Yes, I know from a rhetorical perspective they're a bunch of jerks who do nothing but complain, but is there an actual takedown of their ideological notions? Because just saying they suck without further explanation makes it hard to dismiss them when they pop up. I don't agree with them, I just want to know why I shouldn't. Something about statues and logic and being chained in a courtyard with wind and all that. I'm not sure where to put this, sorry.
I don't know if you've read the text, because the people Lenin criticizes are not what we commonly refer to as leftcoms nowadays (though that term is already shitty and nebulous and doesn't describe anything). Bordiga for example gets a brief mention and gets criticized for his anti-parliamentarism, but that's about it.
I don’t know what you commonly refer to as leftcoms nowadays. If I had to guess, I’d say probably Trotskyites and some Maoist groups. Anyway, Lenin is pretty clear who he was talking about. The comrades in the PSMLS discussion do try and apply the concept to the present day.
Far from it, leftcoms generally despise those guys as much as Stalinists lmfao, though they might be more sympathetic to Trotsky's criticisms of the Soviet Union. Originally leftcoms referred to a bunch of Marxists who were skeptical of Leninism (but not in a Kautsky succdem way), people like Pannekoek or Pankhurst, who were contemporaries of Lenin and mentioned in the book, but that trend more or less completely died out. Nowadays, post-WW2, most people that would be classified as "left-communists" generally follow or were greatly inspired by the Italian left-communists like Bordiga or Damen, or people who fall closer to traditional council communism like Paul Mattick. Leftcom ideas also had a bit of a resurgence after '68 in France, the Situationists would fall under this umbrella for example. Leftcom is just a shit term really, because we've got Bordigists who are "more Leninist than Lenin" grouped together with anti-Leninist councilcoms and straight-up anarcho-primitivists like Camatte, all under the same umbrella lmao. Bordigists seem to be most numerous, though, and most if not all of the points in the book don't apply to them since they agree with Lenin on pretty much everything.