I’m saying that tankies aren’t bad for being Marxists; they’re bad at being Marxists. The identity blinds them to the praxis, convincing them to defend things that aren’t worth defending. They never own up to the problems in ML movements, instead letting power centralize and corruption fester.

The whole issue with liberal capitalism is how it encourages the unchecked accumulation and exploitation of power. ML movements encourage it too, centralizing power through the tactics necessary to win control. It might start off with a leader dedicated to the cause, but in their rise to power, they create an environment that compromises the whole goal of the cause. Liberation turns into imperialism, as selfishness is the path of least resistance.

Libs might claim that MLs and fascists are two sides of the same coin, but they really have themselves and MLs as demonstrations of the same truth. It really is an evolutionary ecosystem of nonhuman macroentities. That ecosystem is blind and cruel, with right and wrong not really factoring into what happens. Might does not make right, only what typically happens.

I guess that puts me into the anarchy camp more than anything, but only in a vague sense. I don’t think it matters what you call me. In a fascinating way, I’m very pessimistic, but not because I think people are bad. Governments aren’t run by the king or the members of parliament, but by the kingdom and the parliament as an entity. Capitalism isn’t run by rich people, but by the the rich as a class. The systems don’t serve anybody; we serve the systems. That’s the real problem.

The political compass is useless for describing actual ideologies. Partly because that’s not how ideologies work, partly because you can’t divorce political philosophies from their contexts in society.

Here’s an academic work going over what liberalism meant to every major liberal philosopher.

Like anarchists, we only call people who support capitalism liberals, because liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism.