Which is literally all states ever.

That's the problem.

This is not an ML problem.

It is, because while they claim to want the workers to control the state, they never do, and they never will willingly 'wither away' as the vanguard claims.

The vanguard is not a class. It’s a group of people.

The Vanguard enjoy a vastly different quality of life compared to the average worker. The Vanguard are not assembling iPhones for western capitalists for subsistence wages while the factory builds suicide nets around the building due to how poor the working conditions are. The Vanguard are in practice a new state-Bourgeoisie.

It’s not a choice. It’s a historical process determined by the real conditions of society.

"Trust me bro, we just need another 100 years of wage slavery before we can do the real communism, Marx said so, so it must be true, and the only way."

The ONLY thing they have to agree to is democratic centralism

Yeah, they just need to agree to submit themselves to the will of the Vanguard, and *everything will be fine!

(* results not guaranteed)

If an anarchist group dismantled the state violently and then a group of people tried to raise a militia to attack the anarchists, the anarchists would absolutely attempt to stop them, with violence.

I'm not aware of an instance where Anarchists were the aggressor against ML's, unlike the reverse.

If the Anarchists succeeded in creating Communism immediately without a transitional state, ML's probably would raise a militia to end it in favor of authoritarian state capitalism, since they're not in charge of it.

Absolutely. Makhno literally collaborated with anti-communist forces during the Russian Revolution.

Have any non-Bolshevik sources (which are the source of many myths against Makhno, since, ya know, they betrayed him and had to make up with some legit-sounding reasons for doing it) to back up that claim?

I'm guessing you're referring to when he took in some conscripts from Petliura's nationalists after he defeated them? The same conscripts that would've then been offered to join the Bolsheviks before they turned on Makhno?

No. I think that was probably a mistake. I haven’t seen any evidence that the anarchists were a real threat to the revolution there.

I have to give you your due here, you're the first ML I've spoken to who thinks that was a mistake.

and the anarchists were building a coalition against the MLs

I've never seen any evidence for that.

You see. That’s the thing about science. Just because you use science doesn’t mean you’re correct. It means you learn from your mistakes. For example, the Spanish ML purge, I think, was a mistake. A dogmatic ideology would say “You must always purge anyone who doesn’t believe what you believe” but a scientific ideology says “You must always learn from your mistakes, but you must always be willing to make mistakes”. There’s nothing scientific about a single action. The science is in the application of theory to your action (in the case of the Spanish, it was a theory of how to fight a revolutionary war) and then you must observe the results of actions and incorporate them into your theory.

I'm glad you see it as a mistake, but it is highly worrying to see it framed as "Killing all those people unnecessarily was a mistake, a big oopsie, if you will. But you see, when ML's commit massacres against the only other group vocally wanting communism, it's just a scientific learning experience! :D"

Like... Ech. It should be a clear example of the ends not justifying the means, which is one lesson that doesn't ever seem to make it into modern ML offshoot theories, and many MLs I've interacted with still think all of the purging Stalin did was justified and based.