State propaganda is the de facto means by which tankies incorporate new information into theory
A bold claim, indeed! Surely you have research to back this up. Maybe you have a really strong theoretical argument that shows how this is inescapable. You wouldn't just open with a totally vibes-based statement and reveal your bias immediately, completely undermining your position, would you?
People may have their own “learning processes”, but ones that contradict the large state either learn to conform better, stop being tankies, or get purged.
Oh. I guess not. I guess you just have vibes. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Thus anyone who has been a tankie for more than a year “settles theory” in a way that is causally determined by state propaganda, i.e. they treat it as dogma.
Big words for such a small idea. One could also say that MLs have a shared discourse through which theory is built upon, like literally every other theoretical discipline, and then have quite varied and dynamic debates about how to incorporate empirical evidence from both historical discoveries and the present day movements. Surely we'd be able to find evidence of this.
And of course, we do. There are people who believe the USSR was a better representation of MLism than China is today, and there are people who disagree with that. There are people who believe that neither are good representations but that Cuba has done a better job. There are those who believe MLism needs to be better integrated with decolonial and subaltern theory and those that believe decolonialism needs to transcend MLism (and of course those that believe decolonialism needs to abandon and reject MLism).
Oh look. A basic survey of the variety of positions that are still as yet unresolved within the community of MLism around the globe. Real dogmatic if you ask me! Those dogmatists should really stop being so dogmatic about regurgitating state propaganda from the largest state.
This means they back the large state no matter what, and other states when the propaganda allows it. And indeed we see that tankies approve of large communist states attacking small ones or engaging in CIA-style political interference.
It's almost like you start with your bias and then reason backwards from there. Refusal to condemn entire movements for specific actions becomes approval of the specific actions, thus proving to you that these people are morally inferior and cannot think for themselves.
The reality is that "tankies" accept errors, failures, and "evils" because they are unavoidable as a class of phenomena. Every single movement will have these moments. That movements have these moments are insufficient reasons to abandon the movements. Adherence to an ideological or moral purity test is...
... dogmatic.
I am asking you to see how the process by which you change your mind can causally be traced back to the owners of large Chinese corporations justifying the accumulation of capital.
Wild! So when Mao said that the revolution needs to embrace class collaboration as a fundamental strategy, he was the owner of a large Chinese corporation justifying the accumulation of capital? Tell me more!