OK I’m having trouble replying to meat_popsicle’s comment, so I’ll do it here

Were the Tiennamen square protestors justified in killing CPC military and police?

https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist

“Tankies”, aka Marxist-Leninists don’t love killing at all. In fact, we’re talking about how to have as little death as possible. If you look at the history of left-libertarian attempts, you’ll see democratic socialist Salvador Allende getting overthrown by fascists and replaced by the violent fascist dictator Pinochet. You’ll see the anarchist Paris Commune being slaughtered wholesale by the french. You’ll see the Americans trying to overthrow the 1917 revolution in the USSR and failing. You’ll see Chiang Kai-shek joining forces with the Japanese to wipe out the Chinese soviets and failing. You’ll see the USA trying to invade and coup Cuba and failing.

So you have a protest that was started by leftists in Tienanmen, which got coopted by people trying to turn it into a color revolution. It’s in the interest of western monopoly media to portray this as bloody as possible, and to put the CPC in the worst light possible, as it is against the general interest of the west to see the success and worthiness of socialism.

Communism is a classless, stateless, moneyless society. The state in this sense meaning the part of government that hurts people, the military and police. The state exists to protect one class of people and suppress another. In a capitalist country, the state protects capitalism and the capitalist class. In a socialist country, the state protects socialism and the working class. The wider the class divide, the more need there is for a stronger state, to protect the status quo. As the class divide shrinks as socialism progresses, the need for a state withers away, in the transition to a stateless communist society.

This is to say that marxist-leninists, your “tankies”, are working towards communism, which is essentially the same goal of anarchists, a society with no state. This is not the desire of people who crave authoritarianism. We are merely saying that history shows that we can’t abolish authority the same time we abolish capitalism, as all attempts to do that have ended in the imposition of fascism through bloodshed. All authority is malignant, but it is a necessary evil in light of historical analysis and the threat that capitalists pose.

There are in fact marxist-leninists who believe that China is a capitalist country after the overthrow of the Gang of Four and the advent of Dengism, and that the USSR went capitalist with Khruschev, but the litmus test for them generally isn’t Tienanmen and they don’t call the people they disagree with tankies.