Is BreadTube Being Overtaken By Tankies? (Maybe it’s Inevitable)
Tags: Socialism, Marxism, Politics, Breadtube

Welcome to BreadBusting, where we attempt to examine the problematic ideas that come out of BreadTube, and the ideology of Breadism more generally. Basically, it’s like Myth Busting, but for Breadism. We also talk about BreadTube adjacent phenomenon, that is, things that fans of BreadTube also happen to like or support, or have a strong opinion on.

Today, I want to talk about something that has been hotly discussed for a while in BreadTube circles. Tankies. There is increasing concern that BreadTube-adjacent communities are being overtaken by Tankies. So who are these Tankies? The term Tankie is generally used by left-wing people to describe leftists who defend Stalin-style authoritarian communism. It originated in a split in Western Marxism in the 1950s or 60s. Most Western leftists these days think of themselves as libertarian socialists, a term I sometimes dispute but I will use out of respect in the remainder of this video. Anyway, libertarian socialists support a version of socialism that they believe to be pro-freedom, and they believe that the authoritarian socialism of Stalin doesn’t represent their ideology. In recent months, the libertarian socialists, who represent the majority of the BreadTube fanbase, have noticed an influx of Stalin-defending Tankies into their online communities and spaces, and are understandably upset about it.

You see, these Tankies often have no respect for freedom at all. They sometimes outrightly dismiss free speech as an unimportant Western capitalist obsession, and openly wish that Americans weren’t so obsessed with liberty, for example. They can be very honest and blunt about their intentions. As for libertarian socialists? They don’t dismiss free speech like that. Not at all. But then, it’s not like they support free speech either, at least not to my satisfaction, as a free speech absolutist. In fact, BreadTube videos dealing with free speech, for example the one from ContraPoints from a while back, generally give plenty of justifications for limiting free speech. Breadists often like to use relatively extreme examples like Milo Yiannopoulos to justify limiting free speech for everyone else. That’s not exactly being sympathetic to free speech, right?

Another thing Tankies love to do is to tell people to read theory. Like read Marx, read Lenin, or read so-and-so. For Tankies, there can be no valid practice without theory. Of course, most of us live in the real world, and rightly treat all kinds of theory with skepticism. Therefore, I totally understand the liberatarian socialists’ refusal to get bogged down by theory. But then, BreadTube itself is full of theory. Almost every BreadTube video deals with some sort of theory. While libetarian socialists don’t often like Tankie theory very much, they like critical theory and postmodern theories instead. The fact is, both Tankism and Breadism are based around theory, just different sets of theory. For both Tankies and Breadists, without theory, there can be no practice. Just like how an engineer needs lots of mechanical theory to do his mechanical engineering, all aspiring social engineers need lots of social theory to carry out their social engineering plans on Western society.

The fact is, the Tankie invasion of BreadTube is inevitable, because so-called libertarian socialists and Tankies are not that different from each other. Both want to engineer Western society into a different state using social and economic theories, and both won’t let individual freedom and the free market of ideas take its own course. Thinking about it, libertarian socialism really isn’t as libertarian as the name suggests. While libertarian socialists don’t want to organize into a Stalin-style top-down hierarchy, they too often have no problem undertaking authoritarian actions like de-platforming speakers, as long as the action isn’t organized by a central hierarchy. But then, I guess the speaker being de-platformed doesn’t care about how the de-platforming squad is organized, they only care that their right to free speech is being trampled on. And trampling on free speech isn’t libertarian in any sense, right?

I guess if BreadTube doesn’t want to be invaded by Tankies, their only option is to draw a line and stop supporting authoritarian behavior of all kinds. I suspect that, if so-called libertarian socialists start to live up to their name, their communities and spaces won’t look so attractive to authoritarian Tankies anymore.

That’s all for today. I’ll be back next time to discuss another big idea. Subscribe if you want to follow our story. And remember to resist the hive mind and stay individualistic. The world depends on it.