Tankie’ was originally used in context of the Hungarian counter-revolution of 1956, which described the pro-Soviet people living in Hungary as ‘tankies’, because the Soviets brought tanks into Hungary in order to stop the Nazi-led counterrevolutionaries.

Prolewiki: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Tankie

Tankies don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism”, but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.

Frome: https://redsails.org/tankies/

Why are there so many trans tankies? What is the beef between trans studies and queer theory? This essay proposes to answer both questions at once by identifying homologies between trans (and other) criticisms of queer theory and Marxist-Leninist criticisms of Western Marxism.

Frome, again: https://redsails.org/the-problem-of-recognition-in-transitional-states/

Though I have included snippets here, all the articles in those links are well worth a read (and Frome is an excellent source).

If the third link is a bit too dense, then I would go through George Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy first to better understand dialectical materialism (DM) though I have recently been recommended Adoratsky’s Dialectical Materialism (an online search for pdfs should net you a copy):

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Elementary_principles_of_philosophy

A potential fuller reading list on DM is (I have included my personal summary understanding of DM below, which I may update over time):

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9962669/7401956

Dialectical materialism = a way of analysis that focuses on contradictions as engines driving change in a given direction to produce a deeper science. Dialectics allows us to understand relationships and materialism grounds it in reality. The material always come before the idea. It is teleological, not positivist and is the enemy of idealism.