memes

That is such a simplification that it is probably wrong.

Marx did not really concern himself with the ultimate goal of communism. His great achievement was his analysis of capitalism. Marx did not describe a slow evolution toward communism, but rather a process in which the contradictions he identified in capitalism culminate in revolution. No evolution! The few times he commented on communism, he described its prerequisites. He writes in the Communist Manifesto "In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat."

Lenin's approach was enormously successful in some respects. After the October Revolution, the USSR underwent unprecedented industrial development, which greatly improved the living conditions of most people. In general, the argument that “it has never worked before” is very problematic. For some strange reason, communist countries have always found themselves under massive attack from capitalist countries. For example, by Hitler's Germany or the US. Inconceivable sums of money were invested by global capital and its states to show “that communism does not work.” If it really hadn't worked, none of that would have been necessary. That still applies today. Lenin was a right-wing, authoritarian communist and was rightly criticized for this by people like Rosa Luxemburg. But economically, things were improving so rapidly that capitalist states became increasingly concerned. The fear was so great that capitalists in the US even agreed to the New Deal. Something similar happened in Europe.

ML does not stand for Marx and Lenin, but for Marxism-Leninism. A propagandistic self-description of the system of the Soviet Union under Stalin. Another word for it is Stalinism.