My gf got this from a manager 3 levels removed. She’s just handed in her resignation at that place after getting a long overdue step up by looking elsewhere, because while that manager noticed if she didn’t see people in the office, nobody noticed whether or not you actually did a good job. The upside of the increase of remote work, of course, being that people who do well has a larger pool of potential places to apply to in order to leave these clowns behind.

Yeah, for my part I had a constant ssh connection to a screen session on my machine at home, and could work on all kinds of hobby projects from the office when I wasn’t in the mood to work and had to still be present. Whether I was there had nothing to do with it - when motivated I’ve often done some of my best work from home in the middle of the night because I wanted to and inspiration struck. Either way, my boss would only know if the actually engaged with me rather than go by whether I was typing. Since I love programming, but sometimes not the programming I have to do at work, I’ve had many managers who could’ve stood there behind me watching me “work” and still be unable to tell if I was slacking or not.

About 25 years ago I was brought in on contract to teach a course on networking to a group of people sent there on a job skills training thing.

Many of them wanted to be there, some didn’t. And so the first thing I was told was to look for people whose faced looked green: They were inn in front of computers, and this was the Windows '95 days, and they all had Solitaire, and if I saw a green glow it meant someone had zoned out and was playing Solitaire.

Over the years it turns out a lot of managers takes pretty much that approach to managing employees. Instead of talking to people and paying attention to whether they are productive, they’ve gotten comfortable with looking for superficial signs of whether or not people appear to be productive.

And the first sign they used to look far was whether or not you were even at your desk typing…

Of course managers who have spent their career dependent on that as their sign you’re working will freak out when they can’t see you.

I tend to stick to what people call themselves when talking to them, but the term “tankie” is broad, and sometimes I don’t feel like listing every variation. I don’t think it’s connotations are much worse than those of the names of their various ideologies.

I kinda like reclaiming the term libertarian, though, because it really fucks with the heads of US right-wing libertarians to quote Joseph Dejacque to them with his agreement with Proudhon’s “property is theft”.

I’ve taken to seeing my goals as not to convince the people I talk to, but to convince “passers-by”. That is far more satisfying because it takes far less effort. You get far just by showing patience and letting the other person stumble in their own words and reach for the insults. Just earlier today someone got a ban for going off the rails and supporting Pinochet in that thread about CIA admitting their mistakes in Iran - he convinced nobody, and ended up contributing to making himself look like a crazed bloodthirsty psychopath. If I’d hoped to “win” that argument, I’d have despaired, but as a beacon illustrating the immorality of coopting democracy “preventatively” out of unsupported fears it was glorious.

With respect to the tankies, my biggest concern is the number of people who just aren’t paying that close attention. There are lots of nice quotes even from Stalin in isolation. When people treat tankies as if they’re just a bit misguided but still part of the same broad movement, they provide fertile ground for these people to peddle their shit that way, and get legitimised by proximity. To me that is the biggest risk the pose - their access to left-wing spaces must be fought, because the moment they’re on the outside their recruitment is far harder.

Indeed. Leninism as something separate to Marxism comes from Stalin’s “The Foundations of Leninism” in 1924. He wasted no time after Lenin died to coopt Lenins already flawed adaptations for his own needs. There is no “Leninism” separate from Stalin.

As a Marxist, and someone who have considered myself a communist (though I rarely use the term now mostly because it results in tedious discussions about exactly by what definition; a more precise term would be libertarian Marxist), I’ve stood face to face with “Marxist-Leninists” who told me that if they were in charge I’d be sent to a labor camp because I supported democracy.

To me they’re as much of a threat and as much of an enemy to me as any fascist.

“Democratic” centralism was a very dangerous mistake, and the notion of a vanguard party likewise, because they combine to make a party far too easy to capture by people who think they know best, and so can do away with the corrective input of other people, and that attracts exactly the same type of people who are attracted to fascism. There may be distinctions in who exactly they want to lock up and what they want to outlaw, but there are significant overlaps there too.