Any recs on where to learn about those anarchist communes you mentioned?

Not gonna engange with OP, seems to be caught up in grandstanding

And who even is they? Do these liberals think there are Marxist parties in the west very nearly poised to take power?

Its a way for boring people who hate reading to tap into that “the communists KILLED my PEOPLE” narrative, its like a politcal personality starter pack. You get an underdog “subversive” ideology, a formative tragedy and an eternal enemy!

Doing god’s work by making that word make even less sense

More proof that tankie means woke

Anarchists cannot fail, they can only be failed. Further proving Western anarchists on the internet are libs who like the edge & aesthetic.

Meanwhile in the original thread I’m arguing with ‘an historian’ claiming Stalin sent ‘his army’ there in a sentence that presented it equally to both Hitler and Mussolini

I’m convinced that instance has the most tedious people on the planet

I really don’t see what Lenin did that was extreme

According to the historical documentary film Anastasia (2020), he personally

Well, to paraphrase Molotov, Lenin was even more harsh than Stalin, particularly to his allies. During the height of the revolution and civil war, if he got a letter from a peasant claiming communist party corruption or malfeasance in an area, he would deputize a university professor and some students to go check it out, and if evidence was found of that corruption or malfeasance to their satisfaction (which had no real legal precedent) they had the discretion to either eject them from the party or, depending on the severity of the offense, just straight up execute them, no trial. Which happened fairly regularly. It was not a case of “We have investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing.”

Even if you think the evidence standards were lax in the USSR during Stalin’s time (which imo they were basically the same as pretty much everyone else’s at the time, they were just far more aggressive at pursuing legal actions against high level party members and generals) at the helm, he still always had trials before executing people, even going as far as trying people in absentia, something that Lenin would have considered a ridiculous liberal facade.

Don’t get me wrong, these were harsh people, but in comparison to the consequences that would face them and the millions peasants they led if they failed, I don’t think they were unnecessarily harsh.

Another one I’ve seen is blaming Lenin for the Russian Civil War and thus hanging all the war deaths on him as well as the deaths from the subsequent famine. He did advocate for turning the imperialist war into a revolutionary (edit: civil) war, so it’s not completely absurd, but how many would have died if Russia had stayed in WWI? Insert the Mark Twain quote about the two reigns of terror.

If they wanted a remotely accurate meme they should have put “no unity with counter-revolutionaries” as the dialogue, since that at least gets at the core divide and argument of the conflict, both then and now.

Edit: Actually the more I look at it the funnier it gets, like theres no Kronstadt? You put “factory councils” over like the one specific thing everyone gets to hear about and have to have an opinion on? What is this, a crypto-Trotskyist meme?

Lenin did kind of revere Kropotkin, but you are right that it was explicitly part of their organization that “there is one party line, not two” and that the vanguard must behave in a unified fashion following the results of a vote or other method of decision-making.

Mao was an anarchist for a minute and actually tried to set up a representational system where multiple anti-capitalist parties could hold office, but no liberals (it was during the Civil War and lasted about 5 minutes before getting replaced by a single party system)

Hit them with this, even if it’s wrong, it makes them very not mad:

TIL Rosa Luxemburg supports the cultural genocide of Ukraine

Think Kropotkin-style anarchism. “Libertarian” used to refer to anarcho-communism–communism without states, hierarchies, and so on–until Rothbard and company started using it to mean laissez-faire capitalism during the 20th century. Some anarchists will still call themselves libertarian socialists or left-libertarians (not to be confused with “bleeding heart libertarians” or “liberaltarians,” which are as awful as you’d expect).

Socialism with kid-diddling characteristics

Really it’s “socialist economy with a significant emphasis on individual rights, e.g., free speech.” It doesn’t sound too bad until you (paraphrasing Parenti here) contemplate the difficulties of actually running a state, confronting capitalist attacks on your state, handling reactionary groups within your state, etc. Basically “do you let the fascists publish their newspaper the day after the revolution?”

Basic summary is its supposed to be Communism without as hard of a grip on the state and structures of society, “without the authoritarianism” as ideological of an explanation as that is.

or for once organize a big enough movement that has a chance of success, then they can actually deal with “tankies”. Instead they join every Western supported protest movement with their tiny insignificant numbers, thinking they can actually change the course of these pro-West colour revolutions.

Na, should have gone full Stalin until now.

wasn’t Bukharin a W tho

Hate them for shooting lenin, it was directly instrumental to their death. But the “anarchist” who did that were allied with mostly russian nationalists.