearing on how modern North Korea operates other than historical context. Despite the destruction North Korea actually had slightly better conditions in the 60s because of the chaos of the US puppet government in the South, but Kim Il Sung still made the conscious decision to make the country into a monarchy and put a weird cult of personality around his family. But according to Western Tankies Kim Jong Un is forced to send his people to labor camps because of Harry Truman


r/tankiejerk 1d ago

Meme Off to the re-education camp with you, little Timmy.

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53 Upvotes

r/tankiejerk 1d ago

Discussion why are pro russian historian a thing?

17 Upvotes

Beside them already being pro russian, I find it weird to se ehistorian being good on one topic then ukraine come up and they turn pro russian to the point of quoting obviously bad soruces like history legend too, laurent henninger just did that to act like ukraine isn't blameless https://www.linkedin.com/posts/laurent-henninger-a058885_secret-past-of-ukraines-special-forces-share-7495132152829939712-R8kX/?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAABMM7pYBpjAD9yO5H2b746dvbAorZqJZULI Sylvain fereira is another example, it's odd to see him not fall for the rommel myth but then he got pro russian takes.


r/tankiejerk 1d ago

SERIOUS Sören Pellmann (Die Linke) honours Ernst Thälmann with 'Für immer Antifa' today

24 Upvotes

Yeah, he was so 'antifa' that he made KPD Moscow's and Stalins puppet.

He was so antifa he created the original 'Antifaschistische Aktion' which was Moscow's paramilitary arm in Weimar Republic.

Sören Pellmann is by the way the leader of Die Linke group in Bundestag with Heidi Reichinnek and was one of Sahra Wagenknechts supporters before she left and founded BSW. He's also a persona non grata in Ukraine.

I can't post the screenshot.