The Caterpillar Crawl of History

I have just come out of Budapest, where for six days I have watched Hungary’s new-born freedom tragically destroyed by Soviet troops.

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Vast areas of the city – the working-class areas above all – are virtually in ruins. For four days and nights Budapest was under continuous bombardment. I saw a once lovely city battered, bludgeoned, smashed and bled into submission. To an one who loves equally the Socialist Soviet Union and the Hungarian people it was heart-breaking.

Peter Fryer Hungarian Tragedy

There's quite a surprising disconnect between online socialists and offline socialists, I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice that people advocating for certain politics behave completely differently on the web than those advocates on the streets, and sometimes different websites will have their own subcultures despite on the surface being identical.

For me one of the most jarring has been social media Marxist-Leninists and their allergic reaction to the term Tankie. That doesn't correlate at all with my experiences with the UK Stalinist remnant.

What's even more annoying is the bizarre allegation many cyberstalinists make that the term is some kind of slur of fascist propaganda. The term of course unusually for slang has a pretty well documented history, and that history is tied up with that of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

The term was coined shortly after the bloody events of Hungary 1956 when the Soviet army entered the country and began violently crushing any traces of dissent, and in the process destroyed a working class revolution built around workers councils and the dismantling of the repressive state functions.

The invasion received the full and enthusiastic support of all Moscow aligned Communist parties in the west including the CPGB, however cheerleading a brutal invasion in the heart of Europe and the culling of many former comrades from the Hungarian party was too much to stomach for many members.

So many members tore up their cards and left, its here that the term Tankie made its appearance. We don't know who came up with it first, but given its slang nature was probably coined by an ex or reluctantly remaining member. But what's strange about this term is that it very, very quickly was adopted as a sort of point of pride.

One of the earliest appearances of the word in print is from journalist Peter Patterson recalling A 1956 interview he had with Trade Union leader Reg Birch shortly after he joined the CPGB's Executive Committee.

 When I asked him how he could possibly have sided with the 'tankies', so called because of the use of Russian tanks to quell the revolt, he said 'they wanted a trade unionist who could stomach Hungary, and I fitted the bill'."

From Peter Paterson How Much More of This, Old Boy-- ?: Scenes from a Reporter's Life

This is an important dialogue, here we have the term linked to the events of Hungary and Reg instead of disputing that or being insulted confirms that connection and that it applies to him and the other leaders of the party.

Reg Birch would eventually leave the CPGB n the 60s to found the Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist CPB-ML which moved to supporting Mao until the late 70s when the party sided with Enver Hoxha in his break with the People's Republic. I'd barely encountered a handful of references to the CPB-ML over the years and they were all in the past tense, so I assumed they had folded at some point, but they're still around and so far have been part of a small coalition of parties pushing for "Lexit".

Anyway, after this the term was used by critics of the party and its politics as a term of abuse, but within the party it found traction as insult and badge of pride. As the CPGB continued it started to fracture with multiple factions and competing tendencies, the two main tendencies broadly speaking were the Eurocommunists and the hardliners, but that's simplifying a lot, both positions in the 70s and 80s would splinter and there were factions and members who didn't really fit into either.

For example the group around the news sheet The Leninist, would go on to be influenced by Trotskyism as well as others, and the group Straight Left was often described as a hardliner or tankie faction by other members but its ideas revolved around working more closely with and using the Labour party.

Essentially its a big mess, who is a hardliner or a soft moderate depends on which former members accounts you read and who they apply it to. Honestly I think at this point in time the term Tankie started to lose much of its original meaning within the CPGB despite its increase in popularity.

Eventually the splintering would eat the party up and when the Soviet Union collapsed the hardliners were adrift and the old CPGB dissolved in 1991 with its members diffusing to at least a dozen other parties.

Over the years at union marches, demonstrations and conferences I've encountered over a dozen old ex CPGBers most of whom were either in the Communist Party of Britain or the Labour Party, but some had attached themselves to pressure groups instead like the campaign for Clause Four or peace groups.

Interestingly they all described themselves nostalgically as old Tankies, I don't think I've ever met a member of the Eurocommunists which is a bit strange. I remember one fellow selling Morning Stars at a stall who told me about how he and his branch used to have secret meetings with Left wing Labour members like Harriet Harman about how to topple the British state.

So this is why I find it so jarring to see so many North American supposed inheritors of the legacy of the old CPGB react this way.

I especially find it very odd, because most of the people complaining about the term are open and even proud of their belief that the events of Hungary and other similar examples of the "workers state" clubbing dissident workers is not only necessary but perfectly compatible with workers liberation.

Hell, many of these people are openly contemptuous of anyone who disagrees with the proletarian party's right to break up strikes and detain thousands.

To be blunt I think calling the older members of Britain's Communist party soup Tankies is a bit insulting since most of them seem to have mellowed out since 1991. I have a hard time thinking the old man in a beret and apron covered in decades old badges would be okay with military police with red stars on their helmets cracking heads on picket lines outside the People's Ironworks No.7.

But the twitter user with a dozen flags in their bio who has just written a thread on how the camps in Xinjiang are great and the dissident Chinese communists are CIA plants etc? Yeah I can absolutely see them happy about that. Many of the online Marxist-Leninists and Maoists seem to have built their identity and political outlook entirely around justifying the repression of regimes who use the right phrases.

Indeed over the past two years I've seen talk of Hungary go from sheepish silence to increased combativeness about how the Hungarians were fascists and deserved to be defeated all along. So if they're okay with Hungary why so hostile to a slang term that accurately describes their own views?