Yeah, I am too attached to my account because it’s several years old and was made when there were next to no instances running. But I can only shake my head at the amount of Marxist-Leninist nonsense that is at times pushed there, that unironically elevates what was a development of “Marxism” out of the material conditions of the Eastern Bloc as an imperialist sphere bent on market expansion and accumulation of national capital, into a religion-like orthodoxy.

No, ideology that is nominally Marxist, and having an educated caste of decision-makers highly trained in your interpretation of it at the top won’t prevent capitalist dynamics and bring about communism, only the material base and changing it will, and your ideology will follow what your material base demands. And that had been expansion of national capital for the Eastern sphere since the revolution failed to link up with any industrialised nations in the 1920s. The elevation of Marxism into a basically teleological ideology, claiming that with subservience to the interests of national capital, there will be communism at the end (a promise broken over and over again), is completely understandable by looking at the Soviet and Chinese spheres of influence from a Marxist perspective.

And even the structures put into place by Lenin were explicitly designed as for his own time and the conditions within the Russian Empire, not as an infallible orthodoxy, and things like Democratic Centralism explicitly contained open and free discussion before unity of action, which was just completely pushed away. Urgh, it’s sad to me, because I think a new, invigorated and organised communist movement is needed more than ever, but by redirecting it to the national interest of states like China (and even Russia, which isn’t even nominally communist, and just opposes western imperialism to impose its own imperialism - like choosing Germany over France in WWI, the exact shit Lenin fought against) instead of the international proletariat, just weakens it overall.