On lemmy.world I posted a comment on how liberals use ‘tankie’ as an invective to shut down dialogue and received tons of hateful replies. I tried to respond in a rational way to each. Someone’s said ‘get educated’ I responded ‘Im reading Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll burn that bridge when I get there’ and tried to keep it civil.
They deleted every comment I made and banned me. Proving my point, they just want to shut down dialogue. Freedom of speech doesn’t existing in those ‘totalitarian’ countries right? But in our ‘enlightened’ western countries we just delete you.
What a cheap cop out. Look to history, look to sociology for explanation of this logic. That power corrupts is a material fact, reconfirmed every damn day. Power is a network of relations that creates and sustains the conditions for its own reproduction, which will start to deviate from the interests one represented in the beginning…
I have yet too see this, except for in individuals, which isn’t really sustainable for a political system. As marxists, denying your line of argument is truly shooting oneself in the foot, as there exists nothing more uninteresting than a socialist vision that cannot be clearly separated from a boring dystopia. Perhaps a better definition of a tankie would be someone who is not interested in marxist theory development, but rather the exercise of conservative, dogmatist circle-jerking.
I can’t speak for Kraus but I have something to add myself.
It’s only a cop-out if it’s interpreted in light of certain assumptions.
One of those assumptions is that by ‘idealism’, Krause meant that power does not corrupt. But that is a bizarre interpretation and assumption.
Idealism is to be contrasted with materialism, yes. But I don’t think Kraus was saying that power does not corrupt in the material world.
The phrase was said in the context of a discussion about states. The argument was that revolutionaries can’t trust or use states because the people who run them will be corrupted by their power. That’s idealism because it prefers an idea of the state based on a concept of bourgeois states over what the state would actually be under a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The fact that power corrupts is not a reason for arguing against the need for a state in securing a revolution. It is idealism to think so. With organisation and discipline, it doesn’t matter that power corrupts because the new ruling class will have to account for that in its constitution. A Marxist state that leaves room for people to use power in a corrupt way is doomed to failure.
Which countries does your “socialism” have?