I keep hearing the term in political discourse, and rather than googling it, I’m asking the people who know better than Google.
I keep hearing the term in political discourse, and rather than googling it, I’m asking the people who know better than Google.
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The whole notion of dictatorship in a sense of a single person running things is deeply infantile. As Anna Louise Strong puts it in This Soviet World:
Here’s an EPUB of This Soviet World, another good book is Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan
seconded
You’re not doing materialist analysis of reality. If the USSR had been ruled by a selfish cadre of self-selected bureaucrats, it wouldn’t have continuously reduced wealth inequality to the point of being the most equal country on earth. It wouldn’t have universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, guaranteed affordable housing or guaranteed jobs. It wouldn’t have had walkable urban planning in the mikroraion system, affordable good quality public transit, affordable and subsidized basic foodstuffs, and it wouldn’t have been the case that by the 1960s there were more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined.
For an example of the results of something closer to what you call a dictatorship, you can look at the social and economic results in Saudi Arabia, where the majority of workers are immigrants whose passports are taken away and work for misery wages in what effectively is an apartheid state.
I never mentioned the USSR and in my original comment I even said that a “tankie” isn’t a communist.
“Tankie” is just a pejorative for communists. It’s used by those who wish to protect themselves from being called an anti-communist, so you concoct this strawman (in your original comment you made it about dictatorship, sexual attraction to it, and a betrayal of communism) in order to attach that strawman to any communist that functions as a communist. The vast majority of Marxists support socialist countries like the USSR, PRC, Cuba, etc, so the only supposed “communists” that you aren’t attacking are fringe western groups that don’t seem to be able to accomplish much of anything.
You were responding to a comment quoting Anna Louise Strong on the USSR, that’s why I brought it up.
In any stable society, leaders represent the interests of a constituency that backs them and keeps them in power.
The Politburo still didn’t have absolute or near-absolute power. There was lots of regional autonomy in the SSRs and SFSRs, and democratization was more thorough than in capitalist countries.
The last line is a fascinating contrast to socialism and UBI. Almost capitalist again in nature
Communists are almost universally against UBI. As much as the right wing wants to portray us as lazy non working people, communists believe that everyone should contribute to society to the extent of their capabilities and should receive at least enough to have their needs covered. Or, as Marx put it, “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”.
UBI is a patch to capitalism. The idea behind it presupposes the existence of unemployment, which communists are fundamentally against. There is no need for unemployment, it’s a fairly new invention (no unemployment in most societies before the industrial revolution), and many nations overcame it (there was no unemployment in the USSR and AFAIK there’s none in Cuba either). Communists want to guarantee to everyone capable of working a decent job, and to people without the physical capabilities to work (due to heavy disabilities, age, or whatever reason) there would be specific aid.
You seem to be missing the fundamental definition. Capitalism is a system where a class of owners exploits those who must sell their labor. A capitalist is a factory owner or a landlord who profits solely from their ownership, not their work. In a socialist state, a worker’s labor has direct social value. They are building a society for all, not generating passive income for a separate class of owners.
It’s just a pejorative for communists in the form of a McCarthyite strawman.
A bloody what now
A strawman based on the worst nightmares of communists from the Red Scare era.
From the bloody what now
Evil caricature of what Statesians think communists are like.