Im a ML and really like this tbh. Very fair critique and I definitely have thought this way in the past as a former anarchist myself.

I think the biggest thing that changed for me was seeing the development of Marxist-Leninist states as the next stage of development away from capitalism and the creation of true state-capitalism. Obviously this is not the end goal, but it’s greatly preferable to the bourgeois state. What brought me to being a ML was not what I’d call “settling” but something more along the lines of “fuck it, it’s the best way we have to defend a revolution and marxist thought from the bourgeois. It may not ever wither away and if it doesn’t, fuck it and overthrow it, but if it does wither away that’s a W”

Should the eventually state wither away on its own, that would be fantastic. If not, we will see the next development exactly along the lines of Marx’s predictions, with the growth of socialism continuing to sprout from the rotting corpse of capitalism, resulting in the overthrow of said state-capitalist regime and establishing whatever form the much more class conscious working class sees fit to bring about socialism and eventually communism.