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.

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.

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.

I studied psychology at a graduate level and have decided that you’re schizophrenic

… sarcasm, right?

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.

Ivory tower leftists hate nothing more than the working man.

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).

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

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.

When was the USSR, China, and Cuba bombed by America directly after their revolution?

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!

So… do you find extermination of these people is a more tolerable course of action than getting to know them?

This is a core point I’m trying to make here, and strive to make fairly often elsewhere. The “rural swathes of MAGA chuds” (keep drinking the 1%s rural vs urban division of the middle and lower classes why don’t you) are a large enough group/voting bloc that they cannot simply be ignored.

It doesn’t have to be you, but someone has to do something about this group. And I’m not coyly endorsing mass murder or sterilization here. I’m also not sitting on my ass telling others to do work I’m not doing myself.

You can resign yourself to try and just outlive them. You could just keep trying to outvote them every time, forever. Sad, but tolerable and entirely understandable, attitude.

You can come up with a large number of other ways that effectively amount to “remove their ability to vote”, most of which would be violations of human rights or elimination of human life. These are the attitudes I find reprehensible, and shockingly fucking common.

Or we could all start making concentrated efforts to start treating people with god awful views as people where some amount of them might be able to be changed. Not as subhuman mosters (the term “chud” is pretty disgusting when you get down to it), as unredeemable fools, as non-entities (wouldn’t care if they dropped dead), or at best as roadbumps to be driven over on the path towards the future.

The fact that so many people look around at their neighbors and see so many of them as just useless wastes of space is one of the most effective ways that those in power maintain that power. Keeping those lower than them squabbling among each other so they can’t effectively organize against the people on top.

I’m not going to argue for some full overthrow of the concept of capitalism, but there is clearly a hell of a lot wrong. A lot of rot up at the top. Willingly and intentionally saying “but those people are so backwards that I could never work with them” is just a disgustingly elitist concept.

Go and punch the actual nazis. Call out “nazi bar” situations. People who literally want you and yours dead? Fire at will.

But those are levels of hatred that are far rarer than people pretend they are. Most people just want to get on with their day, and a lot of people against certain groups fold very quickly when someone they love turns out say, homosexual. That’s not hypocrisy. It’s an opportunity to help someone reflect on their biases. We all have them, stop putting yourself up on such a pedestal.

I’ve rambled enough, but I’ll throw this in as a bonus:

The “rural flyover states” have been done so fucking bad by the federal government, by their local politicians, and by corporations for so fucking long that I can’t help but see punching down every time someone starts in on the bullshit about “those stupid people out in rural areas”. They deal with a lot of similar issues to poor urban areas, and the attitude of the entire fucking world in calling impovershed areas “the global south” should give us all pause, especially when these areas of the US are in no way limited to the former confederate states.

I was born in one of those states. My wife is from one of those counties in a larger state. We’re both happy as hell to be out, but seeing what goes on there on a regular basis is terrible.

People talk about tent cities and rising amounts of homeless in major cities. No one talks about the towns that have had every industry pull out over the last 50 years and the homeless and drug abuse problems in them that are only exacerbated by there being literally no homeless shelters or clinics for 30 miles with almost entirely barren highway in between the few pockets of dying towns.

Leftists cherry pick from holy scripture aka. theory ad nauseam to build arguments to support any inhumane action.

The Christian „love the sinner“, „love your enemies“ is different. There you only need to profess your faith to be accepted in the community. Then afterwards the reeducation/indoctrination/conversion happens over time.

With tankies you go to gulag/reeducation/indoctrination first, and if you survive that you can maybe become a comrade. You will never join the party though. You remain irredeemable and a suspect counterrevolutionary.