If you believe "real communism" can not be achieved by marxism-leninism, then that would be a conclusion. I intentionally did not make any claim like that, because that is wildly subjective and contentious. You're entirely free to think these regimes are "real communism" - I have no interest in that argument.

What, however, is not subjective, is that the stated ideology of all of these regimes is derived from ML, and that there is a vast number of communist ideologies outside of ML. You're free to consider those equally bad if you please. I've not made any argument about that either.

It is a fascinating picture of exactly what keybored argued that the immediate reaction of people is to drag out strawmen like this.

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devilbunny 2 days ago | parent [-]

> communist ideologies outside of ML

Color me intrigued. Any good books to recommend?

	▲	vidarh 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nothing springs to mind that gives a good overview without going to primary sources. It's been literal decades since I spent time reading up on a wide range of these ideologies. This Wikipedia list is reasonably comprehensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communist_ideologies The main split is between "right-communists" and "left-communists" (hence Lenins "Left Wing Communism: An infantile disorder"; the Bolsheviks were considered "right"), where the "left" are those who rejected ML/Leninism on the basis of "democratic" centralism and the idea of a vanguard party. Most of the anti-ML ideologies like council communism, anarcho-communism, libertarian Marxism are in that category. Perhaps texts by Joseph Dejacques, Kropotkin, Rosa Luxembourg, Emma Goldman would give a reasonable introduction to those.