I'm sorry you had to live thought the post Khrushchev era Soviet reforms. I'm also sorry that national propaganda taught you your nation was communist, and you haven't questioned this well into your adulthood.
Have you seriously ever read Marx as an adult? Not under a teachers supervision? He disagrees with >75% of everything Stalin, and everyone who came after him did. A strong argument can even be made that Leninism is a fundamental diversion from Marxism.
But (assuming you are European) non-Leninist communist literature was banned.
I'm quite familiar with anti-imperialists of various sorts. They generally don't start ranting about Trotskyists. That makes this person sound decades out of date.
>at the 25+ crowd with fresh degrees, tons of debt and not-precisely-excellent earning opportunities
There are numerous studies and theories saying that late 19th-early 20th century revolutions wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been coordinated by educated people who hadn't found a stable job (mostly as government employees, not that many private white-collar jobs back then). The Russian revolution definitely wouldn't have happened without university-educated Lenin and Trotsky, and I'd say that even Stalin falls under "educated but with no stable job" umbrella (if I'm not mistaken he had gone to a priest seminary).
In my country (Romania) most of the inter-war intellectuals had turned extremists for exactly that reason, i.e. too few white-collar jobs to chase for people who had finished university. The most well-known examples are guys like Eliade or Cioran, but a more relevant one is Corneliu Zelea-Codreanu [1], which is currently well liked by some people in the US [2] and in Northern Italy [3]. A very relevant book on the subject can be found here [4], unfortunately for the time being with no English translation.
"Though most of the memorials were built from the 1960s through the 1980s, the most abstract designs harken back to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks promised to empower workers and take the reins from the Tsarist bourgeois." - the propaganda language of the article is illiterate as there were two revolutions in Russian Empire in 1917, Tsarist regime was overthrown by February Revolution and bolsheviks overthrew bourgeois regime in October revolution, thus talking about "Tsarist bourgeois" vs bolsheviks is simply not literate.
Lots to unfold here, but clearly you have a lot to learn to get some political culture.
- Yes. Disagree with tankies ? Don't help them write their software either. Tankies are absolute morons and a joke to much of the left. Don't like working with transphobes and people with ideologies fresh out of the 30s ? Don't help them write their software either. Unless you don't mind your name being a few lines under <notorious fascist> in the contributor list.
- Stalinism-Marxism ? Please stop letting Ronald Reagan write your history books, it's just Stalinism, which has followed Marxism-Leninism. Stalin was a notorious denier of Marx's theories. Ask Trotsky about that.
- Sure, use their software if it doesn't bother you. But pretending that it does not contribute to spread also the ideologies by giving them more importance is clueless.
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