From a moral nihilist point of view, morality is something adopted by societies for their benefits and does not exist in reality. Seeing how wildly different other places around the world define right or wrong seems to confirm this. The vikings had no moral hangups when they went abroad to pillage and raid, and in the modern era western imperialists do the same thing without a drop of remorse or shame. The atrocities committed by Japan in Korea in Asia were something not even seen as atrocities until they lost the war. Morality does not exist in reality and will always be made to fit the society of people it comes from, whether they are an oppressor or violent.
When thinking about what morality a modern Marxist-Leninist should adopt, it becomes clear that it should align with proletarian class interests. Shoplifting and fighting a protracted war is not something that will be seen as widely moral by bourgeois sympathizers, but we can decide that it’s moral because it is what benefits us. This seems sociopathic or like a blatant disregard for morality, but every society in history has done this. This is even done today by people who run corporations, work as police in America, or even work for Nestle. Even the owner of slaves rationalizes his brutality with some obscure attempt at defining his own morality. Knowing this, we see how morality is something that can either be used against us or that we can use to empower ourselves.
For a communist, anything that benefits the proletariat is right, and anything that acts against them is wrong. Any moral philosophy that doesn’t serve the proletariat can be damned!
Mortality as a social construct is not nihilism it’s materialism. If you ask a social scientist to define what morality is, he will tell you that he can only see what morality system a certain group of people uphold, and then he is going to make experiments and studies on one particular group of people to see what behavior they condemn or value.
Marxism-Leninism is rooted in materialism, you can’t project class struggle on fundamental philosophical concepts such as morality because class struggle is only a materialistic analysis of society. What class struggle tells us on morality is that the bourgeoise constructs its morality over History in a way that fits their material interests that are opposed to the ones of the proletariat, and as they are the ruling class, their morality is imposed upon the oppressed class.
However this is just how it is, and defining morality as dependent on class struggle is limiting or even tone-deaf in certain cases. How about people raised in religion? Their morality can be understood through social science but certainly don’t serve the proletariat, however go tell them they are plain immortal and should renounce faith or traditions and you just created a bunch of reactionaries.
Therefore MLs should analyse morality as a preexisting construction that has its strengths and weaknesses and must be dealth with carefully to not be alienated from the masses who are subjects to the ruling classes superstructure.
I feel like you’re right, though I personally think if they would become reactionaries after discarding their morality, then on some level they were already reactionaries or predisposed to becoming reactionaries. When I was talking about discarding morality if it conflicts with our class interests, that was more-so aimed at people who are already comrades or the crowd of leftists who want to improve their situation but don’t want “gommunism”