Between memes and second-hand nostalgia, the "new tankies" suffer from an ideological void and superficial political socialisation, contributing to the crisis of the contemporary global left.
In recent years, the presence of a relatively popular political subculture among young leftists has become evident: the new tankies—young people attracted to a romanticised and nostalgic vision of the Soviet Union, Stalinism, and other self-proclaimed communist experiences. This phenomenon is deeply connected to cultural globalisation and contemporary forms of political socialisation, reflecting both the limitations of today's horizons of political and social transformation and a second-hand nostalgia for the bipolar order of the Cold War.
To understand the foundations of this juvenile neo-Stalinism, it is essential to explore two key processes: the impact of cultural globalisation and the absence of a viable socialist horizon at the centre of the imperial system. These factors help explain how these political cultures emerged and why they gain traction on social networks and consequently in global left debates.
Cultural Globalisation and Social Networks: The Cradle of Digital Neo-Stalinism
Cultural globalisation, especially in recent decades, has been predominantly shaped by productions of North American origin. This process profoundly impacts how the most recent generations experience and connect with culture. The generation that built the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, for example, constructed its worldview in a cultural environment dominated by poetry, music, and intellectual debates of European influence, particularly from the Marxist and existentialist Francophone tradition. Social sciences and humanities penetrated public discourse, also contaminated by concrete experiences of resistance and collective struggle, such as the still recent memory of May '68.
Today, with the absence of collective experiences of militancy and associativism (due to a series of causes beyond the scope of this text), a large part of younger generations forms politically on the internet. This political socialisation occurs on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, where cultural production follows highly standardised patterns, reproducing common scripts, aesthetics, and narratives through memes and trends, favouring the consumption of superficial ideas over more complex historical and theoretical analyses. Thus, social networks mirror cultural dynamics heavily influenced by the United States, amplifying political discourses that often use irony and shock as their main rhetorical weapons and putting discussions on the table in terms that would initially be decontextualised in other geographies. Without questioning the internationalist impetus of moments like these, comparing the mobilisation capacity of anti-racist demonstrations in honour of George Floyd with others of the same type but of national context allows us to understand the legitimising power of this type of political and cultural importation. A frequent theme in this subculture's communication is the exaltation of tyrannical discretion. "When you make the revolution but forget to say 'please'", reads a meme with Pol Pot's portrait in the background. Another example is the constant use of Soviet tank images as a response to any criticism, suggesting, with a comic tone, that the solution to everything would be to "send in the tanks", referencing the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Finally, another resource used in this type of communication is the attribution of "social credit" points to validate an opinion with which one agrees. Neoliberal hyper-identitarianism is also, paradoxically, very present in these online niches. Through bio abbreviations like "Marxist-Leninist Zapatista Titoist accelerationist Georgist", digital militants identify themselves as belonging to one or several left-wing sub-tendencies, removing any kind of historical-geographical context from that identity and ignoring potential ideological contradictions. This type of expression also reflects the fragmentation of the global left, where transformative projects have given way to "identities" disconnected from concrete experiences of class struggle.
Aesthetic Nostalgia and the Post-Cold War Ideological Void
Another central factor in understanding neo-Stalinism is the sociopolitical context of the United States and other centres of global capitalism, where these subcultures originate. The experience of the American left, in particular, is marked by an absence of real expectations of socialist transformation. While in Europe the left's imaginary fed on historical moments such as May '68, the 25th of April or even the popular fronts of the 1930s, which fuelled horizons of hope, the US context, even counting moments of enormous social agitation, is characterised by successive political defeats and the absolute entrenchment of the political system culminating in the hegemony of a neoliberal model that, for a long time, was sold as "the end of history".
In this scenario, Cold War nostalgia—and the ideological bipolarity it symbolised—gains strength. The Soviet Union emerges as a symbol of resistance to the dominant imperialism of the United States, ignoring or relativising the contradictions and crimes of the Soviet bloc. For many young people who never lived through this period, the USSR becomes a mythological figure of "alternative", contrasting with the contemporary ideological vacuum to which only cynicism and sarcasm resist.
The nostalgia for an unlived period thus emerges as an option in detriment of a reality that is rejected, being professed above all aesthetically and performatively. The obsession with symbols, posters, music and other cultural and political artefacts is precisely related to this need to construct an aesthetic imaginary that fills the void.
Campism and Purism: The Risks of a Left Without Collective Horizon
This stance also manifests in campism—the tendency to justify any imperialism that opposes the US, as became evident after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. For sectors of this left, the hierarchisation of imperialisms justifies supporting authoritarian regimes under the pretext of resisting North American hegemony. This logic reflects the lack of a real socialist strategy, feeding a defensive and resigned discourse that always privileges rhetoric over concrete transformation.
The phenomenon of new tankies is, therefore, a product of the historical defeat of the left. Far from constituting a coherent movement, they are a cultural expression of aesthetic nostalgia and political resignation. They do not represent the defence of real socialist politics, but merely a postmodern provocation against liberal democracies and their hollow promises. However, this phenomenon is far from translating into merely innocuous provocations. The popularity of these ideas in certain left-wing circles and particularly among young people with little real experience of militancy fosters ideological purisms and political identitarianism, prioritises the affirmation of principles over any practice of collective organisation, and endangers the potential of a left that can win and will need to know how to join forces and build programmes between different traditions. It is, therefore, a danger that requires reflection on how to build alternatives that create healthy spaces for political socialisation and that dialogue with history without falling into the trap of empty nostalgia.
Anticapitalista #78 - January 2025