almost definitely a repost but eh
The world is
sinfulanti-democratic backsliding but we just have to wait until theSecond Comingthe Election happens when everything will be magically fixed. Any attempt to make actual progress makes you alukewarm Christiantankie anything less thanthe Apocolypsethe Election (which is definitely fair and free and democratic full of extremely popular and nice politicians) is completely useless. Also consuming certian media or makin certain lifesytle choices issinful and unchristianmakes you a tankie or a rebellious ineffective anarchist or a secret conservative.I consider myself libertarian, but unlike others, I think my political ideal would be terrible to implement overnight. I see libertarianism more as a direction than an end goal, and we should evaluate how far down that path we want to go.
I’m also Christian and don’t believe in Rapture. Instead, I think that if Christ’s second coming is literal (don’t want to get into a theological debate), any changes will be a process. People won’t evaporate or whatever, instead they’ll be spared in some form from the wider unrest that will end up destroying the “sinners” or whatever. Things just don’t happen all at once like that.
I guess for my personal ideal, the closest would be everyone all of a sudden deciding that their rights are important and worth fighting for?
Those are very reasonable positions to hold.
Out of curiosity, since there aren’t really any libertarians where I live, what makes you think that it’s the best solution, and how do you intend to solve the two problems I percieve to be the big ones: Who else can properly manage public services and how do you prevent corporations eroding rule of law?
what makes you think that it’s the best solution
I believe the ends do not justify the means. The primary goal should be maximizing liberty, with some concessions for practicality.
For example, I believe in UBI, but not because it’s a human right, but because you can’t realistically come back from mistakes or harm from others if there’s no safety net. The options for a safety net are government services (healthcare, food assistance, housing assistance, etc) or cash handouts (UBI or NIT). Government services come with inequity in access (whether you’re approved can be up to discretion), whereas cash is simple and equitable. Outcomes may be worse with cash for some people (maybe they’ll buy drugs or gamble), but that’s because people are free to choose how they use it, and freedom is the ideal here. Ideally we don’t need a social safety net, but because we do, it should be as simple as possible.
I happen to believe that freedom tends to create opportunity and improves outcomes, but that’s not the primary goal.
Who else can properly manage public services?
I absolutely believe government should exist and will have a role to play in this. The goal should be minimal government involvement where competition can exist. Some things cannot be provided ethically by private, competitive companies, such as arrests, but many can.
Some examples:
- electricity (and perhaps water) - generation is private, last mile is public; cities basically buy electricity from suppliers with the goal of reliability and price
- roads - should be funded based on use, meaning vehicle registration taxes, gas taxes, tolls, etc, not subsidized with income taxes; this allows other methods of transportation to compete, like rail
- police - split force into two parts, those that don’t need extra authority (could be privatized) and those that do (cannot be privatized); the former can handle citations, trespass, etc, and can only detain, not arrest, search, taze, shoot, etc; the latter would be the current police system, but with higher pay and expectations
Basically, how can we solve problems with less government/force?
how do you prevent corporations eroding rule of law?
Limit what the legislature can do and push regulations and whatnot to court precedence. I trust juries way more than legislators. The attorney general’s main job should be to sue companies and set regulations by winning cases and setting precedent.
Legislatures want reelection, so campaign donations have a lot of sway, and that may be more effective than actually doing what constituents want. There’s a clear conflict of interest there, so no wonder wealthy companies get their way.
An AG, on the other hand, could be compensated based on winning lawsuits. If they win a lot, they could make a ton of money, perhaps more than whatever the companies they’re suing would be willing to pay. Individuals could also bring their own suit, so a bad AG would just push it onto the private sector, which is a check on the AG. And it’s not just companies that could get sued, but the regulator bodies themselves, so it’s a check on corruption there as well.
The important thing is that regular people decide what’s reasonable, not elected legislators. Legislators should set the big picture (pollution is bad), courts get into specifics (pollution value X is too much), and companies respond by making risk-adjusted decisions (test to make sure pollution is sufficiently under X to avoid lawsuits).
Revolutionaries don’t say that anything less than revolution is worthless, we just point out how electoralism cannot solve the fundamental problems of capitalist society. We also don’t say that revolution fixes everything overnight, it merely allows us to start building and developing socialism, with all of the difficulties and new problems we face when that happens. We also don’t baselessly say revolution is coming any minute or anything, just that as capitalism decays it grows more and more likely, which is reflected in crisis and more violent reaction, like we are seeing with the Trump admin.
