FIRST SET
1. I'm from Greece, and was searching for an alternative (anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, pro-communist) wiki. There was in around 2014-15 such a wiki in Greek language called "antifa-pedia" but it closed and since then there was nothing of this sort. So last month I stumbled upon the Greek language section of ProleWiki in Google Search. Since then I'm reading its articles in the languages I know (Greek and English) and rules/principles and trying to become familiar. I'm a communist and what made me want to join is a desire to contribute to the further education of the workers.
2. I follow Marxism-Leninism. I remember myself as a young kid wanting to learn the history of every phenomenon: if something existed I wanted to learn how it came into existence, what was the evolutionary process behind its coming into existence, in short I always remember myself having an - at first abstract - spontaneous "historicist" conception of things, trying to explain things rationally and dialectically. All my family members were working class, and were voters of the largest communist party in the country. So, the working class background and the "historicist" conception made me start reading Marx and Lenin in my early 20s. Then I also started reading Stalin, Mao and the anti-revisionists. Also Frantz Fanon which helped me grasp the anti-colonial struggle (as a kid I always sympathized with the Palestinians but of course it was abstract, reading Marxist-Leninist literature made these sympathies concrete).
3. Yes, and it was precisely reading the principles that made me want to join ProleWiki. In the fundamental question of our age, that is, the conflict between imperialism (which is only Western) and the peoples, ProleWiki is on the right side. In my country the biggest communist party (KKE) is geopolitically "third positionist", that is, it calls both US and China/Russia imperialist, and uses Lenin's 1914 opposition to WW1 to claim a similar situation exists today and communists should not support anyone. That's a betrayal of Marxism-Leninism which ProleWiki has fortunately avoided. In the beginning I was afraid that this might be a Trotskyist or KKE-ish wiki but it isn't. My advise is that you should continue that way and keep it critically supporting countries where the national bourgeoisie is FOR THE TIME BEING in the same camp with the proletariat against imperialism (this, btw, is not betrayal of the proletarian revolution, as not every nation is ready for that stage and some are faced with outright war by imperialism).
4. I'm supportive of LGBT rights and Marxists should also be. In my country one of my other criticisms of the largest communist party is that they pander to petty-bourgeois first-worlders' and the labor aristocracy's socially conservative sentiments to push an eventually anti-LGBT agenda (of course the right-wing government is also responsible for pink-washing, as is the genocidal Netanyahu regime in the Zionist entity). The USSR was the first state to decriminalize homosexuality, the first to have a gay Foreign Minister (Chicherin) and the first to perform a successful gender reassignment surgery. (Actually, it was a Greek doctor, member of the Communist Party, and pupil of the great Magnus Hirschfeld, Georgios Zouraris, who after the Greek Civil War became a political refugee in the USSR, that helped do this).
5. Stalin has been the greatest Marxist-Leninist of the 20th century (given that we technically cannot call Lenin a Leninist!). Whoever was to become general secretary of the CPSU was to deal with managing a country, a government/party, and an international communist movement at the same time. The country had to modernize among socialist lines in 10 years (what took the capitalist West a century) to endure the attack of imperialism/fascism on its soil. The party needed to be constantly kept purified so that a consistent Marxist-Leninist line could be always followed during the transition to socialism, and the international communist movement had to be led to survive and proliferate in the face of persecutions and fascist reaction. And Stalin succeeded in all three. He transformed the USSR from an agrarian semi-feudal landmass into a nuclear superpower, raised millions out of poverty and ended illiteracy, created the industrial base and moral internationalist unity for the Soviet country and people to defeat fascism in the most titanic struggle in history (the Eastern front in WW2), kept the party consistently clean from revisionists (although he spared Khrushchev which had catastrophic consequences after his death), and led the international communist movement to victories throughout Eastern Europe and the People's Democracies post-1945. He was hampered by the non-classical birth of socialism in the USSR (that is, in a country that hadn't really gone through capitalism first) and while I have criticisms of him such as his re-criminalization of homosexuality, abortion etc., or allowing the traitor Yezhov for a year (1937-38) to unleash a much wider purge than needed, he (Stalin) had to work under historical circumstances that were very adverse for communism so I'm generally more ready to have a "soft spot" in him and see the totality, which was positive. Concerning Mao, he achieved in China many of the same achievements Stalin achieved in the USSR, he is also a great teacher of guerrilla warfare and his tracts are studied by anti-colonial movements throughout the world who may not even be communist. He wholeheartedly helped anti-imperialist movements (his sending of 320.000 Chinese soldiers to guard North Vietnam from 1965 to 1968 was what allowed the People's Army of North Vietnam to move South more easily, and this is an overlooked contribution of China to the victory of socialist Vietnam over the US), but a criticism I have of him is that, when he broke with Khrushchev, he didn't create an International of anti-revisionist and anti-colonial movements. My opinion is that he should have re-constituted the Third International in a Maoist orientation. Many Third World liberation movements became confused by this, and while they sympathized with China, they didn't break with the USSR because there was no Mao-led International in its place.
6. All these five states are socialist in my opinion. The age we're living in is not easy for ruling communist parties, they had in the past three decades to make adjustments to imperialism's dominance after the Cold War. Yet there's certainly a dictatorship of the proletariat in Cuba as far as I can say, and in the DPRK, and also from the little I know in Vietnam. China is definitely not an imperialist country, and its BRI is not like the WB/IMF. There is rational planning of the economy according to the needs of the people in all these countries, and there's no capitalist class "for itself" in any of them, but only harshly regulated by the Party.
