Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
Russia is not imperialist, as it utterly lacks the finance capital required to be as such. It’s predominantly an industrial economy without any colonies nor neocolonies, similar to Iran. Marxist-Leninists do not support the capitalist economy of Russia, but the idea that it even could replace the US Empire as world hegemon is frankly a result of a lack of understanding how and why the US Empire is what it is. Finance capital is the key, and Russia has a tiny amount of it relative to the rest of the world.
As for “authoritarianism,” Marxist-Leninists support workers having control of state authority. All states are authoritarian, the distinction lies primarily in which class wields it. The form may change, and the extent it is applied also changes based on conditions, but at the end of the day the state is an instrument of the ruling class in any given society, be it capitalists or workers. As such, no Marxist-Leninists support the dictatorship of capital in Russia.