If anyone wants to develop a better understanding of Marxism-Leninism, I made an introductory reading list, feel free to check it out! Even the first 2 works listed will give you a much better understanding of our positions.
Could it be because extremist platforms (like filthy rich preachers, Fox News, or toxic, algorithmic apps) inevitably lead to this?
It’s almost like clergy and retired Silicon Valley royalty and social sciences/social media researchers have been warning of this exact thing, over and over, for decades…
I’ve been saying this for a long time now. All the “moral” principles that people supposedly just have are actually derived from christian thoughts that have pervaded society for centuries. All the supposedly secular and “ethical” concepts are actually just christian concepts without the brand name “christian”.
we don’t “wait” for a revolution nor do we expect it to magically fix anything.
but i guess it’s easier to be ignorant than to at least learn what leftism even is.
we don’t “wait” for a revolution nor do we expect it to magically fix anything.
We do wait for material conditions to align (our own or our community’s). Movements needs a cataclyst. Not every moment is ripe for sweeping change.
And we absolutely expect revolutions to improve life dramatically - often simply by removing the corrupt oligarchs mismanaging the system.
But these are pragmatic approaches to economic management, not magical resolutions to human world events.
but i guess it’s easier to be ignorant than to at least learn what leftism even is.
It’s easier to believe in the End of the World for some people than the End of Capitalism.
you added some nuance.
We do wait for material conditions to align
we do, but we do need a critical mass of people, our interests aligned, and to be prepared to swiftly seize the opportunity. all of that’s easier said, and needs a lot of work.
we absolutely expect revolutions to improve life dramatically
in the medium-long term though, right? I don’t really expect my country to be rebuilt overnight, but i can see how we’d start having something reasonable in the decade post revolution, if all goes right. socialism often has to be born from the ashes of scorched-earth capitalism.
easier to believe in the End of the World for some people than the End of Capitalism
preach. i think it’s one of our biggest obstacles tbh.
There definitely are those that do though I think
And tbh I think the more relevant thing that is pointed out here are those that call anyone doing any sort of electoralism/reformism liberals who are worthless. Which, yea, by itself isn’t gonna fully fix society but I’d at least rather people suffer less in the meantime
electoralism is disencouraged because the game is rigged. often when you really get into it, there is truly not much difference between the candidates policy-wise.
and if the ruling class wants fascism, they will bend the rules until they get it. i mean, trump was supposed to be in prison, isn’t he? didn’t he even lose the popular vote in his first term?
i’ve seen it play out in my country over and over again. genuine-sounding people like mamdani eventually gets de-winged, or removed if they flail too much.
you don’t, and that’s good, but that doesn’t make it universal. as for the split between these 2 types, idk so I won’t even guess
true, but it’s ok to take the needed time though. life gets in the way, people work long hours, and helping build a movement is a lot of work.
i’m sure aspiring MLs always have this at the back of their minds, because practicing ones are always pretty insistent on telling people to organize and adjust expectations.
Bingo. In my experience people hear “revolution is necessary” and tune out the rest. Expectations need to be grounded, organizing is boring yet necessary.
Nah I’ve studied political science at the graduate level and this is pretty much spot on.
I studied psychology at a graduate level and have decided that you’re schizophrenic
… sarcasm, right?
deleted by creator
"and if you don’t live by MY interpretation of some dead guy’s beliefs, you are wrong and are worse than the enemy*
This is literally just almost every terminally online ML lol
that’s why I posted this here lmao
You forgot to mention both have accelerationists willing to make people’s lives worse to hasten the
RaptureRevolution.both have accelerationists
Accelerationism isn’t a policy, it’s a coping mechanism.
“Actually, I love that things aren’t going my way, because it’ll all work out in the end” is what you say when you’re down bad with no clear hope of recovery.
And complaining about acceleratism is just scapegoating. You’re not in this position because a secret cabal of extremists is sabotaging your milquetoast efforts because they think losing harder is good.
Accelerationism is definitely also a policy.
A lot of these bastards tacitly favored The Idiot during the 2024 election, essentially on the basis that everyone dying horribly would turn out better in the long run.
Comrade, this time it’s really late stage capitalism comrade, trust me comrade. Revolution is imminent, the workers will rise up. / repeat for 150 years.
Especially over the past few years, this viewpoint seems to dominate over so many leftist spaces, and I believe it’s part of what led to Trump winning the election. I don’t particularly like the Democrats either, but so many refuse to vote for anything other than an impossible overnight jump to socialism.
yOu JuSt hATe tHe WoRkiNG cLaSs!1!
