I think people who are on the left reflexively feel like they have to defend ML just because it's exactly what some will try to clobber them over the head with in arguments. "But so many deaths caused by soshalism!!!1!"

Yeah, but like, you know... It's not the system communists today(aside from tankies) and socialists want to implement. A democratic socialist system should look nothing like any of the ML states, and nobody should feel compelled to defend those failures at all. It's not socialist policies that killed millions, it's cunt dictators and their bootlickers who never should have been running countries in the first place.

But people don't really make that distinction easy.