7. While classical or administrative colonialism is when one nation administers another and exploits its resources from the metropolis with only a small, purely military/administrative presence on the ground of the colonized nation, settler colonialism is when a nation grabs territory from another and settles it with "civilians" from the colonizing nation, who either actively expel, kill, enslave or assimilate the indigenous population. This was done by the French in Algeria and the whites in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and all three regimes fell, but this was also done by the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Zionist entity, who still stand to this day. The early Zionists explicitly called for "colonizing Palestine through settlement". Communists have historically opposed settler colonialism and engaged in armed struggle for the liberation of the indigenous people, whether in Algeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe or the Zionist entity, and they had also strove for the rights of the oppressed minorities in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia (as everywhere else). As for my country, it happens to be "the weak link of the empire", that is, it's still within the imperial boundaries (NATO, EU, countless US bases in its soil) but it isn't in the imperial core, however it still mistreats its minorities (Cham Albanians, Slav Macedonians, Muslim Pomaks) and sinks migrants' ships in the Mediterranean Sea (with the full approval of the EU). my country is close to both war fronts (Ukraine and Palestine) and acts like a forward base of Western imperialism. Proletarians in my country should understand that the migrant problem we have is not disconnected from the imperialist wars, and should oppose NATO, EU and US presence more firmly, and show solidarity with migrants and not be fooled by chauvinist slogans.
8. Palestine was colonized (administratively) by the British in 1917 and since then it has also faced the settler colonialism of the Zionists (and their state-legated occupation since 1948). The struggle of the indigenous Palestinian people for liberation is a just one. I'm critically supportive of Hamas in their struggle for national liberation. On October 7 a military operation happened, reminiscent of the 1968 Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and the August 1955 offensive by the Algerian FLN, but also reminiscent of Hezbollah's cross-border guerrilla raids in the 2000s under the leadership of Imad Mughniyeh. Taking hostages was necessary in order to free the thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in the jails of the Zionist entity. The Marxist-Leninist Palestinian movements (such as the PFLP-GC in the 1980s) have also taken hostages in the past which resulted in the freedom of Palestinian prisoners through exchanges. After October 7 a genocide is happening in Gaza by the Zionist entity, targeting the Palestinian people as a whole: this is a colonial war in a post-colonial age and that's why it's destined to fail for the Zionists.
SECOND SET
2. Even before the advent of Marxism, the greatest minds of bourgeois enlightenment, starting with Johann Gottfried Herder, emphasized the uniqueness of each nation as a historically constituted community tied to its land, language and culture (granted, the bourgeois thinkers had idealist limitations, but the Leninist definition of the nation as articulated in Stalin's 1913 work Marxism and the National Question has theoretically solved these problems). No nation should be oppressed. Engels, quoting Native Peruvian revolutionary Dionisio Inca Yupanqui, said "No nation can be free if it oppresses others." As I said, Frantz Fanon was a seminal reading for me (also Sakai's "Settlers"), so I'm 100% pro-national liberation and decolonization in the countries of the Third World. A problem that may arise is that the post-colonial governments may be bourgeois dictatorships that oppress minorities, and I'm of the opinion that no minority should be oppressed.
3. I've read Zetkin, Kollontai and Krupskaya. I'm of the opinion that Marxist feminism is the more rational form of feminism. While bourgeois feminism sees career and parenthood as black and white, Marxist feminism dialectically unites them. The USSR was the country with the most women scientists and full employment for women, but that didn't mean that women weren't becoming mothers: on the contrary, the state subsidized and gave incentives for parenthood.
5. As I said, Greece is a NATO and EU member saturated with US bases on its soil. Leaving these imperialist organizations should be the priority of the struggle, otherwise no liberation can come. The main communist party in Greece has a ridiculously opportunist line on this issue: they say "socialism first, drachma second" (drachma is the former national currency of Greece, abolished when the country joined the Eurozone, so they mean that now it's not the time to leave the EU and re-adopt the national currency, but we can make "socialist revolution" inside the imperialist EU!!!). They have stopped putting the national independence of the country as the main goal. As a result of this revisionist turn they have also adopted the aforementioned neutralist "neither West or East" line as regards Ukraine and Taiwan issues. They are a parliamentary party, and one may say that's good because very few communist parties in the EU have seats in parliament, but on the other hand it means they have become "established" and harmless το the system. The smaller parties sadly are non-entities, they have better positions but insignificant following.
7. Imperialism according to Lenin is the last stage of capitalism, dominated by monopolies, cartels, financial oligarchy, capital export and the carve up of the world by imperialist countries. Today the only imperialist bloc is the West. The World Bank and IMF exist to enforce the Washington Consensus, ie. sets of neoliberal economic dictates that forcibly "open up" small countries to the penetration of Western capital and the dollar (and when they fail to impose these dictates to a small nation, the US military comes in their place to enforce the same goal). The Chinese BRI is slandered as imperialist, but China doesn't force anyone to adopt measures that objectively enslave one's economy to Chinese capital, as the West does.
8. Except from the classics (Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin) I have read from Soviet philosophy V. A. Vaziulin's "Logic of History", which is in my opinion the best presentation of historical materialism since Lenin's works. From Germany I have read Franz Mehring's "History of German Literature" which is a Marxist historical-literary work from a comrade of Liebknecht's and Luxemburg's, from Italy I have read Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which have influenced me in understanding the idea of hegemony and the role it plays in shaping the class balance of power, and also as I said I have read anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Sakai, George Habash (general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), andthe military writings of Vo Nguyen Giap, Lin Biao, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, which helped me grasp how indigenous insurgencies can defeat the most powerful imperialist armies in the world.