Ivory tower leftists hate nothing more than the working man.
How many would “vote with their dollar” if $==🧨, though? 🤷🏼♂️
The Rapture (or whatever no-effort salvation flavor you prefer) will not be televised.
This may be the worst take I’ve ever heard tbh
Both sides same horseshoe isn’t even a new take
Straw man level 1000
‘I’m not like that.’
Hey, maybe it’s not about you?
I don’t think anyone is like that. I think it’s an entirely fabricated and false perception
Edit: also, by “actual progress” OOP obviously means reformist neoliberal capitulations. It’s biased as hell. No one thinks anything will be “magically fixed.” The author can’t even seem to decide whether they’re trying to dunk on anarchists or authoritarians. It reads like a poorly researched attempt at rage bait
I envy your ignorance.
Edit: I can’t nail you harder than your own edit does.
I can’t nail you harder than your own edit does.
Well, lemme hear it. I’m curious
And they disappeared, to never let us hear it…
I’m probably a strawman myself 😣 I’ve heard that’s terminal
He’s currently raging at me for calling out his transphobia and strawmen, and then says I’m the weirdo.
It’s coming from .world. OP and most of these comments are talking about their weird idea of what MLs believe and practice, while ignoring MLs in this very post. It would be different if OP was Lenin in 1902.
‘Not all MLs!’
But quite a fucking lot of MLs. The loudest MLs. And their mods. And their admins.
You can’t stretch this into prejudice and claim offense. It’s explicitly describing a subset, and they are right there for the lookin’.
You’re doing it right now. If you think that’s what MLs here believe, @ them and ask them if they believe this.
It would be really weird if marxist leninists didn’t read Lenin or derived works.
‘I am explicitly talking about highly visible people not necessarily present.’
‘Well I don’t see them present.’
This is not a me problem.
It would be really weird if marxist leninists didn’t read Lenin or derived works.
And every Christian is super good about what Jesus said.
This is not a me problem.
Proving your claim is your problem, and it would be trivial to just name the people you’re talking about if you actually cared about what they believed. But you’d rather keep being mad and getting other people mad about this type of person that only exists in your head.
Yogthos, Cowbee, Davel, Dessalines, Linkerbaan, off the top of my head.
Not that burden of proof was on me, since your claim is the absolute, from improbable ignorance. Like there’s no reason ML has this reputation. Zero MLs do the thing everyone expects from ML! It is a miracle.
And I worry that that phrasing hews too close to your strawman, where “some” means “all.” If some ML who’s merely a serial annoyance insists they’re not a tankie fundamentalist, then there is no such person.
Why am I bothering. You think pointing to theory means nobody could act differently.
Downvote me father for I have committed bad praxis.
Great take. We must ask ourselves: what happens the day after the revolution?
Building socialism, as has happened everywhere else revolution has succeeded. It’s a long and difficult process, but it’s real and possible at the same time.
Well if we look at China, Cuba, the USSR, Vietnam, Laos, you get invaded/bombed by America.
But also continue to work really hard, but now your labor goes to bringing yourself and a billion others out of poverty instead of further expanding the power of the bourgeoisie.
When was the USSR, China, and Cuba bombed by America directly after their revolution?
The USSR was invaded by every capitalist country that still had a significant army after WWI. Bombing civilians in Cuba was just one part of Operation Mongoose. During the Korean war, Shanghai, Dandong, and Ji’an were bombed by the psycho Lemay. They are still somewhat sore about that.
1rpd/1440=0.00069rpm
Nice.
To idle along nicely, we need to reach about 800 revolutions per minute. So we need to increase our number of revolutions by about x1,100,000
(And I realise now I’ve inadvertently worked out that if I left my car idling for 24 hours, the engine would go through over 1.1million revolutions. Cool!)
Really, if there is a sudden turning point, where Eat The Rich becomes common thought, how long does it last? Is it over in a few days? Is it a literal class war going on for years? If the bottom 50 decides to take out the top 5, how long can it go on for?
Depends on the country. China was at war for decades, Russia had several revolutions before the final revolution, Cuba’s took years, Vietnam’s involved war against the US as well. There are no universal conditions for that.
Check out the Russian revolution. The extremists will put the moderate revolutionaries in the gulag or shoot them.
It’s all a crab bucket in a crab bucket in a crab bucket in a… aw, fuckit.
Hey, when you’re 22 you know everything but your brain still hasn’t fully matured and you don’t have time for that kind of stuff!
Death to capitalist oppressors! Let’s fuck!
