You have quoted the "100 million" death-toll figure, which comes from this book.
Exact numbers will never be known, too many died with too little documentation. the toll was many tens of millions. 100 million is not an unreasonable baseline figure.
Popular dissatisfaction with Tsarism and WW1 and a desire for better living standards had nothing to do with it, right?
that got kerensky. Lenin and his cadres killing kerensky and taking over was his own doing.
but they still existed in high numbers and were even influential (the Frankfurt School is a major influence on critical theory, the Situationists were directly involved in the May '68 uprisings in France, etc).
a couple dozen is not high numbers. And by the time the frankfurt school was influential it had abandoned any pretense of being anti communist.
No, but actual reality is a very complicated thing.
I agree, which is why you should stop acting like the republicans were sitting around having a tea party when Franco decided to murder them all for fun.
Yet even then the bouts of anti-clerical violence that exploded in Spain were nothing compared to the mass violence and State terrorism that was officially planned and carried out by the army under Franco's command.
Estimates for the red terror run from 50-100k, white terror 100-200k. Franco definitely killed more people, but to say the red terror was "nothing like" the white is inaccurate. And had the reds won, their terror would unquestionably continued and spread.
draw insights from Marxist economics, sociology, philosophy or historiography
there is nothing there. Marx had precisely one meaningful insight. though he never used the word, he was one of, maybe even the, first to write of creative destruction, the way capitalism constantly revolutionizes itself. But others have written more eloquently on the topic since. the rest is bunk. his history is facile and wrong. Class conflict as driver of history can kind of sort of work for early modern europe, but no other time and place. His economics is worse. He might have seen capitalism as revolutionary, but drew all the wrong conclusions from that realization. had communists not seized power in russia, marx would be, at best, a historical footnote.
You have yet to explain how anyone who utilized a Historical-Materialist approach towards sociology somehow must be an evil murderer.
it is simple fact that every time anyone who called themselves a marxist has came to power, killing fields were not far off. I do not have to prove why, that is simply the historical record. There are doubtless many reasons why. But if human society is to progress, we need to stop pretending that marxism is anything but what it is, a recipe for disaster.