Your political ideology can use whatever leftist symbolism it wants to, but if the system you enact is an authoritarian, top down hierarchy that supresses the will of the masses in favor of a privileged elite, then you aren’t on the Left.
Even Marx and Engels at their most statist wouldn’t be in the same zipcode as Lenin et. al.
To be on the left means being for democracy from the bottom up and being agaisnt the concentration of money and power in the hands of a few.
Your political ideology can use whatever leftist symbolism it wants to, but if the system you enact is an authoritarian, top down hierarchy that supresses the will of the masses in favor of a privileged elite, then you aren’t on the Left.
Even Marx and Engels at their most statist wouldn’t be in the same zipcode as Lenin et. al.
To be on the left means being for democracy from the bottom up and being agaisnt the concentration of money and power in the hands of a few.
In the real world, authoritarians exist across the political spectrum.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34383522/